Opinion
Tony Eberts
  In the Late Summer 2003 edition of The Steelheader News, guest columnist Brian Coldwells says, in effect, that there should be no further "kowtowing" to natives and their demands__especially in the area of fisheries. And since he is on the side of the huge white majority of Canadians, he may have a winner.
  I think it's a bit too easy, however, to simply write off what has happened to the First Nations people as history that cannot be changed and so should be ignored (except, as Mr. Coldwells suggests, through some mysterious kind of reparations not based on native claims). Consider this scenario:
 You are a wage slave, working hard and hoping to save enough to own your home, living from payday to payday. You discover that your great_grandfather owned a huge ranch in Alberta, but was cheated out of it by treacherous friend. Oil was later found on the land, and the cheater's descendants now are all rolling in money; while you holiday in a leaky trailer, the cheater folk drive Rolls_Royces and swan about in villas in the South of France, Malibu beach houses and Scottish castles.
 Would you try to find some way to share the vast benefits of your great_grandfather's ranch that was wrongly taken from him? Or would you shrug and say, like Mr. Coldwells, that "history is what happened in the past . . . it cannot be changed by any actions now or ever."
 Surely justice and fair play should not be subject to some statute of limitations. When the Europeans took everything the First Nations people had__their land, their freedom, their dignity, their culture and even their children__it was a moral crime of enormous and long_lasting proportions. In most cases, the native people were not defeated in battle, but slyly cheated. The white man cleverly saw that by far the best deal for him lay not in sharing with the aboriginals, but in taking everything and then putting the native minority into a state_supported apartheid system. Can you even imagine the value of the gold, timber, fish, oil and land that was cunningly snatched? But today many whites have the gall to whine about the cost of the apartheid instead of crying out for justice.
 Now that we know this, is it time to work out treaties that truly compensate the descendants of those who received such vile treatment? Hell, no, say the Coldwells of the world. Instead, they say, the natives should be delighted to get on with joining "our" society__delighted to be, after so much time and misery, accepted by their oppressors as (technically, at least) "equals."
 It reminds me of the time when, as a reporter, I covered a series of hearings in B.C. held as part of a national effort to re_write and improve the Indian Act. The hearings were headed by a funny_talking man named Jean Chretien, who then was Minister of Indian Affairs. One of the gatherings was in north_central B.C., and one delegate from a far_flung Reserve was startled to learn that he didn't own the land that he ranched.
 "Indian Reserve land actually belongs to the Crown__to the Queen," one bureacrat told him.
 "The Queen, eh?" said the rancher. "Well, somebody should tell her majesty to come out where I live. Her fences need fixin'."