Désolés, le blogue de Patricia Hughes est seulement disponible en anglais pour l'instant.
Reading about Attawapiskat and today's Globe and Mail article, "First Nations lament living conditions in 'many Attawapiskats'", has taken me back nearly forty years. I had just completed my M.A. in Political Science and had obtained a job for one year at Brandon University, my first full-time teaching position.
One of the courses I taught was one I proposed and designed, on "minority politics", meaning "minority" in the political science of lacking power. The course revolved around several groups as case studies, including Aboriginal communities. At least one (I think only one) of the students was Aboriginal and one night she and one or two other students and I went to one of Brandon's bars for a drink. We sat a long time without being served, blatantly ignored, as she had predicted. Eventually, insistence succeeded, but the message was clear.
Another of my students was an RCMP officer whose plan was to go to law school and become a lawyer with the RCMP. He was a wonderful person (rather the opposite to yet another student, a former RCMP officer whose story in several respects remains for another day). He was married to a nurse who worked on a nearby reserve and who, being aware of what I was teaching, offered to take me onto the reserve. The three of us went (he was in plains clothes, in fact I never saw him dressed any other way).
This visit was meant to shock me and it did, despite my presumptuously teaching about the horrendous conditions on some reserves. Not quite Attawapiskat, but not far off, unless my memory has exacerbated the dreadful conditions in which people were living. A different province, getting on for half a century apart, but the same abysmal respect for fellow human beings, even while we bemoan the living conditions of people in third world or developing countries.
I won't be around in another forty years, but I wonder, I really do....what will the headlines (no longer in a print newspaper, I expect) be then?
