The secret's out about our Native paradise

Page 7

Well, it's finally happened. You can only keep a secret for so long. Especially one as big as this one. And leave it to a Reform Party M.P. to let the cat out of the bag. Yes, I'm afraid what you've heard is true. The entire Native population of Canada has been living under a veil of untruth.

Last week, Reform M.P. Herb Grubel compared the Native people of this country to children living on a South Seas island, financially supported by an over anxious rich uncle-like federal government. Well, you could hear the Aboriginal gasp echo from reserves all across this country called Canada.

To put it bluntly, our secret was out. The last 500 years of oppression, genocide, disease and other assorted afflictions were all a vast and incredibly well managed smoke screen. The truth is it was all an ingenious master plan to achieve this wonderfully luxurious and envied position we now relish.

The fact that we enjoy a suicide rate five times the national average, the knowledge that most Native communities sit at the bottom of the economic ladder and in some cases suffer from grinding poverty, are just a few well established facts that have been exposed for the false rumors and illusions they are.

As the perceptive Mr. Grubel insinuated, the reality is our existence is actually quite similar to life on the South Sea Islands. Having myself been to the South Pacific - as I'm sure Mr. Grubel has or he no doubt wouldn't have made such a comparison - I, like him, couldn't help but notice the similarities.

For instance, similarities such as an amazing loss of Indigenous tongues to the all-power English language, bitterly increased rates of alcoholism, annoying paternal attitudes by colonial governments, and worst of all, hordes and hordes of pesky, sun-burned tourists.

And as Mr. Grubel no doubt picked up on, we Indigenous people share many

of the same cultural habits that we developed as we whiled away the hours on our sun drenched beaches. It's a little known fact that the Maoris of New Zealand once occupied a golf course that was illegally built on ancestral land. Sound familiar? Mohawks .... Maoris...They all look alike.

And I guess when it comes to the South Pacific-North America connection, the biggest shock to people is the news that every night, when it's daytime in the South Pacific, the Queen Charlotte Islands detach and are moved to the South Pacific where the Haida people become Polynesians. I'm sure Mr. Grubel has seen those people, sitting on the beaches, in their sweetgrass skirts, carving totem poles out of coconut trees. I hear Gilligan was half Salish.

So, as the warm tropical breezes start to blow across my designer buckskin shorts - paid for by the overly generous federal government, I must bid you adieu. The luau/bingo is about to begin. This is Drew Hayden Taylor saying Aloha and megwetch from someplace far away from Reform Party M.P.'s.