Tag Archives: Dick Pound

Wente & Canada’s “Savages”

Posted on by elizabeth
6

Any time you’re aching for a dose of ignorance and (deliberate?) stupidity, head over to Margaret Wente’s column at The Globe and Mail.  I stopped reading Wente a long time ago because I felt I was in danger of stroking out.  Sometimes I miss important things though.

Last week, I posted about Dick Pound’s offensive comment to La Presse during the Beijing Olympics referring to Canada’s Indigenous people as “savages”.  In her Saturday column at The Globe, Wente “argues” that Pound’s comment was unfortunate, but correct.  I have to put the word “argues” in quotes because Wente wouldn’t know an argument if she ran into one.

Nevertheless, the woman writes for Canada’s national newspaper so I assume she does have some readers and that some of them may be affected by what she writes – they might think she knows something.  It makes me very happy to direct you to an article in today’s Globe in which Hayden King shreds Wente and points readers in a rational direction in his article “Indigenous cultures rivalled those of civilizations around the world”.  Here’s a bit:

Thomas Jefferson once remarked that those who don’t read newspapers are better informed than those who do, even as the former may know nothing, the latter only know falsehood and error. This brings to mind Margaret Wente’s recent column about Olympic official Dick Pound, who said, “400 years ago, Canada was a land of savages.” Ms. Wente’s Saturday column has likely set back the first nations’ campaign for an accurate representation of native peoples in the mainstream media by 10 years.

In fact, a brief survey of the original peoples of this continent illustrates an array of accomplishments that rival civilizations around the globe, including those in Western Europe. Yet today, in North America, the ancestors of those from both continents live side by side, separated by a canyon of misunderstanding. To gain insight, we need only turn to indigenous oral traditions, wampum belts, birchbark scrolls and Tsalagi and Aztec texts. In addition, scholars of all stripes from all corners of the globe have contributed to a greater knowledge of indigenous cultures.

 

Please read the rest here.

Many years ago, Wente wrote an article about fetal alcohol syndrome in which she stated that, unbeknownst to average Canadians, the majority of children born to aboriginal people in this country are born with FAS.

That would have been news to me, so I wrote to Wente and asked her to direct me to the research she used to support her conclusion.  She wrote back to me to say she had done no research but had a friend who was an aboriginal person and a social worker and she’d relied on him for her information.  ‘Nuf said.

Note:  In fact, judging by the number of articles she’s written on the subject, Wente is obsessed with the FAS issue.  I can’t direct you to the article I read way back because you’d have to purchase it to read it, but there are plenty more here.  Don’t pay to read any of them.

Meantime, here’s another Globe article, this time by Joe Friesen, in which we learn about one of the long-term consequences of European colonization:

The gap in high-school graduation rates for aboriginals and non-aboriginals has grown in recent years, while the percentage of aboriginal people with a university degree has increased only slightly compared with a massive boom among the general population, new research shows.

Both are troubling figures that indicate much more needs to be done in one of the great social-policy challenges Canada faces, according to a study published yesterday by the C. D. Howe Institute.

“Clearly, we’re not doing well enough, and clearly, we should be highly concerned about it,” said the study’s author, John Richards, who teaches public policy at Simon Fraser University.

“A marginalized community, such as aboriginals, living in a modern economy can only escape poverty through an educational transformation.”

 

Read the rest here

EDIT:  I had to come back to fix the link to Hayden King’s article – thanks Vesper!

Dick!

Posted on by elizabeth
2

Uh, hello Dick Pound?  Is there an operational brain working in your head?  I missed Pound’s comment during the Beijing Olympics in which he compared China’s 5,000 year old civilization to Canada’s nation of “savages” a mere 400 years ago.  I missed it because it seems it received coverage only in Montreal’s francophone La Presse and there doesn’t seem to have been any follow-up till now.

Mr. Pound has held posts at the IOC on the international stage for a good many years and is now the Chancellor of McGill University.  He should know better.  And it pisses me off no end that he thinks the problem is simply a matter of political correctness.  No Mr. Pound, it’s an issue of human decency; of extending to Aboriginal Canadians the respect they are due.  A man who has missed the moments in our history when some Canadians have begun to understand the gross indecency, genocide, ethnic cleansing and resulting discrimination and desecration of First Nations perpetrated by white Europeans ought not to hold his position.  I can’t imagine a context in which his comments either make any sense at all, or are acceptable.

Apologize publicly, Mr. Pound, and resign as Chancellor.  Take your brainless head and bury it back in he sand.

Here’s the story from The Globe and Mail:

An aboriginal rights group has reported former International Olympic Committee vice-president Dick Pound to the IOC’s ethics committee, accusing him of making racist and intolerant comments about Canada’s native peoples and demanding that he be denounced ahead of the 2010 Games in Vancouver.

André Dudemaine, director of LandInSights, a Quebec-based aboriginal advocacy group, said Mr. Pound made comments in an interview with Montreal’s La Presse newspaper in August, in which he called 17th-century Canada “a land of savages.” The comments were discriminatory and contrary to the IOC code of ethics, Mr. Dudemaine said.

Mr. Pound, speaking in French in a story about the Olympics published Aug. 9, was responding to a question about the potential embarrassment of holding the Games in China, where dissidents had been jailed and a Tibetan uprising crushed.

“We must not forget that 400 years ago, Canada was a land of savages, with scarcely 10,000 inhabitants of European descent, while in China, we’re talking about a 5,000-year-old civilization. We must be prudent about our great experience of three or four centuries before telling the Chinese how to manage China,” Mr. Pound told journalist Agnès Gruda.

Yesterday, Mr. Pound said he had no intention of making a racist remark, and that it could be clarified by a better understanding of the context.

“I was defending the IOC [and] its choice of Beijing against assertions by the North American media,” he said. “Yes, I’m sure that there’s probably a more politically correct way of expressing it in this day and age. But I was saying think back to what it was like 200 or 300 years ago before you start lecturing a 5,000-year-old society. It wasn’t a comment on the government of whatever the aboriginal peoples might have been. It was a comment about the U.S. in its current incarnation having a solution to everybody’s problems.”

Mr. Dudemaine said the use of the word “savages” is troubling, and that Mr. Pound’s words suggest aboriginal people had no culture or civilization, a myth thoroughly discredited by historians.

“He just hit the nail in the middle of very old prejudices that somehow are still present in Canadian society,” he said. “It is exactly this kind of statement by a very respected person that damages all of the progress we wish to make in Canada.”

Mr. Pound said a fair reading would indicate this is a manufactured controversy. He said his use of the word “savages” was a historical reference.

“That was the word used at the time in all the literature by the Jesuits who were here. They were just generally les sauvages,” he said.

Ghislain Picard, chief of the assembly of First Nations of Quebec, said he was outraged by Mr. Pound’s comments, and called on him to resign as Chancellor of McGill University.

“Mr. Pound should himself understand the immense discourtesy of his remarks and offer to resign,” the chief said.

Historical reference my ass.  Mr. Pound said nothing to indicate that he disagreed with the Jesuit assessment of First Nations.  Mr. Pound’s comments are not only racist, they’re also inaccurate.  What a Dick!