'Cousin Gord's' "historic" signature - theprogress.com

Controlling education is a very dangerous thing. History is history, you can not change it, but you can learn to understand it from another's perspective.

What I see happening is a native only view of things being taught, no one elses, which will in time warp the students.

I remeber being in Germany in 1990, and met a relative from the former East Germany. Canada was off the radar scope. He was never taught about Canada, except we were under the heel of the US (could be right there); a small and hard country. Talking to him about the world was a dead loss, as all he knew was Soviet history and anti American drivel.

The samce could happen here, with a native educational system teaching drivel as fact and ignoring the real issues.

This means we could have generations of 'crippled' native kids, learning local political hoopla, but not what is needed to succeed in todays world.

Grumpy - Agreed!

gasworks,

like him or not, Cousin Gord has worked harder on First Nation issues than any other mainstream political figure...

give him a little credit, where it is due...

Quebec, like the other provinces, controls its own education doesn't it? And we're all one big happy family aren't we? Okay, except for Levesque and Bouchard and Alberta and murdock, freebc and skookum1...

The way I see it things are so bad for the natives now if control of education helps a bit, great, because our controlling of their education is one of the things that got us to the present place isn't it?

What's the worst that could happen? That natives end up as marginalized citizens in their own country? That native kids miss out on opportunities? Gee, we wouldn't want something like that that to ever occur.

People like to say money won't solve the problem. And alone, it won't. Maybe this is one of the things that together with increased control over their own communities will. And its not costing the rest of us a thing.

And if it ever gets real bad we can stick them down in front of Global television so that they can quickly catch up on all the quality US culture programming they've missed and thereby catch up to our own little worldly Einsteins.

No credit due there 'cousin' gullible. Just another example of backwards thinking, while moving forward.

If the 1st Nations have control over education insofar as "culture and tradition" are concerned, doesn't that merely place native literature and history on an equal footing with other literature/historical subjects? Am I too naive?

Forty different creation stories on the West Coast alone surely won't displace a Biblical one which is no more realistic. It's the thinking that's valuable - to be able to take imagination and metaphor and shape it into a useful tool for understanding the modern world.

Incidentally, a small quibble. Mathematics actually originated in India, and around 1020AD al-Biruni brought it back to the Islamic world, which then moved it to the West through Spain. However, there were examples of the Indian numbering system also in use in the Levant and the Adriatic also from the same source as early as the 7th Century (Joseph and Freudenthal).

Ironically, Indian's (East) are also true Aryans. go figure.

this agreement represents acceptance of our failure as a community to accomplish inclusion of all culturally diverse groups. What next? Does anyone imagine there will not be other cultural minority groups, who will lay claim to needing extra support in fitting into the social fabric? Ghettoization is not the answer. Opening our eyes and learning about each other is. If the best we can come up with is the idea that we each go to our room and separately arrive at comparable levels of mutual arrogance and chauvisnism, so there is a 'level playing field'(how I hate that expression - we are not playing, none of us are!), then this falls short of true community and cooperation, and way short of the best that people in this province have the potential to do.

dorothy, that ship has sailed. Once you allow home schooling you've basically said everyone is free to teach their kids whatever they like as long as they learn some english and math.

Therefore when it comes to other minority groups, they already have that right. Catholics have separate schools systems in Saskatchewan too, and other places, why shouldn't every religion have their own system?

Why not split along philosophical lines as well as religous and cultural? Then we can have "left-wing" schools, Liberal schools, Conservative schools etc. Huzzah for diversity.

Wasn't it Maggie Thatcher who said there is no such thing as community?

Not too worry, we'll all watch Don Cherry and Canadian Idol until someone puts the Genie back in the bottle. But in the meantime, why should natives be the only group forced to go to our schools?

I sometimes question the motives of some "aboriginal leaders" and wonder if they really have the best interest of their people in mind or do they just want to maintain their own privileged positions as many non-aboriginal leaders do. It really depends on the individual aboriginal leader.

Due in part to the existence of residential schools many aboriginal chidren grow up under less than ideal family situations so they like other children would probably benefit from smaller class sizes and more individual attention in the early grades.

Teaching human history in elementary school is not a good idea since children are not neurologically developed enough to properly analyze it. History is often used as a propaganda tool in many countries and it should be preceded by evolution and human migration out of east Africa.

Math and Science are part of the world culture because they are intrinsically part of the universe. In this regard Finland and Singaopre do really well in preparing their children.

Just because someone has a great education does not necessarily mean they will be able to get a job that pays more than minimum wage. There are plenty of engineers and scientists that cannot find work in their fields or the whole industry has been moved to a low-wage country.

It’s my understanding that it is already difficult to find qualified teachers willing to teach at band-run schools. The problems associated with living in remote locations are compounded by racism (against non-natives), broken contracts, and working conditions that can challenge even the most committed educator. The funding of these schools would make most administrators drool, but the governance of the funds is the issue. Vandalism aside, why would we think that the funds set aside for education would be handled in any differently than that of housing etc. How strange that Gordo should be considering handing more responsibilities over to band councils when many first-nations people are joining in on the plea for more accountability regarding band budgets.

Personally, I think the sentiment is both noble and correct. I would like nothing better than to see a first-class, first-nations run education system for their children. Such an undertaking would be wonderful, but expensive. It would take billions to implement. How much has Gordo committed to this undertaking? I haven’t seen anything in writing yet, have you? Right. How many “experts” in this field has Gordo consulted? Where are the kudos from the educational community? Right.

The Liberal Party of BC may see a number of possible “positive outcomes” from this plan.
1. We will avert teacher shortages as non-native teachers are forced to resign their positions.
2. The land-claim courts will almost certainly have fewer first-nations lawyers to deal with.
3. Given the connection between education and longevity, future governments will not need to worry about having too many old-age pensioners amongst the first nations population.
4. BC will regain the cheap labour (native) force. Perhaps there will even be a break for employers who hire the functionally illiterate ($4 per hour).

If you have read this as a slight on first-nations, you are missing the point. I believe that the relative failure of First-nations people to thrive in modern society has been because of roadblocks to their success. My fear is that children of first-nations ancestry (which includes my own children), are being sold a bill of goods meant to win brownie points now, by selling off the future.

The cats out of the bag, already. Anyone can educate their children at home if they want to, so what's so different when Indians do it ?
There should be an value put on the cost of an education. If that's $7,000.00 per kid, then we now have a close value.
If you choose to send your kid to a private school, suited to your philosophical needs, the Government should credit you to the amount of that tuition, as we are promoting for the FN on this thread.
This is called the voucher system, that could only be implemented Provincially.
I say, free up the education system, so FN and all of us can choose our options.

Dorothy,I repectfully suggest, we are playing games all of our lives. Otherwise we would just all sit down together and talk about how to strengthen our public education system, perhaps by making it more "public". This requires leadership. First Nations leadership is about as effective as ours.

