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This is more or less how all officials are expected to react after visiting aboriginal reserves reeling from tragedy. It is not enough to lament the horrors on display. There must always be some ennobling sense of optimism that things will get better. The idea of hope — of human progress and redemption, even in the face of epic loss — is embedded in our optimistic Western liberal culture.

In fact, there is little hope for Attawapiskat. Hoskins probably knows this as well as anybody. But a Canadian politician simply isn’t allowed to speak plain truths — not on this subject.

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“There is no economic base there for having jobs and so on, and sometimes they have to move, like anybody else,” he said.

Chrétien isn’t the first non-aboriginal to offer the suggestion; politicians and pundits have made similar comments and arguments in recent months and over the years, after reports of “suicide epidemics” in other First Nations communities across Canada.

The social and economic problems faced by Attawapiskat residents aren’t unique to their community, and as Chrétien pointed out, they aren’t new. But for several prominent aboriginal elders and leaders, telling their people to pack up and leave their homes is too simplistic and misses the mark.

“There are non-indigenous communities in the Atlantic region and the north that are in the economic doldrums, but you don’t hear from federal government leaders, telling those people to move,” says Stewart Phillip, president of the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs and former chief of the Penticton Indian Band.