The Dominion - Turtle Island

This Land is Still Stolen

Moira Peters — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 10:28:36 +0000

The G20 and Aboriginal rights

TORONTO—"I'm here on a personal matter," Jasmine Thomas of the Carrier Nation tells a crowd of several hundred. "I live in Saik'uz, right in the heart of BC, a community of about 600. It's along the proposed Enbridge pipeline route... The proposed pipeline is threatening the traditional medicines that my great-grandmother has preserved for me."

"Not only that," she continues, "I have family at ground zero, at the tar sands. So where my father used to hunt and fish and gather, there are now open pit mines that you can see from space.

"The world's largest energy project is destroying my peoples."

As the tear gas clears over Toronto and the corporate media's frenzy over broken windows subsides, little has changed for First Nations people.

Canada still has not signed the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People; 584 Aboriginal women are still missing and murdered; and many of us still live on unceded First Nations territory—and are exploiting it. The list could go on.

On the other hand, Indigenous resistance is growing in Canada; so too are solidarity movements.

For the second time in 2010 (the first being the Vancouver Olympics), First Nations rights were at the forefront of a major convergence of social justice activists.

"No G20 on stolen Native land," chanted demonstrators throughout the week of protests leading up to G8/G20 meetings, and warrior flags were flying at all the marches—whether led by environmental justice advocates or anti-poverty organizers.

And on June 24, more than 1,000 people flooded the streets of downtown Toronto for the "Canada Can't Hide Genocide" march and rally.

The crowd did not gather on June 24 to protest the G20 so much as to reject it entirely.

"Fundamentally, we reject the G8 and G20 as decision-making bodies over our peoples," Ben Powless, a Mohawk from Six Nations, told a cheering crowd. "These are the illegitimate organizations of the colonial states that seek the further exploitation of our peoples."

Marilyn Poucachiche, an Algonquin from Barriere Lake First Nation, drove nine hours from her community to attend the rally and knows that story well.

"The government has been trying to assimilate or has been assimilating [our] people for a long time," she says.

Barriere Lake First Nation has a traditional governing system, a system that the Indian Act does not recognize. "The Canadian government have been trying to impose Section 74 in our community from the Indian Act," says Poucachiche. Section 74 would require the community to hold band elections. "It favours the Canadian policy on how we should govern and select our leaders."

"That will extinguish our Aboriginal title and treaty rights," she says. "They're trying to select their Chief according to their law. But we're saying it's our way, not your way."

Lionel Lepine, an Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, says the Canadian "way" looks a lot like cultural genocide. Lapine lives at what he calls "ground zero," or Fort Chipewyan, upstream of the Alberta tar sands.

"We are on top of the second largest deposit of oil in the world and they want every single drop at the cost of our lives," he says.

“We're seeing environmental impacts, cultural impacts, human impacts; we're seeing death,” says Lapine. “We're seeing the death of the delta, water, animals, plants, air. It's just a matter of time before everything's going to be completely wiped out."

Considering the devastation of his community and the planet, Lapine laughs at the police lining the march on all sides. "We are not the threat," he says. "The threat to this country are the people in power."

But the growing Indigenous resistance is a threat to something, says Thomas: It's a threat to the pocketbooks of big business.

"Canada, the US and Australia are avoiding signing the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous people," she says. "One of the main points in that declaration is free, prior and informed consent. That means they have to respect our ability to say yes or no to development in our territories. So it's threatening their prosperity."

The prosperity of a few is coming at a serious cost, says Thomas. "We are facing food security issues, basic human rights issues; we have the highest rates of cancer, HIV aids—all these socio-economic issues that are associated with these large projects [such as the tar sands]."

Their connection to the land and also the fact that Indigenous people are literally fighting for their lives make their resistance powerful. "There's always been Indigenous people leading the struggle in terms of defending the land against these large corporations," says Arthur Manuel from the group Defenders of the Land, a network of Indigenous communities united in defense of their lands, Indigenous rights, and Mother Earth.

"Through supporting Indigenous People you're putting in place a new system of order that's based upon a more circular basis of economy, instead of the vertical economy that the system is working on...where the land isn't looked on as Mother Earth but everything is looked at as a resource base," says Manuel. "Indigenous People do not look at it from that perspective. [We] look at the Earth as part of the decision making process. We know that what we do to the planet will sooner or later impact on us."

