Better life starts with industry Progress and protest

Children have been known to ask, “If there’s a Mother’s Day and a Father’s Day, why isn’t there a Child’s Day?”

The stock answer (revealed to new parents, we suppose, in pre-natal classes, between sessions of heavy breathing) is that “every day is Child’s Day.” As unsatisfying as that answer might be to gift-grubbing youngsters, it does have a shred or two of truth: most parents do indeed devote every day to the well-being and happiness of their offspring.

Now we consult some calendars and find “Indigenous Peoples’ Day,” this year on October 8, coinciding with Thanksgiving here and with Columbus Day in the United States. Nobody in either country could reasonably turn that idea away with a smug, “every day is Indigenous Peoples’ Day.” Indigenous peoples across the continent, not to mention other indigenous groups worldwide, have a quality of life far below that of the dominant social groups with whom they share their country. And it hardly has to be said that the mainstream population does not, in the main, spend its days devoting itself to fixing that disparity.

So the concept of an Indigenous Peoples’ Day is unexceptionable, though we have to wonder just what tangible improvements might result from celebrating such a day. The specifics of the day, though, are another matter.

Indigenous Peoples’ Day has its roots in protests in 1991, when Columbus Day marches in the United States were stopped by activists objecting to a statutory holiday celebrating the landings of Christopher Columbus. A year later, activist groups, including the American Indian Movement, began celebrating an “anti-Columbus” Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

Literature from supporters of the movement reads like a grab-bag of trendy-left, anti-development and anti-globalization slogans. Columbus, we are told, left a “legacy of violence and genocide” whose modern outcroppings are resource exploitation, nuclear waste disposal sites, telescopes, and “institutionalized disrespect through name-calling and stereotyping of native peoples in sports.”

There is no hope of ever reaching professional protesters with reasoned argument; they aren’t interested. But they manage to find sympathetic ears among legislators and the chattering class. Marches in Denver this year were attended by Colorado state senators and representatives, one of whom, Democratic representative Suzanne Williams, contrived to see the protests as a way to “break the cycle of hate.”

Political silliness on this order brings back memories of the United Nations’ World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, held last month in Durban, South Africa.

In Durban, too, progressive Western societies were pilloried as the creators of misery and as the chief beneficiaries of “slavery and colonialism” — two concepts yoked together by ideology in defiance of the facts. All this was dealt out to the West, under the beneficent smiles of Western politicians, even with Third World slavery going on — ahem — as we speak.

In Durban, the industrialized West was demonized as the author of slavery and Third World poverty: but (as has been said elsewhere with greater eloquence) it was the West that ended the slave trade, the West that ended colonialism, and the West that gave more of its treasure and manpower to lifting the Third World from its poverty. And yet the ideologues of Durban would have that same West punished for its own progress and its own economic success — two things that did not arise out of the slave trade or out of colonialism.

What hope there is for a better world for everyone springs from progress, from the use of our minds and our resources to free people from mere subsistence labour. A way out of the endless hard work that brings mere survival is the one blessing on which all other progress hangs.

It is Western capitalism that brings that development: to the Third World outside our borders and to the Third World that (to our continuing shame) persists inside them. Any number of pragmatic First Nations groups know this already, but a politicized class of advocates and activists either cannot see it, or will not admit it, preferring to peddle tales of exploitation. And the Disneyfied notion of aboriginal peoples as historical stewards of the environment — historical hogwash, but hogwash that sells easily among comfortable city dwellers — makes the truth a potentially damaging political commodity.

When academia and government see, and acknowledge, what both business and forward-looking indigenous peoples already have seen — that a better life for everyone, everywhere, comes with economic progress, and not with a romanticized vision of a past that never was — then, maybe, every day will be Indigenous Peoples’ Day.