Class system in Native communities flourishes

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In Native society, prior to contact with the Europeans, there was no such thing as a class system. There were no richer and poorer; the ruling philosophy of "sharing" made sure of that. Even the leaders were no richer than others in the community. In fact, many leaders often temporarily had less than other members of their communities, because they gave away what they had when there was a need. Food was distributed within the community to everyone.

Everything was done with the ancestors and the seventh generation yet to come in mind, a reverent model of accountability. Leadership did not bring power, and people were not judged by the accumulation of their possessions. All of these attributes of feudalism were the legacy of the new post-contact dominant society, and they have caused a great deal of damage for Native people everywhere. In Native society prior to contact, all human beings were considered equal and related. Leaders were the servants of their people. But things changed.

When I was a kid in the 1930s and 40s, all Indian people were still equal, equally poor by Euro-Canadian standards. But, according to these same standards, Indians were no part of a class structure. They were below poor. They were just Indians living in imposed desperation and Third World conditions.

During my lifetime, I witnessed this and I also saw it gradually begin to change until my people were also thrust into a class structure of the "haves" and "have nots," just like our colonizers. It began after the end of the Second World War. The bureaucrats and politicians suddenly remembered there were Indians living on those pieces of land, the reserve ghettos, and they decided to lend a hand to those poor, wretched people. They decided they would make some changes to make conditions more civilized, more like Euro-Canadian conditions.

And things did begin slowly to change for those poor Indians. The Indian agents began to appoint favored, compliant, "good" Indians to some menial/meaningless positions of authority by designating certain tasks to them. Thus was born the class system for Indians.

In the 1960s, the federal government began pouring money into the reserve system, and the new class system experienced a steady growth from that time until today. In the 1970s and 1980s, the government began pouring millions and millions of dollars into the reserve system. The class system, by this time, was solidly entrenched within the reserve system, and many leaders forgot those traditional philosophies upheld by our ancestors.

Once these new breed of leaders, elected through the imposed Indian Act legislation, got into positions of power they became exactly like the Indian agent: unaccountable to anyone, and prepared to stay in power for life at all costs. They practiced favoritism, making themselves, their friends and their families rich from the public coffers. They practiced nepotism, building themselves and their families big houses with picket fences, buying big cars or trucks and building summer cottages for family to enjoy while others lived in substandard conditions or went homeless. They had learned the strategies well from the colonizers. It was a class system in all its Euro-Canadian splendor.

Today, all reserves in Canada have a class system. Most have a wealthy class, a middle class, a poor class and a desperate class. Yet, overall, Indian people remain below even the most desperately poor Euro-Canadian class.

We continue to copy our Euro-Canadian colonial masters by dreaming up ways to combat the rapidly growing disparity between the "haves" and the "have nots." We establish committees, conduct studies and surveys, and set up institutions and government departments as a way of appearing to look for solutions. We create, just like our Euro-Canadian masters, bigger, costlier, more cumbersome and more bureaucratic governments to fight poverty, drug and alcohol abuse, homelessness, domestic violence, pollution etc. But it's ll to no avail, just like our Euro-Canadian masters.

We fail to recognize, acknowledge, accept or reconcile just who the real culprit is in all of the man-made, self-destructive madness and abuse of power we are witnessing today. We turn on individuals instead of confronting power structures and systems, structure like the exploitive and exclusive free market economy, big business monopolies, the development-for-development's-sake paradigm. These are the structures constructed by small, fearful men with no vision. This kind of paradigm needs a class structure in order to thrive, and, unfortunately, some Indian people have bought into this. They have become victims of the colonial mind set.