Letter to the Editor

Two books offer perspectives on Indigenous issues that differ from Peter Christensen’s views in his column ‘Justin’s Folly.’

Here are excerpts from a review of former Liberal cabinet minister George Abbott’s book Unceded: Understanding British Columbia’s Colonial Past and Why It Matters Now: “Aboriginal title to the land in British Columbia is a legal reality and must be dealt with in our time, if we can…”

“We’re paying for the failures of the ancestors, and the courts are saying very clearly you have to do that. It’s not an option to put it off another 170 years.

“I think there is a broad consensus in the assembly that we should remedy injustice and move along the path to reconciliation as quickly as we can.”

Candace Savage, after examining her family history, came to understand her place in the settlement of northern B.C. In her book A Geography of Blood, she writes: “Shame? I wasn’t the one who had withheld food from starving people to force them to submit.

“It wasn’t me who pledged a friendship that was supposed to last forever – so long as the rivers flow, so long as the grass shall grow – and almost immediately went back on my word? I’d never slaughtered a buffalo or shot a grizzly or poisoned a single wolf. My grandpa was only a glint in his father’s eyes when it had all happened. Yet no matter how I rail and squirm against the sins of the past, one unerodable truth still stands. As the descendants of incomers to the Canadian prairies, I am the intended beneficiary, however unwittingly, on an ecological and humanitarian atrocity.”

It may be inconvenient to deal with Indigenous rights and treaties in the current world economic chaos, but if not now, when? It’s never a bad time to put our own house in order.

Douglas Francis Mitchell,

Cranbrook

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