There is no “regress to the previous system” available. It would be similar to a hypothetical situation in Alberta; it follows self-destructive energy and development policies that add to global warming, melt Rocky Mountain glaciers, reducing spring run off, causing widespread drought and contaminated underground aquifers making safe drinking water scarce or only available at great cost to cities and towns, to farmers for irrigation, and to individuals wherever one lived.

The provincial gov’t — as you put it — would have f*cked things up and they would be up that particular creek without a shovel. At least, that’s what I would suppose.

Hope this helps.

Too often, we have seen natives take (rightful) control of their destiny and flubb it in a way that is inexplicably worse, then ask for MORE funds to undo the harm they did to themselves.

All native tribes are not alike. I hope the Inuit are smarter than the rest of ‘em.

Should we see drastic improvement on things like school drop out, alcohol dependence, drug use, and other ills that plague their community, I say go all the way with Affirmative Action and make it 99% Inuit.

If they f*ck things up, then regress to the previous system.

I tend to frame the discussion in terms of advertising and brand recognition or writing: taking it into another realm sometimes has broken through barriers with people.

Quick! Think of a banker! What does that person look like?
If the majority of the time in North America that’s a white middle class middle-aged dude, then that is the primary “brand” of banker. And groups of people – especially poor ones – don’t have advertising firms, and often have internalized their own “brand” labels. Of course, people are *people*, and there IS no difference between people in jeans and people in sherwani, but we like to pretend.

I am intrigued that you’re also addressing the “learning the skills necessary” end. This is the part that I haven’t seen spoken about as much, and I think it’s really, really important.

Being a part of a minority in my schooling, and having friends who are of all manner of backgrounds, we’ve often discussed the frustration of tokenism. As an individual you don’t want your achievements to be chalked up to affirmative action, either externally or internally: you want to be able to say “Look at what I did!” with pride, without a nagging fear that you were given a handicap.

Doing the job, and doing it well, is the best medicine to combat internalized negative stereotype, but (and this is studied and shown), it is harder for people with activated stereotype to excel right out of the gate. In psych, locus of control is shown to correlate to outcomes – you’ll have a better outcome if you say “Ooops, I didn’t study enough”, than if you say “Oooops, I am a person who sucks” – but it’s only been recently that I’ve seen studies applying this to larger sociological patterns. (Although I’m sure the studies existed before.) I remember one recently showing that it works immediately like magic just before a test… you can reliably depress women’s scores in math tests by telling them, prior to going in, that “women suck at math”. Activating negative stereotype is powerful, removing locus of control. In that particular case, I have personal experience, and the only way I knew to combat that was to put the locus of control in my court again – I CAN be good at math if I apply myself, whereas I can’t not be female. But that takes education and experience, not tokenism, to learn.

So there’s a two way street, here, in rectifying imbalance: first, making people in power hire outside their own “brand” preference, and second to have the “branded” people decide they’re just people and throw off any further branding. (( Or, sometimes, to choose to accentuate the “good” of the brand. I get this, and I think culturally it’s true – certain cultures do have attributes – but I am generally against essentialism. People deserve respect and opportunity simply for being people, not for being more noble or nurturing or spiritual or non-materialistic than normative.))

Of course, another helpful thing in throwing off the brand is to see people “branded” like you succeeding. Women doing math, for example. Then you know that your non-controllable variable – gender, race, ability, etc – isn’t a death sentence.

Good theory. But it falls apart in the real world, where Liability and Errors and Omissions insurers (not to mention legislation) require that certain functions be performed by folks with a certain level of certification. Determining empirically whether or not someone can remove a spleen could prove to be a costly and messy process.

Several of the folks I’m discussing the issue with on another site are also suggesting that it’s “racist” for NTI to provide its benefits only to beneficiaries…that tells you a bit about where they’re at.

Hope all goes well in the South! So they actually have internet in New Zealand? Who knew?

“No one can disagree that an accountant MUST have a CGA, or a Nurse MUST have recognized certification.”

I can disagree with that. If a person can demonstrate their abilities to do a job, then let them do it. Certification can become symbol worship – and the higher the number of letters/symbols after one’s name, the greater degree of worship offered.

by matttbastard
Ok, so I missed the midweek linkfarm–my apologies once again.  Feel free to sock it to me one time in comments.  Oh, and go show the one Melissa M. some love–that teaspoon don’t shine itself, dig?
Stageleft: Affirmat…

“Racism” is hardly an appropriate category for the Nunavut experiment in self-government (let’s bracket the latter term for now–I’m not wholly comfortable with it, but it gives a general sense of what I mean).

Nunavut is the result of two parallel processes–a land claim and a linked demand for a new territory. The place is 85% Inuit, and it was patient Inuit who, over many years, achieved (in part) their aim. But for eventual success, the feds need to live up to their commitments.

The Berger Report of 2006 should be required reading for anyone who wants to offer an opinion on this. Nunavut is right now a basket case, with a suicide rate 11 times the national average, a land of poverty, drugs, alcohol and despair. Up to one-half of the kids are deaf from chronic ear infections–they have to use microphones in the classrooms. The sedentarization of the Inuit after WWII has been tremendously socially disruptive.

In this context, calling it “racist” when the demand is raised for appropriate levels of Inuit representation in government is simply absurd. They are 85% of the population. Imagine if the Canadian public service were 85% American–would the notion that just maybe Canadians ought to be more involved in their own governance be deemed “racist?”

I think the measures you have outlined–which require a massive commitment to education and training, a commitment that is already supposedly there–are the only way to fly. Otherwise colonial rule will continue, and dependency, and demoralization, and further social erosion.

You didn’t mention the new Official Languages Act. Where are we with that? Right now you can’t even find the Nunavut Public Service Act in Inuktitut/Innuinaqtun.

“Racism” is a red herring. We’re talking simple concepts of democracy and representation, nothing more. And there’s a long way to go before those concepts are made concrete.