I agree mostly. However, I think what's being forgotten in this rush for native people to regain control over their own culture and future is that the rest of us should have an understanding of what came before us, too. It's as if giving natives the ability to teach themselves their own culture means we don't have to understand it at all. That leaves large gaps in our understanding of the world, too. And this isn't just what happened in England - it's what happened right here under our feet.

It's very sensitive and humane of Rafe and the many other Well Intentioned Folks here to say: Native Canadian kids should be schooled in Their Own Culture. Sounds good, right? But it's actually a foolish, impossible, fundamentally-useless project, one with a tinge of genuine racialist contempt to it, and bound to be murderously expensive; aboriginal control of the reserve/status education systems, more importantly, will doom another generation of Indian kids to the sidelines of society, where ignorance, illiteracy, white guilt and cultural confusion have already consigned two generations of post-residential-school citizens. Really. ** Who should teach Tsawessen (sp?), Squamish and/or Westbank kids about who they are and where they come from? Really, who should do it? White people? A subsidised, radicalised class of bureaucrats and "professional Indians" whose concern for actual kids' actual future is absolutely secondary to sclerotic "Taiaike" Alfred-style barricade posturing? Or -- ta dah! -- *their own parents and familes*?? ** Every minority kid, in a free society like this, should learn his languages and his "old ways" from his clan, from adults who love him/her, and from the rich history any family has behind it. What public school, sea to sea, ought to provide, is only those cultural matters rooted in the *whole* nation's past, and even this is less important than the linguistic, mathematical and abstract skills *crucial* to prospering in the *larger* society. You start separating kids out because of their race, Christ, doesn't anyone else see this as problematic? Y'know, lefties -- "marginalising?" "stigmatising?" "segregating?" -- and all the other things a free and unified society ought to despise? How can all your sensitivity lead you to think that putting some kids on a little bus with a Haida frog on it, and shipping 'em off to a brown-skin-defined environment will make them feel *happy* and included? ** Indian business is the business of Indians, I think; and it's only when aboriginals are as free as every other Canadian to move about, to earn, learn real skills and knowledge, and to rely on themselves, that they will be able to be truly themselves, to use their freedom to honour and emulate (or not) their ancestral ways and customs. None of these massive government bureaucracies have helped yet, have they? -- And we're proposing *more of the same*?

"that ship has sailed. Once you allow home schooling you've basically said everyone is free to teach their kids whatever they like as long as they learn some english and math."

People are free to teach their children what they want - and do. Some teach them arrogance, some teach them racism, some teach them consumerism, some teach them leadership, and some teach them criminal thinking.

That's not what we're discussing here. Whether the surrounding societal structure supports you or not, your child's outlook on life is in your hands. We're discussing a whole compartment of children in our society using a different curriculum, one that will be 'culturally appropriate', as if these childre were not capable, as other cultural minority children must, of extracting what they need out of the generic curriculum everyone uses. I would suggest that if they're not, the fault lies with the generic curriculum everyone uses, not with these children, their cultural uniqueness or genetic makeup.
If they choke on kilts and bagpipes as representing them or 'everybody', they are not alone; If they balk at getting told that decent people use Kleenex rather than sniffling, this also is a cultural choice that wouldn't be everybody's. Maybe the fault is not so much with the curriculum as with that breed of teacher who thinks it is his/her job to pick up the little savages of all ilks, be they from the North, the Sounth, the East, or the West, and clean them up and civilize them. Civilization means different things to different people. To my cultural background, for instance, the notion is contemptible, that you have to get everything 'in writing'. That a man or woman would run from his/her word puts them to the bottom of the credibility ladder with no hope of parole.

The ship had better not have sailed, for that would mean we are headed for Afghan states of affairs - no overarching community for all, but one little warlord next to the other, all palying games and slicing it up between them and ripping off their respective underlings. Oh, the trends are on the move, the warlords are there, all eager to 'serve', but we must not let them. We must sit down and 'talk about how to do it better'. You say we lack leadership. If you can see that, why don't you be a leader?

We all play games, somebody says, but some of us are playing for keeps, while others are playing in the dirt.

"Opening our eyes and learning about each other is. If the best we can come up with is the idea that we each go to our room and separately arrive at comparable levels of mutual arrogance and chauvisnism, so there is a 'level playing field'(how I hate that expression - we are not playing, none of us are!), then this falls short of true community and cooperation, and way short of the best that people in this province have the potential to do."

Judging from the postings on this site do you really believe people have opebded their eyes and learned?

What about provincial funding for private schools, including Christian schools.

As noted in an earlier post, the present education system has left many First Nations' students behind. Do the naysayers want that to continue?

[ ... it's only when aboriginals are as free as every other Canadian to move about, to earn, learn real skills and knowledge, and to rely on themselves, that they will be able to be truly themselves, to use their freedom to honour and emulate (or not) their ancestral ways and customs. ] - AGREED!

I think Rafe's comments are incredibly paternalistic and certainly naive. Perhaps he was deliberately provocative or he can't help himself as a product of a socio-cultural system that overtly emphasizes and reifies the ways of the Great White World-View (GWWV) over all others in myriad ways. One of the most effective ways of inculcating including the GWWV has been through mass education which has sought to indoctrinate all and punish any dissenters. Residential schools were a product of this; with their dismantling we (Big Government) offered native communities some limited opportunities to explore their culture in educational settings as long as it could be squeezed into "the curriculum", which mainly smothered natives in the GWWV. If communities didn't play by the rules as set by Indian and Northern Afairs then their funding was yanked.

Now, apparently, we are going to allow native communities much more autonomy in setting their curriculum and educational praxis. Or are we? If the fix is in, that is, if this is merely a 'downloading' of educational administrative authority to band leadership with the proviso that for edu-dollars to flow they must adhere to BC's increasingly rigid K-12 GWWV-based curriculum, then nobody's the richer here, save the educational administrators and teachers. On the other hand, if there is latitude for natives to introduce and determine their educational praxes reflecting historical native traditions, then we may all be richer for it.

There are many important native leaders ready and willing to step up to the plate on this, too, if we're really willing to support them. One of the most seminal books illuminating the attributes of native educational practice in our post-modern world is 'Look to the Mountain: An Ecology of Indigenous Education', by Tewa artist Gregory Cajete (Kivaki Press, 1994).

In this book Cajete asserts the purpose of education in tribal cultures is to connect people to their heritage and to their distinct place on earth. Cajete describes how this is achieved through “mythopoetic” rather than reductionistic teaching methods, including storytelling, sacred art, ritual, immersion in nature and simply through the daily involvement of young people in the life of the adult community. Education is not seen as a technical process to be managed by specialists but as a heroic journey, a challenging quest that each individual undertakes with the support and guidance of the community.

Cajete emphasizes the organic balance between cultivating individuality (“personal power”) through diverse and flexible teaching methods, and leading the individual to understand that people are essentially “social beings living in relation to one another. Our physical and biological survival is intimately interwoven with the communities that we create and that create us”. lndigenous education is, above all, concerned with such relationships, based upon a profound respect for the rhythms and patterns of nature and the ways these are expressed archetypally both culturally and through the individual psyche.

