The Case for Assimilation (Part 1)

December 8, 2001

Jonathan Kay
National Post
http://www.nationalpost.com

Eight months ago, we set Jonathan Kay, editorials editor of the National Post, the task of investigating Canada's aboriginal problem. The federal government spends more than $7-billion a year on aboriginal programs. Yet suicide, poverty, alcoholism and welfare dependence are rampant on reserves.

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During the early 1970s, for reasons no one can explain, Americans exhibited a fondness for kangaroo-themed curios. These included kangaroo hatbands, kangaroo-paw bottle openers and kangaroo tennis-racquet covers. Eventually, the trade attracted the ire of environmentalists. The U.S. government shut down kangaroo imports, Australia imposed hunting quotas and the industry went into decline.

"It was the 'greenies,' " says Paul Albrecht, a retired Lutheran pastor from Australia. "It's the same thing with those seals you've got there in Canada. They look cute so no one wants to kill 'em."

Mr. Albrecht grew up on the Hermannsburg mission station, a tiny outpost in the Northern Territory. For 41 years, beginning in 1957, he worked as the mission's pastor, visiting isolated aboriginal communities with doctors, anthropologists and government workers. His mission also ran a kangaroo tannery that employed aboriginal workers.

When the government began limiting the kangaroo hunt, the supply of fur skins dried up and the tannery was forced to start processing cowhides. But the cowhide supply in the area was irregular, and the mission concluded it would be impossible to keep the tannery operational as a full-time processing facility. Instead, the operators helped local aboriginals create a cottage industry. The tannery equipment would be used for tanning, but the work of making wallets, purses and other leather products would be performed and supervised by the aboriginals themselves, without white oversight.

"We had high hopes," Mr. Albrecht told me. "We got a government grant and used it to hire a specialist to show the workers how to work with [the new material]. We even had an exhibition in Sydney beforehand to make sure the products would sell."

But the operation was a failure. Despite evident demand for its products, the Hermannsburg cottage industry closed quickly.

"The skills weren't the problem," says Mr. Albrecht.

"Aborigines learn skills as quickly as any white man. In fact, they learn them quicker because mimicking is the way their culture transmits information. The problem was they didn't have the social structure to support [a self-directed] economy. Some days workers would show up. Other days they wouldn't. Aboriginal culture isn't hierarchical.

"Aboriginals can't tell each other what to do. So the [boss] couldn't make employees keep shifts. People just stayed home and collected unemployment."

It's the sort of story many people tell. Over the past few decades, the governments of Canada, Australia and New Zealand have gone to great lengths to promote aboriginal economic development while protecting aboriginal culture. It is impossible. The two aims cannot be reconciled.

"You cannot separate aboriginal cultural life from hunting and gathering," says Ray Evans, an advisor to the Western Mining Corporation who has studied the condition of Australian aboriginals for the past 20 years.

"There is no distinction between the sacred and the secular in aboriginal society. The whole point of the dances and the spiritualism is to increase the success of the hunt. As soon as that hunting life is destroyed — which [begins to] happen when the first rifle or sheep is brought in — the culture is destroyed as well. What remains is a museum diorama. It's tragic, but aboriginal culture is totally incompatible with modernity."

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For roughly 13,000 years, aboriginal peoples have lived in the land we call Canada. The fact they were able to flourish in our harsh climate reflects an intelligence and resourcefulness that has rightly been the subject of European admiration since first contact. But the cultural practices developed by bands of illiterate hunter-gatherers living a largely nomadic existence have little relevance to a modern society.

At some level, of course, the cultural relativists are correct: No society is objectively "better" than any other, and it is possible to live a fulfilled life without ever learning Windows or watching FOX. But the conquest of the New World by the Old was no accident. It is part of the pattern Jared Diamond explains in his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1999 book, Guns, Germs And Steel: The Fates Of Human Societies. Throughout history, he argues, societies able to move from hunting and gathering to organized food production have conquered their neighbours. The food surplus generated by sedentary farming permits the creation of cities and centralized states, as well as the emergence of specialists who develop metallurgy, writing and improved armaments. With rare exceptions, societies that graduate from hunting and gathering never look back.

Prior to their first contact with white men, food production —i.e., farming and animal husbandry — was unknown to almost all aboriginal groups living in what is now Canada. Indian societies were typically comprised of small bands or tribes whose myths and values corresponded to a nomadic life spent hunting animals and foraging for edible plants.

