BC Natives Win Supreme Court Decision

[Anonymous]

Here we go, Pee-Wee Herman strikes again.    



You do know that even if they are getting 25-50k a year, which isn't all that much for a family, all you need is one family member with a drug, alcohol or gambling problem and that 50k is gone in no time. So it is very conceivable that they can receive a decent amount of gov. assistance money and still live in poverty and squalor.  So your whole argument that they can't be getting that kind of money because they are still poor is bullshit, as per usual.



This is just another example of how you can't be reasoned with because you are blind to anything beyond your ideological agenda.

That's nothing, on some resource rich reserves in Western Canada members receive a helluva lot more than that. They can receive payments of more than 6 figures. Here's one example from the Hobbema reserve just South of Edmonton.

When youths turn 18, they continue to receive a one-time payment, often more than $100,000. Most follow the example of their parents and, like Candice Saddleback, admit to "spending it foolishly." At the top of everyone's list is a new SUV, and dealerships sprouted in nearby Wataskiwin to feed the habit. Street gangs feed a different habit.

"Drug dealers would come into the community and start giving free drugs to 16 year-olds," Soosay says. "And when they reached the age of majority they came to collect."

In 1999, at the age of 19, Napoose had finished partying away the $127,000 he had received



http://www.thestar.com/news/crime/crime/2008/07/20/prisons_poisoning_natives.html">http://www.thestar.com/news/crime/crime ... tives.html">http://www.thestar.com/news/crime/crime/2008/07/20/prisons_poisoning_natives.html

[Renee]

Here we go, Pee-Wee Herman strikes again.    



You do know that even if they are getting 25-50k a year, which isn't all that much for a family, all you need is one family member with a drug, alcohol or gambling problem and that 50k is gone in no time. So it is very conceivable that they can receive a decent amount of gov. assistance money and still live in poverty and squalor.  So your whole argument that they can't be getting that kind of money because they are still poor is bullshit, as per usual.



This is just another example of how you can't be reasoned with because you are blind to anything beyond your ideological agenda.

That's nothing, on some resource rich reserves in Western Canada members receive a helluva lot more than that. They can receive payments of more than 6 figures. Here's one example from the Hobbema reserve just South of Edmonton.

When youths turn 18, they continue to receive a one-time payment, often more than $100,000. Most follow the example of their parents and, like Candice Saddleback, admit to "spending it foolishly." At the top of everyone's list is a new SUV, and dealerships sprouted in nearby Wataskiwin to feed the habit. Street gangs feed a different habit.

"Drug dealers would come into the community and start giving free drugs to 16 year-olds," Soosay says. "And when they reached the age of majority they came to collect."

In 1999, at the age of 19, Napoose had finished partying away the $127,000 he had received



http://www.thestar.com/news/crime/crime/2008/07/20/prisons_poisoning_natives.html">http://www.thestar.com/news/crime/crime ... tives.html">http://www.thestar.com/news/crime/crime/2008/07/20/prisons_poisoning_natives.html

 

Oops, there goes Romero's position on this into the shitter.

[Romero]

That's not free money. That's funding.

in fact it is absolutely common for squaws to cash checks at the local credit union for between $4000 and $6000 every month just for child payments

No they don't.

Here we go, Pee-Wee Herman strikes again.  

I'm right about that and I was right about First Nations not getting all that free money. Obvious Li's "proof" was indeed just government spending on health care, education etc. like everyone else gets. His only evidence that natives are receiving $15-25K in free money annually is "total payments are probably double or triple"



Probably?



No, they don't. And "squaws", who I call "mothers", do not get $4,000-$6,000 every month for child payments. Obvious Li wants to believe in his hatred so he makes it his reality.

You do know that even if they are getting 25-50k a year, which isn't all that much for a family, all you need is one family member with a drug, alcohol or gambling problem and that 50k is gone in no time.

Look at you assuming a native is likely to spend all their money on drugs, alcohol and gambling. You sure love those stereotypes.