For native and non-native educators struggling to cope with the moral and existential alienation of youths in the modern world, Cajete and others have some great ideas that deserve support, but as an innovative educator myself (director of SelfDesign Learning Community), I am doubtful that ideas like Cajetes' would make it very far up the food chain in the current Ministry of Education.

Telkwa Hoser and Dorothy,

The thing is, natives have already been going to the same schools as everyone else and integrating. It hasn't worked. That's why we're here. Going to school in Saskatchewan I had lots of native classmates. I had none at the U of Sask. The fact of the matter is equal treatment did not produce equal results and I think maybe we need to look at other options, preferably ones put forward by natives themselves, like this one.

IAMC, unfortunately vouchers have not worked anywhere they've been tried.

Frank writes: [IAMC, unfortunately vouchers have not worked anywhere they've been tried.]. ... Sorry, Frank, your opinion is incorrect. Vouchers (and Charter schools) have been enacted very successfully in a number of jurisdicitons in the states, though vested interested organizations have worked assiduously to try to convince people otherwise.

In fact, school choice options, including vouchers, charter schools and tax credits to families, are about to get a much larger profile in the states after this week's class action lawsuit filed in New Jersey on behalf of 60,000 kids. People can learn more about this from the Alliance for School Choice (allianceforschoolchoice.org/).

The dominant culture's other option, forced attendance at residential schools, certainly worked well didn't it?

I think First Nations need an opportunity to try their own hand at the pump.

However, what they really need is taxing power for themselves and their own communities and not just the handouts that a particular government (and I'm not at all convinced that the Campbell government is so keen about this exercise if the Feds aren't paying the bills) is prepared to provide when the 'spirit' seems to move them.

"..natives have already been going to the same schools as everyone else and integrating. It hasn't worked.."

This would only be significant to what is under discussion here, under the condition that it works for everybody else. it doesn't. Ergo, it's not the kids and their origin/history/genetics, it's the system and its attitudes. I don't think we can all afford to just solve the problem for ourselves, nor do I believe we should cynically accept that our educational system is anyone else's 'food chain'. I am calling for us to put pressure on our politicians to do this better in full public view and with inclusive approaches, all of us together, not in a piecemeal fashion, each in our little corner. There is nothing wrong with "Cajetes ideas", in fact I was under the belief that this was the essence of the mission statements of most BC schools. What's with walking all over it to the point where we become completely cynical? Does anyone here not understand what the alternatives are to going the community way? Ask any Afghan farmer, who is trying to build a family and a life for it. Ask any Afghan youth, who will tell you that he is 18, and all he knows is how to cater to his one important possession: The AK-47. You think it can't happen here? Then ask yourself how so many native youth do not get the ballast that will serve to keep them alive, even if there's food on the table and roof over their heads! There are not enough people who give a damn, that's why...We keep talking about past crimes, to exhaustion. The past is gone, we cannot turn back the clock. It's not what we did then, it's what we don't do now.

One thing missing here. The "education system" was never designed to educate, if by education you mean giving people a knowledge of their society, the world and culture. Its chief functions were to give a few basic skills for the work place, such as basic literacy and artithmatic, and to teach obedience to the political and economic bosses. In other word to turn out good and useful wages slaves. Then, as "education" expanded, it became a bureaucratic force in its own right, existing for its own interests. Thus, Native education, or home schooling, for that matter, can't be any worse than what we have now. Might even be better if some kids actually get taught a little bit of reality instead of the usual "our system is the best in the world" propaganda.

bc4me, what is the problem that vouchers fix? The choice to educate your kids the way you want I assume without having to do it with after-tax dollars?

Fair enough and I do have sympathy for those of a religous background etc that feel they don't want their kids exposed to the general education system.

The thing is, where it has been tried it may work for the kids involved but it has not worked for the wider system. Losing those tax dollars has meant a worse-off general education system. When I worked in the US (Carolinas) no one had their kids in public school, everyone I worked with had their kids in private schools.

Now the argument is that like health care, allowing those with means to set up their own systems leaves more resources for those without the means to put their kids in private schools. Well, that didn't work. Public schools have received less resources as those with a strong voice have left the system. So through vouchers the tax dollars leave and with them the better teachers and resources, and you're left with a bad public system.

If you can point me to examples of where the public system has actually improved its outcomes when voucher systems have been available I'll be more than happy to read it.

Frank, you write: "The thing is, where it has been tried it may work for the kids involved but it has not worked for the wider system. Losing those tax dollars has meant a worse-off general education system." To which I respond, what's wrong with using vouchers and charter schools for improving the educational experiences of these kids, thousands of whom, I might add, are otherwise-disenfranchised kids from inner cities, projects, forgotten-rural districts.

C-schools and vouchers (both of which continue to evolve) are designed to help kids, communities and motivated educators create human-scale (for the most part) educational solutions, period. In certain situations they are succeeding very well for richer and poorer communities; in other situations, public schools are surviving and thriving very adequately. I know this to be true, I just participated in a charter school evaluation-exchange in Colorado in April, and learned about many charter school attributes, stuff I certainly wouldn't read about in monthly teaching union newsletters south of the border or north.

Throwing more money at an over-sized, paternalistic, over-bureaucratized general ed system isn't necessarily going to fix anything nor provide any tangible benefits to those kids who need help, now.

What I'm seeing in the new policy is the creation of educational apartheid, period.

Also, the idea that a Halqemeylem, St'at'imcets or Haida account of history is "better" than one in English is only valid if that history is accurate and balanced. Teaching native kids things different than non-native kids are being taught (already in progress) only creates more cultures of division and eventually further discord. It also suggests that native kids will be going to different schools than non-native kids, and living in separate cultures. This is madness. I'm not talking assimilation, but I am talking integration.

And how are things like medicine and physics and technology going to be taught without importing words from Greek and Latin into the native languages? Anybody care to tell me what the Haida or Tsilhqot'in for mitochondria is, for example. Anyone want to take a stab at explaining quantum physics or, for that matter, business management, in Okanagan or Shuswap? Will there be Shuswap and Carrier translations of European and Asian literature and history? Or will it be "other people think different than we do and it's not necessary to learn about them, their culture, or their sciences, except what we want you to know about them"??

I would have loved to learn Halqemeylem or Lillooet/St'at'imcets during my formative years, had it been available. Now, though those languages are taught, they will only be taught in the new parallel school system. And it's what will be being taught in those languages that the whole of our society should be concerned about. One glance at the indoctrinated hostility of the Palestinian "death to Israel, death to America" school lessons and Wahhabist versions of history and morality should remind us of the dangers of such divided curriculum, and the idea that some kids should have a different education than others.

All very scary, but given the political agenda of our current "leadership" there's not much to be done but hope for the best (and expect the worst).

Article author: What I'm saying is this: if an aboriginal youngster is not allowed to learn those things based on other cultures because that gap has been filled by teachings of his own culture, he will be a sadly deprived person."

Why are you assuming that teaching of cultures will be done with blinders on?

I grew up in Montreal and went to English school. I learned primarily french canadien history, general canadian history, some american history, and some First Nations history (albeit from a french and english canadian perspective).

