The Triumph of Greed

How does a distinct society present itself as distinct? By its respect for its traditional culture, its history, its care for itself and its future? Respect for the past need not demand that the past be repeated, when the currency of the present predicates that a culture make life-sustaining alterations or submit to a slow death by gradual attrition. And that is what appears to be happening in Canada's aboriginal communities.

The struggle to maintain traditions and cultures - as a society's mark of respect for its past and its refusal to accept that a new dawn requires an altered perspective to accommodate the needs of its people to a pressing reality - surely marks its descent into a living museum. One that brings no pleasure or peace of mind to its practitioners, presenting as merely a stubborn resistance to developing its potential.

Any social, political or ideological group must prepare itself for life in the world they currently inhabit. Primal societal methods of living in a world that offered existence as hunter-gatherers no longer offers a way of life to anyone, when they are surrounded by all the technical, political and social advances of a modern age. That comes as no surprise to anyone, least of all the people who refuse to advance themselves.

To take advantage of the very same opportunities to learn and to adapt and to take their existential obligations to themselves and their ethno-cultural groupings seriously enough to celebrate the past while entering a future of self-reliance. Canada's First Nations are no different than any other primary social groups; to advance their well being they, like all others, need to adapt to a new reality.

It's a long, slow process, and one which has been unnecessarily put on 'hold' mode for far too long, resulting in disappointment and a self-imposed livelihood of government handouts and squalid lifestyles. How can it be otherwise for an entire group of people who refuse to account for themselves, to encourage their children to value education and the advancement that comes with it?

The aboriginal community at Akwesasne is a case in point. There, the community has found a good measure of independence, of employment, of self-reliance. The trouble is the direction the community has taken has been interrupted by their unwillingness to face off to and reject the criminal element among them. They've permitted themselves to become reliant on the proceeds of illicit activities.

Claiming that, since they are independent nationals of their very own tribes, celebrating their particularities of history, culture and values, they stand outside the laws and social mores of the larger community that surrounds them. They have been complicit in accepting the proceeds of illegal liquor, tobacco, drug production and distribution, and in accelerating their strides toward self-reliance by the proceeds of gambling.

All those frail human vices and devices that plague society, that entrap, beggar, and ruin health and ethics and moral underpinnings. As though there can be any pride of purpose in smuggling narcotics and tobacco, or any other illicit goods with high street value, all the while thumbing collective noses at outside authorities. The production of illegal cigarettes employs a high percentage of the people, so has their blessing.

Weapons distribution, and illicit alcohol, all have a place in a lawless society that prides itself on its ability to maintain law and order in a community accustomed to looking the other way while allowing its members to become hoodlums. The traditional values of a once-proud society have been subverted in the reality of wealth to be obtained through illegal means.

Canadian aboriginals won the right to be self-ruling, self-schooling, self-policing, achieving the kind of self-determination that they and their leaders convinced themselves they required to maintain their standards of life. But what kinds of standards are they observing; anything to be proud of? Anything that would reflect positively on them as ethical, moral, non-violent and caring people?

Where a community could turn itself to the production of goods and services that have merit, that provide purpose for the users and the producers, the struggle to innovate and invent, the need to become role-models for their young as successful entrepreneurs became corrupted by the rush for easy money, and plenty of it, despite in the process plunging the good reputation of the community into the toilet.

The society itself has become one nursing a plethora of grievances against the larger government and society, while barely holding their own leaders to account for their inactions on behalf of the entire community. The very concept of "native rights" has been transformed from a noble vision to a pejorative label of failure. Now the community lives with violence, and the acceptance of a life of despair.

Their vision for their future and that of their children has become deranged beyond their clear-thinking ability to restore themselves to the kind of honour that made them proud of their heritage, and their potential, before they succumbed to the hopelessness of a culture of miserable attainment of material acquisitions by any means.

This is a community too long slumbering in a narcoleptic state of disinterest in their own well-being, clasping their time-honoured grievances of having been hard done by, and never forgetting it, exacting their own kind of revenge through holding the wider society hostage to their guilt. And in the end, achieving nothing positive for themselves, with it.

It will take a strong collective will to wrest themselves from their current situation, to make an effort to become far more than what they currently represent. But should they, in due time, become sufficiently wearied of their tenuous hold on the past while degrading their present by inaction and submission to a dreary life of tawdry crime, they do have the means to become themselves, to be true to their own futures.

It's long past time for the struggle to self-respect and achievement to begin.