Ok....eliminating subsidation = loss of culture
As for the rest....times change....you either adapt or get left behind. Should the gov't be subsidizing wagon wheel makers because an agreement was signed 150 years ago?
If said agreement formed an integral part of our nation's heritage (and yes, the heritage of us white folk too) and is enshrined in our constitution, I would absolutely hope our government would honour those wagon wheel maker's and their agreement.
Just to be clear, I was in the military, I'm extremely patriotic and given that I'm in a relatively high tax bracket, I'm miffed when people scam on taxes and don't carry their load. And in many respect, it bugs me that there is so much waste, corruption and so many freeloaders within the First Nations system. The reason I won't criticize too hard is because the non-Free Nations system is just as bad, maybe worse. The reserves are a terrible idea, we should've never done it, but now we have and do we really have the right to kick people out of their homes for no reason other than "we don't like the culture of these places"? And that's a fair complaint, most reserves are shitholes and the customs and culture that are preserved there could be preserved elsewhere, but even a shithole can be home.
At the end of the day, deciding to cut the natives out would almost be like cutting out Dieppe. You know what? We lost. Hard. It was an absolute disgrace. We were unprepared, undertrained, underequipped and undersupported. We should stop wasting money on keeping the archives and history of Dieppe going. Except Dieppe was huge for us. Yes, we lost, but we lost as a nation and we lost in the bravest of fashions. It was also the first battle we conducted as an independent nation and paved the way for massive reforms both in our military and the militaries of the commonwealth. But it's expensive to maintain and it's not something most of us were involved in, so let's just forget about it. That's what it would be like to cut out natives. And no matter how you try to skirt the issue, ignoring the land claims and the massive mistreatment and rewriting the Indian Act to absolve us of our accountability to them is essentially cutting them out.
The natives are vastly more crucial to the history of Canada than Dieppe or Ypres or Vimy Ridge could ever be, and no one would ever dream of changing our stance on those.
Of course, this is just my opinion. I realize many will disagree. But I would find it shameful if we simply decided to take a difference stance on native affairs because we're feeling "used" for paying taxes that a handful of native living in squalor our ancestors sent them to aren't paying. The benefits aren't that great and a lot of natives have a much more modern and selfless view than many thing. You can see Api's blog if you're actually interested (though I suspect most people who want to take things away from natives have any desire to hear a native perspective) in how the educators in First Nations society actually thing.
http://apihtawikosisan.com/ I hope she doesn't mind me calling her Api, there's no way I'd ever spell her pseudonym without errors.