Whether or not Canadians choose to support Indigenous struggles, the state, as Powless points out, has certain obligations.

"Fundamentally," says Powless, "Canada must live up to its international and domestic treaty obligations and respect self-determination, the right for free, prior and informed consent and the sovereignty of our peoples."

Hillary Bain Lindsay is an editor with The Dominion and a member of the Halifax Media Co-op. This article was originally published by the Toronto Media Co-op.

Never Ask Permission

Land and Rights in Canada

dawn — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 06:47:03 +0000

Don't let Harper play hockey with human rights

COLDSTREAM, BC—We have reached a very critical time in our struggle for our land and human rights as Indigenous Peoples. The Canadian government knows this and has been doing everything in their power to trick us into extinguishing our Aboriginal Title through negotiations under their policies—including their Comprehensive Land Claims and Self-Government Policies. Canada’s courts have been the alternative to negotiations, and there we have had measured success. But the establishment Indigenous organizations, like the Assembly of First Nations, have been stuck with what the government is dictating to them.

As Indigenous Peoples we need to think about what to do now. In early August 2009, Indian Affairs Minister Chuck Strahl sent a strong message to the British Columbia Treaty Commission (BCTC) Common Table, a group of First Nations from different BCTC negotiating tables who came together to raise concerns regarding consistent obstacles they all faced in negotiating land claims agreements in BC. He said that the federal government will not change the existing Comprehensive Land Claims and Self-Government Policies.

The federal government has ignored all objections from groups who do not negotiate and groups who are inactive in their negotiations. Now they have stated clearly to those actively negotiating that they will not review their land and self-government policies.

It is important for Indigenous Peoples who have not signed treaties surrendering their Title to realize that we are all under the federal Comprehensive Land Claims and Self-Government Policies. We must realize that any land claims and self-government agreement will be determined by these policies. Right now, this will mean that the best deal Indigenous Peoples can get is the Nisga’a, Tsawwassen or Maa-nulth Final Agreements. This requires the extinguishment of Aboriginal Title, according to what the government has put on the table under the Comprehensive Land Claims and Self-Government Policies. Indigenous Peoples will have to give up their tax-exemption, take their land in fee simple, and agree to be under provincial control.

There needs to be a fundamental change in Canada’s Land Claims and Self-Government Policies. These policies need to address the direct link between Aboriginal Title and our human rights as Indigenous Peoples. Canada must abandon their existing policy of extinguishment and assimilation and adopt a plan of recognition and co-existence. This dramatic change must be forced on the federal government by direct action from Indigenous
Peoples and our supporters. We get a lot of support for taking direct action. We just need faith and courage to stand up for our rights.

The 1980 Constitution Express, an international grassroots campaign that involved sending a train with hundreds of Indigenous protesters from the west coast to Ottawa, secured section 35(1) in the Canadian Constitution 1982. We need similar collective action to get Aboriginal Title recognized.

A lot has changed since the 1980s.

The Delgamuukw case judicially recognized Aboriginal Title in 1997. The World Trade Organization and the North America Free Trade Agreement recognized that Canada’s policy not to recognize Aboriginal Title was a subsidy to Canada’s resource industries. The British Columbia government now has to report Aboriginal Title as a contingent liability in their annual balance sheet. And the United Nations adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples despite the fact that Canada voted against the Declaration.

Our real problem is that the federal and provincial governments do not want to recognize Aboriginal Title because it ousts their jurisdiction over our Aboriginal Title territory. They want to continue to mutually and exclusively make all decisions regarding our land. Everything comes from the natural wealth of our land. We need to unite, not around our weakest positions in negotiations, but around the strongest defenders of our land. In British Columbia, participating under the BCTC over the last 16 years has had dismal results: it has produced only the Tsawwassen and Maa-nulth Final Agreements, plus the rebuked Common Table Report and the rejected BC Recognition and Reconciliation Act.

Introduced in the spring of 2009, the proposed BC Recognition and Reconciliation Act was originally praised by the BC First Nation Leadership Council, a grouping of the Union of British Colombia Indian Chiefs (UBCIC), the First Nations Summit representing those involved in the BCTC process, and the British Columbia Assembly of First Nations. The proposed Act did not recognize Aboriginal Title, and for this reason was rejected by the BC All Chiefs Assembly in August 2009. All the Recognition Act recognized was that Crown Title also existed where Aboriginal Title existed. It would have been nothing more than a Bill of Sale for the BC government. The Chiefs and People saw through it and rejected provincial legislation resoundingly.