Did you know Mackenaie found his way through the Rockies with First Nations guides and horses? Without First Nations he was just another lost tourist!

Hey Grumpy:

"History is history, you can not change it, but you can learn to understand it from another's perspective."

Come on, we all know people have tried to change (re: rewrite history-usually the victors! Even George Bush tried to change some history-FDR's role in WWII; or perhaps that his grandfather assisted the Nazi's in their banking activities!)

I do not think this initiative will place blinders on First Nation kids, but rather allow them to learn of their culture equally, alongside other cultures.

bc4me, so its not that you think vouchers and charter schools are good (beyond the "human-scale" thing), its just that you think the public system is inherently bad? And therefore that the answer is everyone creates their own school for their own kids and we have no public education system and all the kids will turn out better because there won't be a ministry of education and trustees?

Okay,but I still don't see exactly why that is. If its being able to set up the school you want such as a Catholic school, a fine arts school or a sports school the public system seems to be moving in that direction already.

As for why can't the majority of kids use vouchers instead of using a public system? My own opinion is that many, if not most, people can't add any funds beyond the voucher itself and therefore well-off kids get better educations because their schools are funded above and beyond basic vouchers.

Frank; your statement " that many,if not most,people can't add any funds beyond the voucher itself" is reminiscent of the famous " beer and popcorn " statement made by a prominent Liberal campaign strategist made during our last Federal election, referring the the CPC's daycare payments. It's indicative of liberal thinking, that we can't take care of ourselves, and need the government to make decisions for us.
I couldn't disagree more. This is the line that separates my conservative values from those of a liberal.
But out. Leave me the right to pursue life, liberty and happiness as I see fit.

Unfortuately, despite who 'pays' for the charter school experience and no matter where the 'vouchers' come from, the actual experience and results of students in the Charter system are somewhere between disappointing and bad. California has done an extensive review of their lengthy experiment with the genre. I know you don't generally take the time to research much of what you post here. But others do.

As to the Conservatives' reach around to their base, I think it has been farily established this has nothing to actually do with daycare. Why do you always flog a dead horse? Harper's program is about power and not good governance. I see some more of his lies were disclosed this morning relative to the returning remains of dead Canadian soldiers and the wishes of their families. The emails tell the real story about who is pulling the strings. What a jerk!

I think most of you are missing the main point!
You all seem to be assuming that the modules that will be offered will focus 100% on Our culture and traditions with no integration (btw I hate that word!) of the rest of say history, arithmetic, english, etc.
QUOTE: "Because Arabs gave us arithmetic, the English Dickens, the Irish Wilde, the Germans Goethe, the Italians Michelangelo......"
This is a chance for the contributions of significant Native artists, theorists, historians and Chiefs to have their voices and accomplishments added to the curriculum. Something that should be added to the whole education system rather than the stereotypes of how the events of Little Big Horn were potrayed until just a decade ago. As one commentator stated, BALANCED lessons.
Not once did I see recommendations of this new system to have them "blot out" other cultures' views and lessons and yet that seems to be the message most of the commentators have heard or are basing their opinion on.
It always seems that when an issue regarding sovereign management of resources or the like arises regarding First Nations there is the uproar of it's race-based.
Of course it is, We are a different race and that will never change despite attempts of the governments and people of the past. This continues today.......don't you get the message? We don't want to integrate, assimilate, we want to exist the way we see fit. We can be successful in all aspects of life without "assimilating" on society's terms. Settlements and agreements in principle such as this are needed in order to have a higher "success" rate of First Nations People in North America. The ways in which Our People have been treated and educated has failed miserably for the last 150 years. It's high time that we are given an opportunity to make this work!

> Of course it is, We are a different race and that will never change despite attempts of the governments and people of the past. This continues today.......don't you get the message?
We don't want to integrate, assimilate, we want to exist the way we see fit.

I think You are completely oblivious, if you are not seeing that You are, in fact, *already* assimilated genetically and culturally. Know any "pure" Indians?

Get over Yourself. There is no "You." There is only Us, trying to make it on a small corner of a shrinking globe.

> Settlements and agreements in principle such as this are needed in order to have a higher "success" rate of First Nations People in North America. The ways in which Our People have been treated and educated has failed miserably for the last 150 years. It's high time that we are given an opportunity to make this work!

If Your People want to be successful, You have to adopt a culture that demands academic achievement pretty much from infancy. You can't look at the overrepresentation of Asians in the honour rolls and universities and then call this a racist culture that oppresses minorities. Stop oppressing Yourself.

Sorry to burst your bubble Yammer but I am far from oblivious. Maybe I rant and rave and don't make my point in enough detail sometimes but I am far from oblivious.
Assimilation will never occur 100% of the way it was intended which is why there are reservations, why we still have and observe Our cultures, languages and traditions (except in cases where it was completely beaten out of Our elders in the res. schools) and why there were underground potlatches, Ghost Dances and the like despite being outlawed. It was intended that assimilation (to this day) will quell the "hostiles" and then there will no longer be issues of Native Rights and Land Claims.
As for purity; yes I consider myself a pure Indian as do thousands of others. The only people that question that are those who would like to see us not have that distinct status (no pun intended). The 'blood quorum' was established as a long term "solution" to getting rid of Natives. Hope is that one day no one will have the percentage needed to claim "status" as an Indian. Excellent idea for those who wanted to rid themselves eventually of the Indian question: if you want to eliminate a race you need to focus on eliminating language, customs, religion and identity. All attempts have been made and have proven unsuccessful.
Our People were successful until set up for failure (in most cases) by being put onto remote reserves with no running water, no resources (unless the govt. exploited them) and basically no hope. Academic achievements can be met through this newly proposed system and what I was saying was that the traditional systems have failed thus far. By offering this perhaps it will instill greater hope, drive and pride in the students and they can come up to your standards!
I don't think someone oppresses themselves by standing up for what they truly believe in; unfortunately you would prefer to say I am oppressing myself rahter than reflecting support for a new proposal that may help the First Nations.

IAMC,

It is? I think its just common sense that most of us can't afford paying let's say $10,000 a year for each of our kid's education. Even if the gov't were to give me a voucher of say $6,000 I would find adding an extra 5 to $7,000 each year a hardship and I doubt anyone with 3 or 4 kids in school would welcome it either. Not to mention I'd have to take on all the tasks others do for me like making sure my teacher has actual qualifications.

Nope, its indicative of reality that I can't afford to build my own highways and bridges, hire my own police force or hire my own education system. And I doubt anyone else on this board can either. Like it or not, you have to be a socialist sometimes IAMC. You need to share costs and receive in return shared benefits.

So in addition to education what if the gov't also "butted out" of highway construction and policing, jsut to name two. Would your "conservative thinking" get you through? Somehow I doubt it. I don't see any of us building our personal roads and bridges while doing our own policing and home schooling.

