The Dominion - Sandra Cuffe

Stopping Nuclear Waste in its Tracks

Sandra — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 10:10:27 +0000

Communities, Indigenous organizations pass resolutions against transportation and storage of nuclear waste in Saskatchewan

BEAUVAL, SK—Three places in northern Saskatchewan may be on the map in Canada's search for a high-level radioactive waste dump site, but the spent nuclear fuel bundles may be stopped in their tracks. Communities and Indigenous organizations along potential transport routes and beyond have been passing resolutions against nuclear waste.

The Northern Village of Pinehouse, English River First Nation and the town of Creighton are all currently in the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) site selection process to find a "willing host community" for a deep geological repository to house the waste piling up at nuclear reactors in Quebec, New Brunswick and especially Ontario.

Canoe Lake First Nation, the town of La Loche, trappers from the Fur Block near Beauval, the Métis Nation of Saskatchewan, the Saskatchewan Aboriginal Women's Circle Corporation (SAWCC) and the Native Women's Association of Canada (NWAC) have all formally opposed the transportation and storage of nuclear waste in Saskatchewan. Others criticize NWMO for refusing to deal with site selection process on a regional basis, even though a decision would affect much more than a single community.

Emil Bell has been educating Band and town councilors about the Nuclear Waste Management Organization process and the dangers of nuclear waste. A Cree grassroots activist, he lives in Fire Lake, outside of the Canoe Lake First Nation reserve.

"Canoe Lake is against this whole thing," Bell told the Media Co-op. Located in northwestern Saskatchewan, east of the Cold Lake Air Weapons Range and tar sands exploitation, the First Nation passed a Band Council Resolution against the transportation and storage of nuclear waste.

"I was the one that was going around, getting all the signatures of the councilors," said Bell. "They are dead set against the nuclear dump. It goes against our Treaty rights, our inherent rights. If we get a major disaster wherever they put the nuclear dump, our waterways are, you know, shot. Animal life, the plant life, are going to be drastically affected."

Bell has been traveling up and down the province, meeting with other First Nations, municipal authorities and groups and urging them to take an official stance against the transportation and storage of nuclear waste. "There's a few of us that are going around, doing a lot of work, and we do it out of our own pocket," he said.

But northern activists are not the only ones speaking about nuclear waste in the region. "The nuclear industry people, NWMO, have a lot of money. They're also going around, trying to convince people to, you know, accept the nuclear dump [with] the promise of a lot of money, the promise of jobs...they keep telling people 'oh yeah, it's safe, it's safe,'" Bell told the Media Co-op.

The predominantly Métis community of Île-à-la-Crosse has yet to take an official position on nuclear waste transportation and storage and will likely revisit the issue after the October 24 municipal elections. Île-à-la-Crosse Mayor Duane Favel says he and others requested that NWMO communicate and deal with municipalities in northwestern Saskatchewan collectively because a nuclear waste repository in the area would impact the entire region.

"Our proposal was, as Northwest municipalities, that we try and get NWMO to deal with us as a region, as the Northwest municipalities. We drafted up a letter [and] we tried to get the signature of every mayor—I believe there's 17 municipalities on the northwest side—[so] that NWMO would have to deal with us collectively, if they were, you know, to talk about nuclear waste within their region," Favel told the Media Co-op in an interview in the Île-à-la-Crosse village office.

"However, that got kind of sidetracked," he said. "They started meeting with municipalities individually and convinced, you know, one or two municipalities to agree to—for NWMO to go into their communities and start this process that they talk about."

Many mayors did sign the letter and a copy was given to the Northwest municipalities and to NWMO. But NWMO declined to pursue the regional approach requested by the municipalities.

"They didn't want to deal with that as a collective organization. They wanted to deal with specific municipalities. And I believe some of the reasoning was, you know, the areas that they were looking for, that would be good for this deposit of nuclear waste, wasn't throughout this region," said Favel. "However, that was not our argument. Our argument was if nuclear waste was to be stored in the northwest side of Saskatchewan, that they should be dealing with us collectively and we should vote as a region whether or not we want nuclear waste stored within this area."

The communication between Île-à-la-Crosse and NWMO is currently non-existent, Favel told the Media Co-op.

"I'm still kind of baffled in terms of why they didn't use that approach and actually consult with everybody within the region and try to, I guess at least in the beginning, have a good working relationship in terms of addressing the issue with the people of Northwest Saskatchewan," he said. "I thought it was a completely disrespectful approach."

While Île-à-la-Crosse and other municipalities consider whether to take an official position on the issue, some locals of the Métis Nation of Saskatchewan have been actively organizing opposition to the transportation and storage of nuclear waste. Bryan Lee and other members of the Fish Lake Métis local began looking into the nuclear waste storage issue a few years ago, when they heard locations in northern Saskatchewan were under consideration.

"Once we heard this, then we started looking into the whole issue ourselves because we had heard some things in [the] press, that the NWMO was looking for a 'willing host community' in northern Saskatchewan," Lee told the Media Co-op. "We brought forward a motion within our local to take a position...to oppose the storage and transportation of high-level nuclear waste."

After passing at the Fish Lake Métis local, the resolution was taken to Western Region 2, where it passed as well. A motion for the resolution to be adopted at the provincial level by the Métis Nation of Saskatchewan did not succeed in 2010, but Lee presented it again in 2011.

"I reformatted the resolution and I brought it forward to the annual general assembly November 5, 2011. And in the presentation, we were successful in getting a two thirds majority approval at the assembly, for the Métis Nation of Saskatchewan to take the official position to oppose the storage and transportation of high-level nuclear waste anywhere in Saskatchewan," said Lee.

The Saskatchewan Aboriginal Women's Circle Corporation of Saskatchewan also passed a resolution last year, opposing the transportation and storage of nuclear waste in Saskatchewan. The resolution was then adopted by the Native Women's Association of Canada at its annual general assembly held in Saskatoon in August 2012.

The town of La Loche and the trappers' organization from a Fur Block in the Beauval area have also passed similar resolutions. More communities and organizations are currently considering taking an official stance against nuclear waste in the province.

NWMO is moving forward in its search and Pinehouse, English River First Nation and Creighton are still under consideration. But with all the resolutions against nuclear waste transportation, whether the high-level radioactive waste would ever make it to a storage site in northern Saskatchewan without roadblocks along the way is beginning to look increasingly unlikely.

Sandra Cuffe is a freelance journalist and member of the Vancouver Media Co-op. She recently returned to the west coast after eight weeks in Saskatchewan. This article was originally published on the Media Co-op.

Saskatchewan Nuclear Dump

Intimidation, Irregularities Cloud Pinehouse Election

Tim McSorley — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 13:24:54 +0000

Northern Saskatchewan residents report infractions, climate of fear in municipal election process

PINEHOUSE, SK—Something is rotten in the State of Denmark, according to people in the northern village of Pinehouse, Saskatchewan. Residents contacted provincial officials to report irregularities and acts of intimidation at last week's advance poll in an effort to ensure a free and fair municipal election today.

Longtime Pinehouse resident John Smerek sent a letter to provincial government officials reporting irregularities in the advance poll held September 12. In the letter sent Monday via email to Minister of Government Relations Jim Reiter and carbon copied to several other provincial authorities, Smerek highlighted process infractions such as the failure to abide by new voter ID requirements and acts of intimidation.

"I would like to see the people here have a free and democratic opportunity to vote without the fear or intimidation or false promises offered to them by the individuals that are sent out or hired by our leaders to intimidate the democratic process," Smerek told the Media Co-op in an interview in Pinehouse.

One of the individuals in question is Vince Natomagan, who acts as a community liaison to the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO). He has an office in the village office building and works closely with the Pinehouse council.

Along with two other locations in northern Saskatchewan and more than a dozen in Ontario, Pinehouse is currently part of NWMO's search for a "willing host community" for Canada's high-level radioactive waste. In 2010, Pinehouse Mayor Mike Natomagan sent NWMO an Expression of Interest, initiating the community's inclusion in the site selection process for a deep geological repository for the used nuclear fuel bundles currently stored onsite at nuclear reactors in Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick.

Five hundred kilometres north of Saskatoon, the northern village of Pinehouse is a predominantly Cree-speaking Metis community of approximately 1,000 people near the boundary between the Canadian Shield and Boreal Plain regions. It used to be the end of the road. Trucks now travel another 220 kilometres past the turnoff to the community up to the Key Lake uranium mill. Operated by Saskatoon-based uranium mining giant Cameco, the mill processes ore from the McArthur River uranium mine 80 kilometres further north. Open pit uranium mining at Key Lake itself ended in 2002.

Today, tensions in Pinehouse run high with the municipal election taking place. Some residents are concerned that despite secret ballots, there may be negative consequences if they cast a ballot and the councillors who end up elected believe they voted for other candidates—whether they have or not, said Smerek.

"Our current leaders have hired people that work for them that go around making offers and directions that sound like a threat—that they won't be able to service the people if they don't vote for the current leaders. And they'll try to lead them directly to the polls," he said.

In one case identified in Smerek's letter, voters were threatened on their way to cast a ballot in the advance poll last week. According to an account of an incident by another resident who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisal, residents walking to the polling station were told by an individual affiliated with the current council not to expect anything at all from the village in the future, after they alluded to their plan to vote for candidates not currently on council.

The Executive Director of Communications for the Ministry of Government Relations, Jeff Welke, responded via email to the Media Co-op's request for comment on the allegations of intimidation contained in Smerek's letter.

"References to attempts to bribe voters and/or otherwise influence for whom voters would cast their ballot are very serious allegations, and pertain to legal matters that are outside the Ministry's authority, as well as outside the authority of election officials, to deal with," Welke wrote to the Media Co-op. "Any person or persons who have experienced an attempted bribery, or who have witnessed such an attempt should consider contacting the nearest detachment of the RCMP as soon as possible. Alternatively, they could also proceed under the provisions of The Controverted Municipal Elections Act by contacting a judge and swearing out a complaint."

Smerek's letter also identifies an infraction in the advance poll process itself. At least some residents were not asked to produce identification, despite reforms to the Local Government Elections Act passed in 2011, requiring all voters provide identification. In an affidavit sworn before a Commissioner of Oaths, a resident who has requested that their name be withheld due to fear of reprisal stated that at no time was he required to produce identification when he voted at the advance poll.

"I pulled out my wallet and asked, 'Don’t you need two pieces of ID' to which [polling clerk] Nancy Misponas replied, 'No, don’t worry about it,'" states the affidavit, according to a copy of the text obtained by the Media Co-op. "None of the people lined up in front of me while I was there were asked to produce their identification.”

In his response to the Media Co-op, Welke explained that "province's role in the municipal election process is to provide for and maintain the legislative framework under which the elections are run and to provide training, resources and advice to local election officials." Conducting elections in keeping with legislation is a municipal responsibility with no direct provincial oversight. However, he stated that local officials have been made well aware of elections procedures, including the new voter ID regulations.