The term “recognition” was manipulated by the province just like “self-government” has been manipulated by the federal government. I remember my late father George Manuel really struggled to develop the term “self-government” when he was president of the Union of British Colombia Indian Chiefs. But after the federal government came up with their “self- government” policy, he rejected the term “self-government” because weasel word doctors at the Department of Indian Affairs totally undermined what self-government meant from my father’s perspective.

The province had me in the same boat: I have been fighting for recognition of Aboriginal Title, but I too was forced to fight against the “recognition” offered by the province under the Recognition and Reconciliation Act. This can be confusing because fighting for “recognition” sometimes requires us to fight against words that favour the status quo at our expense. Any definition or term must be decided by us and not the federal and provincial governments.

Indigenous Peoples must realize that these circumstances require us to have strong leadership. We need to assert our Aboriginal and Treaty Rights and not demand money for more programs and services. We need a fundamental change from the existing Aboriginal Land Policies and a National Treaty Policy. We need to take action before the 2010 Winter Olympics against Canada’s Human Rights Record. Our lack of opportunity and our impoverishment are directly related to the fact that Canada does not recognize our Aboriginal and Treaty Rights. Recognition of Aboriginal and Treaty Rights is a fundamental aspect of our Human Rights as Indigenous Peoples.

We cannot support the 2010 Winter Olympics unless Canada adopts and implements the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. First Nations that have agreed to allow the 2010 Winter Olympic Torch through their territory should seriously reconsider that decision in view of how Canada is playing sports with our Human Rights as Indigenous Peoples. Canada will be using any endorsements by First Nations at the international level to polish its image, and to persuade people that Canada’s Indigenous Peoples still support the government despite the fact that Canada voted against the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

We need to be strong. The 2010 Winter Olympics and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is a direct link that connects Canada’s human rights record at the international level. Canada will not change its mind unless we insist, through band council resolutions, not to support the Torch Relay, and to engage in direct action. We must stand up for change. We cannot let Prime Minister Harper play political hockey with our human rights.

Arthur Manuel is the spokesperson of the Indigenous Network on Economies and Trade.

George Manuel.Parliament

Turtle Island Re-Emergent

Maya Rolbin-Ghanie — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 05:08:33 +0000

KUTENAI TERRITORY, TURTLE ISLAND—The genocide of Indigenous Peoples inside the territories claimed by Canada doesn’t end until Canada de-colonizes. As Jean-Paul Sartre recognized when he focused the intellectual power of european philosophy onto the subject of european colonization, colonialism equals genocide. As long as the fair folk of the Canadian State have a colonial relationship with the territorial Indigenous Peoples, then the genocide continues. Canadians left, right and center do not actively advocate genocide. However, there exists an unconscious denial of what Canadians conveniently do not have to witness at close range, thanks to several centuries of apartheid social organization.

Over the past several months, the media collective that calls itself The Dominion has generously offered me a space in the margins to talk to the few of you who happen by. If you’ve been following me, we’ve crossed the invisible apartheid border, looked at the forms of political economy that require apartheid, and had a brief glance at an indigenous socialism from Turtle Island’s past. The ideas I’ve been sharing with you aren’t my ideas. In cultures with an oral tradition, the great libraries of knowledge are held within the ranks of the living, and I’m grateful to those librarians who have gathered, and then passed on to me, some of the enormous storehouse of indigenous knowledge. Now I, in turn, am passing fragments to you.

The current phase of the genocide of Indigenous Peoples will not end by fiddling with the details and single instances of the mechanics of the genocide, for instance addictions, or suicide, or lateral violence. These are symptoms, not causes. For example, I don’t believe that addictions are a problem of the individual, but are individuals' reactions to the cause of the genocide. Colonialism. The entire relationship between our euro-ancestry sisters and brothers, and the remnants of our own societies, indigenous to Turtle Island, is colonial. The structure of modernity, with a representative democracy funded by and responsible to a capitalist economy, based on an extractive, exploitative, minimalist relationship with the natural environment, is colonial. Colonialism kills Indigenous Peoples.

