| First Nations Catastrophe! Immigrant totals highest in 50 years. Ottawa Citizen, February 14, 2011 A Cautionary Tale When your white children first came into this country, they did not come shouting the war cry and seeking to wrest this land from us. They told us they came as friends to smoke the pipe of peace; they sought our friendship, we became brothers. Their enemies were ours. At the time we were strong and powerful, while they were few and weak. But did we oppress them or wrong them? No! Time wore on and you have become a great people, whilst we have melted away like snow beneath an April sun; our strength is wasted our warriors dead. Shinguacouse, Ojibwa chief In The Interviews, Québec separates, in part, because an increasingly polyglot, culturally ambiguous, self-righteous Canada chooses to support religious zealots who came to Canada as part of an unprecedented wave of immigration, and who would turn back the clock on the Quiet Revolution of Jean Lesage, René Lévesque, Pierre Trudeau and others which created the modern “secular state” of Québec. In The Interviews, Québec survives religion's latest assault on the secular state by declaring independence, abandoning multiculturalism and outlawing religious intrusions into the secular sphere. First Nations were not so lucky! “We don’t have a past.” No, those are not the words of Souviens, but of Boom-Boom Singh, and it’s words that First Nations should bear in mind as unbridled mass immigration further threaten their future well-being. The unprecedented immigration of the past twenty five years means that, in a short time, if it has not already happened, people with whom First Nations do not have a past will outnumber the people with whom they do. This imbalance, after The Fracture, will be largely responsible, as foretold in My Brother’s Keeper for treaties between First Nations and the British Crown being declared null and void. Not only will billions of dollars stop flowing to First Nations to allow them to survive in mostly economically depressed areas, but the territories granted under these treaties and territories in dispute will be up for grabs. I asked a Mohawk friend of mind what they will do when that happens. He said First Nations are not subjected to Canadian gun control laws and are therefore well armed and will defend themselves. When The Fracture happens, inexhaustible quantities of guns and other weapons will easily flow north across the U.S. border and First Nations will quickly see themselves outgunned and surrounded on all sides by people who may not show the same restraint as that of the Canadian military at Oka. First Nations in the new Québec will fare slightly better as Souviens reminds us in Tough Love because of the shared history, but I fear that many tribes of a Fractured Nation will follow the Beothuks into oblivion. In Participate or Perish I made a plea for First Nations to get more involved in politics, especially the politics of immigration which will seal their fate. It is a plea that continues to be ignored. Bernard Payeur, February 20, 2011
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