Steve Pope wrote:

> >But who can blame them. They want to live on the reserves and pretend that they
> >are living a traditional lifestyle. There are no jobs on the reserves, or for
> >hundreds of miles around. There isn't much to do but get drunk and stoned.
>
> This wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that white people
> came in and destroyed the native peoples' ecology and economy and
> culture (when they weren't killing them off outright).
>

Ahh.... the old myth about the natives all being natural born ecologists who had
such respect for the land, only killed what they needed and used every scrap of
their prey. They had stone age weapons and couldn't kill much and they would hunt
and fish an area until they ran out of game and then moved on to another place where
they killed everything they could before having to move on again. Their big downfall
was firearms, which allowed them to kill even more. The natives in the far north
wiped out the caribou herds long before there was any significant white presence,
other than the odd trading post.

We tried to educate them to help them adapt to life in the 20th century but that
turned out to be a major problem. They recently got a huge settlement from the
government for all the problems they claimed to have suffered from that endeavour.
They had no money at all when they lived in the remote wilderness, but now they
suffer from a lack of money. They demand a share of the proceeds from oil minerals
they never knew existed.

> To be sure, Canada has done a lot more to try to acknowledge and
> right the situation than most former European colonies have.