An indigenous method of problem solving involves moving towards the desired solution, rather than away from the perceived problem. Many indigenous knowledge bases propose that human intention has actuating power in the physical world; we affect whatever we place our intentions on, through our conscious attention. If we place our attention on our problems, because we want to repair those problem areas, we unintentionally increase the level of energy flowing to the problem areas. Over uncounted millennia, this observed pattern has resulted in an indigenous social program of focusing on the desired outcome, a group behavior that some european somewhere called spiritual. In Dios, literally “In God.” However, I believe that euro-centric notions of spirituality are as far off base as euro-centric notions of what addictions are, for the same reasons.

Practicing my indigenous knowledge, I conjure an intention: humans as indigenous to the actual physical place where we each are, right now. I feel this "indigenaiety" as a relationship, signaled by the pull of gravity to my great Mother, the earth. You, reading these words, can feel this pull, too. Don’t let the illusion of cyberspace or printspace throw you off balance; call to your floating mind with your heart and flow into the physical pull. In Dios. Without the human-made confusion about God and Man.

The French called us the "Cris," the cryers, from the ceremonial action of making a specific sound set with voice, a syncopated counter-rhythm heard during many lodge-type ceremonies. In our own language we are known as the four-part beings, referencing the mental, emotional, physical and spiritual aspects of being human.

These four aspects are in motion. When they are balanced, you get a smooth ride. Riding the spinning wheel of these four aspects—call it a four directions medicine wheel—I conjure an intention: indigenizing Canada. Having this torture session stop would be nice. Ending the genocide would be great. But that’s not where to put my good energy, my builder’s energy, my creative energy. So I call with a Cree cry into the space between your heartbeats, the drum beat of Mother Earth, syncopated: let’s build social power, you and I.

Traveling the pathway from apartheid modernity to an indigenous socialism for the 21^st century calls for walkers, each walking in our own way, but together, in the same direction. The footprints in the grass are already outlining a pathway, from the Mayan Zapatistas to the Bolivian MAS to the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela. Even from here I can faintly see the emerging outlines of a communal council system that someday will organically overgrow colonial forms of political economy.

In my ancient culture, the extended family was the core of the regional governance system, with female Elders gently guiding the whole process. A cross-linked communal council system existed inside the extended family structure. One organic possibility for Canada’s future is the re-emergence of extended, family-based, communal councils, where, for instance, Canadian youth, if faced with dysfunctional families of origin, can simply decide to create new extended families of choice.

In the ancient culture, fresh new humans were intentionally created, by adults three generations deep in childcare facility, on an as-needed basis. In other words, the absolute total size of the human population in any one bio-region was controlled by the members of the group acting in concert. Birth control was understood and practiced, sexuality was recognized as the powerful force that it rightfully is, and social systems were evolved to provide safe and complete outlets for all of that extra non-procreative sexual energy for which we humans are renowned.

By using this system, each new child entered an extended family circle where she/he was the center of attention for an adoring circle of adults who defined themselves in relation to her/him. Great-grandmother, grandmother, mother, aunt, cousin, sister were the circle they toddled into. Every effort was made by all of these adults to prevent injury or abuse.

The Cree education system had two childhood phases before one entered adulthood at puberty. Phase one was the above-described building of a central, indestructible core of individual personhood. When children reached a certain age, they were gently moved into stage two, consciously learning how to seek humbleness. By humbleness I mean seeking balance across both human and non-human systems, so that there is no Above or Below.

Cree children had, as companions in search of humbleness, all of their age-peers, and, as role models, all of the adults around them. Within this educational system, fresh new humans matured into adult humans who were fearlessly themselves and knew how to make decisions for individual action based on the best outcome for the whole group.

The entire practice was ritualized into a belief system that relied on the metaphor of ceremony. Each individual carried inside of themselves their own unique understanding of ceremony, while the actual practice of gathering together to perform ceremony created the conditions for the harmonization of individual, society, and Mother Earth. In Dios.

Turtle Island is re-emerging, after a long eclipse under the shadow of the Americas. I see a wonderful opportunity here for Canadian social activists to place intentions on creating an indigenized pluri-national, multi-ethnic space to fit into Turtle Island re-emergent. I ask each reader to consider what this would mean in their personal life.

Thank you for gifting me with this brief space of your attention.

Together, towards Turtle Island.

Gifted with a white privilege suit on his Birth Day, Steinhauer has been slipping back and forth across the invisible boundary between Turtle Island and Canada, since 1952, in his lovely birthday suit. And this is what he saw.