Uh, gee, seems to me that native artists etc get more ink/hype than anyone else lately, even more than the Chinese Canadians (except in the Chinese-language media, of course); First Nations and Inuit art is entrenched as part of national identity now, and it's a lot easier for a native artist/writer to get funding/publication/airtime than for nearly anyone else, except the proverbial one-armed lesbian-francophone-visible minority single mother with AIDS.

This isn't meant as a slag; I'm a big fan of Bill Reid and the Edenshaws and all native art, and was "into it" a long time before anyone else. But the quoted bit above reminds me of the coals-to-Newcastle sort of logic that you also hear on CBC all the time about how there's not enough dox/films on native life in Canada, supposedly in comparison to stuff on non-natives; while in the meantime the CBC's schedule is choked with the stuff; or with stuff on the "multicultural communities".

The new education system isn't going to advance native art/culture to the general Canadian community any more than it has been; and currnetly it's top of the list IMO; where it will advance it will be only within the native community/culture. But what will native kids learn about everyone else's cultures? Will we have a common Canadian culture if the fragmentation of identity continues? I wonder if we still do, in fact...(although of course we're told we didn't have one at all.....)

I don't get it -- why do Europeans think we know what Native kids should learn? And why do we think Native parents don't know what their kids should learn?

I don't think it's all quite so easy as that, Yammer. You have to ask what the honour roll in universities represents now? To what degree does it represent the ability to conform?

So, ntvprd, may be making a very valid point that assimilation ( whether within cultures, within universities) is usually about quelling the hostile forces of those who protest the status quo...whether they be hostile forces in the form of those who defend their right of settlement to land claims ...or whether they be hostile forces of protest and change who see university education as being increasingly co-opted by a corporate culture that is predicated on unquestioning acceptance of the status quo.

I'm not so sure Yammer. I think the quality of education being squeezed out of the sausage press in most universities today is not a very useful criterion for judgment any more.

In fact, it may not be too much longer before the kinds of 'traditional knowledge' that Indians (I'm glad to see some native writers still use this term as opposed to the PC terminology) prize and try to preserve is a hot commodity in the wider world.

“It always seems that when an issue regarding sovereign management of resources or the like arises regarding First Nations there is the uproar of it's race-based.”

That’s not my focus at least. I am in full agreement with subsection 15(2) of the constitution, which reads:

(2) Subsection (1) does not preclude any law, program or activity that has as its object the amelioration of conditions of disadvantaged individuals or groups including those that are disadvantaged because of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age, or mental or physical disability.(5)

My worry is, that the separate education constitutes an acceptance of our complete failure to create a community, within which there is room for everyone, such as we aspire to have. It is all very well that native people and their children, based on treaty rights, can lay claim to what they need, but that doesn’t mean everybody else is doing just fine. There are many children here, my own included, whose sojourn in the public education system is just miserable, because the system is oblivious to as well as brutally arrogant towards their cultural background. This is why I would rather see holistic answers to these grievances, for that would help everyone; the same way better door handles and stairs made for the benefit of disabled people actually give everyone a better and less potentially disabling environment. We could view the native youth as ‘indicator students’, in that their misery in public education in truth reflects varying degrees of misery in almost everybody. There is something rotten in the state of our educational halls. We need each other, and so even if people such as ntvprd abhors the idea of assimilation, this actually only happens in a Borg collective. In these parts, maybe we could accomplish a decent level of cooperation?

And I'm not a European, thank you very much. I'm a Canadian. The use of "European" - which we used to mean someone fresh off the boat/plane (and which didn't include Britons and Irish) is just a cheap post-modern quasi-correct euphemism for "white". All it does is try and separate us further, instead of recognizing diversity within the Canadian population, i.e. Norwegian Canadians, Irish Canadians, Ukrainian Canadians etc (or any combination thereof, and with non-"European" Canadians) are NOT Europeans in the language I was raised using.

In other words, and along the same lines as your complaint about why "we" should tell "you" how to educate your kids, why do non-white Canadians and the academic cabal which have furthered this term insist on telling us what our "designation" should be. That there's even a "we" and "you" is the precise problem; and labelling "us" Europeans WHEN WE'RE NOT and pretending this is OK is just more divisive "multicultural" bullshit.

Lynn and G West

Like you, I would of course deny that conventional academic achievement is the whole of life's riches.

However, there seems a very evident causative line that begins with the basic parental expectation that the child will become a university-educated professional, to the outcome that the North American Asians enjoy very high rates of employment and very low rates of idleness and criminality. This despite obvious racism in the past, manifested by the Chinese head tax and concentration camps for Japanese.

The obvious lesson for any underclass that wants to become prosperous is to raise expectations on the children. The parents should be reading to the kids from infancy, exhalting book learning and good habits, and having a minimum expectation of post-secondary training, if not degrees.

I don't doubt that having a native education programme could bring substantial advantages to native people.

My point is that it is behaviour of the individual in school which has the proven result of prosperity, not the educational system or the racial biases of the majority.

Is this a plea for conformity, Lynn? Yes, to a degree. But I think you can "conform" with established systems of effort and reward without necessarily becoming a clone or characterless drone.

NTVPRD - you answered my post most civilly, thank you. It not that I would obstruct an innovative new programme, so much as I would think its efforts are going to be wasted without a culture shift in favour of excellence rather than accomodation.

First Nations people look back at Trudeau and the white paper calling for assimilation as a turning point for the reassertion of native identity. Well, another bit of Trudeau-maniacal policy that comes to mind whenever the multicultural/immigration issues are on the boiler is the immortal and rather bigoted quote "English Canada doesn't have a culture - I'm going to give it one".

And so here we are....every culture BUT English Canada's, which we are told won't even exist in 30 more years. Check out the debate on:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Chinese_Canadian

where something between 30% and 50% of Chinese in Canada doen't speak English and apparently have no intention of learning (or no ability to, so stated somewhere in there); multiply that by recent StatsCan comments that by a certain year over 50% of Canada will be of Chinese origin. If you can't see the implications of that, or think that's just peachy, you were born in a different country/planet than I was (and I don't mean physically, i.e. that you're a "foreigner"). Yet it still remains taboo to discuss the new cultural colonialism, and it's a given in official-think that English Canada is an obsolete concept and we should be all happy multiculturalized now and no longer "bad old Anglo-Saxons" (as if we ever were; "Anglo-Saxon" being used with as much venom by historians and anti-"us" spinners claim that "Oriental" is (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:The_Orient)

Part of the issue in raising this here, re the First Nations education discussion, is that on top of the separate First Nations education system, where the local traditional languages appear to be the main content of the projected curriculum - successful enough in Ireland and Brittany and so on - there's another large bulk of people in the country who will be pressing for a separate education system as well as potentially a third official language (as has been called for here in BC; ironically not Toishan Cantonese, the old Vancouver brand of Chinese, but Mandarin); and already there's pressure to expand ESL spending/programs and ESL time in regular classrooms.

Which leaves first-language English speakers where, in terms of classroom times and ancillary services? Caught short, that's where.

OK, so that may not seem directly related to the First Nations education issues. But how it's related is the idea of racially-based education, and the creation and fostering of distinct, separate cultures within Canada. Towards what end?