[Romero]

at the age of 19, Napoose had finished partying away the $127,000 he had received



http://www.thestar.com/news/crime/crime/2008/07/20/prisons_poisoning_natives.html">http://www.thestar.com/news/crime/crime ... tives.html">http://www.thestar.com/news/crime/crime/2008/07/20/prisons_poisoning_natives.html

 

Oops, there goes Romero's position on this into the shitter.

That was corruption. The government gave that money to the reserve, not the individual.

[Renee]

at the age of 19, Napoose had finished partying away the $127,000 he had received



http://www.thestar.com/news/crime/crime/2008/07/20/prisons_poisoning_natives.html">http://www.thestar.com/news/crime/crime ... tives.html">http://www.thestar.com/news/crime/crime/2008/07/20/prisons_poisoning_natives.html

 

Oops, there goes Romero's position on this into the shitter.

That was corruption. The government gave that money to the reserve, not the individual.

"at the age of 19, Napoose had finished partying away the $127,000 he had received"



Go back and read and stop making an ass out of yourself.  



So AGAIN? if everyone else is wrong what are the real numbers? I've been asking this for days now and all you have answered with is your usual circle jerk.



BTW, nice try with the smear tactic regarding stereotyping. As I say, you are good for one thing; hysterics, but then again you are a far left liberal so you are very proficient at it. I guess we should all be like you and turn a blind eye to the rampant drug and alcohol abuse among the indigenous peoples. That's kind of like saying that crack and meth abuse doesn't affect the black community; your kind is good for that too.

[Romero]

"at the age of 19, Napoose had finished partying away the $127,000 he had received"



Go back and read and stop making an ass out of yourself.  

If you understood it you would see that the government did not give him that money. Government money is for the needs of the reserve and not meant to be dished out through corruption.

So AGAIN? if everyone else is wrong what are the real numbers? I've been asking this for days now and all you have answered with is your usual circle jerk.

There are no real numbers. The government does not give out free money. The answer is $0.

[Anonymous]

Here we go, Pee-Wee Herman strikes again.    



You do know that even if they are getting 25-50k a year, which isn't all that much for a family, all you need is one family member with a drug, alcohol or gambling problem and that 50k is gone in no time. So it is very conceivable that they can receive a decent amount of gov. assistance money and still live in poverty and squalor.  So your whole argument that they can't be getting that kind of money because they are still poor is bullshit, as per usual.



This is just another example of how you can't be reasoned with because you are blind to anything beyond your ideological agenda.

That's nothing, on some resource rich reserves in Western Canada members receive a helluva lot more than that. They can receive payments of more than 6 figures. Here's one example from the Hobbema reserve just South of Edmonton.

When youths turn 18, they continue to receive a one-time payment, often more than $100,000. Most follow the example of their parents and, like Candice Saddleback, admit to "spending it foolishly." At the top of everyone's list is a new SUV, and dealerships sprouted in nearby Wataskiwin to feed the habit. Street gangs feed a different habit.

"Drug dealers would come into the community and start giving free drugs to 16 year-olds," Soosay says. "And when they reached the age of majority they came to collect."

In 1999, at the age of 19, Napoose had finished partying away the $127,000 he had received



http://www.thestar.com/news/crime/crime/2008/07/20/prisons_poisoning_natives.html">http://www.thestar.com/news/crime/crime ... tives.html">http://www.thestar.com/news/crime/crime/2008/07/20/prisons_poisoning_natives.html

I saw a tv documentary about Hobbema and they discussed the cash giveaways to teenagers and the problems it has created..



I always wondered where the slogan cars cost less in Wetaskiwin came from and is known all over Alberta?



Too much money has created problems the community would not otherwise have..



That money would be better used for so many other things than giving it to people who are not yet ready for such responsibility.

[Anonymous]

Consider, for example, the large "coming‐of‐age" payments that are

common on native reserves with significant oil and gas revenues, such as the

Samson Cree reserve in Hobbema, Alberta (which sits on top of a massive oil

field that accounted, in its prime, for 10 percent of Canada's national oil output).