"Prior to any round of municipal elections the Ministry holds workshops around the province for election officials...Pinehouse attended the May 9 session in Prince Albert. As well, the Ministry took extra measures to try and ensure that local election officials were aware of the new requirements including articles in 'Municipalities Today', guides and resources on the Ministry's website and the production of promotional materials that could be downloaded and used at the local level to help citizens become familiar with the voter ID requirement," wrote Welke.

"Ministry officials have also been in direct contact with local election officials in Pinehouse to reinforce the need to abide by all election procedural rules, including the new voter ID requirements," he wrote.

This year's municipal election is not the first time a resident has voiced concern about local governance and requested the intervention of the provincial government. In 2011, Fred Pederson wrote to Municipal Affairs officials requesting an investigation into the actions of mayor and council. He highlighted the alleged misuse of village funds, the appropriation of a youth centre, housing issues and intimidation.

"People feel threatened about losing their jobs because council sit on every board in town. So it influences people from feeling free to speak out or even votes during an election," wrote Pederson in his undated letter. "[The village] office is being used for their own benefit [and] every rule has been broken...all of them have [quit] their jobs to live off of the Village."

Pederson received a response from Colleen Digness, Manager of the Northern Municipal Administration, based in La Ronge. Her letter, dated November 30, 2011, outlines and includes the relevant sections of The Northern Municipalities Act, 2010, including section 128: "No member of council is eligible to be appointed as an employee of the municipality or of any committee or controlled corporation of the municipality in which he or she serves as a member of council."

After last week's advance poll, Pederson again contacted Municipal Affairs officials—this time by telephone—to report irregularities and request intervention. The response from the central office in Regina indicated that the issue was a matter for the La Ronge office. When Pederson contacted the Northern Municipal Administration in La Ronge, he was informed that his concerns should be raised with the local village council implementing the elections process.

Pederson is running as a candidate in today's election, on a platform based on honesty. He has been an outspoken critic of the potential selection of northern Saskatchewan for a nuclear waste storage site and of the process the council and the industry-led Nuclear Waste Management Organization have been pursuing during the site selection phase. They meet behind closed doors and the community is not informed of the meeting dates, Pederson told the Media Co-op in an interview last month.

Pinehouse is not the only place in NWMO's site selection process where a council has come under fire for undisclosed meetings with NWMO. Shannon Quesnel reported in the Elliot Lake Standard that a meeting between NWMO and the city council of Elliot Lake was the subject of a complaint to and ruling by Ontario's ombudsman. In her September 5, 2012 article, Quesnel cites Elliot Lake City Clerk Lesley Sprague: "The mayor and five members of this city’s council attended [the NWMO meeting]. The ombudsman stated despite the fact the meeting was arranged and hosted by a third party, this does not relieve the municipality from giving notice of the meeting. And despite the fact the meeting was not closed to the public it is still considered to be a closed meeting because of the lack of public notice."

Back in Pinehouse, Smerek is an outspoken opponent of Pinehouse and northern Saskatchewan being considered for the site of a nuclear waste repository. "Say No To Nuclear Waste" reads a sign on the front of his house, a stone's throw from the shore of Pinehouse Lake.

For now, though, Pinehouse residents are focused on today's election. Smerek hopes his letter will result in the presence of an outside election monitor to ensure due process—including the chain of custody of the ballots—is respected. He has also requested the presence of an RCMP officer to ensure no intimidation or threats take place at the polling station.

"I'm trying to get free and fair voting opportunities for our community," said Smerek.

Sandra Cuffe is a freelance journalist and a member of the Vancouver Media Co-op. She is currently in northern Saskatchewan. This article was originally posted on the Media Co-op.

Pinehouse Map

Marketing Consent

taramichelle — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 13:47:48 +0000

A journey into the public relations underside of Canada's mining sector

VANCOUVER—It’s no secret that Canadian mining companies are fanned out around the world. Conflicts linked to large-scale mining projects have come to the fore as some of the most intense social and environmental struggles in this hemisphere and beyond. But well outside of the headlines, another industry, one that purports to link Indigenous people internationally in order to benefit from resource extraction, has slowly taken off.

Whether or not they are upfront about their connections to mining companies, Canadians with labyrinthine corporate, consulting and Indigenous affiliations have been paying unexpected visits to Indigenous communities throughout the Americas. A closer look at an example of this intervention reveals how their promotion of the Canadian mining industry in impoverished communities undermines local struggles to protect territory and exacerbates conflict.

In Panama, Vancouver-based Corriente Resources began promoting the Cerro Colorado copper deposit in recognized Ngabe-Bugle territory three years ago, even though the company never secured permits from the government. In February 2011, Law 8 was passed, revising the 1963 mining code to allow direct foreign investment in mining concessions. Together with a proposed hydro-electric dam, mining interests at play even before the legislation changes were at the heart of intense protests and repression. The government repealed Law 8 in March 2011, but protests demanding a definitive ban on mining in Ngabe-Bugle territory continued.

Two Indigenous protesters were killed on February 5, 2012 when police opened fire on highway blockade actions taken to defend the Comarca’s land and resources. On March 21, after an agreement between the government and the elected Ngabe-Bugle leadership, the National Assembly of Panama passed Special Law 415, prohibiting mining concessions and development in the Ngabe-Bugle territory, and requiring consent for hydro-electric development.

The Ngabe-Bugle Comarca—a State-recognized territory with some degree of political autonomy—was established by the Panamanian government in 1997, in large part due to political pressure from the Ngabe and Bugle peoples seeking political autonomy and control over lands threatened by resource exploitation. With the largest Indigenous population in the country, the level of poverty in the Ngabe-Bugle Comarca is among the highest in the country. Since the Panamanian government did not cede subsoil or water rights as part of the agreement, struggles to protect the territory, subsistence agriculture and traditional culture are ongoing.

While Corriente is only one of many threats, the company's presence has involved much more than mine exploration: Canadian Don Clarke has been active in the Comarca. Clarke is a member of the Black River First Nation, head of a consulting company, Kokopelli, and was previously a community relations representative of Ecuacorriente, a Corriente subsidiary in Ecuador. During his time in Ecuador, Clarke was involved at the inception of a small pro-mining Indigenous Shuar federation led by a man who was expelled from other Indigenous organizations and confederations, according to a report by MiningWatch Canada.

In western Panama, the Jadran Nigwe Nirien Ngwaire Ngobe Association appeared around the same time Clarke was first reported to be promoting mining in the Comarca. Jadran claims to represent the majority of the Ngobe communities. According to the association, communities want a 50 per cent stake in the Cerro Colorado deposit so that, in the event of its sale to a mining corporation, the money can be used to finance community development. At the same time, Jadran insisted that it was not necessarily in favour of mining; the association claimed that its objective of a 50 per cent stake in the deposit’s ownership did not entail support for mining activities in the Comarca.

Jadran has denounced organizations opposing mining as unrepresentative foreign-influenced groups. In a letter to the editor published by the Panama America newspaper last December, Jadran president Adriana Sandoya called on the government to reject the claims and demands of organizations opposing mining in Ngabe-Bugle territory. “Our association rejects the so-called ‘Special Law’ promoted by the so-called ‘Coordinadora,’ [for the Defense of Natural Resources and the Rights of the Ngabe-Bugle and Peasant Farmers] which represents no one, was never elected by anyone, and that only seeks to propagate and increase the existing levels of poverty in our Comarca,” she wrote.

Despite Sandoya and Jadran’s claims that the association speaks for thousands of local residents in the Ngabe-Bugle Comarca, its own membership process is questionable. In early 2011, a post on Jadran’s website explained how to become a member: “If you want to be a member of Jadran and join our struggle, you only have to sign our membership book during our meetings and it’s done!”

This process allows the organization to unilaterally enroll members without their explicit consent, mirroring a practice common among mining companies, which often claim consultation with, and support from, anyone signing an attendance list.

In February of 2011, Panamanian President Ricardo Martinelli signed a decree to halt speculation over mining activities in the Ngabe-Bugle Comarca. The Government of Panama subsequently issued a public statement that gave foreigners involved in promoting activities relating to mining in Ngabe-Bugle territory a deadline of two weeks to leave the jurisdiction of the Comarca.

According to widespread reports in the Panamanian press, the primary reason for the measure was the persistence of Kokopelli, Clarke and Chilean associate Loreto Cubillos in promoting mining in the region.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, an individual working with Corriente Resources told The Dominion that Clarke held a position with the company five or six years ago in Ecuador, but has not since been employed by Corriente or any of its subsidiaries. He later had a contract with the company to work in Panama, but both the contract and all company activities in Panama were terminated when the company was taken over by a subsidiary of a Chinese consortium in 2010. According to the Corriente source, however, Clarke may well be working with other mining companies in Panama. While none were specified, Canadian corporations Petaquilla Gold and Inmet are both active in the country.

"We're seeing that a lot of these companies don't have the understanding and the experience to understand the local communities and of course you're seeing a lot of conflict," Don Clarke told the CBC in 2007. At the time, Clarke was pitching the idea that First Nations could sell their expertise on managing conflicts over natural resources to the Southern Chiefs Organization and Manitoba Keewatinook Ininew Okimowin. "We see a real business opportunity for our First Nations people to capitalize on the knowledge that we have and the experiences," he told the CBC.

The same CBC article identifies Clarke as “an adviser to the mining committee of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce” in Ecuador. But Clarke's titles were many: adviser of International Affairs, Southern Chiefs Organization; Clarke Educational Services; and Black River First Nation. This chameleonic identification allows for the obfuscation of ties to industry when it is advantageous.

In Panama, it would appear that Clarke's presence instigated activity by a small vocal group advocating for involvement in a mining concession and criticizing opponents, something that was not achieved through his interactions with the Diaguita council in northern Chile.

Sergio Campusano, President of the Diaguita Huascoaltino Indigenous and Agricultural Community in northern Chile, has a clear memory of Clarke.

Campusano’s community council has long been an outspoken opponent of Canadian mining projects in their territory. In 2005, at beginning of organized Diaguita opposition to Barrick Gold’s planned Pascua Lama gold mega-project, the community was approached by the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs (AMC).

“What happened is that at that time, it was the first time we were faced with a project of that scope,” said Campusano. “They said that in Canada, Indigenous Peoples had good agreements with the companies in their territories—they received up to 50 per cent of the production profits, that they were given university [education], that thanks to the money they had houses, had work,” Campusano told The Dominion this June.

The Diaguita Huascoaltino community was opposed to Barrick Gold’s Pascua Lama project, but open to learning more about the proposal and weighing their options.

After Campusano and the directive council met with AMC representatives—including political advisor Don Clarke—in Vina del Mar, Chile, they researched his claims with the help of a Chilean Indigenous rights group. Campusano said that try as they might, they could not find an example of an Indigenous community in Canada receiving any more than four per cent of the production profits, plus some education and other benefits. Clarke, Campusano and others met again in Santiago to discuss cultural and other exchanges, and an International Agreement of Indigenous Co-operation on January 19, 2006.