Divide and conquer.

Add onto this the open admission, often stated clearly in newscasts, that the future of our economy requires importing more capital/immigrants - that immigration is the growth engine of our "economy". Meaning the ongoing urban sprawl and accompanying jacking of real estate prices, an endless bubble. In other words, we don't have any other economic hope, we're told, other than maybe the occasional megaproject - Olympics lately, at one time Expo, before that the Columbia River Treaty and the mega-expansion/subsidization of forestry in the '70s and '80s - and spinoffs from Alberta's tarsands boom.

Do we actually talk about coming up with a producing economy? Not "producing" in terms of housing starts, new "jobs" created - mostly McJobs, or highly-trained ones needing either educational retraining subsidies or the importation of skilled immigrants. Video games and software? Well, maybe. But financial services do NOT produce anything except more financial needs, real estate does nothing but cause more, well, real estate.

There's a lottery mentality here dating back to the days of the gold colony, and it seems that for all the great ideas that have come out of here, only a few things we've actually gotten into making. Making, m-a-k-i-n-g, and I don't mean bad copies of Hollywood movies/TV shows. Sure, Ontario's and Quebec's auto industry and other manufacturing are in many ways sunset industries; in the not very long run so also will be the oil boom. So what else to do to be able to afford the jacked-up price of living here, to pay for the high standard of living "we" all love to boast about so much. More immigrants? Is that our only "cure" for our economic future??

And what do we do when the land runs out? The water? One glance at LA or Texas is a good clue, never mind Lagos and Sao Paulo and Manila and . . . .

Apocalyptica perhaps. But in light of the mass immigration, you have to wonder how viable/useful it's going to be to have small towns in the Interior and up the Coast educated in a different language (Carrier or Shuswap or whatever) - if no one else, including all those millions of new immigrants - are not learning those languages.

This isn't saying that, maybe, Asians and Europeans who move into Smithers shouldn't be expected to learn Gitksan, or Latin Americans in the Shuswap and Okanagan learn those languages. But that's not the point of the native education system; it's not for anyone else.

Sure, OK, Grisons/Graubunden is last holdout of Romansh, and Sami is being kept alive (just barely) in northern Scandinavia. I'm all for linguistic survival, and cultural respect. Thing is, it seems it's only from-Canada Canadians have this respect; many newcomers don't and in fact (as before) are among the most racist and anti-Indian; or oblivious to the reality of First Nations life/culture anyway, and more concerned with retrenching their own in the new national milieu, which they're busily rewriting the history and identity of to suit themselves (with help from our pollyannas).

Yeah, OK, easy enough to dismiss this as a redneck rant; but rednecks don't think like I do, and this isn't about race. It's about culture, and national unity and collective identity. We don't have one - what we did have was systematically undermined and destroyed and of late has been getting thoroughly discredited by badly-written and very biased histories and journalism.

Fine. Throw the baby out with the bathwater. But if I'm going to have to teach English for a living (which might become the case) I'd rather do it in Cuba or Thailand or somewhere people know who they are, and aren't willing to sell out their country just to "keep the economy going". And don't pretend there aren't immigrants and offshore residents here who DON'T say how stupid Canadians are for being so willing to sell out; you won't see it in print, but you hear it all the time....

Oh, yes, Skookum1, you may see it in print. I am an immigrant (probably not surprising to anyone), and I don't mind saying that Canadians are, if not stupid, then at least looking the other way, while illuminati lackeys sell out the ground under our feet for purposes of shortsighted greed.
In fact, I left my old country, because I felt that it was starting to sell out, so there is nothing new under the sun. Apropos what we are discussing here, this may easily be the grossest insult we can hand the natives, and I am surprised they are not more incensed about it.
As for 'we're all in this together', the problem is that so many groups of people are under this grand illusion that it ain't so. The ones who can easily afford having the AC running at top capacity while others roast right now really think that ultimately, they will find a way to salvage themselves and their immediate family from global cooking and whatever else hits the plebs. This is of course laughable. Look at this globe, how small and fragile and interdependent it is, and perceive the monumental, aye, criminal, stupidity in this 'screw with no end', our 'econnomy'. Reduce, reuse, recycle; if there is a religion worthy of picking up, this is it. And close the border to all comers, right now, and get us armed to the teeth, so we can defend our turf. Redneck? Maybe. Coming from a small nation that is all but 'generositizing' itself out of existence, and fast, certainly. But Canada has only five times the number of people there, and is not a giant as we may believe when we look at the map.
If we don't have a shared sense of direction and identity now, we had better get it fast, for the boat crew is hauling up the gangplank, and we will be left on the dock.

Fair enough, Yammer, certainly life involves a certain level of conformity...but that was not the point I was making. Instead I was questioning the so-called superiority and worthiness of a results-based traditional education that is so dependent on the need for both assimilation and conformity...as well as acknowledging ntvprd's apt comment in that regard.

(Akin to the questioning that revolves around achievement and IQ tests being culturally-biased.)

'But I think you can "conform" with established systems of effort and reward without necessarily becoming a clone or characterless drone.'

It should be that way, shouldn’t it? Except that so many of the systems you are talking about are played with loaded dice. Think about it. If there was straight sailing being done, why do the native youth even have a problem? We shouldn’t be discussing this now.

You are evaluating a situation without having noticed, that big ethnically based communities have been on the front page and in the village square screaming foul, and have been able to bully their way to some – yes, accomodation. Try to find – and listen to some of the smaller ethnic groups, those without any real clout in numbers or votes, and you will find out they are not evaluating the situation as fair and upright and gung-ho happy. We are a country of somebodies and nobodies, and what the Chinese and other such large groups have achieved is shouting loud enough to become grudgingly accepted as somebodies for fear of losing votes or investment.

We havent’t done the job until there are no nobodies.

I know you're questioning the superiority and worthiness of traditional education, Lynn. That's what critical thinkers do. It's good work.

However, you also have to look at the answers.

The answer I get is that the formerly racially oppressed minority, orientals, find the so-called white man's education to be perfectly palatable and that it gives them riches, not just culturally but the tangible, BMW-in-driveway type.

Therefore, we can dispense with the idea that black hair and almond eyes is what's keeping native people (closely related genetically) from having the same results.

Obviously the problem is cultural. I don't agree that it is because of cultural bias per se. Sure the standard system is culturally biased, like an IQ test. What system would not reflect the biases of the culture in which it is inculcated? Standardization is useful. Have you ever been in a choir? Imagine if there was no sheet music, that everyone just improvised their own part.

Or, worse, if the choirmasters arbitrarily decided, on the basis of race, that some kids were not capable of doing the sheet music. Guess what? They will never, never function in the choir.

That's the true racism.

