Indians, Jews, and genocide

Took the hounds for a ramble over the back seventy this afternoon. It was a bright sunny day but a bitingly cold Nor'wester meant you had to bundle up.

Indian Creek runs through the property. It hails from lakes Mary and Gowan and melds with the Indian River somewhere in the marsh across the way; the front thirty to us.

Indian Creek and Indian River bear mute homage to the fact that this area was once populated by Indians.

You can safely drink the water from our creek. There's no cash-cropping going on upstream, so there's no toxic chemical run-off polluting the groundwater. In fact, we've got multiple springs right here at Falling Downs that leak potable water out of the ground and dribble down to Indian Creek.

We are truly blessed!

Generally speaking, the Indians who used to call this land their own are not so blessed. Google a list of Canadian communities that don't have potable water, and what do you find?

It's been a cold spring so far. The meadows are brown, with random splotches of not-yet-melted snow. The hounds sniffed out a really plump coon chilling on a branch just out of their reach. In spite of the hysterical caterwauling on the part of the hounds, that old raccoon didn't bat an eye. It crossed my mind to toss a stick at it...

But why?

Leave it be.

There's a beaver dam at the back of the property, just after Indian Creek crosses onto our place. The beavers have made the marsh upstream navigable. Without the beavers the bikers wouldn't have waterfront property.

The bikers are fascinating local legends.

They are allegedly affiliated with outlaw biker types. I don't know if there's any truth to that. All I know is that in late middle age they bet everything on starting a restaurant over in Sauble.

That's something I have a lot of respect for. It was actually a pretty decent place, but alas, it didn't work out. But the point of the story is that when we first moved out here, and for the first few years that was weekends only, we actually shared a party line with them!

In the age of everybody having a cellphone in their pocket, most people wouldn't know what that means.

But that inadvertently led the Farm Manager to have several serious wine-fueled conversations with Mrs. Outlaw, whose name was Pansy if I remember correctly, on the general theme of "men are assholes."

Luckily, we expunged that party line before too much damage was done.

But back to Indian Creek.

Besides the beavers, there's a family of river otters who have made their home in our creek.

There's lots of folks who claim that the settler treatment of native people here in Canada is nothing less than genocide. I can't disagree.

My Saturday Globe featured a lengthy anti-Putin diatribe by noted Russophobe Anne Applebaum, which invoked the concept of genocide. I'm willing to buy that Stalin's treatment of the Ukraine was effectively genocide...

If that was genocide, what we've done to the native people here in Canada is genocide at least twice over.

But here's the thing; I'm German and the Farm Manager is a Jew. Seventy-five years ago my forebears were busy cramming her forebears into ovens at Auschwitz.

Today Germany is one of the top destinations for millennial Jews fleeing Israel in search of a better life.

That's why we don't have a lot of sympathy for folks who want to wallow in the wrongs inflicted on them two hundred years ago.


Life goes on.




 

Winnipeg gets $300 million Museum for Human Rights

Now you'd think somewhere along the chain of command somebody would have second thoughts about plunking down a Museum for Human Rights in the child poverty capital of Canada. And the urban native poverty capital. And the gang capital. You'd be wrong. I've been watching this stuff for fifty years and I'm not the least surprised by the sheer chutzpah of our leaders.

Nor am I surprised that the project is already bogged down by feuding among the various groups wanting to be represented in the Museum. When you build a 300 million dollar temple to human rights and the lack thereof, there's a lot of players want in on the action.

The Chosen People, laying claim to the Holocaust, want to have their own separate exhibit. The Armenians claim they suffered a holocaust too, so why should the other guys get special treatment. The Ukrainians want in too. Their holocaust is called the Holodomor. I think that's Ukrainian for holocaust. Then there were the Japanese who were interned during the war, the Chinese who were brought here to build a railroad, the Palestinians who claim they're still getting the dirty end of their little middle-east holocaust, and on and on and on. Believe it or not even the German-Canadian Congress has some beef they need the Museum to address. Last but not least, the First Nations, the guys who were nice enough to move to the reservations to make room for all these whiners, want the sorry record of their history included.

Since all these folks are now Canadians, they are finding beautiful Canadian solutions to their differences. Well, solutions may be too strong a word. But they are having meetings. Study sessions. Focus groups. They are striking committees. Having more meetings. Forming sub-committees...

Things almost came to a head last week at the 27th sitting of the Standing Ad Hoc Inclusivity Committee. Shlomo Weintraub, assistant counsel to the Canadian Jewish Congress, challenged Grand Chief Wilber Manytroubles of the Manitoba Chief's Congress to fisticuffs right there in the boardroom. Apparently Chief Manytroubles, having sat through 26 previous disputations, finally reached his breaking point, rose to his feet and shouted, " ad hoc this you moron" while making a gesture that could be considered either obscene or long overdue, depending on your point of view.

Fortunately the delegation from the Gay Ugandan Refugees (who have yet to have a holocaust but are expecting one imminently and therefore have observer status on the Committee) were able to intervene and an all out brawl was averted. The meeting was adjourned and the 28th sitting of the Standing Committee will convene tomorrow to continue discussions.

I remain optimistic that in the fullness of time all these disparate positions about who suffered the most and who deserves the most floor space will be resolved. For 300 million bucks at least Winnipeg's poor and unemployed can go see that they don't have it so bad after all.