Come on in, grab an apple. Tasty. The fire is nice, but the snow and wind are not so much. I'm actually craving some warm weather, which is really weird for me.
So here's the thing. Us white folks are fucking idiots. Like ... how did we get control of so much of the world when we're barely above open mouth breathing retards? Seriously. A whole race of fucking morons just milling about and wrecking stuff.
See, I'm taking a class on ethics in literature, and a class on utopian literature, and y'know what? Philosophies, societal models, and world views that First Nations came up with more than ten millenia ago are what keep popping up. I have to look at these things and go 'Ok, what the fuck?'
Lemme give you two examples. William Morris' News From Nowhere. Were it not for some differences, that make the society unlivable, is a description of First Nations life. The 'European' additions, or edits, from the lifestyle and world view is essentially what critiques attack his utopia for, and they were solved by FN culture thousands of years ago! Leave it to a Pre-Raphaelite to screw up a pretty well done idea. (Rambling digression: The only one I liked was the younger sister, whasername. The Rossetti chick. She was a dirty girl. Anyways, sorry for the digression.)
Secondly. The big Ethics folks on the literary scene in our modern era are all so concerned with being right, that the whole lot of them can't see that they're all right. Relocate the arguments into a rough circle and understand the interflow of the ideas and they describe Bimaadziwin ethics. IF you're willing to say everyone is right too and integrate the various theories AND stop trying to divorce ethics from a very personal stance. From personal interpretation. But hey, what would a group of people who spent their entire winters thinking and developing these things know? They only spent, oh say a couple thousand years do it or so, and then another 10000 years refining it.
And yes there is a lot of similarities to Greek philosophy but again, this desire to compartmentalize and claim 'This is right, this is the truth' rather than a more holistic acceptance causes some serious fucking issues. It's that simple.
So one of the other classes I'm taking is a class on Inequality in Canada. And Little Bird's mom and I are in the class. So we're discussing the class and stuff and in particular the heinous abomination that is Bill C-31 and how it affected the passing on of status, and the assumptions within the act. And she goes 'Well crap, we've got it all wrong, why don't we all try to become Indians?!' And that really is the crux. White folks, join me. Give up the whiteness. Come on over and join the Indians, we'll all get status, we'll all get free schooling, no taxes, and all the other perceived 'benefits' of status that are not actually there and we can all stop fighting about it. Whaddya say? See, that's embracing assimilation, just the other way around!
4 comments:
I need some education, Rich. Bill C-31 seems to have made the Status cracks that some Indians fell through smaller. What am I missing?
That's the 'official' statement. What it actually does is legallize the assimilation of status through marriage in two generations. I am a section 6(1). Because my daughters have non-status mothers, they are 6(2). They can only pass on their status if they marry another status. The hilarious part there is that any two status members who have a child, that child becomes a 6(1). But it still punishes status for not 'sticking to their own kind.'
http://www.bloorstreet.com/200block/sindact.htm
That's a nice annotated work on the Indian Act, and section 6 is explained better.
There's a rather large school of philosophy (and psychology, and sociology for that matter) that talks about 'universal knowledge'. The claim here is that certain concepts, be they beneficial or detrimental, will surface again and again across diverse population groups.
An example here would be the development of certain kinds of tools, agriculture, artistic/literary tropes, and, indeed, governance. It's why ancient cultures in Swaziland, for instance, share stories, mythologies, and forms of dispute resolution with Aborigine peoples from New Zealand, or China, or Ireland. It's a really interesting area of study, in fact.
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