I'm a Canadian of european descent. While I was a small child, reservations were basically described to me by my elders as a special private place for First Nations to practice their culture without being bothered by Europeans. The picture was basically painted like how first nations had been on tv; fishing and hunting deep in the woods.
When I was a teenager, I got to do a geography project at the cartography center in PEI. Knowing that PEI didn't really have dense woods, I went and checked what the lands types were for the reservations. Each one was described as salt marsh. You can't grow anything in salt. You can't build anything in marsh. It's the worst possible land. No one would choose it. They had to have been forced onto it. The lie was revealed, and I felt crushed.
Is that generally true even out in Ottawa/Ontario that reservations are on the worst possible land? Would it be an improvement/more manageable if reservations were relocated? I suspect a lot of the water issues are stemming from this. It's probably cheaper to move people closer to fresh water than to make purification plants. Would First Nations be open to relocation, or would there be a trust issue with the government?
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I'm a Canadian of european descent. While I was a small child, reservations were basically described to me by my elders as a special private place for First Nations to practice their culture without being bothered by Europeans. The picture was basically painted like how first nations had been on tv; fishing and hunting deep in the woods.
When I was a teenager, I got to do a geography project at the cartography center in PEI. Knowing that PEI didn't really have dense woods, I went and checked what the lands types were for the reservations. Each one was described as salt marsh. You can't grow anything in salt. You can't build anything in marsh. It's the worst possible land. No one would choose it. They had to have been forced onto it. The lie was revealed, and I felt crushed.
Is that generally true even out in Ottawa/Ontario that reservations are on the worst possible land? Would it be an improvement/more manageable if reservations were relocated? I suspect a lot of the water issues are stemming from this. It's probably cheaper to move people closer to fresh water than to make purification plants. Would First Nations be open to relocation, or would there be a trust issue with the government?
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