Six days later, the AMC assembly passed a resolution to establish an International Relations Committee of Chiefs. The AMC resolution focused on trade and cultural relationships in broad terms, but on the ground it became apparent that they were seeking to intercede in negotiations with Barrick Gold.

“The Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, through then [Grand] Chief Ron Evans, said that they could achieve much more than that, but only as long as we gave them the mandate to negotiate for us, because they had experience getting more money, more profits for the benefit of the community,” Campusano told The Dominion, adding that the mandate sought by the AMC for negotiations with Barrick Gold was a sort of power of attorney. “It was as legally authorized representatives.”

The Diaguita Huascoaltino leaders took each proposal back to their own bi-annual community assemblies, which chose to negate the right of the AMC to negotiate or act on their behalf. The communities did request a visit by Ron Evans, which was accepted by the AMC.

“He said he was going to go. We prepared a massive ceremony. We made a tremendous schedule. And only Don Clarke shows up,” said Campusano. The Diaguita Huascoaltino authorities informed the AMC that without a visit by Ron Evans and clarification as to connections to Barrick Gold, the co-operation agreement was null and void.

“I have documents where the famous Don Clarke wrote to me and every time he wrote these emails to the institutional Huascoaltino email, there would be copies sent to three high-ranking Barrick Gold representatives,” said Campusano. According to documents obtained by The Dominion, copies of an update were sent by Clarke to Barrick Gold VP of Operations Kelvin Dushinisky and Barrick South America Director of Community Relations Rod Jimenez.

“So that was when I realized that this mining company was behind it,” said Campusano.

Clarke's involvement in Chile is far from the exception to the rule. Not only is he just one among several similar consultants for hire, but mining companies are also not the only financiers of Indigenous partnerships in the mining sector.

The Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) has also been involved in the Indigenous promotion of mining activities over the past two decades. One project under CIDA’s ongoing Indigenous Peoples Partnership Program (IPPP) was a “Mining Sector–Indigenous Capacity Building” project in Guyana, Colombia and Suriname from 2007 to 2011, to “[enable] two-way learning between Canadian Indigenous peoples and Indigenous partners in Latin American and the Caribbean regarding interactions with mining companies and governments,” according to CIDA’s project description.

“The initiatives supported by the IPPP were conceived both by indigenous organizations in the Latin American and Caribbean region and their Canadian Aboriginal partners,” wrote CIDA media relations representative Katherine Heath-Eves in an email to The Dominion.

But closer examination shows the initial project documents were not developed by Indigenous organizations in either Latin America or in Canada. They were instead developed by a consultant who frequently works for Canadian mining corporations.

Although not Indigenous himself, the founder and president of Canadian consulting company Wayne Dunn & Associates has often worked in Indigenous communities through contracts in dozens of countries around the world over the past 20 years. His clients include government agencies, extractive industry corporations and other sectors.

“I actually had the contract to develop the initial documents for the Indigenous Peoples Partnership Program for CIDA,” Dunn told The Dominion in a telephone interview from California.

Aware of some of his prior work in Canada regarding Indigenous business partnerships, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) asked him to submit a proposal for a project under the auspices of the UN’s International Decade of the World’s Indigenous People, 1995-2004. “So I made them a proposal and next thing I know I was mission leader on this seven-country mission that started this whole Inter-Indigenous Partnerships thing,” said Dunn.

What began as a 1994 UNDP scoping mission for Indigenous-to-Indigenous business and trade opportunities in Central America soon became a larger project for Apikan Indigenous Network, Dunn’s consulting company at the time, with funding from CIDA, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and several other agencies. In fact, Dunn accompanied Jean Chretien on his first Prime Ministerial Trade Mission to Latin America in January 1995, shortly after the initial scoping mission.

At the same time, the Canadian government began involving Indigenous individuals and particularly First Nations band council Chiefs in its trade, business and investment promotion visits and activities in Latin America.

Proposed mines continue to spring up around the world and governments, corporations and non-governmental organizations are increasingly focusing their attention on Corporate Social Responsibility. The forecast for the niche market of extractive sector consultants seeking "social license" in Indigenous territories has never been brighter.

“Businesses—especially extractive sector businesses—need to be able to work effectively with local people and communities. And I think, you know, participation in the Trade Mission is able to talk about how some Canadian companies have been able to do that,” said Dunn. “We see [a] broader group of Canadian Indigenous Peoples involved internationally than we did, you know, 15 years ago. We see more individual First Nations and Indigenous businesses directly involved than we did then.”

In the context of questions about how Indigenous communities are approached where there is conflict or opposition regarding a proposed mining project, Dunn emphasized the importance of companies focusing getting a return on their “social license investment” just as they would on other things.

“My role is to help [companies] to find ways that they can produce more local benefits for less costs, or that they can get a better return on what they're investing in. I find often when I go into a project that...companies can be investing a lot of money in trying to do it, but they're just not strategic about it,” he told The Dominion. “We've developed some pretty sophisticated and successful frameworks and strategies around that.”

In Panama and throughout the Americas, consulting company strategies and the involvement of Indigenous individuals acting on behalf of Canadian mining interests continues. Whether this will be enough to overcome the increasingly militant opposition to multi-national mining ventures remains to be seen.

Sandra Cuffe is a Vancouver-based freelance journalist who has way too much fun doing research.

Marketing Consent Truck

Marketing Consent

Defending the Land from Nuclear Waste

Sandra — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 09:23:31 +0000

Indigenous community elders, activists gather in northern Saskatchewan against nuclear waste site

SOUTH BAY, SK—The storm clouds had moved on by the time people arrived at South Bay on lake Ile-a-la-Crosse last Friday for a grassroots gathering against a potential nuclear waste site in northern Saskatchewan. Dene, Cree and Métis elders from affected communities, grassroots activists from around Saskatchewan and others from as far as the west coast and Germany shared coffee, songs, experiences and a whole lot of moose meat from August 3 to 6 at the Survival Celebration Camp for Sustainable Earth.

"We have to protect the land," Jules Daigneault told those gathered in a sharing circle around the campfire. When the 70-year-old elder heard about the gathering happening in South Bay, he travelled across the lake to the camp from his home in Ile-a-la-Crosse in a boat he made himself. "Everything comes from the land. All our food comes from the land."

Gunter Wippel traveled to the camp from Germany, where he has been actively involved in anti-nuclear activism for decades. Wippel has been visiting northern Saskatchewan since the late 1980s, involved with struggles against the expansion of the uranium mining industry. He was also in the province in the mid-90s for the Seaborn panel hearings on nuclear waste management in Canada.

"I can't believe that we still have to protest that same shit," Wippel remarked during the closing circle on Monday.

As is the case in most countries with nuclear power production, spent fuel bundles are stored onsite at reactors in Canada—in Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick. The federal Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) is planning a deep geological repository to place all of Canada's nuclear waste underground in the rock. No permanent waste storage facility exists anywhere in the world, largely due to opposition from scientific, environmental, activist and other communities.

In the latest stage of the decades-long search for a long-term nuclear waste disposal site, NWMO has received expressions of interest to host the site. Although Saskatchewan is already host to the tailings and waste from the uranium mining industry producing the uranium to be refined and processed for nuclear energy elsewhere, the province was included in the search for a willing host community. Along with several places in Ontario, NWMO has three locations in northern Saskatchewan on the map: Pinehouse, the English River First Nation and Creighton.

But elders and community members from Pinehouse and the English River First Nation say that their communities are largely opposed to hosting nuclear waste in their territories. Despite the money that NWMO and Saskatchewan-based uranium mining giant CAMECO have recently been pouring into the local councils, community promoters and other programs, they say that they did not initially even know that their own councils—municipal in Pinehouse and Band in English River—were advocating for the multi-million-dollar proposals.

"The Chiefs there don't say nothing to us. They just talk about money, budgets," Dene elder Louis Wolverine told The Dominion. Wolverine, 84, was one of several elders who attended the camp from Patuanak, near the part of the English River First Nation seemingly identified for the waste site.

"They say that it's okay, that nothing's very dangerous," he said of CAMECO and NWMO. The people in Patuanak don't want nuclear waste, he said. "The elders too—they don't want it."

Elder Mary Jane Wolverine spoke to people attending the elder's circle in Dene, with translation into English by another elder from Patuanak. Several elders spoke of the impacts of uranium mining on fishing, hunting and gathering grounds. Some had traplines and seasonal camps where the Key Lake mine is now located. They are now speaking out to protect their traditional territory, the interconnected lakes and waterways, the animals and the medicinal plants from further destruction.

"We have our children, our future grandchildren growing up...Myself, I don't want it in our country," she said. "All the elders are saying the same thing, that we don't want anything to do with nuclear waste."

In Pinehouse, a town located along the road up to the Key Lake uranium mine, the mayor and municipal council have been meeting with NWMO behind closed doors, says Fred Pederson, an outspoken Cree elder from the community. NWMO has a group of paid promoters, an elder's group and access to young students, says Pederson.

But 60 per cent of eligible voters in Pinehouse signed a petition against nuclear waste disposal in northern Saskatchewan, without the petition even having reached the whole population. The Committee for Future Generations, a grassroots organization in the region, presented the petition with more than 12,000 signatures to the provincial legislature last year. Opposition continues to grow in Pinehouse and around the province.

"It's not the people that want it. It is just our leaders that are promoting it," Pederson told The Dominion. He and several others at the gathering also raised the issue of systemic racism by the provincial and federal governments in their search for a nuclear waste disposal site in northern Saskatchewan, in Indigenous and Metis traditional territories. "It's just like we don't count, like they can kill us off."

When the nightly conversation and music around the fire continued into the wee hours of Monday morning, those who stayed awake extending their time together on the last night of the gathering were rewarded. The northern lights made a surprise appearance in the night sky, with shimmering green lights dancing overhead as the last people wandered off to their tents, campers and the beach.

Elders from affected northern communities, the Committee for Future Generations, and others who attended the camp from further away reiterated their commitment to the struggle against nuclear waste in northern Saskatchewan. Revitalized by the camraderie, inspired by the elders, and energized by the young children playing along the beach, those involved with the gathering have plans well underway to continue the campaign over the next few months.

"If we band together, people produce power," said Pederson. "We can stop all of this. We can stop the destruction."

Sandra Cuffe is a Media Co-op editor based in Vancouver, and a member of the Vancouver Media Co-op.

Survival Celebration

Hemispheric Resistance to Canadian Mining

Sandra — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 09:56:30 +0000

Day of Action organizers speak out about repression, connections, solidarity

VANCOUVER—From Canada to Argentina, preparations are well underway for the Continental Day of Action Against Canadian Mega Resource Extraction on August 1.

Dozens of organizations have signed a call for the day of protest in solidarity with communities impacted by Canadian extractive industries. The event is meant to highlight the dominance of the Canadian mining industry worldwide. Their demands range from divestment to putting people before profit.