During the 1980s, the federal government in Canada collected over $783 million

dollars in royalties for the Samson Cree, almost $200,000 for every individual on

the reserve. Half this money was held in trust, the rest was distributed and spent

on various projects. At the time, families were collecting nearly $3,000 in

royalties each month and teenagers were given $100,000 on their 18th birthday.

At the same time, Hobbema became the suicide capital of the country. Between

1985 and 1987 the male suicide rate was 83 times the national average (peaking at

a rate of 300 per year, in a community of only 6,000) (Laird, 2000, p. 18).

[Anonymous]

Native land claims and self-government are bad because native governments do not really have an opposition, there is no local media to keep em honest(just a band press mouthpiece), no private property or business development because the chief and band council decide who lives where and what gets built. They also have budgets disproportionate to similar sized local governments with bloated civil service and yes those jobs are also filled by who the corrupt chief and council like.



You want t see how easy it is for wealthy native bands can have such poverty. They also have great wealthy too, but because they are so corrupt the money is not allowed to filter through and improve the lives of the masses.

Money won't solve problems Of any reserve in Canada, the Samson Cree Nation is a prime example of how money can't solve social problems.

By The Calgary Herald April 20, 2008  



Of any reserve in Canada, the Samson Cree Nation is a prime example of how money can't solve social problems.



The reserve, where 23-month-old Asia Saddleback was shot in the stomach when a gang bullet blasted into the kitchen wall, is one of the wealthiest in Canada. It sits atop a vast oil reserve that has netted Samson residents hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties. Samson Oil and Gas is a wholly aboriginal-owned company headquartered in Hobbema, whose mandate is "enhancing the wealth of its shareholder, Samson Cree Nation, and providing employment and opportunity to First Nations in the oil and gas sector." Among the reserve's investments, further generating community wealth, is St. Eugene's resort complex with golf and a casino in Cranbrook, B.C. The Nation's economic development department's goal is to "promote and facilitate the development of a strong and diversified economic and tourism base in our community."



Yet, the drug trade is flourishing, in part because of Hobbema's position as a route for drug supplies to Fort McMurray, and the area gang count is 13 -- this is with a combined population among four neighbouring reserves of just 12,000 people. Drive-by shootings like the one that left Asia with a bullet lodged permanently in her abdomen are commonplace. Two-thirds of calls to the Hobbema RCMP come from the Samson reserve.



Something is lacking here, and it's not money. What's missing is what money can't buy -- a sense of community and individual purpose. Because of the band's oil wealth, it's been customary for kids to receive payouts from trust funds to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars on their 18th birthdays. That's money they never had to work for. There's no reason or incentive for them to work or pursue an education, when the drug trade is so lucrative, when their trust funds are brimming with money and when they come from homes where high rates of alcoholism make their parents poor role models.



The RCMP can vow to step up policing, Indian Affairs can offer to help and Chief Marvin Yellowbird can declare the band council is "dedicated to the reduction of gang activity." But unless individuals work toward change in their own lives, nothing will be accomplished. There are models for change all around -- for one, there's the example set by Chief Clarence Louie of the thriving Osoyoos band in B.C., whose ground rule is that band members must be at work or at school; doing nothing is unacceptable.



Last year, Bryce Montour, then a Grade 8 student at Hobbema's Ermineskin Junior-Senior High School, wrote in a letter to the Herald about the social problems he sees around him: "The worst is the gangs; the gangs are killing each other. People are dying because of this; there are drive-bys, and people are drinking and driving." Classmate George Saddleback wrote: "(Our people) abuse themselves with gang violence and drug abuse."



Out of the mouths of babes comes the impetus for change; the cry needs to be taken up by the entire community, one individual at a time, until it becomes a roar.

http://www.canada.com/calgaryherald/news/theeditorialpage/story.html?id=e7ca8173-a63b-4311-9cd1-f65f385ac7c6">http://www.canada.com/calgaryherald/new ... 5f385ac7c6">http://www.canada.com/calgaryherald/news/theeditorialpage/story.html?id=e7ca8173-a63b-4311-9cd1-f65f385ac7c6

[Obvious Li]

That's not free money. That's funding.

in fact it is absolutely common for squaws to cash checks at the local credit union for between $4000 and $6000 every month just for child payments

No they don't.

i will pass on your comments to the manager of the local credit union, who is a good friend of mine and needs to sign off on each check before it is cashed.....i'm sure she will appreciate your ability to enact denial as a method of changing reality.......in this small community she deals with more than a dozen of these instances ($4K to 6K range) every month...i assume Dog River is not the only place it happens....

