When I was doing missionary work when I was younger, which started this obsession of mine with the literature of witness, I was a translator for a missionary group, and I spent years in a Tijuana dump. People were really thrown by the fact that the Mexican poor, many of them pureblood indigenous people, seemed happy.
Solutions will not be found while Indigenous people are treated as victims for whom someone else must find solutions.
We are seeing healing among the stolen generations, and initiatives which are enabling Indigenous people to make their distinctive contribution to our national life.
We are lagging far behind comparable countries in overcoming the disadvantages Indigenous people face.
Yet there are thousands of Indigenous people searching for family members.
If I meet someone who's Native American and I don't know anything about indigenous people in New Jersey - which I kind of don't, which is not really good - I can learn more and more about their lives, and that makes me a more open person and a more accepting person.
Indigenous people have discovered that Christianity is not inherently Western but universal - 'translatable' into any cultural idiom.
Here in Canada, the people who oppose the tar sands most forcefully are Indigenous people living downstream from the tar sands. They are not opposing it because of climate change - they are opposing it because it poisons their bodies.
It is racist, and it was racist when it was created. The Indian Act controls, or seeks to control, the lives of all indigenous people in a way that you and I would never accept.
If you take a look at the breaches of rights, whether it's the underfunding of education or health care, and all these issues which accentuate the poverty of Canada's indigenous people, and the lack of reaction to them - it becomes clear that if Canadians understood what's at stake, they wouldn't stand for it.
