This video makes me very sad and angry and upset.
At my university, I always see people helping out foreign countries and their people in poverty. It hurts me to see that there is not one group to help home.
I hope to see more change in this while I am at the school. Who knows?
I know that I want change to happen! New goal for new year? I think so!
The other day in my psychology lecture, I learned about something called “Learned Helplessness.” Learned helplessness is simply defined as a behavioural condition in which someone believes that no matter what they do they cannot change their environment they are in. It is mostly found in clinical depression or where people felt like the lost all control.
After writing my essay on suicide rates for Aboriginals and correlation to lost of cultural identity, I found that a few of my articles would highlight that Aboriginals had feelings of “helplessness.” I believe that this is the case for most Aboriginal communities. That throughout the years and generations of Aboriginal Families, and the conditions that they were either born or raised in, that certain communities believe that there is nothing they can do to change their environment. This can be true for isolated communities, and not just Aboriginal communities but also remote, northern communities.
I believe that we need to help these communities UNlearn this behaviour. We need to help them learn coping techniques/mechanisms, and goal setting and planning techniques, just to name a few. These two techniques I know are techniques that have helped me when I felt so helpless and thought that I could not control anything. It took me a long time to notice that but I did.
Once again, I was excited to finish my essay, now I just have to wait to receive my mark! Shall report later!
A discussion I had today with another student reminded me of the Elijah Harper film.
In it I noted that the same year Aboriginals were allowed to vote, they were also allowed to buy alcohol.
It is alot easier for Aboriginals to buy alcohol on a reserve than it is for them to vote (especially the secluded/more isolated reserves).
I think this needs to change! Even for me, I found it hard. I have not voted since I was allowed to vote. At first, it was because I lived in the city and had to go to my reserve and couldnt find a ride. Now, I live in a completely different county and have to make travels home in sync with the elections. Or apparently, there is such a thing for mail-in votes. But do these mail-in votes exist for Aboriginals. That will be my next task to find out about the magical mail-in votes.
Today at school I noticed a newsletter featuring the proposed drinking water bill. Unfortunately, I did not read the entire article but on the face of it, it appears that Aboriginal Leaders want to have a say! I could not believe what I was reading. Aboriginal leaders want to have a say! I am ecstactic about reading this! Here is the article link for that story. This makes me really excited about Aboriginal leaders.
Unfortunately in the same breathe, I read another article (link here) that Aboriginal leaders earn more than PM! That is crazy! I do not know why or how this could happen. This is where Aboriginal leaders need to be held accountable for the decisions they make. If they are going to be in the forefront of decision making in their communities, that includes where money is distributed, then more leaders need to be held accountable for wrongful decision making. For example, there needs to be detailed reports of where the money coming in is going and where it is going. There also needs to be reports on who the money is going to (and not just listing a corporation). There needs to be specifics because the issue with money on First Nations for many is that it stays within the family. Many families can exist on First Nations but the reality of it all is that many of those members are related to one another in some form or another. If one of those members suddenly decides to start a corporation and repeatedly requests money from the leaders/councillors, a detailed report of how this money is going to be used needs to supplied and to whom the money is directly going to and who is making the distributions. I know this is easier said than done.
However, this is part of holding people in power accountable.
Aboriginal leaders need to be held accountable not only for the bad decisions they make but also the GOOD!
I hope that more and more communities begin to see that their problems do not lie within themselves but within their leaders. HOLD YOUR LEADERS ACCOUNTABLE!
Well, I am working on my second essay for my intro to sociology class.
This would be my second essay in five years! CRAZY!
This topic of this essay is: lack of cultural identity leads to increased suicide rates for Canadian Aboriginals.
It is a sensitive topic, but maybe more of a personal journey for me. I have attempted suicide many times. Ended up in ICU a couple of times, and in the hospital many times, and the longest stay I had was a month long stay in a psychiatric hospital for children.
Everything that lacked in receiving help: nobody listened to what I was saying; lack of cultural approaches/understanding.
I guess I kind of already know the answer to why the suicide rate is so much higher amongst Aboriginal youth (5-6x higher) than the rest of Canada from a personal level. The answer being: I was afraid to be Aboriginal and afraid to become a “True Aboriginal” when living off the reserve. Being an Aboriginal is having a culture. Having a culture is having a cultural identity. An Aboriginal Cultural Identity is something that has been oppressed for many years, especially since the Indian Act in Canada.
Also, I guess I am writing this essay as to wanting to know more about it and get a clearer understanding of why I did what I did.
Shall report later on the outcome of this essay! So excited to be writing this!
1960 – The year Indigenous people were allowed to vote in Canada.
The Indian Act prevented them from voting amongst other things!
Why do some Canadians walk around like Chicken Little? As if the end of the world is near because the sky is falling!
Honestly, if you have clothes on your back, your own bed to sleep in and clean water to drink…then you are already doing better than most Canadian Aboriginal children.
If you want to help others, you have to help home first. Some First Nations dont have CLEAN running water, living with boil-water-advisories is the norm. Some First Nations have to “export” their young to receive a “quality education.” This recent Toronto Star article prompted this blog!
Its not that they (the First Nations) dont care, they just dont know how to care about anything else but the way they live now: alcoholism, low budgets, isolation from the rest of the world. Just to name a few. If you are going to blame the First Nations for their problems, blame their leaders. They are the ones that control the budgets, control the spending and control the financial statements. First Nation LEADERS not First Nation citizens themselves need to be held accountable for what happens to their own community.
I believe it is time to re-write the Indian Act. This legislation needs to change with the changing face of First Nations!
Helpless is the new book title written by what is labelled as “anti-native” journalist.
The author claims this book to be about how the law has “failed to protect its citizens equally.”
At time of publication of Prof. Marguerite E. Moore’s Title Searching & Conveyancing in Ontario 6th ed. (April 2010), the Registry Act and the Land Titles Act “do not recognize Aboriginal Title or rights claims to be a registerable interest…[making] it extremely difficult to search for and [sic] identity potential Aboriginal claims.” (p. 503, Moore 2010).
This law and this title go hand and hand but if the author is talking about the law failing non-aboriginals, then she is wrong; however if she is talking about Aboriginals being failed by the law, then it is by definition about Aboriginal land claims. It is these laws that continue to marginalize Aboriginals and their reoccuring quest to protect their identity in a country where laws are still in place that put Aboriginals issues and rights in the background of the creation and the foregoing of these types of laws.
Eventually I will get around to reading this book. Eventually I would love to meet with this author and at least talk to her about her experiences. Eventually I would like to change the way people view Aboriginals in Canada, moving away from negative images towards more positive images.
Aboriginals are not anarchists. Aboriginals are not part of nightmares. They are however angry and upset with their rights to land consistently being in jeopardy with the forever existence and new creations of laws.
kwetoday 