While some Canadian aboriginal groups, the Iroquoian peoples of southern Quebec and Ontario, for example, created temporary farms to supplement the food they found in the wild, none developed cities, writing, advanced metal tools or any religion beyond animism and shaman-mediated sorcery. In terms of economic, military and intellectual development, the societies European explorers found in North America were roughly on a par with what existed in the Fertile Crescent in 8,000 BC.

This does not mean Canada's native peoples are genetically inferior to Europeans: Mr. Diamond makes a convincing case it was an accident of geography and plant speciation that led to Eurasia's advantage in technological development. His experience with indigenous New Guinean tribesmen led him to conclude they are "on the average more intelligent, more alert [and] more expressive [than] the average European." Many Canadian experts have reported to me they have the same impression of our own native peoples. But so far as forward-looking policy goes, that has little relevance.

To protect aboriginal dignity, however, our elites promote the fiction the meeting of Old World and New World was a clash of rough equals. The 1996 Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP), for instance, argues that the aboriginal bands European settlers encountered were "nations" whose modern claims to land and resources must be negotiated with Ottawa on a "nation-to-nation" basis. "On both sides of the Atlantic," wrote the report's authors, "national groups with long traditions of governing themselves emerged, organizing themselves into different social and political forms according to their traditions and the needs imposed by their environments."

Aboriginal education experts stress similar themes. In an essay contained in a recently published book, Aboriginal Education: Fulfilling the Promise, Brenda Tsioniaon LaFrance argues such education "must not supplant the values and knowledge of aboriginal peoples." Science students, she says, should study "units of the Haudenosaunee teachings of the Four Winds, Thunder, Lightning and Sun, along with overall notions of conservation and ideas stemming from Western science." The study of math should focus on "a survey of aboriginal number systems [as well as] the limits of counting."

By conflating the intellectual traditions of aboriginal societies with those of Europe, we have given credence to the idea that new-world cultural practices are compatible with economic advancement. But this flies in the face of history. Since the industrial revolution, the rural poor have advanced economically by moving to urban employment centres. Except in the case of certain cohesive, literate religious minorities, economic integration has proved impossible without cultural integration. In Canada, government officials and academics seek the former, yet cringe from the latter.

More than cringe, in fact. The Government of Canada's 1969 White Paper, which supported the then-mainstream policy of assimilation, is dismissed by critics as a relic of colonial thinking. Assimilation is spoken of casually as "cultural genocide," a term whose very utterance pre-empts debate and is often cited as the basis for many suits launched by those who attended church- and government-operated residential schools. In academia, careers are being built on the veneration of aboriginal culture. A prominent example is Patrick Macklem of the University of Toronto, whose recently published book, Indigenous Difference and the Constitution of Canada, argues that "aboriginal cultural interests warrant constitutional protection because aboriginal people face unequal challenges."

The situation is no different in other Western countries with indigenous populations. Since 1970, Australia has pursued a policy of "separate development." In New Zealand, the policy is called "biculturalism." The United Nations' Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, produced in 1994, would ban all instances of "ethnocide and cultural genocide," including "any action which has the aim or effect of depriving them of their integrity as distinct peoples, or of their cultural values or identities."

In a bid to keep aboriginal culture in a protective clamshell, government policy has been designed to encourage Indians to remain on their ancestral lands. Registered Indians do not pay taxes on reserve land or on income earned on a reserve. The GST does not apply to on-reserve goods. The Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development pays for new homes on reserves and the renovation of old ones. All in all, the federal government spends more than $5-billion a year on reserve Indians — about $70,000 per family. Much of the spending is self-directed: About 90% of the cash transfers that flow through the Indian Affairs department are doled out by Indian bands or tribal councils.

The result: tiny Bantustans of poverty, welfare-dependence, disease and social pathology. In some bands, fetal alcohol syndrome, a debilitating neurological disorder that afflicts babies born to binge-drinking mothers, afflicts one in 10 babies. The on-reserve rate of tuberculosis incidence is five times the national average. Close to half of reserve Indians list government transfer payments as their major source of income. According to one researcher, the rate of suicide among aboriginal youth is the highest reported for any culturally identifiable group in the world.

