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I honestly think the people up there need to market to us people down here why we should give a care what is going on up there? I you choose to stay up there .....well it is your choice ....and you need to give reason to remember why we should care?
It seems a bit harsh, but at the same time people have to help themselves. If they cannot afford to live where they live, and do not like the lifestyle that is available in that location, why is it someone else's responsibility to fix the problem? The obvious solution that most Canadians choose is to move to a place that suits them better. Isn't it everyone's responsible to at the very least making sensible life decisions that allow them to live as comfortably as possible?
Not giving away money does not mean people are giving up on the north. It is a choice to live there. All decisions are a compromise. By choosing to live several thousand miles away from any kind of population center, you're making the choice to abide by the consequences of those decisions. One of which is that everything is f'n expensive because it has to be brought in by air or barge. The ancestral land comment is ludicrous. So live like your ancestors. I guarantee there was no black diamond cheddar 150 years ago, so you shouldn't have to worry about it. If you want to live in the 21st century, you have to let go of some things to be part of society.
You beat the road and rail thing to death last year, and now it's just give people money. By living in Iqualuit you de facto do not get to have the same lifestyle as living on Yonge St., regardless how much you may want it to be so.
This is the best response.
The people in the north ARE being subsidized. But to argue that they should have the same quality of life and price level as in major cities, that's just stupid and unfair to other tax payers. We all have to compromise one way or another. Yes, they can't afford $23 cheddar cheese but who absolutely needs cheddar cheese to survive?
The government should be caring, however, every member of the nation should at first strive for a sustainable lifestyle, and one can't just expect hand out from other their entire life, no matter what the history is like.
If people in the north can't even feed and heat themselves without massive subsidies, I would say there is something wrong with the way they live and produce in the first place, before crying about $23 cheese. Adapt with the world. Either continue living the north, which is their right, and maintain the traditional life (I suppose without daily cheese intake, or coffee or coke), or live in the cities and be a contributing member of Canada.
Yes, the white people treated their ancestors unfairly, brutally, but there should be a time this can no longer serve as an excuse.
It seems a bit harsh, but at the same time people have to help themselves. If they cannot afford to live where they live, and do not like the lifestyle that is available in that location, why is it someone else's responsibility to fix the problem? The obvious solution that most Canadians choose is to move to a place that suits them better. Isn't it everyone's responsible to at the very least making sensible life decisions that allow them to live as comfortably as possible?
this is not harsh at all.
Everyone should at first strive for a self-sustaining life mode. If those people don't like the Canadian way of life in the south and refuse to be part of the Canadian economy, then fine, they should be able to produce for their own needs and not feeling mistreated.
I don't subscribe to the view that if they move to the cities, they will be rejected, lonely and end up dead. WHy do we suppose that? Plenty of black, Asian, Arab, Hispanic people with very different culture and lifestyle move to Canada and adapted, without resorting the alcohol abuse and didn't end up dead. What exactly is SO special about aboriginal people? If you refuse to be part of the society, then unfortunately, nobody can help you.
I am not trying to force the "mainsteam" life on them, and they are free to stick to their traditional lifestyle if they prefer and consider it sacred, but don't apply double standard here - the traditional lifestyle didn't include cheddar cheese, 24/7 indoor heating or medical specialists, did it?
It is nice to be idealistic and to imagine that everyone in the far north has the same 'freedom' you might have in the south - and therefore the same solutions will apply - but in many cases I just don't think those of you who are proposing what I am sure seem like logical solutions to you have a real clue here about some of the conditions many natives are living under in the very far eastern Arctic for instance.
Believe me, I am a huge proponent of people helping themselves first before I do much to help them, but, your cavalier 'let them eat cake' solutions, which yes, might suit many other situations around Canada (and frankly, when it comes to the Yukon, I think many of you are correct when you say they need to demonstrate some initiative on their own first) but even then, much of the Yukon is like Toronto if you are comparing the conditions and possibilities to places further north and east where the land is pure tundra.
