[LINK] Some Friday links

This week, I've added the comment forum t h e FORVM to the blogroll. Go, visit!

• Acts of Minor Treason's Andrew Barton blogs about the need to remember history so as to war against the dying of the light.


• Alpha Sources' Claus Vistesen is wondering what the investment patterns of Japanese housewives indicate about the structure of the Japanese economy and the prospects for world economic recovery.


• blogTO reports that fiddleheads are now available to eat in Toronto. real fiddleheads, not the ones that I mistakenly identified on Prince Edward Island as a youth.


• Antonia Zerbisias at Broadsides points out that Mother's Day was proposed by a woman, Julia Ward Howe, who sought to make the holiday into a memorial by mothers to their sons killed in the Civil War and other conflicts. And yes, she also wrote the Battle Hymn of the Republic.)


• Far Outliers' Joel quotes Niall Ferguson on the origins of the Second World War, to the effect that Hitler's foreign policy was actually a radical reorientation of Germany's traditional foreign policy.


• t h e FORVM's M Aurelius makes the point, on Margaret Thatcher's 30th anniversary, that she would come across as a "Euro wimp," a member of the Democratic Party, even, to many Republicans today. (She believed in science! She allowed abortion rights! She didn't bomb targets on the Argentine mainland!)


• Lawyers, Guns and Money's Charli Carpenter makes the point that the question of whether or not torture is effective is beside the point.


• Marginal Revolution explores the reasons why Canada's financial sector didn't have a meltdown on the American model. Among other things, people can't walk away from their mortgages.


• pauldrye at Passing Strangeness examines the horse flu epidemic of the 1870s, with its implications for the economy, politics and war, and the emergent fields of microbiology and epidemiology.


• Noel Maurer takes on the concept of a resource curse.


• Space and Culture has a picture of oil sands scrapers on the move in northern Alberta.


• Spacing Toronto's posts a video depicting the Lower Donlands, now a relatively industrial and unattractive area, post-clean up and restoration, while Thomas Wicks blogs about the Iroquoian longhouse in Toronto.


• Torontoist's Kevin Plummer commemorates the 1934 visit of Canadian communist leader Tim Buck to Toronto.


• The Volokh Conspiracy's Ilya Sumin wonders when the United Federation of Planets became socialist. Yes, I know.


• Window on Eurasia suggests that interethnic marriages in the North Caucasus are becoming increasingly rare and wonders about this statistic's import on interethnic relations.

[BRIEF NOTE] Kaliningrad's Future

Some days ago, Window on Eurasia featured a very interesting article on Kaliningrad's future as seen by the mayor of the city of Kaliningrad.

Kaliningrad is not a trophy won by Moscow as the result of the Soviet victory in World War II but rather “a Russian city” that became part of the Russian Empire two centuries earlier, according to that city’s mayor. For that reason, he says, it is his personal view that it would not be a problem to restore Koenigsberg as its name.

Indeed, Feliks Lapin said in a wide-ranging interview on Echo Moskvy radio yesterday, Russians should be proud of the fact that Koenigsberg is a Russian city, although he admitted that many people would have problems with this or with calling the entire oblast, created in 1945, Eastern Prussia (www.echo.msk.ru/programs/town/589217-echo/).

[. . .]

[O]ne dimension on which Kaliningrad is distinguished “from other [Russian] cities in a positive way: [there] city can walk about at night without fear.” And he acknowledged that this was “certainly” the result of what his Echo Moskvy interviewer described as “the influence of the neighbors.”

Those include both the Poles and the Balts, all of whose countries are members of the two key Western institutions, the European Union and NATO. But those memberships do not prevent the Russian residents of Kaliningrad from having regular and positive interaction with members of those nations.

“You know,” Lapin said, “when people talk to one another, no one typically asks whether you are a NATO member or not a NATO member.” Instead, they focus on common issues, including on shared works of art and culture which lay the foundation for “a communion of people and a closeness of people.”

Because that is the case, the mayor continued, how one calls the city he heads matters. Calling it Kaliningrad as now focuses on the events of 1945 while restoring its earlier name of Koenigsberg would serve to underscore the way in which that city has long been part of Russia and of Europe.

Russians have every reason to be “proud that Koenigsberg is a Russian city,” although he noted that many would object and even more would have problems with calling the oblast “Prussia.” It might be better to keep its current name, Kaliningrad oblast, “or call it something else,” such as “Western Russia” (www.rian.ru/society/20090509/170568924.html).

I've blogged about Kaliningrad in 2005 and 2006 (1, 2), both times because the post-1945 history of the historic region of East Prussia, of which Kaliningrad--once Königsberg--was the core, fascinates me.

