To the editor:
Let me opine, first, that Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence is not on a hunger strike; she is drinking water and eating fish broth. One can live lean, but live on those essentials.
Second: her small reserve, with an inflow of millions of federal dollars each year, was in financial disarray - in poverty, if I recall the news back then.
Third: today's white Canadians are not the reason so many native kids are handicapped by fetal alcohol syndrome, or why so many reserves are disaster areas, or that natives are over-represented in the country's prisons. Forth: Do I plead the extermination of my grandparents, my uncles, my aunts, my cousins at the hands of the Germans before and during the Second World War as a cause for my bad or ignorant acts? No.
Don't sign me up for any quantum of white liberal guilt for the misery that so many natives live in. But, yes, our government should resolve - in a positive manner - what it can have a hand in.
Mike Tropp, Vancouver