One cannot just build a house out of nothing, and one cannot dig a well in permanent permafrost, and one cannot grow a garden in a snowbank, nor raise chickens and cows without shelter and heat and food. I am sure many natives in those places wish they had stuck to the ways of their ancestors but we 'kindly' introduced them to some bits of our way of life and now many can't go back to 'the way things were'. And yes, crazy as it sounds, evolution has not yet gotten around to giving some of these peoples the same ability to tolerate our western vices as yet ... not only are they lost but often they do succumb to things like alcoholism with much more 'ease' than you or I might because their bodies don't yet process these things the same way ours do.
Are you the same people who cry when you hear about the starving kids in Africa and scream at the government for not doing more to bring in peoples from war torn countries? Do you scream to save the whales or the baby seals - but not the people who have hunted them for centuries for food and warmth?
Are you the same people who scream about the residential school scandals? Are you the same people who are concerned about the native women who came south, fell into prostitution and were perhaps murdered along roadways across Canada? If you don't .. is that because you think that bringing these people who fell victim south and plopping them in a 'foreign land' without all the skills you naturally acquired as a child living in suburbia was all you needed to do to 'fix their plight'?
Were you removed from your families when you were little and sent to schools far away where you felt really scared and foreign and where people may have beaten or raped you as a child? I was a kid in the Yukon going to school with those kids - and from my perspective back then they had a great life (and better clothes than I did - and movies every Saturday night) but apparently all was not what it seemed on the surface according to investigations and complaints made many years later. You just might want to consider that all is not always what you think it is behind closed doors - and be thankful you are not in their place.
I also saw the destruction of houses their parents were given by the government - in the fall they were fully finished and furnished .. by spring they were denuded from the inside and were mere frames that surrounded a tent inside that housed the occupants (who still however watched a big screen tv!). I walked every day past the Whitehorse Inn where the drunks were lying about on the sidewalk at 30 below while their kids ate chocolate bars instead of real food. Yes, I thought those people could help themselves too - and to a great extent I still do. They have had several generations to adapt and get their acts together but in many cases they have not so my sympathies are not as deep for them any more. They definitely could do better after all that government has done to help them - and some 'tribes' have .. others have not.
But I have also seen places in the eastern arctic where those are not the issues at all ... where there is a real struggle for life in truly barren lands and where the tradition is that if there is no medical help or food available for thousands of miles, people simply died, where there is no wood to build houses, where no telephone lines exist to call for help much less internet or big screen tvs or electricity, where they have never tasted cheese and don't even want to. It was always a hard life but for centuries they lived it and didn't complain. And then we came and told them they didn't have to live that way .. that things were better down the block and we expected them to be thrilled and just adapt on the fly as we might. Or we expected if we gave them pictures to see what life looked like in the south, they could recreate it where they were and all would be well .. and they would create huge industries (out of tundra?) and prosper and we could go back to our lives and never worry about them any more.
So we threw money at the problem. But, money doesn't really help either in some places - where would they spend it? We give them snowmobiles so they can replace their dog sleds but without someone flying gas in for them, those sit idle. We give them rifles so they don't have to make weapons by hand, but without ammunition or any more animals to shoot are those useful? We bring them diseases they have never had to deal with before but then we don't bring them medicines or expertise to help them fight those. We bring them cheese when their systems don't tolerate that kind of food and tell them to learn our language while they lose that of their ancestors, along with the skills and way of life that actually did work for many thousands of years. We made them reliant on southern foods and now complain that it costs too much to get it to them.
This is not just about the cost of cheese in Gjoa Haven. There are no simple or one size fits all solutions! I am no bleeding heart - I expect people to pave their own way and to make their own futures - but I am pretty appalled that you (presumably southerners all) can't even imagine a life that might be any different from your own and that might need different solutions to help the people survive and prosper .. in their own way. Is this what the schools are teaching you these days?