But some activists in North America argue that the serious repression accompanying Canadian mining around the world requires going further than those initial demands. They say that acknowledgment, a sense of urgency and a deeper strategic analysis for concrete local action are also needed. Communities and organizers resisting extractive industry projects in Latin America continue to face displacement, harassment, threats, and death, often dismissed as part of unrelated violence and conflicts.

Decentralized actions will be taking place throughout the western hemisphere on Wednesday, including a national day of mobilization in regions of mining conflict in Colombia, a memorial in Vancouver to remember those who have lost their lives opposing mining projects and a rally outside the Canadian Embassy in San Salvador.

The National Roundtable Against Metallic Mining (Mesa Nacional Frente a la Mineria Metalica) in El Salvador, comprised of community-based groups affected by mining as well as environmental and other organizations across the country, will be actively participating in the day of action. Vidalina Morales spoke with The Dominion from her home in the department of Cabanas, El Salvador, where Vancouver-based Pacific Rim's plans to develop a gold mine have been fraught with controversy.

"We're going to rally in front of the Canadian Embassy here in El Salvador," said Morales, adding that there will also be a press conference on-site. Over the course of the Roundtable's actions and campaigns, many affiliated organizations have faced ongoing human rights violations, particularly in Cabanas.

The community-based resistance to the Pacific Rim mining project in Cabanas has suffered extreme repression, including murders of several active community organizers and activists from communities in the vicinity. Earlier this month, 19-year-old engineering student David Alexander Urias was murdered in the community of Palo Bonito, says Morales, only a few kilometres from Pacific Rim's operations. His murder has been reported as being gang-related, but Morales says local community organizers suspect otherwise.

"Because we continue directly in the region where we're in conflict and where the company has shown so much recent interest in mineral exploration, we've seen some things that seem surprising to us—when families that have been longtime supporters of our efforts are attacked. Here in this department where we live, a youth [David] who was only 19 years old was recently murdered—a young student who is the son of a woman who has been very involved in this struggle," she said.

"Here, anything that happens, they always blame it on the gangs, because it's the easiest way to deny links to other things," said Morales.

In Colombia, murders, threats and other repression against individuals and communities facing large-scale mining activities around the country take place amid an ongoing armed conflict. Mario Valencia, a member of the Colombian Network Against Large-Scale Transnational Mining—RECLAME—spoke with The Dominion via telephone from Bogota, where preparations for the August 1 day of action are in full swing.

"In the middle of this conflict, the issue of mining can't be seen as unconnected because many of these conflicts take place in zones that are rich in natural resources...It's a struggle for territory. It has to do with taking possession of these areas—for example, displacing small-scale miners from territories where they have been mining for years, or even for centuries, and the conflict becomes a tool for that to happen," said Valencia. "The National Confederation of Miners of Colombia, which unites small and medium-scale miners, is currently threatened and being persecuted by the government, to make way for transnational companies."

In Colombia, a national day of mobilization "to stop the mining-energy locomotive" is being organized, coordinated by an alliance of unions, communities, and organizations, including the National Confederation of Miners and RECLAME. Rallies, marches, carnival-style parades and cultural festivals will be held in over a dozen different departments, all regions with mining conflicts. In Caldas, for example, actions will denounce the displacement of communities to make way for Canadian company Gran Colombia Gold's Marmato mining project, says Valencia.

"Mining is one of the principal activities in the Colombian economy. The government's idea is that Colombia should be a mining country, so the most important issue is territorial defense. We have proposed to take this on as the defense of life, the defense of water, the defense of territory, so that these transnational companies can't find the conflict, the pretext to enter these regions," he told The Dominion.

Valencia says that organizations in Colombia realized that they would not be able to confront the mining policy alone—a mining policy imposed on the country from outside but fiercely adopted by the Colombian government. Some of the sectors that have joined forces against transnational mining in Colombia may not seem like natural allies to some people, he says, given that they include communities resisting mining, mining and energy sector workers, small-scale miners and environmental organizations.

"Obviously not everything is all rosy and there are conflicts, but we are fundamentally united in RECLAME for one reason," Valencia explained, adding that the unity is a product of years of discussion. "We came to the understanding that the main aspect of the contradiction on the issue of mining isn't between workers and communities or between environmentalists and small-scale miners, but that the principal contradiction is with transnational large-scale mining companies."

Root Force, a campaign based out of Tucson, Arizona, also connects environmental, social and other justice issues through a strategic anti-infrastructure approach to solidarity with communities in Latin America resisting extractive industry projects. Root Force has signed onto the call for the Continental Day of Action, although concrete actions are left to the discretion of the various autonomous collectives and affiliate groups scattered throughout the southwestern US, the Pacific Northwest and beyond.

"The sort of broader goal of Root Force is to help bring down this global economic system that is at the root of the various injustices that so many of the environmental and social justice groups are organizing against," Ben Pachano, an organizer with Root Force, told The Dominion in a telephone interview. "The method that we've identified for doing that is by preventing the expansion of this resource extraction and transportation infrastructure that underlies the system.

"The actions that Root Force promotes and that, you know, our affiliate and allied groups take are aiming toward that ultimate goal, which is itself an act of solidarity, because the idea is that oppression of an Indigenous community resisting a mine, say in Guatemala, is coming in large part because of the demand for that metal in the first world," said Pachano.

The organization provides resources to facilitate connections between like-minded groups, to raise awareness about struggles against extractive and infrastructure projects in Latin America and their connections to the US, and to promote effective strategic action at the local level.

"Because of that sort of interconnected nature of basically a globalized capitalist economy, that means that you don’t necessarily need to be in the place where the resources are being extracted to take actions affecting that extraction," he said.

In Canada, which is home to companies that together own more than 3,000 mining projects around the world, actions are planned across the country. In Toronto, where many corporate headquarters and the Toronto Stock Exchange are located, people will mobilize at Queen's Park. In Vancouver, another city with a huge number of mining company offices, the local Mining Justice Alliance is hosting a memorial action outside of Goldcorp's head office.

Latin American communities spearheaded the Continental Day of Action, but the Vancouver action is also in solidarity with communities in Asia-Pacific, in Africa, locally and around the world, Mining Justice Alliance member Beth Dollaga told The Dominion. She is also a founding member of Canada-Philippines Solidarity for Human Rights and sees the same patterns of extraction and repression that occur in the Philippines happening elsewhere as well. Paramilitaries around the world are often trained not just to protect corporate infrastructure, she says, but also to harass communities resisting mining and people who speak out in support of community resistance.

"We know that the aggressive extraction—mining—it’s not just the environment plundered or killed, but also mostly Indigenous people, because this happens in the remotest areas of places, like in Latin America or anywhere in Asia-Pacific. So most of these places are actually the Indigenous ancestral domain. And people are killed," she said.

"Part of this event is also to remember them. And to continue. It's not just remembering those people, those martyred activists, but also to carry on and pick up from [where they left off], in solidarity, from wherever we are," said Dollaga.

Dollaga is not the only one to recognize that solidarity organizing with resistance to Canadian extractive projects is often a matter of life or death for people from affected communities. Pachano also emphasizes that for many, it is a fight for survival.

"When you look at a lot of communities that are opposing mega-extraction projects, often the root of their opposition is that they believe that these projects will destroy their way of life and that at the end of the day it's a battle for survival," said Pachano. "Solidarity requires that we take that—that we sort of take to heart the urgency of the battles we’re in solidarity with."

"Ultimately, true solidarity requires looking at the systems that are producing these types of exploitations and actively trying to take them down."

Sandra Cuffe is a Vancouver-based freelance journalist.

Day of Action

Reconciliation Takes Two

dawn — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 09:43:57 +0000

Residential school survivors gathered in Saskatoon critical of federal government's actions

Note: This article may be triggering. For immediate emotional support, the 24-hour Indian Residential Schools Crisis Line is available toll-free at 1-866-925-4419.

SASKATOON—The thunderclouds had scattered by morning when the sounds of footsteps, engines and drumbeats converged in Saskatchewan last month. Thousands of Indigenous residential school survivors, their relatives and people from different walks of life gathered in Saskatoon, traveling from all four directions.

From June 21 to 24, laughter, tears, songs and stories were in the air at Prairieland Park, where the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada held its fourth national event. Survivors who gave statements about their experiences and participants who witnessed the event reiterated the importance of documenting and understanding the truth of residential school history. But on the reconciliation of that history, consensus was not even on the horizon.

"There were approximately 15,000 survivors registered for this event," Commissioner and residential school survivor Chief Wilton Littlechild told the crowd gathered for the closing ceremonies of the national event. "And there has been a lot of truth-telling."

Half the estimated number of residential school survivors in Saskatchewan, the registration was the largest to date. Countless others also attended the event and more than 5,000 viewers from countries around the world tuned in to the live webcast.

The event's Education Day also had the highest participation on record. Nearly 2,000 grades seven and eight students from public, Catholic and First Nations schools attended the national event to hear from survivors and learn about residential school history. Over 150,000 First Nations, Métis and Inuit children attended residential schools operated by the federal government and various churches from the late 1800s until the 1990s. Their languages and cultural practices were forbidden. Many suffered physical, sexual and emotional abuse.

The event in Saskatchewan marked an important midway point in the commission's activities, said Littlechild. Statement-gathering, research and outreach events are ongoing across the country, but the commission must also hold seven national events, according to the mandate established by the 2007 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement. Winnipeg, Inuvik and Halifax hosted events during the first half of the commission's five-year mandate, with Saskatoon marking the mid-point before Quebec, Vancouver and Alberta.

"We shift our focus now from an emphasis on truth to an emphasis on reconciliation," said Littlechild.

But whose emphasis will be in focus remains to be seen.

Representatives of various churches and the federal government, parties to the Settlement Agreement along with survivors of more than 130 residential schools, have made apologies and often speak of reconciliation in the present tense. References are often made to "a new chapter" in Canadian history, placing the "sad chapter" of residential schools mentioned in Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s 2008 statement of apology firmly in the past.

Many residential school survivors have publicly expressed skepticism, anger and doubt about reconciliation. But another critical perspective is found within the commission itself, in Lead Commissioner Justice Murray Sinclair.

At a regional event in Victoria this past April, Justice Sinclair said that the role of the commission is to begin a conversation with Canada about what reconciliation means. The commission fully expects that reconciliation would take at least as long as the 130 years during which residential schools operated. The issue is about more than the abuse many suffered, he added.

"This is a conversation about an attitude about a whole race of people," said Justice Sinclair, echoing a view that many survivors have expressed about the continuity of attitudes, policies and legislation from the residential schools and the founding of Canada through to today.

"You don't have to forgive your perpetrator to begin your healing," he said, addressing the residential school survivors gathered in Victoria. "Coming to terms does not necessarily require forgiveness."

Frustration and doubt about reconciliation with Canada have also been expressed by members of the commission’s advisory Indian Residential School Survivors Committee.