What makes the situation even more tragic is that aboriginal culture is not being preserved in any meaningful way. According to a 1998 Statistics Canada report, only three of the country's 50 indigenous tongues are considered safe from extinction. The welfare trap has caused men to lose their traditional role as food providers, and, thus, their status within a community based on hunter-gatherer traditions. As a result, many have moved to job centres. In 1951, only 7% of aboriginals lived in urban areas. In 1996, the figure was close to 50%. When I attended the Canadian Aboriginal Festival at the SkyDome in Toronto last month, the most popular food provider was Pizza Pizza. The biggest employer in attendance was Casino Rama, a 24/7 casino complex located on the lands of the Chippewas of Mnjikaning First Nation.

We have, in other words, the worst of both worlds. Our Bantustan policy encourages Indians to remain in economically isolated hamlets; but thanks to paved roads, sedentary living, English television, liquor and a necessary government presence on every reserve, these hamlets are not nearly isolated enough to protect aboriginal cultures.

Yet the solution proposed by Canada's academic elite and aboriginal leadership — what University of Calgary professor Tom Flanagan calls the "aboriginal orthodoxy" in his recent book First Nations? Second Thoughts — is more of the same. Matthew Coon Come, the National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, wants bands to have more money and more power, and blames the current nightmare on a campaign of "systemic racism."

As for the authors of the above-mentioned 1996 RCAP report, they tell us that "Only as members of restored nations can [aboriginals] reach their potential in the 21st century." Naturally, this means more government money. The RCAP report calls for up to $40-billion of extra spending over the next 20 years. To lend dignity to these handouts, the report's authors argue they should be made under cover of the aforementioned "nation-to-nation" treaties. The plan calls for Canada's more than 600 bands to coalesce into 60 to 80 self-governing units, each with a population of about 5,000 — an archipelago of quasi-independent rural hamlets that would comprise yet another order of government in Canada. Each nation, according to the report, would run its own "aboriginal economy."

Exactly how isolated rural communities would generate anything close to economic self-sufficiency is never properly explained in the RCAP report. Nor do the authors cite a single precedent from all human history of a hunter-gatherer society maintaining its culture and autonomy in the shadow of a more advanced civilization while, at the same time, attaining economic parity with that civilization. No doubt, the authors draw inspiration from the mainstream literature in Canada, which rapturously describes the benefits of aboriginal autonomy merely by reference to increased self-esteem, empowerment and self-actualization. Some authors speak of self-government as a magic wand. In From Wooden Ploughs to Welfare, Helen Buckley writes that "the magic of self-government" means "more people will be working" and "the costs of welfare, social service, and the rest will go down."

The issue of how one preserves the culture of a nomadic, pre-literate society in the shadow of a sedentary, industrialized economy would not be problematic if Indians really did yearn to revert to a pure form of the primitive hunter-gatherer lifestyle they once practiced. But few do. Across Canada, the cry from aboriginals is not to be left alone to pick berries and follow the caribou herds; they want cash, and they want it for the same reason we all want it — to buy bigger homes and faster cars. Even native-rights activists who extol the traditional ways would be appalled if aboriginals were denied access to first world housing, medical care and schooling; or if native women and children were treated according to the cruel standards of patriarchal tribal societies.

"The fundamental fallacy here is the multicultural idea that cultures are totally distinct, but also that they can interact with other cultures," says Kenneth Minogue, a Professor Emeritus of political science at the London School of Economics, and author of a 1998 book on New Zealand's Maori population. "All interaction entails judgment, and it's hard to see how aboriginal culture survives that judgment."

"The idea of 'aboriginal economies' is also preposterous," adds Mr. Minogue. "Basically, what is being advocated is [North Korean-style] autarky. It's a sort of socialist fantasy — like the Israeli Kibbutzim or the kolkhozes in the Soviet Union. Except, in this case, the fantasy is based on the noble savage myth instead of socialism."

"Democracy destroys the authority of the [aboriginal] elders," writes Gary Johns, a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs in Australia and the editor of Waking Up to Dreamtime: The Illusion of Aboriginal Self-Determination. English, he says, which is "necessary to communicate the solidarity of aboriginal people, destroys the need for the old languages. Science destroys the need for much belief in myth. Material wealth destroys every aspect of the previous economy."

