By Colin Alexander ——Bio and Archives--March 8, 2024

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Even many ostensible conservatives buy into the Indigenous iconography of a pre-industrial Garden of Eden—and so-called reconciliation under the UN’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). It’s enough that misplaced romanticism condones the transfer of untold billions of dollars without accounting for where it goes.

That said, these questions remain unanswered: Should Canada enable next generations for the high-tech economy? Or should they expect to live according to some presumably modified traditional lifestyle?

The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples’ 1995 report on suicide, Choosing Life, stated the challenge: “Aboriginal youth described both exclusion from the dominant society and alienation from the now-idealized but once-real “life on the land” that is stereotypically associated with aboriginality. The terrible emptiness of feeling strung between two cultures and psychologically at home in neither has been described in fiction and in art, as well as in testimony. … This inward-looking subculture may reinforce hopelessness and self-hate, and their exits may appear to be the oblivion of drugs and alcohol—or death.”

So how can we resolve this conflict? In the March 1953 edition of The Beaver, Northern Affairs Minister Jean Lesage wrote of the challenges: “The objective of Government policy … is to give the Eskimos the same rights, privileges, opportunities, and responsibilities as all other Canadians. In short, to enable them to share fully the national life of Canada. … The task … is to help him adjust his life and his thoughts to all that the encroachment of this new life must mean.”

With this thinking later as premier of Quebec, Lesage ushered in the Quiet Revolution. He believed French Canadians could develop as a modern people without losing........

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