Canada Hunting Laws
Explain how each of the following greatly affected the traditional lifestyle of the First Nations in Canada?
a) Canada’s greatly increased population:
b)the move of First nation people onto reserves:
c)the use of residential schools:
d)fishing and hunting laws
e)resource and development
Similar to the Nation’s experiences across the North American continent:
(1) Population increases basically displaced the Nations from territory they used for hunting and fishing and, for nomadic groups, reduced their ability to spread their food gathering across many natural resources. Additionally, more non-Nation people made discriminatory practices easier to commit. The Nations lost both access and recourse for complaint. Moreover, traditional conflict settling approaches were not available between the Nations’ citizens and the new immigrant and imperialists.
(2) Reserves effectively destroyed the lifestyle of the Nations’ peoples and relegated them to being dependent on their enemies/oppressors/benevolent masters for their very survival. For a peoples used to high levels of self-sufficiency, this was anathema and completely undid the traditional roles within the tribal structure. Breadwinners weren’t breadwinners anymore.
(3) Residential schools isolated Nation students during particularly impressionable ages and allowed the rising dominant culture to indoctrinate these students. Depending on the age, these children might return to their families unable to even speak their Nation native language. Additionally, the children would return with habits and behaviors of their teachers rather than manifesting the teachings of their parents and ancestors. Historically, schooling like this has been used to destroy the culture of many indigenous peoples. In Australia, for example, Aborigine children were actually kidnapped and then taken hundreds of miles away to “schools”; many died trying walk back to their communities and families.
(d) The limitations to normal Nation access to hunting and fishing resources rendered them helpless to sustain themselves in the ways they always had. The Nations would also find themselves unskilled to make a sufficient living to buy foodstuffs for their families, or worse, they would be discriminated against – denied the jobs they needed or exploited by being over-worked and under-payed for what work they could find. Unused to “paying for” or “buying” food, families would suffer greatly.
(e) For those members of the First Nations who believed in ownership principles, it can be said that resources and the development of them began with the taking of those resources from the First Nations. Land that had been accessible to all was suddenly the “property” of foreign immigrants. Mineral wealth was never rightly paid to the Nations who had inhabited the areas for centuries. And of course, without full “citizenship” the Nation’s protests fell on deaf ears because they had no rights within the rugged frontier environment they experienced.
All in all, the Nations First Peoples suffered grievous harm that has yet to be recompensed by many who enjoy much of what was taken from them.
Hope this helps!
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