Grounded aid, more than words
A year ago, I sent an idea to a number of Mennonite agencies and individuals with a suggestion for a way to lend meaningful help to Canadian First Nations. As so many others, I was troubled by the news coming out of many native communities. I called it Grounded Aid.
At that time it was Attawapiskat that dominated the news. Recently it has been the Attawapiskat chief Theresa Spence's hunger strike, the Idle No More movement as well as the strong demands made by an array of First Nations chiefs.
I would like to repeat the suggestion I made at that time.
Simply stated, my idea would be that we create a structure that would offer Native communities the expertise of skilled, wise, motivated people who could come into the communities for shorter or longer times and bring with them guidance and teaching in a range of areas. These might include training in basic work skills (for example, building trades, machine repair, gardening); ability to advise at more senior levels in areas such as community management and fiscal accountability; offer experience useful for developing local economic activity; or bring background to enrich on-reserve education; or even offer marriage and family life coaching.
Since there would be costs associated with such a program, the helps would carry a charge, but only enough to keep the program self-sustaining.
There are many Native and non-Native groups who have assumed an advocacy role for Native grievances, but relatively few who have been willing to offer concrete helps where most of the needs exist. The idea here is that advocacy should be left to others. Grounded Aid would intentionally focus its energies on practical helps and skills.
Recently, the CBC carried a report of a small program designed by the Manitoba Real Estate Association that had been designed to help Native families in the city to buy their first house. Over a period of several years, 11 families found homes from this initiative. The program wasn't free, the money had to be repaid. But it had made a huge difference to those who entered it. Habitat for Humanity has done similar things, giving Native families opportunity to get into a home and begin building equity of their own.
Negotiating their way out of a life of dependence, developing meaningful self-government that avoids talk about "sovereignty," generating economic activity and employment on reserves as well as gaining a share in wider enterprises, and making cultural changes are huge challenges facing Canadian Native communities. To offer help on this road might be the most healing thing the Christian community could do for their Native neighbours.
Brian Stiller wrote a column recently in which he asked, "at the core of the national, historical and disruptive issue of Aboriginal claims," whether there was "a wounded heart." No one observing what has been happening on Canadian streets and highways, in front of Parliament or at provincial legislatures, could mistake the huge sense of grievance. Putting ourselves into the shoes of the demonstrators, one could easily embrace that grievance.
Yet simply perpetuating that sense of grievance has become a dead end for many Native communities. If a hunter-gatherer way of life is elevated without finding some way of creating a wage economy, as Jeffrey Simpson wrote in the Globe and Mail, "the path lies clear to dependence on money from somewhere else, namely government, which, in turn, leads to the lassitude and pathologies that plague too many aboriginal communities." There has to be change.
I, along with many others, am torn when I think about the conditions in Native communities. We have an adopted daughter who teaches in an elementary school on a Manitoba reserve. We hear her stories. As I've listened and watched, I've concluded that little will change until Native leaders are able to say that the responsibility for their future rests with them. Along with the rest of us they will have to take on the challenge of their future. Because they have lived in a hunter-gatherer culture, some of these changes are much more difficult for Native communities than for those of us who grew up in farm settings or were urban dwellers for generations. But with us they will have to make changes. It must be done without losing the good elements of their culture and identity.
And as they work at it, we can enter in with real forms of help. My idea is that Grounded Aid should only go where it is invited. It should only provide help that is bought—anything else will ultimately not be valued. But the goal would be to help Native communities find healing, confidence that they can occupy a place from which they can enrich a wider society, and be equipped with skills that enable them to do for themselves what every healthy community needs for its well-being.
This then is the challenge to Christian churches and aid groups. We must find a way to offer more than lip service to the grievances of Canada's Native people. Our presence in the lives of Canada's Native people must offer genuine hope. Without for a moment forgetting the Christ we serve, let's offer help that really helps.
Dear Readers:
ChristianWeek relies on your generous support. please take a minute and donate to help give voice to stories that inform, encourage and inspire.
Donations of $20 or more will receive a charitable receipt.Thank you, from Christianweek.