This is not just about the cost of cheese in Gjoa Haven. There are no simple or one size fits all solutions! I am no bleeding heart - I expect people to pave their own way and to make their own futures - but I am pretty appalled that you (presumably southerners all) can't even imagine a life that might be any different from your own and that might need different solutions to help the people survive and prosper .. in their own way. Is this what the schools are teaching you these days?
I can accept the traditional life just fine. The problem is that the requests for rational support in this thread are not coming from that community, but a couple of numptys that think Iqualuit should be gifted to be Winnipeg of the North, on the back of Canadian taxpayers.
The Nunavut challenge is that people genuinely WANT a better lifestyle, but it's unsustainable because of remoteness and climate. As you said, there's no simple solution, but overall the answer is you can have a "white" life and you either need to have buckets of cash, government intervention, or both, just to have a shadow of what is nominally available, or you are traditional, and roll the dice. Most people are somewhere in the middle, which in a nutshell explains why there are so very few people (under 35,000) that choose to be there.
Everyone should at first strive for a self-sustaining life mode. If those people don't like the Canadian way of life in the south and refuse to be part of the Canadian economy, then fine, they should be able to produce for their own needs and not feeling mistreated.
I don't subscribe to the view that if they move to the cities, they will be rejected, lonely and end up dead. WHy do we suppose that? Plenty of black, Asian, Arab, Hispanic people with very different culture and lifestyle move to Canada and adapted, without resorting the alcohol abuse and didn't end up dead. What exactly is SO special about aboriginal people? If you refuse to be part of the society, then unfortunately, nobody can help you.
I am not trying to force the "mainsteam" life on them, and they are free to stick to their traditional lifestyle if they prefer and consider it sacred, but don't apply double standard here - the traditional lifestyle didn't include cheddar cheese, 24/7 indoor heating or medical specialists, did it?
I must have 'zoned' on the part about how people who want to live in the sticksdie when they move to urban environments. Given the suicide rates amongst people in remote areas, it's clear that the cause is unrelated to 'urban environments'.
Peoples from all over the world live in Canada and continue to practice their traditional native cultures. It is neither acceptable nor true to suggest that anyone in Canada is prevented from practicing whatever traditions they want from any place they want.
But I have also seen places in the eastern arctic where those are not the issues at all ... where there is a real struggle for life in truly barren lands and where the tradition is that if there is no medical help or food available for thousands of miles, people simply died, where there is no wood to build houses, where no telephone lines exist to call for help much less internet or big screen tvs or electricity, where they have never tasted cheese and don't even want to. It was always a hard life but for centuries they lived it and didn't complain. And then we came and told them they didn't have to live that way .. that things were better down the block and we expected them to be thrilled and just adapt on the fly as we might. Or we expected if we gave them pictures to see what life looked like in the south, they could recreate it where they were and all would be well .. and they would create huge industries (out of tundra?) and prosper and we could go back to our lives and never worry about them any more.
Great input.
However, nobody was forcing anyone to adapt to anything, right? People choose their own way of life. But all of a sudden complain about high prices of food and lack of amenities? They didn't have those before the Europeans came, did they?
The truth is they need to make a decision. If they want to significantly improve their quality of life and have the affordable food, shelter and services, they need to live closer to cities and towns where such amenities are available, but if that new lifestyle is unacceptable due to tradition or whatever, don't complain the prices of the stuff is so much higher than in the south, or the lack of this and that, because it is just not realistic to provide all them to such remote areas.
The true north is hardly inhabitable, not to mention create "huge industries", and therefore it is impossible to secure a high living standard comparable to mainstream Canada. That's just a truth, and the aboriginals have to make a decision. It is not helpful to just keeping blaming the white for stealing their land and livelihood. Those will never be returned unfortunately, just like the treasures displayed in London, Paris and NYC museums will not be returned to China, Egypt and Iraq. What we can do is look at the present and make the right and best choice.
I don't really know the north, but somehow I don't think they did enough to make changes either. Whatever happened 200 years ago is long gone. All these generations have passed and it is time to look at the future. Otherwise, it is poverty and nothing else.