Pointing out the incompatibility between economic integration and cultural autonomy is practically a heresy in Canada; most of the mainstream aboriginal experts I interviewed for this article were either surprised or mildly offended when I raised it. When pressed, each of them them — including Michael DeGagne, executive director of the Aboriginal Healing Foundation in Ottawa; George Erasmus, co-chairman of RCAP and national Chief of the Association of First Nations from 1985 to 1991; Marlene Brant Castellano, Professor Emeritus of Native Studies at Trent University and a co-director of research at RCAP; and Roberta Jamieson, Chief of the Six Nations of the Grand River Territory in southern Ontario — rightly defined aboriginal culture by reference to the pursuits that lie at the heart of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle — tracking, hunting, fishing, animal-skinning and so forth. But when I asked how a culture based on such traditions might be adapted to a settled, urban existence, the answers turned vague. Ms. Brant Castellano offered the most coherent response. She told me that aboriginals in her community preserved their culture by gathering in community centres to burn sweetgrass. "They have to turn off the smoke detectors, though," she noted. "You have to get special permission for that."

Ms. Brant Castellano made another interesting comment. On the subject of culture, she drew an analogy to the Jews. "They were once nomadic herdsmen and look how they managed to preserve their culture," she told me. "The Jews also managed to integrate economically. It's not so different from us. That's the model I would choose."

But, alas, she has ignored a crucial distinction. Pre-contact Canadian aboriginal societies were illiterate. But by the time the Jews were cast into Babylonian exile in 586 BC, they were already committing their system of beliefs to written form. Because the Torah was portable, so was Jewish culture. Judaism, moreover, is, like Christianity and Islam, monotheistic, which is why Jewish congregations in Johannesburg, Moscow, Brasilia and Toronto all recite prayers from the same Siddur.

Animist aboriginal faiths, on the other hand, are conceived and transmitted to explain local weather, terrain, plant life and animal migrations, and are therefore not transplantable. The land and the mysteries surrounding it comprise the aboriginal man's bible. Once he is geographically deracinated or scientifically educated, the culture is lost.

That doesn't mean the aboriginal view of the modern world is the same as that of white people. There are important differences. "Our traditional modes of governance are more egalitarian and less hierarchical," Ms. Jamieson told me. "This reflects some of the core values of aboriginal peoples, including plurality, consensus and non-confrontation."

That's only logical. Most aboriginal societies consisted of small bands containing no more than a few dozen people, or tribes containing a few hundred. As numerous anthropologists have noted, a consensus method of governance is appropriate in such societies because everyone knows everyone.

But it's impossible to maintain a culture of "consensus and non-confrontation" in an anonymous corporate world where interaction with strangers is common and conflicts are resolved by appeal to a well-defined hierarchy.

Other cultural differences between indigenous and white societies also serve to impede the economic advancement of aboriginals. "The cultures of virtually all preindustrial societies are hostile to social mobility and individual economic accumulation," concluded the authors of a study on the effect of cultural values on economic development published in the American Journal of Political Science in 1996. "Preindustrial economies are zero-sum systems: They are characterized by little or no economic growth, which implies that upward social mobility only comes at the expense of someone else. A society's cultural system generally reflects this fact. Social status is hereditary rather than achieved, and social norms encourage one to accept one's social position in this life. These norms are antithetical to capital accumulation and conducive to nepotism."

Therefore, it should not surprise us that so many Indian bands are plagued with corruption. Hunter-gatherers have no need for a structured system of wealth distribution: Their economies are based on reciprocal exchanges between kin. This is why the first thing many band leaders do once elected is fire everyone under their authority and replace them with their own relatives. In Australia, aboriginal women will often be spurned by aboriginal-run domestic abuse centres if they belong to the wrong clan. This appalls white women, but many aboriginal women see it as perfectly reasonable.

"The network of kinship obligations can actually be a major impediment to economic development," says Ron Brunton, an Australian anthropologist who has been studying aboriginal issues for the past decade. "If aboriginals are economically successful, they get nothing out of it, because they have dozens of relatives coming to demand their share of his earnings.

The Case for Assimilation (Part 2)

"A lot of the promising recruits from mining programs have dropped out because they realize they're not going to get to keep their money — everything goes to the family."

Another incompatibility with modernity crops up where land ownership is concerned. As Ms. Jamieson told me, "[The aboriginal] concept of land ownership is different. We occupy the land communally. We do not see ourselves as its owners." Again — not a bad way to organize your affairs when you're talking about a band of hunter gatherers roaming a vast territory looking for food; it's no way to promote the accumulation of wealth in a modern society.

