Best commentary on Attawapiskat I've yet heard

Last month, the plight of people in Attawapiskat captured the attention of the Canadian media. Attawapiskat is a reserve/First Nation in northern Ontario, near Kenora. (The best background on the immediate crisis might be this article, by the MP for the area, which helped launch the media frenzy; this blog post by Pam Palmater gives excellent historical context).

This is a piece on Attawapiskat written by Bob Lovelace. Bob's an elder and former chief of Ardoch Algonquin First Nation, and lecturer at Queen's University. I was lucky enough to attend a presentation he did on the history of the Ottawa Valley and its original people, the Algonquins.
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Seeing the Forest and the Trees

If you can cut through the racism, ignorance, and half-baked opinions of pundits, politicians and sound-bite media most folks will realize that Attawapiskat and many other First Nations have been laboring under the repression of Colonialism far to long. The antidote for poverty is self-determination and no one can give you that. You have to standup and take action yourself to make it happen. Colonialism does not give way on its own; it must be defeated through vigorous and enlightened opposition.

It is difficult in the face of human suffering to turn attention to the systemic and structural reasons that have led to this catastrophe but this is the very time when thoughtful analysis is needed. The homes are small and cold. The tedium of poverty bears down day-by-day and those who have stolen your children’s future call the daily bread on your table a “handout”. It is difficult to feel anything but shame through the numbing that is required to get-by every day. But there are reasons behind this suffering. There is a history. There is a structure to oppression, denial and indifference that houses this suffering and there is a system that perpetuates it.

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Read the rest of the post here, at Bob's Decolonization Blog.

I'm certainly no expert on the situation, and haven't even done a very good job of following the media coverage. But two thoughts occur to me:
1) Government representatives in damage-control may toss around impressive-sounding figures that they've sent to Attawapiskat, implying that the money must have been wasted through corrupt management. But per individual, on-reserve natives get 2/3rds of the spending for government services that other Canadians receive. (Hello! That's racist!) So the amount spent on a similarly-sized group of 'regular Canadians' would be even greater.

2) If there's no place for natives to live on-reserve, maybe they'll move away and assimilate properly into mainstream Canadian society. Wouldn't that be convenient?!