Aboriginal futures

There is no issue more important (and harder) to overcome for Canada to address issues facing its Aboriginal population than racism. 

Though it’s impossible not to be aware of phenotypic differences between Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals, it is really time that people stop thinking these differences carry with them a genetic pre-disposition to slothfulness, greed and vice.  I have no idea how this unenlightened position continues to exist or how its subscribers rationalize that a Caucasian drunk is just a person who needs to dry out by an Aboriginal drunk is beyond repair. 

But at the end of the day, a person is a person.  It might be that one has more pigment and perhaps their teeth have a slightly different shape, but these things are overall meaningless.  And although I've never thought otherwise, I was given a nice reminder of this over the weekend.       

I had the opportunity to instruct three Aboriginal grade 10 students on the ins and outs of the workings of a radio station.  Mason, Diandra and Payton are from the Skownan reserve and were in Winnipeg as part of the CareerTrek program. 

They weren't all overly interested in getting jobs in radio, but went through the program and seemed to have a legitimately good time being "on-air" and selecting music to play.  Which is admittedly easy when you don't have to try to adhere to CRTC standards when programming a largely hip-hop centric music station.

The worst I could possibly say of them was their education seems to be lack the knowledge of contributions to the world of music made by Vanilla Ice.  I can’t imagine why anyone would think this an important inclusion in a curriculum, but I can say that the fact that a couple of them through I was talking about icing on a cake which made me feel a great distance from my own days of youth.   

The highest praise I could possibly give is that they all have a fantastic sense of humour.  Some of it is rather dark humour, like a sarcastic assertion that one of the girls might not achieve anything greater than being the First Nations version of the octomom.  And this "most embarrassing moment" story from Mason: http://www.hilderman.info/resource/mp3/mason_story.mp3

And in the end, they were a group of kids probably more connected with the world than some adults I know.  One spoke at length about a former Member of Parliament (I'd hazard a guess that most Canadians probably couldn't name their current MP), there was talk about the need of jobs on their reserve (what's that racist line again? that they all just collect welfare?), and dreaming of the biggest dreams. 

I suspect that none of them will ever have the chance to walk on the moon as they hope, but it's awesome that they aren't ruling it out.