Most Canadian homeowners can sell or mortgage their property as they please. That is not true on Indian reserves, where the land is owned by the Crown in trust for the band, and individual homeowners are merely granted the right to use it. Private ownership of land would be problematic: It would permit Indians to sell their property to whites, and thus crack the cultural clamshell government officials and Indian leaders want to keep closed.

But the communal arrangement produces problems for aboriginal entrepreneurs. Small-business owners typically raise capital by providing their home or other real property as collateral. But since on-reserve aboriginals do not own their property in fee simple, it cannot be sold, mortgaged or otherwise used as a source of debt financing.

In his critically acclaimed book, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumph in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto shows that this sort of property regime promotes poverty. Following detailed investigations in various Third World cities, he concluded: "The lack of legal property ... explains why citizens in developing and former communist nations cannot make profitable contracts with strangers, cannot get credit, insurance or utilities service: They have no property to lose," writes Mr. de Soto. "They are taken seriously as contracting parties only by their immediate families and neighbours. [They] are trapped in the grubby basement of the precapitalist world."

Mr. de Soto's theory applies to North American aboriginal peoples. In the United States, the federal government transferred ownership of large chunks of government-owned Indian lands to individual Indians during the first third of the 20th century. As a result, Indian reservations in the United States comprise a patchwork — with some plots owned outright by individual Indians or non-Indians, and other plots held in a perpetual trust by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. After analyzing agricultural productivity in 39 large reservations, Terry Anderson, a professor of economics at the University of Montana, concluded: "In general, trust lands [are] used in relatively low-valued uses, such as grazing, rather than in high-valued uses such as row crops, small grains, and horticulture ... The ratio of trust land output to fee simple land output shows that, on average, trust lands are about half as productive as fee simple lands."

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Given the many contradictions that plague the theories behind state-subsidized aboriginal self-determination, and all the economic advantages of assimilation, why has the former risen to the level of orthodoxy while the latter has come to be seen as a racist plot? A big reason is that, for a few centuries, assimilation was a racist plot. Until relatively recently, virulent racism was the expected experience for any Indian who had contact with white society. Theories of genetic inferiority abounded. To this country's great shame, Indians were not given the right to vote in federal elections until 1960. Until 1951, many Indian ceremonies were banned by the federal Indian Act. Assimilation is a very old idea — in fact, it was the accepted orthodoxy until about 30 years ago — but it was a pipe dream to suppose Indians would willingly flock to white culture in an era of isolation and bald-faced discrimination.

This legacy of discrimination has shaped current attitudes. As Alan Cairns, author of Citizens Plus, argued in the September, 2001, issue of Policy Options, "People who have been demeaned, humiliated and stigmatized inevitably construct arguments and reinterpret the past in ways that enhance their dignity." Assimilation makes sense for many reasons. But no one, myself included, would characterize it as an option that enhances the "dignity" of aboriginal culture.

This helps explain why aboriginals are so suspicious of assimilation. But what about our white elites? Why does the most highly educated stratum of society — not just in Canada, but also in Australia, the United States and New Zealand — almost unanimously bleat approval for culture-clamshell policies in the face of so much contrary evidence?

The answer lies in the massive emotional investment Western elites have made in the virtues of aboriginal cultures. As culture critic Richard Grenier noted in his 1991 book, Capturing the Culture, Western intellectuals "judge [their] own society by the flaws and inadequacies they see all about them. But they tend to judge alternative societies, of which they often retain a peculiarly stubborn ignorance, by these societies' officially announced ideals."

Citing the work of sociologist Paul Hollander, Mr. Grenier describes the attempts of Western intellectuals to "locate a better world in Moscow, Peking, Havana, Hanoi and even Tirana" and their "recurrent fantasies of new forms of liberation and collective gratification." Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Marxism has not offered a credible Utopia. Thus, intellectuals have increasingly been forced to look back in time rather than overseas for confirmation of the conceit that there exists some viable alternative to capitalism and liberal democracy. The veneration of aboriginal cultures by white intellectuals is best thought of, therefore, not as misguided humanitarianism, but as an expression of collective cultural self-loathing.

Such self-loathing carries a long pedigree. In his essay On The Cannibals, published in 1580, Montaigne described Brazilian Indians as having "no practice of subordination or of riches or poverty ... Among them you hear no words for treachery, lying, cheating avarice, envy, backbiting or forgiveness." The tradition was amplified by Shakespeare in The Tempest; John Dryden, who first coined the phrase "noble savage" in a 1669 play; Jean-Jacques Rousseau; and 20th-century anthropologist Margaret Mead, who was famously duped by Samoan women into the farcically counterfactual belief that the South Sea Islands were a paradise of guilt-free sex.