To be quite frank (as I generally tend to be) we hear all this stuff about a 6,000 year old civilization (subtext: they're superior) but I don't see very much of it. The kids (mostly rich) who clog up SFU's hallways yakking in Chinese, or yelling into their cellphones on the buses and while in the gym (where they have no concern for gym rules) aren't studying the Tao Te Ching or Confucius, they're studying western civilization, ie. business and technical culture. They're rarely interested in other aspects of what the West has to offer them, and it's clear in many cases that, while they may be "Canadian" by passport, they have no intention of being part of this society, and have their eyes on careers in China. To where they will take the legacy of John Stuart Mill and Henry Ford and build a quasi-"American" China. And in the 4th-year history course I took, in which over 1/3 to 2/5 of the papers we had to study dealt with the alleged sufferings of the Chinese in British Columbia - there was not one in the course.

Now, as for First Nations students in university, it's much like feminism/women's studies. They're not interested in studying anything else but their own field, or through their own glass, and darkly. Come to think of it, there weren't any First Nations people in that history course either, and the material was overwhelmingly about them.

What I'm seeing is the growth of segregated cultures and identities, around the universities as elsewhere; and in the case of passport-of-convenience Canadians, an exploitation of our educational system/resources for skills that will be used to develop competing countries rather than our own. The rebuttal of this is that it's supposedly racist to complain; but again it's not about race, it's about culture - and national purpose. Whose national purpose is the point....

It might be different at UNBC, with their large First Nations language department and less of a business/engineering tilt to the curriculum (which has destroyed SFU in my opinion); and I submit that it might be a good thing if UBC medical students were given a break on their tuition if they undertook to spend a year up there to learn Carrier or another northern, living language, with the intent that they would locate as "bush doctors" for part of their career. Might also break the medical student crowd of the "I'm in this for the money" attitude which they are so notorious for (especially once they become specialists...).

IN our little town( Victoria0 there is a Chinese school and nobody is getting their shits ina knot. Other ethnic background groups have courses in their culture and we all tend to be happy to go to events put on by the groups. If a local band sets up a school, and there already is a very nice one up the peninsula and it meets the BC curiculum standards what's the big deal. The only issue I would have was expressed years ago at treaty meetings. I asked "When you get a tax base which includes non Indian residents, will they be invited to schooling in those schools". A few Indian leaders were quite adament the answer would be no. But they arn't all the leaders and in no way will the governments allow that to happen. In some areas of the province that might be the only school for many miles.

Emily Dickens, Rafe?

Ya, I think we need the past mouthpiece of the anti-Indian movement to tell First Nations that they should not shut out Emily Dickens in their education.

Maybe non-aboriginals should be educated that you wrote the Foreword to the foremost anti-aboriginal book in Canada, Our Home or Native Land? You have no credibility on native issues. Why does The Tyee let you write such garbage?

You know I think it is great that First Nations will be able to determine their own currciulums, but only if Rafe and his anti-Indian buddies could just pass a law to prevent them from buying paper. Hell, decades ago people like them outlawed outboard motors and farm tools.

By the way, anyone see that picture of Martyn Brown, former organizer of the anti-Indian organization BC FIRE, in the newspaper today? He's now the Chief of Staff and seeing how he can keep BC government employees. That's how racist organizers are rewarded in BC.

"..orientals, find the so-called white man's education to be perfectly palatable and that it gives them riches, not just culturally but the tangible, BMW-in-driveway type.

Therefore, we can dispense with the idea that black hair and almond eyes is what's keeping native people (closely related genetically) from having the same results. .."

Not that closely related genetically. The Amerindians, as the geneticists call that group, has, for instance, a complete absence of the gene for blood type B, which is about 15,000 years old. With it goes some adaptations to harsh living conditions on marginal lands and unfriendly climates, suitable for nomadic living. The gene likely arose among nomadic populations of the Siberian steppes and has been acquired by 'orientals in an order of 20-30%. This says good deal of which part of evolution the natives of North America missed out on: the one that makes it easy for one to live with constant change and disturbance. Try to take a peek in the book 'eat righ for your type', as well as internet references to Luigi cavalli-Sforza's research. So, if we want to look at genetics, let us at least do it right. Based on genetics, Amerindians have more in common with 'old ice-age hunters' from Northern Europe, than they do with any 'oriental', almond eyes notwithstanding. You still can't judge a book by its ccover, the proof is in the pudding.

Wow, isn't that cute. Fun little concerts with exotic costumes; the epitome of hyphenated multiculturalism, and yeah fairly innocuous, if a bit tacky in general. EuroFest at the Scandinavian Centre in Burnaby ever year does the same with Serbs, Croats (in the same space, no less), Romanians, Russians, Germans, Balts and Scandinavians selling baking, perogies and jam and reliving life in the peasant villages back home. Wonderful, huh? How cute, how Canadian? Yet most of those people, many of whom have double passports, would rather be back home and often say so; like the 40,000 that were in Lebanon instead of here; the passport in this case being a ticket out in time of trouble, but with no intention of "becoming Canadian" or living here otherwise, i.e. unless they have to, as a last resort. Like a pre-approved refugee application (consider, on the other hand, the 40,000 people who didnt get those passports who DID want to become Canadian, and not keep ties to the homeland...). "Becoming Canadian" apparently doesn't mean much now, since multiculturalist ideology has forcibly rederined what "Canadian" means; movable goalposts which even deny the existence of a Canadian ethnicity, or any national character or identity except as mandated by the policy and the various propaganda images: Dieppe, hockey, health care, maple syrup, yadyadayada.

But about that Chinese school: I know it's been there for generations. But you don't have tens of thousands of young Chinese who show disdain for speaking English, do not mix with those of other ethnic groups (even other Asian ethnic groups), and do not shoulder people aside on busy sidewalks; and it's not just young Chinese, either. And other Asians of my acquaintance comment on this behaviour, so it's not a "racist" issue (a cheap word used typically in a browbeating context by people who are more racist than the people they're accusing it of).

When Colwood is 50%+ Chinese, and you rarely hear English in downtown Victoria, you might have an appreciation for what I've been saying, and what you will hear from other mainlanders (of any colour/race, including old-stock Canadians of Chinese descent). We have been colonized, and the occupiers have no intention of joining our culture; rather, they want ours to adapt to their existence, and their propagation of Chinese-only living and workspaces.

Of course, it appears Victoria may have bad feng shui (like New West) so it may never be so much of an issue there....

Actually, central Victoria's feng shui is more or less alright, even though it does face west. But Saanich and the Western Communities generally not, except in certain localities. And in general all that wind in the Greater Victoria area is a bad thing, as well as the general hilliness and irregular street-pattern.

Becoming Canadian means the same now as it always has. It means calling Canada home; it means being willing to stand up for it, also if and when the going gets tough; it means giving it your very best, which, if you’re an immingrant, does not add up to some dilettante attempt at being –oh-so-canadian (for instance leading to tens of thousands of immigrants from all over the world, to whom this was completely alien, having their baby sons circumcised, believing it was the Canadian thing to do). It means being who you are, and giving to Canada what you and no one else could contribute, precisely because you come from some place else with different experiences and skills.

If Canada is not prepared to see some kinds of paradigm shifts and changes to the social patterns as a consequence of immigration, then maybe it should not invite immigrants, but either take care of producing its own home-grown work force, or only invite people as temporary workers on contract with the understanding that they would remain ‘foreign’, go home again, and never join the Canadian nation.

