While most revelers enjoyed the 150th anniversary of Confederation celebrations, the role of aboriginal Canadians included an aura of conflict.

Despite claims by some that First Nations people had nothing to celebrate, they were an integral part of the program.

Simultaneously, a predictably outraged group of activists erected a teepee on Parliament hill in a mock “reoccupation” to protest the historical treatment of indigenous people in this country.

It was a contradictory tantrum that undermines the struggles of First Nations people within Canada.

Our way forward as a nation, which includes our indigenous people, is to move forward, not back.

Canadians all come from elsewhere, and history is dark in all of those places.

History has also made us roommates in the here and now.

North American’s aboriginal population descended from indigenous, nomadic tribes in China and northern Asia.

Many black North Americans are descendants of Africans brought over as slaves.

Many Chinese from Chinese workers brought to build railways here.

History is replete with outrages and atrocities committed by this country against various immigrant groups — indigenous peoples, blacks, the Irish, Jews, the French and Acadians, the Chinese.

We share this shame with virtually all other nations on earth.

Despite this, we became a confederation.

That was, in 1867, and it remains today our best future — as a nation.

Canadians know this, even if their prime minister panders and plays identity politics, declaring “indigenous” will replace “aboriginal” while conditions on many reserves across the country remain deplorable.

Protest and appeasement thwart real change, and encourage backlash.

When Pierre Trudeau’s efforts to integrate and resolve the segregation of indigenous Canadians failed because of a country-wide Aboriginal Rights Movement that came to be known as the “The Red Power Movement,” he uttered in a moment of anger and frustration, “We’ll keep them in the ghetto as long as they want.”

It was prescient. Many have been impoverished ever since.

The ever idealistic Bob Rae wrote recently that, “It’s time to recognize Indigenous peoples as our founders” in the Toronto Star, a statement that ignores history.

Britain and France colonized North America, subjugating the “New World” as they had elsewhere around the world. Indigenous tribes here before the Europeans did much the same over millennia, fighting and warring with one another over land and territory.

That is why it is most disheartening to hear the next generation parroting Bill Erasmus, the Grand Chief of the Dene Nation, when he talks about “cultural context” and a mystical spiritual attachment to nature.

The Britons living in England had a mystical attachment to nature before Rome conquered and colonized that new land.

The only cultural context that matters today is our shared relationship and aspirations.

Otherwise, we are not a nation.

Canadians must rise to challenge this divisive and self-serving nationalism of individual groups, or we will be in serious trouble.

The indigenous focus on political status and revanchism is a thoughtless betrayal of future generations.

It simply compounds the wrongs of the past with new wrongs.

We should all refocus on helping indigenous people deal with the very real problems they face today in areas such as education and health care, spousal and sexual assault, child neglect, suicides, addictions and other urgent problems.

The current path is especially debilitating for the succeeding generations of indigenous youth who need to adopt or “appropriate” the “white man’s” ways.

Aboriginal politicians should reflect on their hubristic raison d’etre, since results have been less than stellar after five decades.