A member of the Survivors Committee from Saskatchewan, Eugene Arcand played a key role throughout the Saskatoon event. He seemed to be everywhere over the course of the four days, addressing the students at Education Day while accompanied onstage by his granddaughters, speaking at the opening and closing ceremonies, and greeting just about everyone.

Arcand is affectionately referred to by many as any number of variations of the nickname Bird. Like Big Bird, he towers over almost everyone else, but many in Saskatchewan look up to him for more than just his height. Other residential school survivors at the event would tell each other if the Bird was coming their way and wait to shake his hand, meet his family or thank him for the work he has done.

Arcand spoke of his own experiences with truth and reconciliation at a Circle of Reconciliation panel on Friday afternoon. Residential school survivors were seated in a semi-circle alongside representatives of the parties to the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement. The Métis Nation was also represented onstage, although its members were largely excluded from the agreement.

"The truth is somewhat easier, when you can come to it," said Arcand. "Reconciliation has been difficult. It takes two sides."

"I was there at the apology," he said of the Primer Minister's statement of apology to former residential school students in June 2008, on behalf of all Canadians. "I was a little boy the night before, crying in my room."

"It's been difficult to talk out of one side of my mouth about truth and reconciliation when in another side of my heart I have very strong feelings about the actions of the federal government," said Arcand, mentioning the Canadian government's halt to funding for the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, mandated by the Settlement Agreement.

"Actions speak louder than words," he said. When he explained that leaders—not only those of the federal government, but also First Nations leaders—must be evaluated not by what they say but by the legacy they leave behind, the room erupted in applause, whistles and cheers.

Arcand was the first of ten people to speak during the Circle of Reconciliation. Seated directly to his left was former Assembly of First Nations (AFN) Grand Chief Phil Fontaine. Directly across from him was current AFN Grand Chief Shawn Atleo. John Duncan, Minister of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada (AANDC, formerly INAC), was also present onstage.

In his own presentation about reconciliation, Duncan followed the path other institutional representatives have sometimes taken at commission events and told personal stories. He spoke of the dislocation of his home community in a coal-mining region in BC's interior. He told of his childhood confusion when his mother told him that his Squamish best friend Richard from the neighbouring Capilano reserve might not be returning to public school in North Vancouver for grade five.

Duncan had a ten-minute opportunity to respond to direct challenges from survivors regarding federal funding cuts to the Aboriginal Healing Foundation and other organizations, the exclusion of the Métis from the agreement, and other relevant actions taken by the Canadian government. He did not take it.

No one participating in the Circle of Reconciliation mentioned that the court-mandated Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement that ended the largest class-action lawsuit in Canadian history is only an agreement until it is broken. If any party to the agreement—such as the Government of Canada, for example—does not fulfill its obligations, representatives of the original plaintiffs—residential school survivors—can return to court.

Many residential school survivors not participating in the panel sessions or in the event in any official capacity were also critical of reconciliation, both in their statements to the commission and in conversations offstage.

Paul Sylvester was enjoying his pancakes on Saturday morning, sitting in the sun at the edge of a long table under the food tent in Diefenbaker Park. The free breakfast was served before the long 12-hour day ahead at the national event across the street. Finishing his pancakes, Sylvester set up an impromptu smoking section while speaking about the land near his community of Turnor Lake. A Dene residential school survivor, he also shared his thoughts about the event and reconciliation.

"It'll never be forgotten or forgiven, no matter how big a conference you set up," Sylvester told the Vancouver Media Co-op. "To me, here, it's just a gathering. Numbers, that's all."

Sylvester gave statements to the commission earlier this year, at regional hearings in both Prince Albert and La Ronge, in northern Saskatchewan.

"The first one was pretty rough. It was just tears," he said. "Between the first and the second one, I felt a lot lighter. After the second one, it don't bother me no more."

Sylvester takes strength from the memory of his mother, he said. He is the eighth of 23 children, although eleven passed away, most as infants, from malnutrition. Despite all of the loss and everything she went through, his mother always told him to stand tall and keep his head up.

He has been retired for a decade, but Sylvester continues to be active in grassroots political activity in his own territory and beyond. In spite of his own experience in the residential school system, he believes in the importance of education. He is currently working with the Office of the Treaty Commissioner in Treaty 10 territory on a "Teaching Treaties in the Classroom" project, developing curriculum for elementary and high school courses.

"There's not too much curriculum in the classroom about the lifestyle of the Dene People, of our survival on the land, or the history," said Sylvester. The First Nations history currently taught in the province is largely focused on southern Saskatchewan, he said, and it has not been easy to advocate for revisions.

"It's a give and take," Sylvester said of the struggle to change curriculum in order to include Dene history, Treaty history, and the issue of self-government. "It's viewed as a thing of the past."

But the passion that Sylvester has pursued throughout his life is getting to know Dene territory directly on the land. As a young boy before attending residential school and as a youth after he returned home, Sylvester accompanied his father along his trapline, taking notes and drawing maps. He prides himself on continuing to live off the land, tracking and hunting animals, working the trapline, and using local resources to make his own canoes and snowshoes.

And to deal with the trauma of his residential school experience, Sylvester turned to the land he has known since childhood.

"I did my reconciliation already," he told the Vancouver Media Co-op. "I done my healing on my trapline. When I go out on my trapline, there’s peace."

Fred Sasakamoose also found some healing in walking on the land. He led a three-and-a-half-day Indian Residential School Survivor Walk from the residential school he attended as a child to the national event in Saskatoon.

"I walked to get here," he said, seated in the middle of Friday's Circle of Reconciliation panel. "I walked 130 kilometers."

Sasakamoose, 78, now has more than 40 grandchildren and 40 great-grandchildren. He took five of his grandchildren with him along the walk, which began at the place where St. Michael's residential school once stood, in Duck Lake, Saskatchewan.

The building is no longer there. He had to use old stones and memories from over 60 years ago to attempt to answer his grandchildren’s questions about the location of the building and the makeshift hockey rink where he learned the skills that would later propel him to a brief professional career in the NHL.

"I thought I would hear screaming and crying, because that's all I knew," said Sasakamoose of his visit to the grounds. He was sent to residential school in 1940 at the age of six, along with his eight-year-old brother whose abuse he witnessed before being himself sexually abused at the school. He gave his statement to the commission at a regional hearing earlier this year.

"I thought I would leave everything behind. I told the story so many times. I told myself I'm never going to do it again," he said. "I want to leave it behind me now. I want to be healed. I no longer want to carry that load."

But he still carries the memory of five children from his reserve who were sent to St. Michael's and never came back. They are buried somewhere on the grounds that he visited, he said.

"Every footstep that I've made, it was for the people that never told their story, that are gone," said Sasakamoose.

As the event came to a close on Sunday evening, the sky began to cloud over as people prepared for the journey back to their families, communities and territories. Many will gather again at the commission’s remaining national events in Quebec next spring, Vancouver in the fall of 2013, and later in Alberta. Others will turn to their families, communities, or back to the land for healing.

The discussion about reconciliation will continue. The truth-telling will continue. And the memory of the thousands of children who never lived to tell their stories remains ever-present.

"When we leave here it’s going to rain, just for a little bit," said Eugene Arcand during the closing ceremonies. "Those are going to be the tears of those who couldn't be here, transformed into raindrops."

As people left the event and began to make their way home, in all four directions, the raindrops began to fall.

Sandra Cuffe is a Vancouver-based journalist and went to Saskatoon to cover the national event. This article is the fourth in a series funded and published by the Vancouver Media Co-op about the TRC and the residential school system and legacy.

TRC Saskatoon

A New Guide to Making Beautiful Trouble

dawn — Wed, 23 May 2012 05:20:43 +0000

"It's like an Anarchist Cookbook for the 21st century, but without the bombs"

VANCOUVER—Every chair, couch space and rolling computer seat, as well as some floorspace and standing room, were needed to accommodate the dozens of people who came out to the Purple Thistle Centre on Tuesday evening for the Vancouver launch of Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution.

Along with local contributor Harsha Walia, co-editors Dave Oswald Mitchell and Andrew Boyd were in town to discuss the book, a sort of encyclopedia for creative activism. More than 70 artists, authors, organizers and other shit-disturbers contributed entries.

"It's like an Anarchist Cookbook for the 21st century, but without the bombs," quipped Boyd. His other marketing brainstorm likens the book to the offspring of 1960s Yippies founder, activist prankster and writer Abbie Hoffman and community organizer Saul Alinsky, author of the seminal 1971 book Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals.

Boyd's joking aside, the comparison of Beautiful Trouble to Alinsky's Rules for Radicals has its merits. Both works focus on strategic planning and organizing for effective actions and campaigns. To that end, each of the modular entries in Beautiful Trouble's four main categories—tactics, principles, theories, and case studies—is accompanied by sidebar references to other entries in the various sections as well as to books and websites for further reading.

"It actually came from the field of architecture," said Mitchell of the book's modular organization, derived from the concept of pattern language in architecture. "It puts the tools into people's hands so that they can apply them to their situation."

The collective organizing experience and activist knowledge of those gathered at the youth-run Purple Thistle would likely add up to a few centuries' worth. As people commented on slideshow photos of past actions, such as a famous snapshot of a lunch counter sit-in for racial desegregation in the southern United States, co-editors Boyd and Mitchell described some of the tactics, principles and theories at play in each example.

Local South Asian activist and writer Harsha Walia participated in the Beautiful Trouble project, contributing the entries "Challenging Patriatchy as You Organize" and "Consensus is a Means, not an End" to the Principles section of the book. She had not seen the final edited version of the publication before Tuesday.

"It was all kind of compiled in this wiki-type thing," Walia said of the process for contributors. She added that the book really encourages strategic thinking, reflecting that often when people are organizing, they are not really focused on the differences between strategy, tactics, goals and so forth.

"There's all kinds of ways that we don't really think things through," said Walia.

One of the tactics discussed at the launch was Prefigurative Intervention, an action that creates "a little slice of the future we want to live in." Its common uses are listed in the book as follows: "To give a glimpse of the Utopia we're working for; to show how the world could be; to make such a world feel not just possible, but irresistable."

Walia shared her reflections from a seat at the back of the room alongside some of the women who participated in the tent city that took place during the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver. At the end of the tent city, housing was found for some 80 homeless participants, but Walia considers it to have been more than just a successful direct action.

"The community that developed at the tent city was a prefigurative community," she said. "A lot of people refer to it as a place of freedom."

Boyd envisions that people will use Beautiful Trouble in two different ways: as an introduction to new ideas for people who are new to activism, and as a sort of reference book for "veterans."

"It's like a network of ideas and principles and tools," he commented, describing the book as "rhizomatic."

"I don't think that it really works reading it cover-to-cover," added Mitchell. "You just sort of navigate by association."

The launch of the book Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution will be followed by the launch of a website in the same vein as the design and purpose of the print publication. In fact, blank module formats are included in the book so that anyone can outline a tactic, principle, theory or case study to submit a new entry to the web-based project.

