Post 129 –Calvin Helin’s Aboriginal Critique and Solution

Back in Post 123 on August 30, I wrote about Calvin Helin, to whom I referred as one hell of an Aboriginal whom I really want to meet some day.  I sort of half promised that I would one day give you a few summaries from the book he wrote, Dances with Dependency. It is the most honest and most brutal book about Aboriginals I have ever read—and Helin is an Aboriginal. His stuff is from the inside, from the cradle of his own people. 

So, here’s the very first paragraph of text from the Preface, the opening salvo, if you like:

The purpose of this book is to look at practical ways to move indigenous populations forward. Money has been liberally thrown at Indian problems with nominal impact. Neither mainstream nor indigenous politics has had lasting widespread impact on improving the lives of ordinary indigenous folk, no matter how many hyped political announcements and other solutions have been touted. It is time to look at the problems and issues at the broadest level in order to seek general solutions that might be tailored to the different circumstances of Tribes now.

I expect every person of goodwill will shout an affirmative “Amen!” to this opening salvo. “Money liberally thrown” with little impact—that sounds like the sad case of Vancouver’s Down Town East Side, where a million is being spent every day with little or no impact over the years.

Moving on to p. 25, after he gives a short vivid description of the traditional and comparatively sophisticated economics and politics of his people along the coast of British Columbia, he writes:

My father was a commercial fisherman and a fine one. Though he had made a good life for our family, I was well aware that life in an Aboriginal Indian reserve had a very sinister side to it. Such a bad environment has persisted so long in most Aboriginal communities that many Aboriginal  people have, over generations, been socialized into thinking that this widespread dysfunction is normal. Imagine a situation where tragically high youth suicide rates, gross unemployment figures, frequent banana republic-style corruption, and persistent abuse—both substance and physical—prevail, and you might begin to understand what life is like on many Aboriginal reserves.

Towards the end of Chapter 1, Helin presents us with a general journey that Aboriginals must embark upon with the concrete details worked out in the rest of his book. Here are some of his phrases and statements from pp. 36 and 39: 

“Aboriginal citizens must…squarely face the Industry of Non-Aboriginal Hucksters, and ‘consultants,’ and those Aboriginal politicians who are openly profiting from this sea of despair and poverty. In spite of what they say, this ‘Indian Industry’ has no real interest in changing a system from which they are profiting.”

“the unkind hands of the welfare trap.”

Families are falling “as casualties of a fatal ‘welfare syndrome’—one that is literally stealing the lives and hopes of our future generation….”

“We must shake off the apathy of what has become an all too comfortable ‘cloak of welfare’….”

With reference to the economic opportunities available to his people, he writes, “To exploit these opportunities will require a fundamental change in the dependency mindset of Aboriginal people. For lasting solutions, decisions have to come from Aboriginal people themselves. Aboriginals have to consciously choose a more beneficial path than the dependency course they are currently on—and have the conviction to live with the consequences.”

The pursuit of economic opportunities before them, “could lead to the Holy Grail of rediscovered independence and self-reliance. It is time to re-take control of our lives from government departments, bureaucrats and the Indian Industry.”

Well, if you think the above sentiments and observations are racist, coming as they do at this point from a Caucasian writer, you’ll have to take it up with Helin himself, a man with all of his roots deeply entangled with Aboriginal history and culture—and, I should emphasize, full of passionate love for his  people. I suppose you could push this a bit farther by saying that my choosing to quote all this and bring it to a wider public is racist. Well, go ahead, if that makes you feel better.

I have long been concerned with the state of the Aboriginal people in Canada. In fact, when I first returned to Canada as a “retired” person after 43 years, I actually hoped to do a serious study on the subject and publish its result. Because of my life’s work, I ended up focusing on Islam and wrote a series of eight books along with quite a number of articles on that subject, all of which are available to you free of charge on the Islamica page of my website < SocialTheology.com.> So, I never got around to Aboriginal issues, but I have a large archive of Aboriginal articles collected for that purpose. If any reader is interested in that archival material, contact me. I am prepared to donate them it of charge to any party who is seriously involved in Aboriginal affairs, especially Aboriginals themselves, even more especially to Helin, who has become a hero of mine. If any reader knows him, please draw his attention to my offer and to these posts in this blog.