Canada seeks to exterminate aboriginals

[Good Mind Seeds]

www.presstv.com/detail/2012/10/14/266573/canada-seeks-to-exterminate-aboriginals/

The Canadian government seeks to exterminate the country’s aboriginal people, keeping them in concentration camps, a Canadian aboriginal former chief tells Press TV.


Recently, the UN has strongly condemned Canada's record on children's rights, and accused Ottawa of systematic discrimination against aborigines and immigrants.

Activists say there has been a significant rise in human rights violations together with an unprecedented crackdown on freedom of speech since Canadian Premier Stephen Harper took power in 2006.

Canada has forced thousands of aboriginal children into ghastly boarding schools where they have been abused sexually, psychologically, and physically.

Press TV has conducted an interview with Dennis Pashe, a former Dakota Tipi First Nation chief, to further discuss the issue. He is accompanied by Terry Nelson, a former Manitoba First Nation Chief. The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: There are many examples, and I’m going to highlight one that hopefully you can expand on for us; for example, prisons, it is said that there is an overrepresentation of aboriginal people in Canada’s correctional system as a whole, and then certain data that indicates that it’s at 17 percent. But more alarmingly about 25 percent of federal female inmates, which in some prisons is up to 90 percent, is comprised of them. Why is there such - what seems to be - an effort to jail aboriginal women not to mention, of course, the aboriginal population as a whole?

Pashe: It’s part of the ongoing effort by the Canadian government to exterminate us. At one time there was 60 to 90 million First Nation people in North America - the United States and Canada. Now there is less than three million.

We are a race of people who are endangered. They use policies. They use legislation. And in the past, they used the gun, disease-infested blankets to wipe out our people, to take out our resources, to take our lands and to exploit them for their own profit.


Today, they use legislation as the gun. Alcohol and drugs as the bullet, so to speak. They use alcohol and drugs to cause a lot of social dishevel in our families and communities, to undermine our family values.

When people are put in that kind of life - overcrowded housing, no running water, mold-infested homes - it impacts them psychologically.

Many of our people in the past were put in residential schools, which was a Christian way of indoctrinating our people in taking away their values, their beliefs. And they sent them back home and created… a lot of them are abused and many of our people are murdered, even, in the residential schools.

All these years, 500 years of contact with the European immigrants has not been very good for our people.

We envision the next 500 years that we have to make friends. We come to Iran. We’re thankful for Iran for bringing these issues of how our people are treated in Canada to the world.

So, we come here seeking friendships and looking to work together to try and let the world know what has happened to our people and what is happening to our people.

You are right, our jails are overrepresented. The Canadian system of law is not a justice system, it’s a legal system. So, our rights are constantly being attacked by the Canadian legal system.

The altar of the Canadian legal system takes away our rights by undermining, again, our family, our values and our nation’s rights.

We are a First Nation. We are a sovereign nation. We tried to break out of these cycles ourselves.

I’m here representing Chief Frank Brown from Manitoba. He’s under 66 charges for opening up a cigarette smoke shop to try and make for his people and his community.

They live on 225 dollars a month on social assistance. They cannot buy food. They cannot buy the proper food, the proper diet. A lot of them have cancer. A lot of them have poor health and diabetes and they’re not free. They’re captured in that concentration camp known as the First Nation. It’s a vicious cycle.

Press TV: Again, the research done on this has brought up the issue of women - and this issue of missing sisters or stolen sisters in which no one knows exactly how many indigenous women have gone murdered or missing in Canada - the numbers seem to be overwhelming.

Is it correct to conclude that women have been targeted in order for… when women are targeted in this respect, they’re not going to be able to reproduce which means the population won’t be able to expand. Is that one of the reasons why, perhaps, women have been targeted?

Pashe: It’s a result of systematic institutional, what I would say, discrimination. It appears to be, I would say, a deliberate attack on our future generations by, we say, ‘take the womb of our mothers’, and they have so many ways of undermining our nationhood, either socially, politically or physically.

It seems they’re saying that the life of an indigenous woman is not worth as much as a non-indigenous woman in Canada, so the police forces don’t treat them as a priority when they are reported missing or [involved in] violence.


The violence still continues in our communities because of the alcoholism. The justice system, legal system turns a blind eye because if it’s a politically favorable leader, they’ll turn a blind eye to that.

So, they do attack our women, our nation, our families, and our children going to care. Terry has more involvement, information on that as well.

Press TV: Human rights is one of the things very disturbing here, but we have had some positive motions made. I’m looking here that the UN just recently faulted the Canadian government for its gross violations. We also had the UN committee on the rights of the child issue, the formal report on Canada’s treatment of children.

Gathering from what you guys have been saying so far, has there been any improvement? Has there been any action from the Canadian governments or any other organizations within Canada to tackle some of the obvious gross mistreatment that is going on?

Pashe: In Canada, we have political organizations. You know, the Assembly of First Nations represents 630 communities across Canada. We have provincial organizations that are the voice of First Nation’s people. We have women’s groups. We have many political organizations that are supposed to speak for us.

What Canada has done last month is cut all their money, cut their funding down to very minimal funding, so basically they’re silencing the voice of our people to address our issues, and that’s one of the ways to do it, by controlling the dollar bill. They control our people that way.


Unfortunately, there’s always the ‘Golden Rule’ - Canada’s government controls the gold, so they rule. Importunely, it’s to the detriment of our people.

Press TV: Hypothetically speaking, if you had Stephen Harper sitting across from you, what would you be telling him?

Pashe: I would be telling him, why not we work together to solve our problems, to rebuild our nations? The 500 years in the past that we’ve had has not been good for us. Let’s build a future, a better 500 years for our people.

www.presstv.com/detail/2012/10/14/266573/canada-seeks-to-exterminate-aboriginals/