In the modern context, the noble savage concept has taken hold among anti-corporate activists, who have exploited the idea as a means to block economic development in rural areas. Environmental groups invariably seek to portray indigenous peoples as wise stewards of the land; and argue that Indian bands must be awarded veto power over development in their ancestral areas. The Gaia Atlas of First Peoples declares that "all [indigenous cultures] consider the Earth like a parent and revere it accordingly ... According to indigenous law, humankind can never be more than a trustee of the land, with a collective responsibility to preserve it." An endless parade of otherwise respectable academics fawn over the inborn sense of environmentalism ascribed to aboriginals. Witness Mr. Mecklem's claim that "aboriginal people tend to regard their relationship to land in terms of an overarching collective responsibility to cherish and protect the earth."

There is little evidence for this, and much which contradicts it. While North America's natives generally had only a marginal effect on the environment, that is because a hunter-gatherer life-style supports only very low population densities. (The aboriginal population of Canada is now larger than it was before the arrival of Europeans). In those few regions of North America where Indians did manage to develop food production, those inhabited by the Choctaw, Iroquois and Pawnee for instance, slash-and-burn methods were employed and deforestation was common. Buffalo were sometimes run off cliffs en masse, and tons of excess meat was left to rot. When aboriginal groups do gain control of natural resources, they typically act just like the white man. A decade ago, rock star Sting successfully lobbied the government of Brazil to transfer control of 25,000 square miles of rainforest to the Kayopo Indians. Before the ink was dry, the Kayopo chiefs began cutting deals with the logging and mining companies Sting had vilified. "They're always trying to deceive you," Sting later said of the Kayopo. "I was very naïve and thought I could save the world selling T-shirts for the Indian cause. In reality, I did little."

When Asian migrants originally populated North America, they engineered the greatest single extinction of large animals in human history. The Americas once teemed with elephants, horses, lions, cheetahs and camels. But unlike creatures of prey in Asia and Africa, New World megafauna evolved in an environment free of human threats, and so were easily exterminated by the human invaders. "More than half of the large mammal biota of the Americas disappeared in a cataclysmic extinction wave at the very end of the Pleistocene," writes John Alroy of the California-based National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in the June 8, 2001, issue of Science. "This dramatic event, unparalleled in the deeper fossil record and unmatched in other continents at the same time, has been attributed to the direct effects of human predation: The first solid evidence of large human populations in the Americas is at 13,400 years before the present, near the beginning of the extinction spasm."

The idea that Indians were pacifists is also wrong. When Europeans arrived in North America, South America, Australia and New Zealand, they encountered a world of warring tribes that slaughtered one another as a matter of course and, where food gathering methods warranted the practice, engaged in slavery. Mr. Diamond writes in Guns, Germs and Steel: "Extensive long-term information about band and tribal societies reveals that murder is a leading cause of death ... I happened to be visiting New Guinea's Iyau people at a time when a woman anthropologist was interviewing Iyau women about their life histories. Woman after woman, when asked to name her husband, named several sequential husbands who had died violent deaths."

None of this should surprise us: Aboriginals living in small, scattered bands had no significant political or legal institutions to mediate conflict, nor did they possess a religion or cultural tradition that prescribed peace between people from different clans. Moreover, the baseline level of morality exhibited by human beings is roughly the same everywhere in the world. The idea that a large chunk of the global population should be natural-born pacifists and environmentalists is absurd.

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Any group of people would suffer if encouraged to adopt a way of life that is incompatible with self-enrichment. In Canada, we have offered aboriginals free money — whether in the form of fiscal transfers and social assistance, or dressed up in the false dignity of "land claims" settlements — and they have taken it and grown dependent on it. White elites have told them to blame all their problems on racism, and they have done that, too. It is as if we deliberately set out to fuse 19th-century Melanesian cargo cultism with late-20th century U.S.-style identity politics — and succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.

Our leaders, meanwhile, keep telling themselves, in the face of all evidence, that the ancient traditions of illiterate hunter-gatherers can somehow be welded to a modern economy; as if the cruel march of history could be defeated by an act of collective good will. How tragic that so many hundreds of thousands of aboriginals must pay with their livelihoods, and often their lives, for the self-loathing of our country's intellectual class.