StarWoman

Through Canada’s Rez Zone Looking Glass

Moira Peters — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 06:37:03 +0000

Israeli Apartheid Week

KUTENAI TERRITORY, TURTLE ISLAND–Divining the past can be difficult, especially when your crystal ball is a bit smudged; it’s not all shooting fish in a barrel. In this fifth consecutive year of an international effort to call attention to the nature of the relationship between the Israeli state and Arab Palestinians living within and without that or any state, a question has been stirring at the margins of permissible thought.

What would a Canadian Apartheid Week look like? American Apartheid Week? Mexican Apartheid Week? An Apartheid Week for every nation state in the so-called Americas? Except for Bolivia, of course. After the last Bolivian national election, the new President said that Bolivia would no longer be needing a Department of Indian Affairs because the Indians were now the government.

As an Indigenous person, I ask myself if there is some level of hypocrisy going on in Canada if progressives demonstrate against Israeli state actions while continuing to enjoy the benefits of living in an entire hemisphere of apartheid, at home on native lands. Why not do both at once? And while we’re at it, why not join in with an international movement to guarantee the right to life for Jewish folk no matter where they are located?

Before the Empire, under Britain’s fading leadership at that time, declared an Israeli state in 1948, Jewish Palestinians and Arab Palestinians were living comfortably side by side. That peaceful co-existence can be traced back a long ways. As a member of Turtle Island’s Indigenous Peoples, the year 1492 stands out for me, as an important date in history. It’s an important date in Jewish and Muslim history, too: the year that Sephardic Jews and Muslim Moors were expelled from Spain. Where did the majority of Sephardic Jews flee to? The Arab Muslim Ottoman Empire, where Sephardic Jews were valued and appreciated for their skills, particularly in areas of scholarship. It was a reciprocal relationship, with Jews also introducing into Western Christian societies important Arabic knowledge in maths and other sciences.

Sad to say, but Empire has other needs. Now under US leadership, the Empire needs the Israeli state to continue relentlessly on the warpath it started down in 1948, a war of extermination against Arab Palestinians located within the region coveted by Eretz Israel. Eretz Israel is the land promised by the Hebrew Bible’s God to Abraham and his descendants through Issac and Abraham’s grandson, Jacob. This arrangement suits the Empire’s needs quite nicely, namely as a highly developed forward base for Empire’s ambitions in the Middle East. I’ll describe apartheid’s economic functions in more detail shortly, but for now suffice to say that, as long as the Israeli state follows the same exact methods practiced in Canada, the United States of America, Mexico, etc., etc., on down to and past (but now having to avoid Bolivia) then it will all work out... for the Empire.

This calculation leaves out the question of blowback against Jews, no matter were they are located. A thousand years of pogroms resulting from elites setting up Jews to be the fall guys should be enough of a history lesson, but consider the fate of Israeli Jews when Empire loses it’s regional grip. Add in Empire’s weakening of secularism within Arab states and Empire’s strengthening of fundamentalist beliefs, whether Christian, Islamic, Hindi, or Judaic, all united by the common belief that their own God has asked them to kill members of all of the others, and it looks like a sure recipe for disaster. Why would an intelligent Israeli Jew want to travel even one step further down that path?

Is anyone else confused about why the three major world religions that claim to descend from Abraham, namely, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, all seem so intent on remaining bitter enemies, in action repudiating their own philosophies of brotherly love?

The question at hand, however, is a discussion about an international Israeli Apartheid Week. In all fairness to Israel, Zionist war mongers would have to kill hundreds of millions of Arabs, and occupy 16,430,000 square miles of Arab territory, in order to achieve parity with the apartheid system calmly proceeding, apparently unnoticed, on Turtle Island, in Canada, the US, Mexico, and so on.

An area that size would have to include all of the Middle East, plus considerable amounts of South and East Asia. A territorial expansion of that magnitude is certainly in Empire’s "New American Century" playbook, but clearly not in the cards for Israel. For an accurate comparison between Israeli Apartheid and Americas Apartheid, one must look at the historical record to make stage by stage comparisons.