In the days of the Second Reich, Danzig, Memel, and Königsberg were the easternmost enclaves of Germandom. The German states of these cities were threatened, not only geopolitically by the Russian Empire that nearly surrounded them, but demographically and ethnolinguistically by the relatively more fecund Poles, Lithuanians, and kindred peoples. The Ostflucht, the migration of ethnic Germans from the eastern reaches of the Prussian realm to richer areas in western and central Germany, began almost as soon as Germany was unified. The recreation of independent Polish and Lithuanian nation-states impinged directly upon East Prussia, which became a sovereign German island in a Balto-Slavic sea. Unsurprisingly, the failure of Nazi Germany's gambit to unite all Germans into a single nightmarish empire left East Prussia and its adjoining cities forfeit. Memel was renamed Klaipeda and restored to a post-war Lithuania now a Soviet republic; Danzig became Gdansk as part of its annexation to a Poland that now also included the Warminsko-Mazurskie Voivodship, the south of East Prussia; the core of East Prussia, around the devastated city of Königsberg, became the Russian republic's 'Калининград province (Kaliningrad in Latin script).

Pravda once suggested that Kaliningrad might become a detached territory of Russia, at once included in the Federation and the European Union. That's unlikely, since the European Union is interested in developing a relationship with a Russian Kaliningrad. The ways in which Kaliningrad could develop in the future fascinate me, not least because I'm not sure what could happen there. Can my readers come in with their own suggestions?

[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] The end of Canada's First Nations

The Toronto Star last Sunday had an interesting article on the legal assimilation of First Nations in Canada, Nicholas Keung's "'Status Indians' face threat of extinction".

Leaning against a creamy white war monument on the 1,200-hectare Alderville First Nation reserve north of Cobourg, Wayne Beaver wonders how long his ancestors' land will remain in his people's hands.

They've survived decimation by disease and discrimination, but now Canada's native people are facing what Beaver calls "a legislated extinction of status Indians."

Statistics that show the self-identified aboriginal population is growing fast – a 45 per cent jump over 10 years to 1.2 million – can be deceiving, said Beaver. Under Canadian law, those who "count" are "status Indians" – a group strictly defined by the Indian Act.

Many First Nations communities will die out within a few generations, in terms of registered Indians. That's because the "two-generation cut-off" created when the Indian Act was revised in 1985 stipulates only children born of two Indian status parents inherit status. Because of intermarriage, some communities will see their last status Indian born as soon as 2012.

"Status matters, because all our funding is tied to how many status Indians we have in our nation," said Beaver, 69, whose 1,000-member community expects to see its last status Indians born in 2032.

"What happens to the land when there is no more (status) Indians? The reserve would be returned to ... the federal government. Eventually, we will lose our land and everything that we call ours now."

Bill C-31 was passed in response to a formal censure by the United Nations, which decried the old law's practice of discriminating against Indian women: Women lost their status when they married a non-status person. Men did not.

But instead of opening the doors to the non-status partners of aboriginal women – a move that would have hugely increased Ottawa's financial obligations – the amendments ensured that men and women suffered equal losses.

The new law extended Indian status and its accompanying rights, benefits and services – such as tax immunity, health benefits and reserve housing – to just one more generation by creating two classes of "status Indians": the 6(1) Indian who has two status parents, and the 6(2), who was born in a union of a status person with a non-status person. If a 6(2) marries a non-status spouse, their children are deemed to be non-status.

In Canada, members of the First Nations--not, incidentally, including Inuit, Métis, or unregistered Indians--are all listed on the Indian Register, which defines who can and who cannot be considered a member of a First Nations by government, and thus be eligible for a wide variety of benefits. This, as a parliamentary report notes, is a serious problem.

The most important target of criticism is the “second generation cut-off rule” that results in the loss of Indian status after two successive generations of parenting by non-Indians. People registered under section 6(2) have fewer rights than those registered under section 6(1), because they cannot pass on status to their child unless the child’s other parent is also a registered Indian. One criticism comes from women who, prior to 1985, lost status because of marriages to non-Indian men. These women are able to regain status under section 6(1); however, their children are entitled to registration only under section 6(2). In contrast, the children of Indian men who married non-Indian women, whose registration before 1985 was continued under section 6(1), are able to pass on status if they marry non-Indians.(27)

Children of unmarried non-Indian women and Indian men are also treated differently according to gender. Male lineage criteria in the legislation prior to 1985 permitted the registration of all such male children born before 1985. After the passage of Bill C‑31, however, female children born to Indian men and non-Indian women between 4 September 1951 and 17 April 1985 became eligible for registration only as the children of one Indian parent.

The application of the amendments has also led to a situation in which members of the same family may be registered in different categories. One example could occur in a family that enfranchised, and in which the mother is a non-Indian. Under Bill C‑31, a child born prior to the family’s enfranchisement is eligible for registration under section 6(1), while a child born after enfranchisement is eligible only under section 6(2), since one parent is not an Indian. This affects the ability to pass on status, because the latter child will be able to pass on status to his or her children only if their other parent is a status Indian.

In the final analysis, the Indian Act may end up seeing the assimilation of First Nations into the general Canadian population. If the Indian Act is not revised, if intermarriage rates continue to grow, language shifts to English or French from native languages continue, and the ongoing urbanization of First Nations population goes on at the standard rate, in the end nearly all First Nations populations save those concentrated in native-majority territories--Inuit Nunavut and Nunavik in northern Québec, say, or Cree-populated areas in the northern prairie provinces, perhaps--might just blend in and so remove the basis for any continued autonomous regimes. Probably, perhaps; I find it telling that Nicholas Keung is the Star's immigration reporter, not native affairs reporter.