Feeling guilty yet? Well, you should be, at least that’s the idea that drives these cliches. Of course, it’s true. Whether we arrived by way of the Bering Land Bridge or in steerage, we all came from somewhere else. According to that logic, aboriginals are immigrants too. As the oldest, best-established group on the continent, they presumably owe an enormous debt of gratitude, moral support, time and money to all subsequent arrivals. But somehow it doesn’t work that way.
It is Canadians of European descent who are expected to subsidize – in perpetuity – those who came before us, as well as those who continue to roll in. In other words, we must assist those we displaced, while supporting efforts to displace us. Aboriginal rights revolve around the idea that a standing population was first overwhelmed, then subsumed and forced to toe the line by new people(s) and new culture(s). We’ve heard the charges of genocide and cultural extermination.
(Both concepts have been rather successfully marketed to Canadians of European descent under the guise of ‘multiculturalism’). Noticing any similarities is rather forcefully discouraged. Aboriginals may balk at the the mere suggestion, but their ancestors crossing the Bering Land Bridge, had more in common with immigrant European arrivals than PC politics will admit. Aboriginal and European antecedants did not find their way here through the intervention of an immigration lawyer or consulting service. And both arrived in a wilderness.
They most assuredly did not find welfare, educational, old-age or medical programs. Even the most hopelessly brain-dead liberal knows there is a WORLD of difference between today’s immigrant and those (red and white) who created something of that wilderness. The liberal just doesn’t want you to talk about it. And while we’re on the subject, not all of us came to North America as immigrants. Indeed, our two major founding European peoples — the French and the English — came to part of their homeland. The French came to “New France”; the English to a British colony.