"We will be able to continue to add modules as they come up," explained Mitchell, adding that the website will be just as important as anything in book in that it will encourage activists to think in strategic terms.

Because publisher OR Books is printing the book on demand, Beautiful Trouble will likely not be available at many bookstores anytime soon but can be ordered online.

Mitchell and Boyd have moved on to book launch events in other cities and will be in Edmonton on May 23, but hopefully the discussions about strategic and creative activism that they inspired on Tuesday evening will continue in Vancouver.

Sandra Cuffe is a Vancouver-based journalist and regular contributor to the Vancouver Media Co-op, where this article was originally published.

Beautiful Trouble

Aboriginal Peoples' Stories Remain Unheard

stephlaw — Wed, 09 May 2012 10:13:37 +0000

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has travelled across the nation, but few have paid attention

Note: This article may be triggering or distressful. To access the Indian Residential Schools Crisis Line, dial toll-free 1-866-925-4419.

VANCOUVER—The national Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools, which started over two years ago, has been largely ignored by the Canadian public, despite the participation of thousands of residential school survivors and countless others, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous.

In fact, the first and only history lesson many Canadians ever received about residential schools was through the Prime Minister of Canada's "Statement of Apology to Former Students of Indian Residential Schools," issued in June 2008 and broadcast from coast to coast.

The commission is now over halfway through its five-year mandate. Although the government established the commission in 2008, it took until July 2009 before Head Commissioner Justice Murray Sinclair, Commissioner Chief Wilton Littlechild, Commissioner Marie Wilson and a ten-member Indian Residential School Survivor Committee began gathering statements and documents.

The core of the commission’s mandate is to establish the truth about the schools, educate all Canadians about that history and begin a dialogue about reconciliation.

"Residential schools were part of an overall approach toward Aboriginal people in this country," Head Commissioner Justice Sinclair told reporters in Vancouver at a press conference in February, when the commission issued an interim update on its activities and released several preliminary recommendations.

"It is commonly said that it takes a village to raise a child. The Government of Canada took Indian children away from their villages and placed them into institutions that were the furthest thing away from a village that you could expect," he continued. "Then on top of that, the Government of Canada set out to destroy their villages, so when they got out of those institutions, they didn't have a village to go back to."

Thus far, the commission has held statement-gathering and outreach events in over 500 communities across Canada—including a prison in the Northwest Territories—and national events in Winnipeg and Inuvik.

It has not been easy for survivors to get to a microphone and relive their experiences at these events. But the commission has helped them realize what they’ve overcome.

"I think if you document something, you can't say it didn't happen,” Kecia Larkin, 41, told The Dominion, after speaking at the commission’s regional event in Victoria in April. “And if people who have spoken find some pride in themselves, in the courage to speak out, then that's something that has been accomplished.”

At the regional event in Victoria, 158 residential school survivors and other affected people shared their experiences. More than 2,000 people attended the event and another 3,300 people from 16 countries tuned in to the live webcast.

The commission is not only examining the history of residential schools, but also their ongoing impact on communities as a whole, and on intergenerational survivors like Larkin—the residential school students’ children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and so forth.

"I've seen a lot of pride there," said Larkin. "But it was very painful for a lot of people. It was very heart wrenching. It made people cry out loud."

From the 1860s up until the 1990s, more than 150,000 First Nations, Metis and Inuit children attended residential schools. Some schools were operated directly by the Canadian government and some by Canada through partnerships with church organizations.

Cut off from their families and communities, students were forbidden to speak their own language or engage in their own cultural and spiritual practices. Many children experienced emotional, physical and sexual abuse.

Larkin’s mother and grandmother attended residential schools, and her father attended a boarding school. As a young child, she traveled around North America with her mother, who was involved with the Red Power movement in the early 1970s, which came out of the American Indian Movement and a growing sense of pan-Indian identity. It was not until they moved to Alert Bay when Larkin was four years old that she experienced the legacy of the schools. After being caught for years in cycles of familial violence and abuse, amidst a community dealing with youth drug use, suicides and sexual abuse by the local school principal, she left her home at the age of 15.

Larkin moved to Vancouver and wound up in the child welfare system, which she considers a modern-day extension of residential schools, and on the streets in the Downtown Eastside. After experiencing multiple traumas, she became a heavy drug user and later tested positive for HIV.

Months after discovering her HIV-status, Larkin was able to leave the streets and settled in Victoria, on unceded Coast Salish territory. Over the past decade she has spent much of her time doing advocacy work in the medical system and is co-chair of a group of women that created the first Aboriginal Women’s HIV and AIDS Strategy in Canada.

“Because of colonialism, our experience is very different, which is tied to not just violence but also residential school, and it’s intergenerational,” Larkin said.

Larkin now has two children of her own and has made a conscious effort to give them a better environment to grow up in than the one she had.

"I don't have a lot of connection with my community and culture, and I think that's how it's impacted me directly, and my children, and my family,” she said. “I tell my children what I can, what I know."

The idea that Canadians need to change the way they think about Aboriginal people’s history and experience is one that the commission emphasizes.

"In talking about residential schools and their legacy, we are not talking about an Aboriginal problem, but a Canadian problem," reads the commission's 2012 report. "It is not simply a dark chapter from our past. It was integral to the making of Canada. Although the schools are no longer in operation, the last ones did not close until the 1990s. The colonial framework of which they were a central element has not been dismantled."

The commission was created through the ratification of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement in 2007. It was a result of residential school survivors launching the largest class-action lawsuit in Canadian history against the government, churches and individual school staff for the abuses they endured.

The agreement also established a nominal “common experience payment” for all students who attended the 134 schools and residences identified in the deal, as basic compensation for the people’s sufferings under the residential school system.

But there are many survivors who feel dissatisfied by the compensation offered. Perry Omeasoo, a Cree residential school survivor, told the commission that he was raised by his grandparents as a young child. After his mother’s prior residential school experience, she was unable to parent him and was mostly absent throughout his life.

"It was almost nothing,” Omeasoo said of the compensation payment at a Commissioner Sharing Panel. "I would have rather had my mother. And for that, I will always be resentful."

Not only do some survivors not find the payment healing, but the forms that survivors had to fill out to qualify for payment triggered mental breakdowns in some.

"Amazing how sheets of paper can be so re-traumatizing," said Kat Norris, a Salish residential school survivor and the spokesperson for Indigenous Action Movement. "I had previously gone through years of counselling, so I assumed I was going to be fine. Instead, I totally backtracked, put it on the shelf, and went into a depression."

Norris is a survivor of the Kuper Island Residential School, which she calls the “Alcatraz of residential schools.” She was sent to the school with her two younger brothers and her sister, as young children. When they arrived at the school in the evening, her brothers were taken away from her, straight out of her hands, because of the strict gender segregation.

"The common thread we survivors share is sibling separation," she said.

"It's one of the biggest painful memories of my whole life, seeing them both walking down the hall, looking back at me, not knowing where they were going and I couldn’t do anything," continued Norris. "We only learned, as adults, about how much we all suffered at that school."

There are diverse opinions about the 2008 statement of apology among residential school survivors and other Indigenous people, Norris said. She herself expresses mixed reactions.

“For me, it acknowledged our Indigenous Holocaust," Norris said. "Immediately, I felt I could breathe, I felt free. And it's because our experience was acknowledged."

At the same time, she explained, “it isn't enough. It is a token apology, trinkets, again, from a government that continues to barrage our people with ingenious legislation bent on keeping our land and destroying it forever. It is felt that we can simply be paid off and silenced forever. Realistically, our pain carries on throughout our lives, as shown by intergenerational impact.”

Norris is planning to give a statement of her own experiences at the commission’s national event in Vancouver next year.

While statement-gathering and outreach activities are ongoing across the country, the commission also has several national events left in its mandate: June 21 to 24, 2012, in Saskatoon; September 18 to 21, 2013, in Vancouver; yet-to-be-determined dates and locations in Quebec and Alberta; and a closing Ceremony in Ottawa.

"We know that the damage continues," Commissioner Justice Sinclair told those gathered at the event in Victoria. "In two years this commission will no longer be around, but this conversation must continue."

Sandra Cuffe is a freelance journalist and researcher currently based in Vancouver, unceded Coast Salish territory. She hopes to make it to Saskatoon in June.

IRSSS

We Need to Fight Back!

stephlaw — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 11:31:28 +0000

Community March Against Racism takes to Vancouver streets

VANCOUVER—Hundreds of people took to the streets of Vancouver on March 18 for the annual Community March Against Racism, marking the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination on March 21. The march, organized by No One is Illegal (NOII)–Vancouver, began at Commercial Drive and 14th Avenue and made its way along the Drive to Grandview Park.

Along the way, stops were made to gather for songs and speakers. After Coast Salish drumming and singing in the middle of the busy intersection of East Broadway and Commercial, Kat Norris of the Indigenous Action Movement asked for a moment of silence "for all of our people on the street, for all of our people incarcerated, for all of our people suffering in their homes..."

Further along the Drive, the march paused once again. "There was a man that was lit on fire on this street by neo-Nazis, and very little was done about it," explained rally emcee Harjap Grewal.

Robertson De Chazal and Alastair Miller, both reportedly members of neo-Nazi group Blood and Honour, have been charged for the 2009 attack against a Filipino man, who had been sleeping on a discarded couch near Commercial Drive. The attack was one of several in recent years that targeted people of colour.

"Feeling safe to walk these streets should not be just a Canadian fiction," a group from the Kalayaan Centre recited in a collective poem. "So-called progressive Van city, silencing histories."

NOII's Grewal highlighted the fact that in the early 1900s, Vancouver was home to race riots and racist legislation—and today racist attacks and legislation remain. "We need to see how these things are linked, and we need to fight back."

"Aqui estamos y no nos vamos. We are here and we're not going anywhere!,” said activist Richard Marquez. "We can't rely on the cops, the courts and the legislators. We’ve got to rely on the people's movement."

Sandra Cuffe is a writer and aspiring janitor currently living in Vancouver.

This article was originally published by the Vancouver Media Coop.

Community March Against Racism

Canada is a Racist State

No fences, no borders

Carnival Band

"Stand With Us to Fight"

Tim McSorley — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 12:42:20 +0000

Hundreds protest Enbridge pipeline and oil tankers at Heiltsuk-led rally

VANCOUVER—Hundreds of people from First Nations, environmental and community organizations, and others from Vancouver and beyond, rallied against Enbridge's Northern Gateway pipeline and coastal oil supertanker traffic earlier today, filling the Vancouver Art Gallery grounds.

A march led by the Heiltsuk Nation of the Central Coast departed from the Coastal First Nations office at Granville and Hastings Streets and wound its way through the downtown business district to join another group waiting at the Vancouver Art Gallery. The rally marked the 23rd anniversary of the Exxon Valdez oil spill off the coast of Alaska, which spilled hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil on March 24, 1989.

