Journalistic Opinion as Free Speech or Promoting Racial Unrest? The Case of Ric Dolphin and the Calgary Herald's Editorial Presentation of Native Culture

"No Simple Solutions to Native Problems," by Ric Dolphin

Wherever I traveled during my recent sweep across the West, there always seemed to be a place nearby where there were cars on blocks, paint peeling from the clapboard and a lot of people of working age who weren't.

Many Canadians instantly recognize these nests of hopelessness as Indian reserves. They are a legacy of our well-meaning Victorian forbears who believed they were being humane when they gave the conquered tribes a place to call their own.

The road to hell, as we know, is well populated by missionaries, social workers and all of those other well-intentioned folk who are sure they are doing the humane thing. But if the current plight of the Indians isn't proof of misguided charity on a horrendous scale, I don't know what is.

On my trip, whenever the subject of the local natives came up—be it the Nootka on Vancouver Island, the Cree in Winnipeg, or the Blackfoot of southern Alberta—voices would be lowered and the same line of argument would ensue.

Treaty Indians receive billions of dollars a year in aid; their food, housing, university, college and medicine is free; they pay no taxes; they can hunt and fish whenever they want to: and they are accorded special treatment by the courts, the schools and employers.

Despite all of this largesse—okay, probably because of it—their society is a shambles. Rates of addiction to alcohol, cocaine, gambling, glue are eight to ten times the norm.

Birthrates, encouraged by child welfare benefits, are three times the non- Indian level, and the progeny are typically fathered by several men, usually absent.

A disproportionate number of native children are born with fetal alcohol syndrome, a condition that predisposes them to not working or to the drug-oriented criminal world. The number of Indian youth in criminal gangs, at least in the gang-central city of Winnipeg, increases by 20 per cent a year.

Unemployment in the native population everywhere hovers between 60 and 80 per cent. And although they constitute only six per cent of the general population, Indians account for 43 per cent of the social work caseload and 50 per cent of the prison population.

Still, their leaders—left-wing lawyers, for the most part, trained in the arts of grievance and entitlement—clamor for more. More land, more programs, more free this and free that, more good money after bad for ever and ever amen.

For all of the problems faced by the aboriginals are, say these professional apologists, the result of white oppression and racist policies.

Many of the people I talked to about this in the West, from the mayors of the cities, to the drivers of the taxis and the cops on the beat would—off the record—provide a succinct, one-word response to such contentions. It begins with bull and you know how it ends.

That Indians have everyone to blame but themselves for their predicament may still have currency among the CBC classes and the social workers whose numbers are bolstered by failure. But those of us without the vested interests or the inclination to wallow in the delicious collective guilt are beginning to wonder why our politicians lack the guts to do what is necessary.

"Have you been along Main Street?" the 23-year-old University of Manitoba political science student asked me as she served me supper in the Winnipeg restaurant where she worked to pay her tuition (something a native student wouldn't need to do).

"It's like the Third World. That's what the politicians should be dealing with right now, but you know they won't."

A Chinese-Canadian friend...