Avigdor Lieberman’s call for the administration of a loyalty oath to Arab Israelis needs to be compared to the nation state of Canada’s Province of British Columbia, where new legislation is currently under consideration to legally recognize Indigenous Peoples within the boundaries of the province as human beings. Lieberman is ahead of the Province of British Columbia in that he already recognizes Arab Israelis as human beings, viciously prejudiced as his judgement may otherwise be. In BC, I’ll have to wait with bated breath, as the business community battles the Recognition and Reconciliation Act proposals, to discover whether I will become a legal person in the eyes of the law. Since Governor James Douglas' 1858 legal declaration that the lands in the new Crown Colony of British Columbia were unoccupied, Indigenous Peoples within that territory have been non-persons, especially in relation to any type of property rights, Indigenous or Canadian, a declaration still in effect at the time of this writing.

Taken in total, I’d like to suggest that Palestinian Arabs, Jews of the world no matter where located, and Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island have common cause: surviving genocidal onslaughts. Cynical power players within Arab, Jewish, and Indigenous populations can be seen siding with Empire, no doubt prompted by a misguided sense of Darwinian notions about survival of the fittest. This individualist perspective leaves out long-term analysis, especially an analysis of long-term non-human global reactions. For instance: general environmental destruction, to name just one.

We humans have the mental, physical, emotional and spiritual capacity to turn course, change direction. The recent presidential election in the United States was a collective expression of exactly that desire, immediately subordinated to the needs of Empire. As a not-yet-recognized-as-human denizen of Canada’s Rez Zone, BC division, I’d like to humbly suggest that the solution to the apartheid problem could be more quickly advanced by a solidarity movement involving Indigenous folk, Jewish folk, and Arab Palestinian folk, against Empire in general, and apartheid states in particular.

Canada’s Indian Act and Indian Policy is the acceptable role model for Israel’s apartheid policy, and for South Africa’s apartheid policy of yesteryear. Canada’s Gaza Strip and West Bank were happening in the 1800s: mass slaughters in various colonial frontier encounters, like the Chilcoot War; forced starvation, for instance the sealing off of western prairie reserves as collective punishment after the North-West Rebellion, where up to 50 per cent of reserve populations perished; and the systematic destruction of Indigenous economic, political and social structures that was and still is Canada’s Indian Act.

When I was a child there was a large “NO TRESPASSING” sign, in English, a hundred yards from my house at the edge of Saddle Lake Indian Reserve # 125, obviously meant for Canadians to obey. Centuries of forced separation still play out in the daily lives of Cree folk and Canadian settler descendants; in small towns like St Paul, Alberta, the apartheid is so palpable you can cut it with a knife, and folks on both sides of the now-invisible barriers regularly do.

However, in spite of five hundred years of living this experience, I’d like to suggest that our common cause is much more significant than our presumed differences. This is true for any of the so-called areas of conflict in the post-modern world, where folks tend to focus on gender/sexual orientation, or race, or class, or ecology or authority. From an Indigenous perspective these are all parts of the elephant being described by blind persons as they each touch the portion closest to them. Apartheid systems are just one facet of the global control system I’ve been calling Empire.

As promised earlier, I’ll return to a brief examination of the economic function of apartheid. Apartheid serves as a necessary firewall between human beings belonging by birth to differentiated groups. Differentiated groups are brought into close physical proximity by colonial expansion, which I’ll call imperialism. Imperialism solves some of the inherent contradictions in capitalism, by expanding capital supply through primitive accumulation (expropriation of lands and resources), expansion of non-home markets, safety valve outlets for burgeoning unwanted home population, sources of lower cost labour power, and, in more advanced cases, through the creative destruction of productive property, thereby allowing a new cycle of production to begin by generally reducing previous over-productive capacities.

One problem encountered in the settlement stage of colonial expansion is that humans have the tendency to ignore the artificially imposed differentiations, and spontaneously re-group. Some sort of apartheid policy is necessary to prevent the potentially “destructive” co-mingling of plain human beings. Theories of race were invented to specifically re-enforce this artificial separation.

In Canada, apartheid is still an important social dam holding back a generalized reaction against the ongoing systematic de-humanization that I and all Indigenous Peoples inside of Canada are daily subjected to. The BC Chamber of Commerce is very concerned about the proposed new Recognition and Reconciliation Act because it threatens this apartheid relationship which allows smooth functioning of traditional colonial accumulation through dispossession. Timber. Minerals. Real Estate. Water.

At a moment in human history when the obvious contradictions of capitalism, imperialism, sexism, and ecological destruction are glaringly in-the-face of the human public, amplified by the as yet unrestricted access to information provided by communications technology, a unified pro-life choice movement may be timely.

