Re: ‘We are the voice of the voiceless’, Headline, October 31, 2015.

Regrettably, in our modern world we are forced to prioritize misery. Despite the desperate state of the Syrian refugees, the Canadian government and its citizens cannot save the world from itself and must take care of their own problems before lending assistance to other war-torn nations – most urgently that of the plight of our 1st Nations peoples. The war against indigenous peoples has been waged covertly and openly for more than a century and continues to go on today. As the Syrian conflict drags on and the humanitarian crisis continues to escalate, Canadian politicians from all three political parties were recently in a compassion competition during the election campaign to demonstrate their concern for the Syrian migrants while not uttering a word of sympathy or committing to a single concrete action in relation to the Third World conditions that our 1st Nations peoples endure 3rd world conditions daily while living in a 1st World nation like Canada. They live in a democratic gulag. If any crisis deserves our immediate and intense attention it is the primitive living conditions endured by our Aboriginal peoples for the past century and beyond at the hands of their “civilized” colonial masters who conquered them and then enslaved them. The Syrian crisis should be solved by the countries nearest to Syria who have a similar responsibility as Canada to their own people. In effect we are subsidizing Bashar Al Assad.

While we recoil in horror at scenes of crowded refugee camps in various countries in Europe and the Middle East we ignore the fact that our own Aboriginal peoples were put in similar refugee camps more than a century ago – we call them “reserves”. The problem was that these were not short-term accommodations they were a life and generational sentence imposed by white European peoples who invaded North America and displaced, murdered and raped millions of indigenous peoples who were the rightful owners and first residents of our country. We didn’t “discover” America we conquered it. The result was utter and complete devastation of vibrant indigenous cultures for which western nations have still not taken full responsibility.

While for the Syrian people this phenomenon is a relatively recent occurrence, it has been the generational experience of our 1st Nations citizens with no hope of improvement. Government after government has turned deaf ear and a blind eye to the slow-moving train wreck of aboriginal life including endemic poverty and chronic under funding of the aboriginal peoples, residential schools, rampant drug use and the systemic racism and abuse of indigenous children and women while confining them to a democratic gulag of reserves with little economic or political prospects for improvement. The conditions of our aboriginal communities and their people is a national disgrace.

As heart-wrenching as the Syrian situation is, it is not any different than the millions of people around the world that are regularly displaced, murdered and enslaved as collateral damage in the endless imperial conflicts that megalomaniacal dictators, despots, sectarian leaders and ruthless, supposedly benevolent governments and corporations inflict upon the global populace daily and have throughout history. The Middle East conflict in Syria is only one in a long and continuing list of problems driven by self-serving, bigoted self-designated “leaders” of the world who see it as their mission to inflict cruelty, inhumanity and oppression on humanity for in this case dogmatic sectarian reasons driven by blind and distorted beliefs articulated centuries ago. They use religion to justify their own barbarity and dominance.

So the unenviable question for the Canadian people and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is: Who is more deserving of our compassion and emergency support – our own long-suffering aboriginal peoples or Syrian migrants?