Indians, Jews, and genocide

Took the hounds for a ramble over the back seventy this afternoon. It was a bright sunny day but a bitingly cold Norwester meant you had to bundle up.

Indian Creek runs through the property. It hails from lakes Mary and Gowan and melds with the Indian River somewhere in the marsh across the way; the front thirty to us.

Indian Creek and Indian River bear mute homage to the fact that this area was once populated by Indians.

You could safely drink the water from our creek. There’s no cash-cropping going on upstream, so there’s no toxic agricultural run-off. In fact, we’ve got multiple springs right here at Falling Downs that leak potable water out of the ground and dribble down to Indian Creek.

We are truly blessed!

Generally speaking, the Indians who used to call this land their own are not so blessed. Google a list of Canadian communities that don’t have potable water, and what do you find?

It’s been a cold spring so far. The meadows are brown, with random splotches of not-yet-melted snow. The hounds sniffed out a really plump coon chilling on a branch just out of their reach. In spite of the hysterical caterwauling on the part of the hounds, that old raccoon didn’t bat an eye. It crossed my mind to toss a stick at it…

But why?

Leave it be.

There’s a beaver dam at the back of the property, just after Indian Creek crosses onto our place. The beavers have made the marsh upstream navigable. Without the beavers the bikers wouldn’t have waterfront property.

The bikers are fascinating local legends.  

They are allegedly affiliated with outlaw biker types. I don’t know if there’s any truth to that. All I know is that in late middle age they bet everything on starting a restaurant over in Sauble.

That’s something I have a lot of respect for. It was actually a pretty decent place, but alas, it didn’t work out. But the point of the story is that when we first moved out here, and for the first few years that was weekends only, we actually shared a party line with them!

In the age of everybody having a cellphone in their pocket, most people wouldn’t know what that means.

But that inadvertently led the Farm Manager to have serious conversations with Mrs. Outlaw, whose name was Pansy if I remember correctly, on the general theme of “men are assholes.”

Luckily, we expunged that party line before too much damage was done.

But back to Indian Creek.

Besides the beavers, there’s a family of river otters who have made their home in our creek.

There’s lots of folks who claim that the settler treatment of native people here in Canada is nothing less than genocide. I can’t disagree.

My Saturday Globe featured a lengthy anti-Putin diatribe by noted Russophobe Anne Applebaum, which invoked the concept of genocide. I’m willing to buy that Stalin’s treatment of the Ukraine was effectively genocide…

If that was genocide, what we’ve done to the native people here in Canada is genocide at least twice over.

But here’s the thing; I’m German but the Farm Manager is a Jew. Seventy-five years ago my forebears were busy cramming her forebears into ovens at Auschwitz. Today Germany is one of the top destinations for millennial Jews fleeing Israel.

That’s why we don’t have a lot of sympathy for folks who want to wallow in the wrongs inflicted on them two hundred years ago.

Life goes on.