Another and Important Perspective
by Bob Hooton
A long time friend and wonderfully outspoken advocate for wild steelhead, Ehor Boyanowsky, is a man of many and diverse talents. His professional qualifications include graduate degrees in human and social psychology. Until his recent retirement he was a faculty member at Simon Fraser University. He is a past president of the Steelhead Society of BC and now resides on the banks of his all time favourite river, the Thompson, near Ashcroft.
Ehor has never been one to shirk responsibility to say what wouldn't be said otherwise. He follows (fish and environmental) politics closely and sometimes has views and opinions that don't survive political filters or conform with the views popularized by mainstream media. Earlier today Ehor forwarded me a copy of a piece he prepared and distributed to a long list of personal contacts. I read it and contacted him immediately to seek approval to share it here. For those who might like to broaden their perspective on where we find ourselves today and what may lie ahead, enjoy.
"Today’s news that non-aboriginal Nova Scotia lobster fishermen have escalated their protest to destruction of boats and catch against a massive lobster fishery mounted out of season by aboriginal fishermen is heartbreaking, but sadly, expected, even inevitable. Nova Scotia is perhaps the most peaceful idyllic place in Canada, even North America. I found its people welcoming of strangers rather than clannish when I moved there many years ago. It is why several members of my family moved back there recently to escape the social, political and climatic uncertainties, the turmoil besetting the normally preferred promised lands of BC and California.
Why inevitable? Because as research all over the world, including some conducted by my colleagues at the University of BC, Hong Kong and by me has repeatedly recorded: when an identifiable minority, often ethnic, is repeatedly awarded special status, privilege or even just preference by government and the courts to compensate for past injustices, it creates resentment and psychic tension. When the tensions reach breaking point, sometimes over an unrelated issue, the result is violence toward those minority groups seen as privileged. Accompanying that violence is a growing hatred where none existed before, a psychological phenomenon justifying the violence in the minds of the perpetrators as they witness themselves committing acts they would never before have contemplated.
Witness the slaughter in Rwanda where hundreds of thousands of Tutsis were murdered, cut to pieces with machetes by their once friendly neighbours even though many of them had intermarried with the marauding Hutu majority. Why? Because over the last century, the colonial Belgians had shown preference in treatment, education and government jobs toward the lighter skinned Tutsi minority. But that was in the distant past? No, scarcely 26 years ago while the United Nations, the world stood idly by.
But that was Africa you might argue where the people are traditionally tribal, backward, suspicious of outsiders, believe in witches and demons, even today. As anthropologist Claude Levi-Straus observed, humanity ends at the outskirts of the village. Why almost every tribal group’s name for itself means simply ‘the people’ and so everyone else is a nonperson as the Japanese perceived the Chinese in Nanking during their invasion. Again wanton massacre ensued.
But alas, not just in Africa or Asia. So too in every country on earth. As the ironically, relatively (by comparison to what followed) benign shroud of communistic equality slid from Yugoslavia, Serbs, and Croats resumed ethnic identities, resurrected old grievances, descended into age old enmity and slaughtered each other and Muslims in their midst. Not simple tribal people but those with PhDs, lawyers, physicians and poets driving BMWs not oxcarts and not worshipping obscure idols.
Judges in Canada have been in a frenzy to promote the welfare of aboriginal people. Alas, there is now a whole generation of judges and lawyers trained very narrowly and badly by crusading law professors, demagogues who do not promote logic and deduction and the serious negative implicatons of favouring aboriginal plaintiffs, but declare by fiat that aboriginals have a special position in society based on ancient treaties or even merely statements made by the colonial English in a time when those governing officials, now foreign to Canada, gave what they saw was a crust of bread to a minority of people: hunting and fishing rights in exchange for their loyalty in conflicts with the Americans.
They did not envision a mosaic of tribal groups that are part of larger Canadian society, the fastest growing sector in Canada, even as they reproduce at the highest rate and incorporate nonaboriginals into their group. Two years of living common law with a status aboriginal makes you eligible for aboriginal status and all of its privileges as my recent mover, a pleasant young man of Russian descent recently joyfully declared: “No more taxes, no more hunting or fishing licences.” I was happy for him but I silently wondered if he knew the societal unrest he was contributing to.
Pierre Trudeau, the elder, in his wisdom, despised by many for being unfeeling, (entirely ‘left brain we say in psychology) was prescient, saw the coming conflict and societal disarray and instructed his apprentice Jean Cretien to patriate the constitution from Britain and with it to eliminate any special status for aboriginal people, for Quebec, for anyone. Today in hindsight it is clear how much conflict, resentment and mistaken reliance on the federal government for bounty at the individual and provincial level that would have avoided. Alas, a national alarm was sounded by men of limited vision with perhaps misguided, kind intentions, personified by Ed Broadbent of the NDP… and Trudeau backed off.
His offspring Justin, now PM in a confusing frenzy to ‘reconcile’ with aboriginal people has rescinded the aboriginal accountability bill that forced chiefs to show where they are spending taxpayers’ money (hopefully for housing, sewage and health rather than personal condos in the USA), he visited the family of an armed home invader (who had posted his intentions to rob on Facebook) who was shot (but not those innocent ‘settlers’ who were invaded), and he appointed as the leading lawmaker in government an aboriginal lawyer of little experience who had written a long, dense book about how to disassemble Canada and return it to aboriginal ownership.
As a former ten year member of The BC aboriginal treaty negotiation advisory committee I urged the BC government to proffer land, money and administrative expertise to aboriginal groups but not to isolate them nor to perpetuate special rights and privileges. Clearly the federal courts did not follow such a plan and have created a situation that has emboldened aboriginals to undertake untenable lobster fisheries against Federal Fisheries scientists’ recommendations, to allow the killing of endangered species of salmon, eg Thompson River steelhead (and putting the evidence on Facebook without repercussions) and to kill large game, even those endangered, in and out of season.
The result is a widening of distance between status aboriginal people and the rest of Canada that if history repeats itself here, even in “the peaceable kingdom” will lead to hatred and increasing violence. It always has in the past."
Ehor Boyanowsky
October 15, 2020
Author
Topic: BC Salmon - an historical perspective (Read 8854 times)