[Obvious Li]

Consider, for example, the large "coming‐of‐age" payments that are

common on native reserves with significant oil and gas revenues, such as the

Samson Cree reserve in Hobbema, Alberta (which sits on top of a massive oil

field that accounted, in its prime, for 10 percent of Canada's national oil output).

During the 1980s, the federal government in Canada collected over $783 million

dollars in royalties for the Samson Cree, almost $200,000 for every individual on

the reserve. Half this money was held in trust, the rest was distributed and spent

on various projects. At the time, families were collecting nearly $3,000 in

royalties each month and teenagers were given $100,000 on their 18th birthday.

At the same time, Hobbema became the suicide capital of the country. Between

1985 and 1987 the male suicide rate was 83 times the national average (peaking at

a rate of 300 per year, in a community of only 6,000) (Laird, 2000, p. 18).

[Anonymous]

Interesting article by Christie Blatchford about the lack of transparency and  accountability by reserve councils for the tens of millions they receive from both Ottawa and industry.

When you wade into the shark-infested waters of writing about matters aboriginal, you quickly learn how stupid you are.



Well, that's my experience. So it was with the Caledonia occupation; and this week again with the shooting death of Ethan Yellowbird on the Samson Cree First Nation, one of four First Nations situated south of Edmonton at a place called Hobbema in English and Maskwacis, Cree for "bear hills," to natives.



The good news is that there are many people who have spent lifetimes either trying to figure out the problems or observing them, who are infinitely smarter than me, and who sometimes kindly write in aid of my further education.



A classic example of what I mean is that I said once this week that the competition for seats on the Samson council (a dozen people ran for Chief, 92 for 12 council positions) was surely a sign of a healthy community, I was dead wrong.



In the federal riding of Trinity-Spadina in downtown Toronto where I live, such a great number of candidates might signal a raucous democracy.



But on reserves, it usually means just the opposite: The reason such jobs as so hotly contested is because residents are desperate to get a piece of a highly politicized pie, not to mention the jobs for family members.



One of the most cogent policy papers I have ever read in my life is on this very subject, First Nations governance.



Written by a former federal bureaucrat named John Graham who has made aboriginal governance his bailiwick, it was produced for the Ottawa-based Institute on Governance, a non-profit think tank.



Now a private consultant, though still a senior associate at the institute, Graham wrote it in April of last year. It identifies 11 significant problems with First Nations governments that act as a brake upon reserve health.



The impetus was the revelation that despite significant increases to First Nation funding (for water, housing, education and economic development, plus residential-school healing), the gap in what's called "community well-being" between the rest of Canada and reserves just keeps on growing.



Community well-being is how the federal aboriginal-affairs people measure health — using indices of education, housing, labour force and income.



"So why is the gap widening?" Graham asked.



His answer: A principal cause is the degree of dysfunction in First Nations governance, which he describes as "unmatched in any other jurisdiction in Canada."



The specific problems that collectively slow progress range from Ottawa's own difficulties in taking a whole-of-community approach to development (there are 30 different federal departments that deal with First Nations) to an attitude of victimization from FNs (here, Graham quoted the writer Irshad Manji's lovely line that "The language of victimhood seduces, then paralyzes").



But the bottom line is that the average reserve works like a company town, and as someone who grew up in one in northwestern Quebec, I can't help but agree.



In my town, the copper mine was the key employer, owned the golf course, recreation centre and swimming pool, and most of the houses.



Same thing on a reserve.



But in my small town, there were all the checks and balances Canadians expect — a free press, a hearty private sector and the mishmash of volunteer organizations such as churches, Legions, Moose Halls and watchdog or advocacy groups that together raised the alarm when the powers that be stepped out of line.