Of course, the flip side of that is a more unpredictable labor situation, and having to compete for skilled labor, something which is now getting meaner by the day.

What’s wrong with perogies, anyway? Or feng shui? Canada advertises itself to the outside world as the place where we find strength through diversity, sharing and caring and being open-minded and trying to get to know each other, rather than fashioning ghettoes and building impenetrable fortresses. If this is all false, we ought to own up to it and get mean up front.

It is up to either ‘home country’ to say no to double nationality. That Canada does not is one of the things that can make us look slightly Mickey Mouse. Scandinavian countries, for instance, remove citizenship from those taking up citizenship elsewhere. Why do we put up with the double deal? Let us make people choose (including Americans). It is one thing we do have exclusive control over, and where ‘retaliation’ from other countries would be completely inconsequential, as many of them already have the law in place, and we don’t seem to know the difference.

I've got nothing against perogies, except that they're fattening; I train weights and have often speculated on how to make 'em high-protein, low-fat, but can't cook worth a damn anyway, and first on the list is high-fat, low-sugar/fat Nanaimo bars....

As for feng shui....well, for starters, it's the reason all those trees get cut down without permits; not just to improve the view, i.e. the dollar value, but either to encourage Chinese buyers or to satisfy Chinese owners. Why? Because trees block the dragons from accessing your home and bring wealth and prosperity to it, that's why.

Fine, if you have to have pointy things on top of apartment towers to dispel square-box energies, and you don't have pointy shapes aimed at your home/office (as the Bank of China perpetrated on an unwilling Hong Kong, but that's a different setting), and you want houses that don't have through hallways (or the dragons will fly through instead of roosting), sure, whatever. But clear-cutting the city's urban forest to enhance the prosperous energies, and so the profitability of real estate, that's a different story. Sure, there's western geomancy at work here, too, if you know much about the history of the masons and the degree to which their symbology and design ethic/superstition is built into certain buildings, but their earth-magic and design-magic doesn't apply to ripping up trees for superstitious reasons....

I might add that in classical feng shui, things like monster houses, which impinge on the psychic space of neighbouring houses, are decidely aggressive in character; although internally the feng shui ethic is implicit in their design. Oh, but we're not allowed to use "monster houses" because it's "racist", right?

And about that "diversity" this country is supposed to celebrate; why do all non-visible minorities get lumped together collectively as "European" instead of identified by origin, including Canadian origin? (I'm Norwegian, Irish, French-from-France and English; I couldn't have happened ANYWHERE ELSE, not in 1955 anyway). And the diversity within the country; the thing that makes different parts of BC distinct/diverse, and BC distinct from Alberta, is being subsumed into a "created Canadianism" built on a complete redefinition of the word "Canadian". Yeah, it's about integration and hybridization of a new culture; but that's not going to happen so long as purists concerning respective and intently-distinct transplanted cultures are resistant to mingling and adapting to the rest of the community.

Sure, Gung Haggis Fat Choy is kinda funny and cute; but it doesn't give Robbie Burns the respect he deserves, in my opinion; and although there's been Chinese bagpipers in this city for generations, the new Chinese are largely aloof from such mixed-culture undertakings. Even if haggis is uncomfortably like some of the more bizarre tastes in Chinese cuisine...

Entrenching separate languages, separate cultures, separate shopping centres is a recipe for disaster. I was welcoming to the Chinese in the 1970s, even though I was taken aback by such comments as "we only hire Orientals here" while looking for work in a certain swank hotel by Coal Harbour (as I was told, smirkingly, by the Chinese bell captain), but when you hear about people "having" to work in Chinese-language-only work environments because of language difficulties, and others not being able to work at all those "new jobs created by immigration", you have to wonder exactly what's going on, and who's getting the short end of the multicultural stick.

fixing incomplete sentence/phrase:

...because they don't speak a required offshore language, be it Chinese, Punjabi or ??...you don't hear it about German, Spanish, French (except with the feds in that case) and a lot of other languages; only with those with large "culture ghettos" in the workplace. "xxx an asset" is code for "non-xxx need not apply".

“Norwegian, Irish, French-from-France and English; I couldn't have happened ANYWHERE ELSE, not in 1955 anyway”

You’re wrong about that. Canada isn’t the only historical ‘Grand Central’. My family includes a branch with Danish, Norwegian, French-from-France, Spanish and Hebrew heritage. The first person with that combo was born in the 1930’s. In Denmark.

‘European’ is better than ‘Caucasian’, which would only be true for some of us.

Ultimately it’s up to each one of us to define ourselves, or other will do it for us, and we may not like the result. We have been caught sleeping, thinking that white western superiority was so unquestionable, that anyone coming here would aim straight for the ranks of look-alike WASP’s. or whatever. What is there for them to aim at? You mention a ‘created Canadianism’. I do not know that there ever was anything else, as Canada is not a nation-state, but a confederation of former colonies established by different nationalities.

I still think we should get mean up front about this, and not follow our politicians, who will lick the ground a moneyed immigrant has walked on, being suckers for ‘new bizness’. Let us start an advertising campaign and make clear to would-be immigrants, that they can indulge in their superstitious and otherwise deviant tendencies in their own backyard, but out among ‘us’, they will speak English and follow our ideas of social decorum. And that includes not attempting to subvert the official languages act in employment relationships. We only have two official languages in this place; English, French and Haida, and only the mastery of them can legally be made a condition of employment. No ghetto-building, no Waco’s, no Plentiful’s, no flouting the tree replacement bylaws, even if a politician is willing to take a greased palm in return, or even just to bring ’new bizness’ to town. To Hel with ‘bizness’. It has been said that a country sacrificing sovereignty and freedom for any commodity will not only lose them, but also the commodities for which it was willing to bring the sacrifice.

Besides, I think they’re wrong about the dragons. You can’t control their behavior through something as simplistic and obviously manipulative as architecture. Dragons are smarter than that. They only stick with people who are working up good Karma.

These aren't Buddhist dragons; they're Taoist ones, or something along those lines; although Chinese dragon mythology predates Lao Tzu/Taoism. And I think you're confusing our Scandinavian dragons with Asian ones; they're different in character and motivation....that being said, I think I'd rather meet a Chinese one than a Norse one...always meant to do a playlet or short film on the confrontation between Sigurd and Fafnir, but that's another story.

There's a few things in your post I've been meaning to respond to but caught up in other things for a few days; this is notice that I'll be back so "watch this space". About the "created Canadian identity" thing, I didn't mean the identity of created-Canadians, but the created Canadian-identity that's post-1982 Constitution; flag-waving and the new "meaning of being Canadian propaganda", as redefined in the age of multiculturalism and post-Trudeau Canada. See my latest post on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Canadian_identity#Comment - that page is going to be deleted entirely soon, as it's a ratsnest of conflicting and incoherent views (I don't mean my post; I mean the main article).

I meant "the propaganda about the meaning of being-Canadian". Written syntax is so much different than spoken.....