"Only seven percent of that oil was cleaned up," said Coastal First Nations Executive Director Art Sterritt of the Exxon Valdez spill. "Our well-being as First Nations is dependent on our lands, on our waters.

“Our people, the Heiltsuk people, have always had a position: No oil tankers on the coast! That position has never changed,” Heiltsuk elder Edwin Newman said, addressing the rally. “We are pleading with our coastal neighbours to stand with us to fight this issue.”

“When we stand together, we are a powerful people,” added Newman, whose call for unity was echoed by speaker after speaker.

"We are Canada's energy union and we stand with you on this issue," Jim Britton, Western Region Vice President of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers' Union (CEP) told the crowd. "We do not support Enbridge. We do not support Northern Gateway...This isn't just about oil. This is about us. This is about our communities."

If built, the proposed 1,200-kilometre Northern Gateway oil pipeline would transport a half-million barrels of tar sands bitumen from Alberta to Kitimat, BC. The proposed twin pipelines' 30-metre-wide right-of-way would cross hundreds of rivers, streams and watersheds along its route through numerous unceded Indigenous territories. The crude oil would then be transported on massive oil tankers through delicate coastal ecosystems and Indigenous territories and finally across the Pacific to Asian markets.

"The world that we have lived in for the past 10,000 years is shifting around us," Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, an organization dedicated to building a global movement against climate change, told the rally, situating the coastal struggle against pipelines and tankers within the global climate justice movement. "The planet is starting to become unglued because we are raising the temperature."

"We know, we absolutely know that this fight is going to completely eclipse the [fight for] Clayoquot Sound," Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, President of the Union of BC Indian Chiefs said. "We know that this fight is going to intensify."

While the struggle against Northern Gateway has garnered massive support and international attention, it is not the only pipeline project facing opposition in the province. Grassroots Wet'suwet'en community activists have been resisting the proposed Pacific Trails natural gas pipeline that would connect to a new Liquefied Natural Gas port on the Central Coast. The project would traverse the unceded lands of many of the same First Nations opposing the Enbridge project. In its case, however, the elected leadership of several First Nations along the route are supporting the Pacific Trails project.

Another lesser-known pipeline project already runs through the lower mainland. The Kinder Morgan oil pipeline brings tar sands crude across the Rockies along its Trans Mountain pipeline to terminals in both Burnaby and Washington State. Only two months ago there was a spill in Abbotsford, BC, following a major oil spill at the Burnaby terminal site in 2007.

Kinder Morgan is expected to announce its expansion plans for the pipeline, according to Ben West, Healthy Communities Campaigner for the Wilderness Committee. The company is reportedly looking to increase the quantity of crude transported from 300,000 barrels per day to 600,000 or 700,000.

"Kinder Morgan has been trying to do this as quietly as possible," West told the rally. "We have to stand together to say no to all these projects!"

As the rally wound down after two hours in the rain, the loudest expressions of support were heard for 11-year-old Sliammon First Nation singer-songwriter Ta'Kaiya Blaney. She recalled going to the Enbridge office in Vancouver one year ago to express her opinion about the Northern Gateway pipeline.

"I was escorted out and I was told that if I didn't leave I would be charged for trespassing," Blaney recounted to the ralliers, who showed their support with enthusiastic cheers.

Before performing her song "Shallow Waters," Blaney told the hundreds gathered on the Monday afternoon of the message found in the song: "If we do nothing it will all be gone."

Sandra Cuffe is a writer and aspiring janitor currently living in Vancouver.

This article was originally published by the Vancouver Media Co-op.

Questions? Comments? Drop us a line: info@mediacoop.ca

Heiltsuk Nation elder Edwin Newma

Rally against pipelines at Vancouver Art Gallery

Justice Embodied

Tim McSorley — Mon, 23 May 2011 05:59:28 +0000

Bearing the future to protect the Earth

VANCOUVER—A boy found his younger brother’s body hanging in the basement. Another mine passed the environmental review process. More women are going missing and are murdered. The search for a nuclear waste site continues.

Stories told by the media are presented as a series of disconnected incidents and issues. Most governments, federal or otherwise, work in a similar framework of disconnection, whether to determine jurisdiction or to deflect accountability. Public discussion often separates reality into compartments.

The discourse of many groups and campaigns working on environmental and climate issues explicitly rejects this disconnected perspective. However, that same discourse has been questioned for its failure to make many other connections that Indigenous peoples, women and others have been pointing out for decades.

“Once you go to a birth, you know how connected you are to the earth, and to all creation around us,” says Neddie Thompson, a traditional midwife from Akwesasne, in Kanienkehaka (Mohawk) territory. “It’s the women who give birth to all of our children...to take care of this land.”

“As an Indigenous feminist, one of the links I, as well as many Indigenous women across the world, see is between reproductive health and environmental justice. Simultaneously I am angry about the lack of recognition of this link within most environmental discourse,” wrote Cree/Norwegian Indigenous feminist Erin Konsmo. Also a student, she added that “[it’s] insulting to hear in environmental classes that the idea of any form of sustainability is a new concept.”

The declaration from the International Indigenous Women’s Environmental and Reproductive Health Symposium held last year in California states that “[sovereignty] and autonomy in relation to our lands, territories and resources are intricately connected to sovereignty and autonomy in relation to our bodies, minds and spirits.”

In occupied Canada, and throughout Turtle Island (North America) and Abya Yala (the Americas), the language used to describe resource extraction and environmental destruction is often framed in terms of the war on the land. The phrase is often used as though this were somehow separate from the wars on Indigenous peoples, on women, and on all beings inhabiting the planet.

The identification of the planet as living, life-bearing, and feminine—Mother Earth, among many other names—has been adopted by many environmental and climate activists. Resource extraction and environmental destruction are often also framed in gendered language, particularly using analogies of rape. The use of these words, however, often does not include any kind of analysis of the connections between violence against the earth and violence against women.

An entirely different worldview is illustrated through the spoken and written words of Indigenous peoples throughout this hemisphere, the original keepers and defenders of the lands on which environmental and climate campaigns are now carried out.

“Grassroots and land-based struggles characterize most of Native environmentalism,” wrote Anishnaabeg author and activist Winona Laduke in All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life. “We are nations of people with distinct land areas, and our leadership and direction emerge from the land up.”

“Western European peoples have never learned to consider the nature of the world discerned from a spatial point of view. And a singular difficulty faces peoples of Western European heritage in making a transition from thinking in terms of time to thinking in terms of space,” wrote Sioux author, teacher and activist Vine Deloria Jr. in his now-famous 1972 book God is Red: A Native View of Religion.

“The very essence of Western European identity involves the assumption that time proceeds in a linear fashion; further it assumes that at a particular point in the unraveling of this sequence, the peoples of Western Europe became the guardians of the world,” continued Deloria.

Many environmental and climate organizations and activists now support the ongoing struggles for collective Indigenous rights to Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) over any activity or policy that may impact their territories. Less well known is the story of how the struggle for the right to FPIC is rooted in the organized response of Indigenous women some 40 years ago to the involuntary sterilization of Indigenous women in different territories otherwise known as the United States.

“It’s a really interesting history how it became central to our work and recognition of our rights as Indigenous people—the right to FPIC now relating to development on our territories, laws, toxins being used on our lands related to cultural items, and it all started as medical [terminology]. It started with the right of women to say yes or no, to be fully awake and not under threat when they give their agreement or any kind of medication,” longtime International Indian Treaty Council organizer Andrea Carmen told multiracial Indigenous hip-hop feminist reproductive justice freedom fighter Jessica Yee. The transcript of the conversation is included in Yee’s introduction to Feminism FOR REAL.

In the words of the SisterSong Women of Colour Reproductive Justice Collective, a network of dozens of grassroots organizations, the reproductive justice framework “represents a shift for women advocating for control of their bodies, from a narrower focus on legal access and individual choice (the focus of mainstream organizations) to a broader analysis of racial, economic, cultural, and structural constraints on our power.”

“We believe reproductive justice exists when all people have the social, political and economic power and resources to make healthy decisions about our gender, bodies, sexuality and families for ourselves and our communities,” wrote Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice, one of the founding members of the SisterSong. “Reproductive Justice aims to transform power inequities and create long-term systemic change, and therefore relies on the leadership of communities most impacted by reproductive oppression.”

The terms “reproductive justice” and “environmental justice” have been used to emphasize this broader analysis and the need for long-term systemic change. The “justice” framework is not new; it has been used for decades by marginalized women and communities, and in particular, Indigenous women.

“Climate justice” is a term now used by many different people and organizations to make a similar distinction between their perspective and the narrow framework of much environmental discourse. However, if the centuries of experience and voices from the same people and communities the climate justice movement purports to support are ignored, dismissed, romanticized, or silenced, then perhaps the inclusion of “justice” is a cosmetic touch to the same environmental discourse.

Regardless of intentions, a mission statement or policy document is only words on a piece of paper. They can either become an ongoing reality, or they can join a long trail of broken treaties.

In 1992, longtime Sioux activist Floyd Red Crow Westerman recited some of the lyrics from his 1973 song “They Didn’t Listen” to conclude his testimony at the World Uranium Hearings in Austria: “And I told them not to dig for uranium, for if they did, the children would die. They didn’t listen, they didn’t listen to me. And I told them if the children die, there would be no keepers of the land. They didn’t listen.”

“If our midwives pass on Indigenous concepts of respecting our environment and keeping it healthy for the next seven generations, should they not be central to environmental discourse?” wrote Erin Konsmo in An Indigenous Feminist Reminder of Women and Environmental Justice. “They absolutely need to be. Otherwise, the ideas of risk will be greatly slanted away from our women and our future generations.”

Sandra Cuffe’s mom used to borrow her own mother’s old typewriter so her little daughter could type her stories. Thanks!

This article was published in A People's Forecast: The Climate Justice Issue, our 2011 special issue. To read more articles as they are published, click here.

Justice silenced

It's Not Easy Being Green!

Tim McSorley — Mon, 09 May 2011 05:11:58 +0000

Unraveling myths of sustainable power

VANCOUVER & TORONTO—As the climate crisis worsens, the Canadian public is being told that new developments in “green energy” are helping reduce the carbon footprint of our energy needs. The PR push around green energy comes as the fossil fuels sector in Canada is plowing ahead, extracting heavy crude from the tar sands, pulling coal from open pit mines, and opening up remote territories for natural gas extraction.

While the idea of cleaner energy resonates with many, provincial governments have increasingly undermined the concept of “greener” energy production. Today, high-impact hydro-electric and nuclear power projects make up a significant percentage of so-called clean energy targets in Ontario and British Columbia.

“The climate argument is being used as a justification for lots of new dams around the world. It’s being used to greenwash dams,” Patrick McCully, Executive Director of the International Rivers Network (IRN) told The Dominion. He highlighted hydro-kinetic turbines, and wave and tidal energy as potential alternatives in the ongoing redefinition of hydro potential.