A big problem is a lot of the locals didn't choose to live there and were born there and their parents and grandparents etc. Why is it a child's fault that he was born in Iqaluit and all his family live there? It seems that many are suggesting that people living in the north abandon it so that people can get a better quality of life in the south. Then do we even want the north anyway? It seems many see it as a burden.
We cannot put the genie back in the box. I certainly am not saying that is even a possibility. But, this is a complex issue - and the solutions are equally complex, and it will probably also mean they are varied as well, depending on each settlement's situation/location/history and the composition of its population. Compared to many eastern arctic places, Iqaluit is not primitive or backwards or underserved (but yes, the food and other things one might want to purchase are expensive because there is no road and the winter is long). The population there is not entirely native either which can also mean that the issues there are very different from places where the native population is more predominant and the old ways are still prevalent.
There are issues with alcoholism - it was a semi-dry town when I was there (only a couple of places where you were allowed to drink and those were pretty well shut off from the native population - but the local priest also imported large quantities of wine .. for the church services I am sure - and I still used to run into drunk Inuit in stair wells .. selling carvings for 5 dollars to buy bootleg booze). I believe that the alcohol restrictions were eased a few years ago and I don't know how that is going but drinking often underlies and/or generates other issues. It is a vicious circle in many cases. Hopelessness breeds suicides, which breed more suicides, especially in the young who are already fragile. Young people in many northern communities have nothing to look forward to any more. They know how the outside world supposedly lives - and yet they see no way to make that happen where they are and soon get caught up in cycles they cannot control. Just at a time they should be seeing great possibilities in life, they are broken down and what dreams they may already have are often shattered by the realities around them. Yes, that can happen anywhere to anyone and yes, it is up to the person to make the effort to break the cycle but opportunities are much more limited in the north - one cannot easily escape and few encourage the youngsters to do so because they know that adapting to life in the south alone can also be very traumatic for them - and carry even more temptations they may be unable to resist.
Many attempts have been made to bring back pride to the native community. Pride is the key to them turning all this around I think. Craft and art have been promoted widely but not everyone wants to carve or paint and not everything they do will sell well for good prices - just as they don't elsewhere either. That is not an industry that can sustain entire communities. The Inuit have been given much more input into how they want to run their lives than they have had for a long time. There is progress .. it is just slow. And honestly most who don't live up north would rather just throw money at the problem unthinkingly or say move them all out to a place where it should be easier to survive and let them be 'just like us'.
We could build them safe, sturdy housing, set up sustainable ways for them to get water and to treat sewage (all very expensive .. much more than in the south) and supply their own power, etc., build them great schools and hospitals in every small hamlet, even set up businesses for them so they are self-sufficient theoretically (though in a different way than they used to be and all are VERY expensive ventures) but until we manage to get more than a few from each town trained as doctors, nurses, teachers, lawyers, pilots, etc. I don't think we will see less self-destructive behaviour. There are few southern trained physicians, nurses, lawyers, teachers who want to go up there and stay long periods so there is not only not much continuity in care and teaching, but, there is also often a conflict with the people who they teach and treat who still want to do things in the ways of their elders. The kids are still learning one way at home and another in the school system - and they don't know how to reconcile that and often go off track because of the conflict in values and ways of doing things. Add in new access to drugs and alcohol and you have another lost generation.
(and p.s. I spelled Pangnirtung incorrectly .. I am sorry .. I should know better!)
A big problem is a lot of the locals didn't choose to live there and were born there and their parents and grandparents etc. Why is it a child's fault that he was born in Iqaluit and all his family live there? It seems that many are suggesting that people living in the north abandon it so that people can get a better quality of life in the south. Then do we even want the north anyway? It seems many see it as a burden.
That is sort of the thing... you choose to stay ... you choose to suffer. I live in a city full of people that choose to leave other places to get a chance at something better. I really think the burden should be on the people who choose to stay there to attract interest in others investing there. The except is if there are there for a cause that benefits the rest of the country or if they are first nations and are suppose to be getting these resources as part of treaties that were signed with the government.
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