Time for a reality check!
by Gilbert Oskaboose

This is a response to the tons of e-mail and letters I've received from loonies and cry babies who took offense at the article I wrote a while back about it " could be a helluva lot worse than being born and raised an Indian here in Canada."

It was a simple essay advancing the notion that given the horrendous natural catastrophes and the extreme poverty and social conditions throughout the rest of the world, we could have done a helluva lot worse than being born and raised here in Canada.

One loonie from Nepean suggested that I had the brains "of an Ottawa river sturgeon" for daring to suggest such a thing - whatever the hell that means! Another scolded me for wandering far afield and suggested I look first at the problems here at home in Indian Country: suicide rates, alcoholism, wife and child abuse, drug addiction, poverty....

Ok, let's do that.

Suicide? Why the hell should I or anybody else give a shit about anyone else who cares so little about their own lives that they consider suicide? If they take that precious gift from the Creator so lightly then why should I care? They don't give a shit about who they hurt and who they leave behind to live with the memories. Why should I?

Alcoholism? This is a big one in Indian Country, eh? My own father died drunk on the highway, struck down by a drunken miner with a load of drunken Indian women. Charming, eh! What about sobriety? Is that too novel a notion? What about simply staying sober? My three older sisters and I have stayed sober all of our lives. Among us we have 280 years of sobriety. Add the children and my wife and it comes up around to around 580 years of sobriety. And I hear Indians bragging that they have five or ten years of sobriety. What a joke! Given the limited resources Indian Country has do you have any idea how much is wasted every year going back to pick up those who have voluntarily passed out or suicided along the way? What a goddamn waste of human and financial resources!

Wife and child abuse? Just don't do it. My wife and I spent a combined total of twenty years in native residential schools, under the loving strokes of a strap wielded by Jesuit priests and white nuns, being systematically stripped of our language, our culture, spirituality and and everything else it meant to be born Ojibway. We survived that and didn't use it as an excuse to use each other or our children as punching bags or sexual objects. Jeez, take some responsibility for yourselves, for your families and for your own tribe.. And right now we're suing the bastards who done that to us.. It's payback time.

Drug addiction? There's no drug addiction here, except maybe cigarettes in a few cases. Just stay away from drugs. It's as simple or as complex as you yourself want to make it. Nobody is holding a gun to your head, forcing you to take drugs, forcing you to be a drunk, forcing you to abuse your wife and kids. Get real!

Poverty? No poverty here, unless it's self induced. What you get out of life is roughly equivalent to what you put into it. Get a Life, get an education, get a job and stick with it. If there is no work on the reserve where you live then get out and look for work. My wife and I have done that for the last fifty five years, whether we felt like it every morning or not. We respected ourselves and we wanted a better life for our children. Last year my wife retired after 25 years with Canada Post. Ten years ago I retired from 30 years of journalism, ten years after the stroke that left me in a wheelchair. I worked 10 years from a wheelchair and disabled before I retired. If a damn "cripple" can do it, why can't you? I even kept moose-hunting from a specially designed truck. We've earned our goddamn old age benefits and feel no great need to apologize to anyone for it!.

Eighteen years ago the wife and I made the first down payment on the first Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) house here on the Serpent River First Nation - no more freebie shacks for Indians here. Seven more years and it's all ours - lock, stock and barrel plus CP'd land.

Sure we have problems here in Canada, but what the hell, there are problems everywhere So you overcome, you adapt, you survive. What the hell else can we do? What's the alternative, shoot some more drugs, choke down another beer and lay around whining about how tough it is to be born Indian? Hell, I even have enough left over to help a young unrelated lady through college. She has the brains to see that there is nothing here for her on the rez and the balls to go out into the world and take what she wants for herself. I applaud her. I respect her.

That's more than I feel for all the pathetic losers out there crying the blues and whining about how tough it is to be an Indian in Canada. Why don't you losers go hump somebody else's leg before you really begin to piss me off!