11 Comments

Imagine Kimberley Murray’s life without the “colonization” that has given her a western education, a modern long and comfortable life, and a $300,000 salary. The life of an illiterate woman in a Mohawk settlement would have had its rewards, but it would also be rather heavy on the “brutal, nasty and short” side. For a privileged person like Murray not to understand why she should show gratitude, as well as criticize, defies understanding

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300,000 dollars. I am just imagining what that feels like. I am trying to understand the weight and responsibility of that tax-funded position. I don't think we're getting our sweat equity out of this fellow citizen.

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I concur that “colonization so enriched the material, social, and cultural lives of our formerly pre-literate, stone-age aboriginal peoples that any talk of reparations smacks of both ingratitude and greed.” Most Canadians will with time.

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Watched you on the radical centre podcast- that was an excellent conversation, well done. I'm so sorry for what happened (is continting to happen) to you. Thank you for your voice.

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Haven't we already *been* paying reparations lo these many years? How would you tell where welfare, lawsuits, make-work, resource rents for no value-added, and special grants for scavenger hunts for unmarked graves ended and reparations began? Or are reparations on top of all those other payments?

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Not to mention any time there is a "partnership" in a business venture the native side of it has been underwritten by taxpayer dollars in the best case scenario or fully paid for by taxpayer dollars in the worst case scenario. In either case, if any such business venture goes tits up through poor management or anything else, taxpayers are on the hook. That's why I get so pissy about these ResourceWorks folks and their focus on "indigenous partnerships." it isn't a partnership where one party, the taxpayer, puts up all the money.

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Exactly. If an indigenous consortium is going to buy the Trans Mountain Pipeline from the federal government, isn't it really just a case of us giving it to them? Where else are they going to get $30 billion for a pipeline with them all crying poverty? With a hefty percentage to the lawyers and brokers for greasing the nominal value of the transaction of course. The talk is that the government will "sell" it for its actual value but with Canada to remain responsible for the debt from the massive cost over-run (which was largely run up by obstructionism.) That sounds like a bad divorce settlement, not a commercial transaction.

Better that we should just sell it to them for $1 and call it a day. Leave the new owners with the debt for it. I take it Kinder Morgan isn't interested in buying it back....

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I have heard this preposterous claim of “genocide” so often I’m starting to lose patience. I’m tempted to post a picture of the bodies that Eisenhower and co. found when they opened the death camps, place it beside any one of hundreds of pictures of the smiling faces in any one of the residential schools and say, “Genocide/Not genocide. See how easy it is to tell the difference?”

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author

I actually did that in a couple of previous publications.

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Missed that. I will look it up.

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No proof = no more funding🤬 And who ever approved of the salary and pay raise Ms Murray received should be locked up. Also, much the same as the federal gov’t, Ms Murray spent more than her allowed budget.

When will the money flow to indigenous come to a halt??

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