Surviving the Cure
by Gilbert Oskaboose

Well, it appears that the $350 million for "residential school survivors" and the gang of pecksniffs that will administer it has surfaced.

A friend, and fellow survivor, from Akwesasne called the other day and laid an e-mail address on me. That lead me to the Aboriginal Healing Foundation on the world wide web. I spent the next few hours reading and trying to understand what the Foundation was all about and how do "survivors" go about accessing all the big bucks that are floating around out there. It's http://www.ahf.ca  if anybody cares.

Didn't seem to be much for actual survivors. As a matter of fact they made it quite clear that "the funding will not be used to provide compensation to victims of physical/ sexual abuse in the Residential School system." That leaves me out, thank you very much.

Very little of what I read had anything to do with residential schools and the survivors of same. The Foundation is headed up by super Indian Georges Erasmus, former co-chair of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, ex-national chief and distinguished holder of no less than seven honorary degrees from various and sundry white Canadian universities. Don't know if he was unfortunate enough to have ever attended an Indian Residential School. Doubt it.

Theresa Nahanee, a B.C. lawyer, appears to be the only one of his seventeen illustrious Board of Directors to have done hard time in an actual residential school. The rest of them never set foot in a Native Residential School. Who me? Yes, I put in ten long years under the loving strokes of a Jesuit strap in a residential school in Spanish ,Ontario so I can say whatever the hell I want about people who did or did not attend residential school.

Speaking of non-sequiturs, one of the things currently infesting Indian Country are Indian Fat Cats. An Indian Fat Cat is a native person who has learned to play the white "funding" game and he/she has learned to play it well. They have become expert in the ins and outs of grantsmanship. They are fluent in psycho-babble and the bullshit rhetoric designed to loosen white purse strings. They're really good at it and they grow fat on the pain of the "grass-roots" people. "Grass-roots people" is one of their buzzwords. So is "culturally appropriate health programs." This $350 million bucks will bring the buggers out of the woodworks in droves.

Indian Country is currently infested with this type of bottom-feeder. It goes from the national level on down to provincial/territorial level and down to the local band office loonie grabbing all that he/she/it can grab.  We in Indian Country don't have to worry about white folks doing us in any more. There are more than enough Indian Fat Cats grunting laboriously behind us. We've got our own to worry about.

So, what kind of hoops do we have to jump through in order to get our grubby little hooks on some of that money? I really don't know. I've read the damn thing over three times and I still don't know what it is they're saying.

In the "backgrounder" one sentence contained 57 words!  I  managed to understand the first sentence in the "Overview," plus a few others. The rest was highly polished gooblety-gook. Bureaucrat-speak.

On January 7, 1998 the Government of Canada announced Gathering Strength - Canada's Aboriginal Action Plan, a strategy to begin a process of reconciliation and renewal with Aboriginal Peoples. A cornerstone of Gathering Strength was the Government's commitment of $350 million to support community based healing initiatives for Metis, Inuit and First Nation people on and off reserve who were affected by the legacy of physical and sexual abuse in Residential Schools.

Seems straightforward enough, eh? So far so good.

But what exactly is a "community based healing initiative." I've lived in a native community most of my life and I know that "community based healing initiatives " are something created by the fat cats from local Tribal Councils or home-grown band office loonies, not by the "community." "Community based healing initiatives" is not the way the average band member thinks or speaks. Get real.

I'm an English major and I still had trouble understanding what the damn thing is all about. It's so vague that it could be interpreted in any one of a dozen different directions. It reminds me of residential school and the Jesuits flinging out handfuls of candy for us children to fight over. Whoever was the biggest, toughest and the smartest gets the most. The rest can go to hell! That appears to be what this latest Government "initiative" is all about: big bucks for those groups well versed in grantsmanship and proposal writing - and jack shit for everybody else. Charming. You may or may not get a single red cent from these people - no matter how hard you try!

They even hint at their "modest budget" set aside for helping people. Don't count on a lot of help from these buggers.

I've heard talk about Language Training Centers and Counseling Centers for residential school survivors. My wife and I are both survivors. We're both in our late fifties, a bit late to be learning a new language. It's also a bit late for anyone to expect us to be spilling our guts to some fuzzy-assed kid fresh out of therapy school. That's not the way pain is dealt with in Indian Country. You internalize it and learn to live with it. So much for even a basic understanding of the dynamics of how pain is dealt with in Indian Country. For shame....

This new initiative should help create a whole new generation of Indian "health care workers." Remember when the native work force was just nurses and pulp-cutters? Now they're will be thousands of brand new "native health care workers," dancing around buck-naked, muttering incantations and casting spells on decent folks trying to get on with their lives. Boy, you think Indian Country has problems now. Wait until that group arrives. This new initiative should fit in perfectly with all the born-again Indianism currently infesting Indian Country.

This latest "initiative" from Ottawa and the brown bureaucrats infesting that city makes me want to puke. Every year I think they couldn't possibly sink any lower and every year that is exactly what they do - sink lower. They become more and more like the whites who trained them. Forty, fifty years ago these people incarcerated us in Indian residential schools and left us there to rot. Now they're back again, this time with "native helpers," to screw us again. Is there no end to these goddamn people?

My God, is there no end to them?