We’re all flawed

So there it was, live on Canadian television. The announcement by a spokesman for Chief Theresa Spence that the second coming had arrived, and it had taken the form of the leader of the Attawapiskat reserve and her alleged hunger strike. Spence’s aid Danny Metatawabin explained to CTV’s Kevin Newman that “many thousands of years ago” the Virgin Mary had given birth to Jesus, and that Spence and her protest were rather similar. It will change the world and light a fire, he said, just as with the Son of God made flesh in Bethlehem.

Newman was so cemented in political correctness and so nauseatingly unctuous that he merely nodded and moved on, but such messianic chatter is surely breaking news. Perhaps all this is recorded somewhere in those gnostic gospels Dan Brown keeps going on about.

Not “many thousands of years ago” Danny, as this was Jesus rather than Zeus, and as far as I recall Jesus was not the recipient of tens of millions of public dollars, did not try to blackmail political leaders into meeting Him and did not mislead the public with staggeringly tendentious propaganda. But still exciting stuff all the same!

The statement is patently absurd, but the hyperbole and narcissistic rhetoric it epitomizes says so much about the Idle No More movement and the relationship between natives and the majority population. The same week, another aboriginal leader, in Toronto, claimed repeatedly that Stephen Harper was intent on the “physical genocide” of her people.

Whether you like the Prime Minister or not is up to you, but a man who oversees billion-dollar aid packages to a people, and who introduces legislation to guarantee clean water and more autonomy to that same people, cannot seriously be compared to Hitler. Then again, within the new left and the native movement virtually everyone with whom you disagree can be compared to the Fuhrer.

Native suffering is an undeniable reality, as is the damage caused by European settlers, and indeed some people — though far from all — within the Catholic Church. But the problems are layered, nuanced, complex and nowhere near as simple and convenient as good Indians, bad white men.

Internal horrors of drug and alcohol dependency, family abuse and suicide have root causes of course, but the danger of blaming others is that it invariably excuses many of the genuinely guilty. The ravaging poverty of some reserves, for example, has to be honestly explained when we know enormous amounts of public and private investment has been forthcoming in the last decade. Where did the money go?

Too often, however, commentators fall into the racism of lowered expectations. Native leaders are treated like children and not pushed and questioned, while their white counterparts are virtually interrogated. This is patronizing and ultimately harmful to the people these leaders claim to represent. Take a look at Newman’s grovelling offering if you doubt me.

Most of us can trace collective suffering in our past. Irish Catholics, European Jews, myriad and various victims of communism and Nazism, black people and so on.

It’s vital for Catholics to have an empathy, spiritual as well as political and social, with the native people, but such fraternity demands intelligent analysis and a mature appreciation of the problems and the possible solutions. It’s considered an easy cause: fashionable and smug to support natives, whereas taking a stand on Ireland, Israel, Palestine or Afghanistan could lead to problems.

The Idle No More activists have sometimes broken the law, their demands are often outlandish, they fail to address very real concerns about native violence at Caledonia, Ont., and elsewhere, and they have formed alliances with some extremist, anti-Catholic, anti-life leftist groups.

Pray for justice and peace, but know that we have all sinned and all need to examine past behaviour and current beliefs. Chief Spence is not like Jesus, and natives are flawed people just like the rest of us — made in the image of God and wonderful to behold, but deeply, deeply flawed.