A newspaper recently printed a column by Andrea Bear Nicholas, the chairperson in Native Studies at St. Thomas University. In the first section, she listed some of the numerous gestures made by the provincial government to help the Maliseets reclaim their culture and get a leg up in native businesses -- "All funded with great fanfare and a lavish outpouring of money by the New Brunswick government," she claims. She doesn't mention the equally lavish outpouring of federal funds. Still, hers is not a thank you note; rather, it is diatribe against "the government's sinister intentions". Listed among those intentions are . . . "Forcing our children to be educated in English . . . actively destroying our culture by promoting entrepeneuralism and Canadian citizenship." I guess that keeping their children unilingual in Maliseet will ensure their cultural integrity -- while also ensuring that they will never get jobs anywhere in North America. However, if one's entire existence is going to be living on the government tit on a Maliseet reserve, it doesn't really matter, does it?

All of these "sinister intentions" are considered by her to be a purposeful attack on fundamental Maliseet values. Concerning apartheid South Africa, the hue and cry world-wide was that the white government had forcefully segregated the blacks into Bantustans, where they would be isolated from the wealth-producing benefits of the white world. Obviously, Ms. Bear Nicholas would consider the Bantustan idea a cultural treasure chest -- so long as said Bantustans were subsidized by lavish amounts of wampum (That would be Canadians' tax dollars.) Despite what she calls "the gifts, the jobs, and the celebrations dispensed throughout the year", she demands more. Considering that she believes the entire province belongs to the native people, she might have a legitimate grudge.

It is this kind of retreat from the modern world that produced the Taliban. She complains "Our people still die at hugely disproportional rates, from poverty, poor diets, and disease, caused by the subsequent pollution of our lands and resources."

First of all, most reserves are not situated in industrial areas, and second, after the Canadian taxpayers hand over more than $10 billion--that's TEN BILLION DOLLARS!--a year to them, the taxpayers will not--should not have to--take responsibility for their poor diets or poverty. Perhaps she should examine more closely the rampant corruption on the reserves. Recently, a couple of councillors on the Big Cove reserve were arrested for siphoning off two million dollars in funds. Some chief in a small Nova Scotia reserve pays himself a third of a million dollars a year. These frauds are seamlessly woven throughout the reserve system. I guess that is the fault of the whites, as well. The final irony of Ms. Bear Nicholas's screed is that, if education is the curse of the Maliseets, then why is she the chair of Native Studies at a university? She could go back to the Tobique reserve -- or wherever -- and practice her fundamental Maliseet values.

Speaking of native education, it is always interesting to see that natives made up at one point--if not still today--the vast majority of the university social work graduates at her university -- to the point where a respected researcher, now deceased, used to call it the Native Drunks and Druggies' degree -- since most graduates returned to the reserves to work in social services. In the other faculties which might improve the natives' lot through acquiring marketable skills, native students were almost non-existent. I suspect it is still the case. With someone like Bear-Nicholas as the Native Studies chair, this perpetual whinging is not surprising. An acquaintance who was involved with the math program for natives at one of Canada's universities remarked that if one moves beyond the high school level with them, they drop out in alarming numbers. This educator's supervisor/department head simply said, "Forget about standards and pass them. It's a political correctness joke. Go with the government's flow." So to keep a job, make a guess as to what happened.

Another educator's experience came from teaching an adult up-grading course--GED--at a nearby reserve. This teacher had to drive outside the city to the students because the potential students refused to accept the previous system of busing them into the city to the local high school. So unmotivated that it would involve too much effort on their part, the official reason given was that they felt "out of place". Starting with approximately 40 students, by the end, there were never more than four in each of the two classes -- and not the same ones either. You could not depend on the same ones returning; maybe they sent their friends to take notes for them. Two weeks before the final exam, almost nobody showed up -- as they had a softball game to attend. Another time, they had to attend a fashion show at a local mall. I guess you have to have your priorities straight. Ten students wrote the final exam, three of whom had never attended more than a few classes. All passed -- miraculously. (There is another story as to how that was achieved -- which will be left for another time.) Then it was on to university and Ms. Bear Nicholas' xenophobic curriculum -- or that of another like her. God help us all.