Not so on reserves, which may explain why walking into a band office is akin to that scene from old Westerns, where the stranger enters the bar and everyone turns to give her the long hard stare of suspicion.



On First Nations, the executive and legislative functions are fused in the Chief and council; there's no official opposition, private and volunteer sectors are under-developed, som.etimes grossly, and if there's a press, it's the furthest thing from independent



At the Yellow Quill reserve in Saskatchewan, for instance, once-shiny fire trucks sat rusting and unused when I was there a couple of years ago — no volunteers. And on the Samson reserve, the only media is a radio station owned by the band and a newsletter from the Chief on the band website.



FN governments are also huge, "perhaps the largest local governments in the world," Graham writes. He has been on 700-member reserves with a public service of 100.



Now, they have responsibilities that comparably sized municipal governments in the rest of the country would never dream of taking on, particularly the big three of education, health and social assistance.



In Manitoba, many First Nations governments even organize and pay for members' funerals, which, in the more remote places, can mean flying in a whack of family from Winnipeg. It's a cost that no other government, let alone a small local one, would saddle itself with or take on.



As Graham told me in an email, "It's another indicator of how pervasive FN governments are in the lives of their citizens."



The per-capita costs of FN governments are huge, an average $17,000 compared to a per capita cost of $1,800 for all municipalities in the rest of Canada. And they have unparalleled numbers of politicians too, many of them full-time and on full salaries.



(If the Indian Act mandates one chief and one councillor for every 100 band members, it also allows the band to customize the numbers, an option that in some cases has actually increased the number of politicians.)



This has led to frenzied family competition, what Graham calls "rapid political churn," and the overt politicization of the public service.



I've just scratched the surface of what's in the paper; you can find it yourself on the institute's website, and his own website.



But it all goes to answer the question I had all week in Hobbema.



Samson has revenue from oil and gas royalties. In addition, aboriginal affairs records show that for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2010, Ottawa paid out a little more than $30-million in the usual monies to the band. That doesn't count what Alberta may send Samson's way.



So why does all that money buy so little for the people in that run-down, impoverished place?

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/07/16/christie-blatchford-in-hobbema-where-does-the-money-go/">http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/201 ... -money-go/">http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/07/16/christie-blatchford-in-hobbema-where-does-the-money-go/

[Renee]

That's not free money. That's funding.

in fact it is absolutely common for squaws to cash checks at the local credit union for between $4000 and $6000 every month just for child payments

No they don't.

i will pass on your comments to the manager of the local credit union, who is a good friend of mine and needs to sign off on each check before it is cashed.....i'm sure she will appreciate your ability to enact denial as a method of changing reality.......in this small community she deals with more than a dozen of these instances ($4K to 6K range) every month...i assume Dog River is not the only place it happens....

Don't we all? Romero has raised the art of denial to almost legendary heights. He uses it exclusively in almost every debate he enters no matter what the topic happens to be. It's simply amazing.  

[Anonymous]

What is undeniable is the massive waste that happens with monies meant for Native-Canadians. My eyes really opened to that when the books were opened on Attawapiskat's malfeasance. Millions and millions and millions of dollars transferred to that tiny reserve and the chief cannot give an account of what happened to it. I hope for their sakes third party management is an improvement even if it is only marginally.

[Romero]

That's not free money. That's funding.





No they don't.

i will pass on your comments to the manager of the local credit union, who is a good friend of mine and needs to sign off on each check before it is cashed.....i'm sure she will appreciate your ability to enact denial as a method of changing reality.......in this small community she deals with more than a dozen of these instances ($4K to 6K range) every month...i assume Dog River is not the only place it happens....

Don't we all? Romero has raised the art of denial to almost legendary heights. He uses it exclusively in almost every debate he enters no matter what the topic happens to be. It's simply amazing.  

Obvious Li is making it up.



First he claimed natives are being given up to $25,000 annually in free money, but his only evidence is "probably".



Then he claimed over 50% of the native population is under age 15, but it's actually 28% according to Statistics Canada.



First Nations parents do not receive anywhere near $4,000-6,000 in child support every month.