Without the needs of Empire to sustain, there would be no need for the accumulation by dispossession facilitated by apartheid systems. Scarcity, like race, is an artificially constructed ideology that serves the purpose of Empire. Overcoming the ideology of scarcity is the next major collective undertaking facing humanity. If Jewish Peoples, Arabic Peoples, and Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island were to unite in an anti-scarcity campaign, properly called a pro-plenty for all campaign if we remember to share, then we would see real, sudden, and dramatic change; the kind of change folks in the US thought they were voting for, the possibility of such a change that folks around the world celebrated ecstatically, on the evening of November 4th, 2008.

I realize that it’s a bit more complicated than that, and I’ll return to economic issues later, but for now I’ve had my say about apartheid. What do you think?

Steinhauer I

Steinhauer III

The Longest Walk 2 in Baltimore, Quechan Sacred Sites, and Other Wanderings

Sandra — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 11:08:32 +0000

Baltimore.ChildrensStaffCircle.JPG

Greetings from a teepee in Delaplane, Virginia...

The Longest Walk 2 (www.longestwalk.org) for Mother Earth, health, sacred sites & indigenous rights is rapidly approaching Washington, DC, after thousands of miles of walking and running from Alcatraz on the west coast. Thirty years ago, in 1978, the American Indian Movement's original Longest Walk walked into DC to present their manifesto: Affirmation of Sovereignty of the Indigenous People of the Western Hemisphere.

Four days from now, the 2008 Longest Walk 2's Manifesto for Change "All Life is Sacred" will be presented to the United States government when both the southern and northern routes of the Walk converge in DC, after the July 8-10 Cultural Survival Summit in Greenbelt, MD.

The day before yesterday, a small group of us from the southern route traveled to Baltimore to meet up with the northern route for a press conference in the middle of a plaza in the city's Inner Harbour district. A photo-essay about the event will be online on my other blog - thistidehasnoheartbeat.wordpress.com - very soon, likely before you read this one. The photograph above was taken at the press conference of the young girl who carries the lead staff of the northern route: the children's staff, for the future generations.

I was invited to go along to Baltimore to take a break from the 18-hour workdays. I haven't been able to walk for over a week now because of a foot injury (the doc says achilles tendonitis, but then again he also tried to inject me with something I had just told him I was allergic to), so I've been working with the Manifesto writing & editing team. Luckily there's usually a steady stream of coffee.

Sandra's new blog, Tyendinaga & the Longest Walk 2

Sandra — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 15:47:26 +0000

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Hello fellow Dominion readers!

I thought I'd get this blog started while standing in an office store with free wireless somewhere in North Carolina while the American Indian Movement driver of the trash pick-up crew van sleeps a while in the parking lot...

Thanks to the Dominion for editing & posting 'Gravel and Gold', a narrative article about a prison visit with Tyendinaga Mohawk spokesperson Shawn Brant, Barrick Gold's Pascua Lama project in Diaguita territory ('Chile'), and related issues.

The longer (as in 16-page long) version (PRISON NOTES: They Came First For the Mohawk, and I Didn't Speak Up Because I Wasn't Mohawk...) is available on my other blog.

My most recent article, THE ROAD BEGINS AT THE BOTTOM OF YOUR FEET: The Longest Walk 2 Speaks Out for Mother Earth) is about the Longest Walk 2, the Dooda Desert Rock resistance and uranium mining in the Navajo Nation, the Y-12 National Security Complex & nuclear plant, and the bombing and mining of Western Shoshone territory.

Québec Native Women's Association responds to Harper's apology for residential schools

Anna Carastathis — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 18:34:47 +0000

Ellen Gabriel.jpg

The Québec Native Women's Association has called upon the Canadian government to acknowledge that residential schools were an act of genocide.

Statement by Quebec Native Women's Association/Femmes Autochtones du Québec

Re : Government of Canada's Residential School Apology
June 11, 2008, Kahnawake

Quebec Native Women recognizes the Prime Minister's official apology concerning the genocidal experience of Aboriginal people in the history of the Residential School system. While the apology to Aboriginal peoples is long overdue it is contradicted by the oppressive policies of the Indian
Act.

The heinous crimes committed against Aboriginal children who were victims and survivors of the Residential School experience must be dealt with beyond mere apologies and monetary compensation.