We are now two months into the crisis. Temperatures have dropped well below -20 Celsius. If it had not been for the work of the Red Cross, people may have died. And yet, Christmas will come with families still living in tents and sheds. This is completely unacceptable.

Chief Spence wants no outside interference -- just more money and no questions asked or controls demanded. If any non-Aboriginal community were run the way Attawapiskat was run, there'd be a revolt among residents -- and the feds would long ago have cut off funding.

There will be lots of individuals and government officials or departments that we can point to and blame for the third-world living conditions on our reserves. But in the end we need to turn our finger inward and point at ourselves.

What this is about is distance. A distant bureaucracy from a distant culture imposing baffling edicts and regulations on a group of people who were highly self-sufficient hunters and trappers for thousands of years before they wandered into the quicksand of the Indian Act.