“There’s a possibility of getting electricity out of flowing water in an environmentally benign way, but not by building big dams everywhere,” added McCully. “And lots of small dams on lots of small rivers—that could also do a lot of harm.”

As with large-scale hydro-electric dams, the greening of nuclear power is dependent on the omission of economic externalities: costs or benefits that affect a third party and are not accounted for in market transactions. Nuclear power generation offers a clear example of the externalities potentially overshadowing the direct impacts of a nuclear power plant itself.

Along with hydro, wind, and solar, nuclear power is considered by the Canadian government to be “clean energy,” defined as “energy that is produced, transmitted, distributed and used with low or zero greenhouse gas (GHG) and other air emissions.” The government of Canada has indicated that by 2020, 90 per cent of the country’s electricity will come from these “non-emitting sources,” including nuclear power.

PHOTO: SAM BRAD

“The nuclear power industry has latched onto global warming as an argument for its renaissance,” wrote Karl Coplan, a Law Professor, in 2008. “[Put] simply, the nuclear industry, with government complicity, has transferred and deferred the most expensive part of the cost of the nuclear fuel cycle to future generations and civilizations unknown,” he wrote, addressing the contentious externality of nuclear fuel waste over its lifespan of at least hundreds of thousands of years.
Communities across Canada have been negatively impacted all the way along the nuclear fuel cycle.

On the front end is uranium, of which Canada is the world’s number one supplier. According to the Canadian Nuclear Association’s Nuclear Facts, “In 2008, the uranium mines in Saskatchewan accounted for approximately 21 per cent of the world’s total uranium production.”

Canada’s uranium deposits and mines are concentrated in the Athabasca Region in northern Saskatchewan, in First Nations territory. Strong resistance to uranium mining across the country over the last several decades has resulted in uranium mining bans in different provinces and regions.

“Mining companies came and robbed us of our country, where we lived, fished and hunted,” said Annie Benonie. The 88-year-old from Wollaston Lake near the Saskatchewan uranium mines was interviewed by Swedish journalist Fredrik Loberg last year. “The land will never be restored again [for] future generations,” she said.

Canadian uranium powers nuclear plants in a number of provinces, including Ontario. Today, Ontario’s energy grid stands at a crossroads. According to the Ontario Power Authority, by 2025 80 per cent of the province’s aging energy-generating infrastructure, traditionally powered by nuclear, hydro and coal, will need to be replaced to avoid increasing power line loss and allow for broader deployment of renewable energy projects. By 2030, the province plans to spend an additional $87 billion on overhauling the power grid.

“The constraint in increasing the installation of renewables is currently in transmission and distribution,” Adam Scott, Renewable Energy Coordinator at Environmental Defence, told The Dominion. “Ontario needs dramatic upgrades to the transmission and distribution systems.”

Yet, at this critical moment, the province’s recently released Long Term Energy Plan (LTEP) is focused primarily on the rapid elimination of coal-fired generation—using increases in nuclear, hydro and natural gas generation—in order to meet the modest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change targets of 450 parts per million atmospheric CO₂ by 2045.

Of the forecasted $87 billion in capital investment, the LTEP estimates $33 billion will be spent on nuclear power compared with $9 billion on solar, $14 billion on wind, $4.6 billion on hydro and $4 billion on biomass.

Scott, however, is generally pleased with the LTEP, pointing to the fact that it puts a greater emphasis on Ontario’s Feed In Tariff (FIT) program, which compensates wind and solar generators for energy they produce and feed in to the grid. Such programs have been successfully adopted over the past 20 years throughout Europe.

“Ontario added more solar power in its first year than [any FIT program in] Spain, Germany [or] France,” added Scott.

However, not everyone agrees that the LTEP was a step in the right direction. Criticism from environmental organizations has focused on the potential of a nuclear disaster, coupled with the long-term commitment required to re-invest in the technology.

“[Ontario] exempted its nuclear electricity plan from an environmental assessment,” said Shawn Stensil, Nuclear Analyst at Greenpeace Canada, in a news release. Stensil stated that nuclear re-investment “will limit the long-term growth of cleaner, safer and more affordable energy options.” A recent study commissioned by Greenpeace, the Pembina Institute, and the Canadian Environmental Law Association claims that renewable investment with a larger wind portfolio would be cheaper than re-investing in nuclear power.

The enormous cost overruns of nuclear power continue to be a point of contention even among those who are optimistic about the province’s expansion of FIT. “LTEP didn’t move us away from nuclear. We’re actually paying other jurisdictions to use the surplus electricity at night from reactors that can’t be throttled down,” Mike Brigham, Chairperson of the Toronto Renewable Energy Co-op [TREC], told The Dominion.

TREC helps incubate locally owned solar and wind projects such as Windshare, a 100-metre-high turbine located along Toronto’s waterfront that produces enough energy to power at least 100 homes per year. An urban project like Windshare could never be built today, said Brigham, because of recent legislation prohibiting the construction of turbines within 500 metres of residential areas. As a result, groups like TREC have invested a significant amount of resources in solar installations, which can be deployed in both rural and urban areas.

At the other end of the fuel cycle is nuclear waste. In late January, New Brunswickers held a rally outside the NB Power headquarters in Fredericton, protesting the costly and potentially hazardous errors made in the ongoing reconstruction of the Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station. Located along the northern shore of the Bay of Fundy, only some 20 kilometres west of Saint John, Point Lepreau has a history of controversy, including a 1997 leak in the reactor core that produced a 75-day shutdown.

Atlantic organizations joined forces with the Nuclear Out of Quebec Movement (MSQN) to denounce Hydro-Quebec’s plans to remodel the Gentilly-2 Nuclear Generating Station in Becancour, 100 kilometres northeast of Montreal. They point to the controversial Point Lepreau reconstruction, slated to go back online in 2012, as reason enough for their opposition.

A joint press statement released by the MSQN and Atlantic organization representatives on January 26, 2011, the same day as the NB protest, said Gentilly-2 will be “far more costly than anticipated, and will create entirely new categories of radioactive waste that will have to remain in Quebec for permanent storage because the federal government takes no responsibility for such wastes.” The release also noted that the upgrades would add approximately 100 tonnes of high-level waste to the existing stockpile for every year of continued operation.

In terms of policy at the federal level, the “Creating the Economy of Tomorrow” budget document on Canada’s Economic Action Plan website outlines investments in science and technology, as well as in universities and research. While improving infrastructure at universities and colleges has the highest stimulus value for 2009-10 out of the 13 categories included, “Strengthening Canada’s nuclear advantage” is in second place at $351 million. Right behind it is “Transformation to a Green Energy Economy” at $200 million. The budget allotment for nuclear development is over ten times more than the amount designated for the Canada Graduate Scholarships program.

The development of sustainable technologies is constantly redefining the potential for “green” energy in Canada; however, as of yet, the term has not captured much real meaning.

Justin Saunders is an information technologist and journalist based in Toronto. Sandra Cuffe is a freelance writer, a contributing member of the Vancouver Media Co-op, and a coffee-lover.

This article was published in A People's Forecast: The Climate Justice Issue, our 2011 special issue. To read more articles as they are published, click here.

Good power bad power

Good power bad power II

Revolving Door

Moira Peters — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 13:52:36 +0000

Sex offender who targets Aboriginal girls should not be released, say Vancouver residents

VANCOUVER—A growing number of Aboriginal teenage girls are speaking out about their survival of drugging and sexual assault by Martin Tremblay. On February 3, 2011, relatives and friends once again rallied in support outside the Vancouver Provincial Court at Main and Hastings Streets in Vancouver.

"I hope our message gets through to the federal government and the provincial government to tell them the people are now finally speaking up instead of sitting back, hoping for the worst," explained Hank Bee, who had come to the rally from the BC interior to represent the family of his niece Kayla Lalonde, who was murdered last year.

Tremblay is in custody and facing drug charges. His bail hearing was postponed again and is now scheduled for February 16. Tremblay was arrested along with several others in a January 2011 sweep by the Vancouver Police Department's (VDP) "Project Rescue."

Both Project Rescue and "Project Tyrant" targeted some of the city's most predatory and violent drug dealers. While the VPD reports that the arrests are the outcome of their outreach with some Downtown East Side organizations, the police and courts face ongoing criticism for their failure to protect Aboriginal girls and women from sexual and physical violence.

"This place is bullshit; [it's a] revolving door. He'll probably get out within the next couple of months, 'cause that's the way it is," said Bee in an interview with the Vancouver Media Co-op outside the Vancouver Provincial Court at 222 Main Street.

In December 2003, Tremblay was convicted for five counts of sexual assault against Aboriginal teenage girls. However, he was released from custody the following year, after serving only a fraction of his three-and-a-half-year sentence.

Several Aboriginal teenage girls have spoken out to police and media over the past year, denouncing Tremblay for drugging and sexually assaulting them since his previous release.

A white francophone man in his mid-40s, Tremblay is known by youth as "Uncle Martin," "Frenchie" and "Dad." According to the girls and women in the DTES who have been speaking out about Tremblay, he has been preying on young Aboriginal teenage girls in East Vancouver for years, luring them to his home with promises of free alcohol and drugs.

Finally, on February 11, 2011, the VPD released to the public a photo of Tremblay. "We believe it’s necessary to put out his picture because he goes by different names. He has used 'Daniel Simard' and changed his name from Martin Tremblay to Joseph Walter Martin Tremblay," said Inspector Dean Robinson in a public statement from the VPD.

“Extraordinary situations call for extraordinary measures,” said Chief Constable Jim Chu, of the unusual step of releasing a photo of a suspect of a continuing investigation.

Those seeking justice for girls assaulted and killed feel police response to those crimes is still lacking. "How many girls do they need to keep him behind bars? A hundred? You want a hundred dead? You know, like, isn't one assaulted good enough? Isn't one dead good enough?" said Aboriginal Front Door volunteer Bobbi O'Shea after the rally on February 3, 2011.

Statements by young girls reveal detailed accounts of Kayla Lalonde and Martha Hernandez's "visits" to Tremblay's residence.

In 2009, Lalonde survived a sexual assault by Tremblay while she was unconscious and woke up naked at a bus stop downtown. Details of this incident were publicly revealed to the media by another 17-year-old Aboriginal teen, who also shared details of her own survival of a sexual assault by Tremblay.

On March 2, 2010, 17-year-old Martha Hernandez died from a lethal dose of drugs and alcohol inside Tremblay's home in Richmond. That morning, 16-year-old Kayla Lalonde's body was discovered on a street in Burnaby. Forensic evidence determined her cause of death to be a similar lethal dose of drugs and alcohol.

"I don't know why we haven't heard that, you know, he's up on any charges [related to the sexual assaults or deaths] yet," said O'Shea, who also told the Vancouver Media Co-op that she personally knows nine Aboriginal teenage girls who have been sexually assaulted by Tremblay.

"I feel failed by the system," continued O'Shea. "If it was a white person from the West Side, and a Native person who victimized them—one person!—[the Native] would have been locked up, closed, case closed. But because it was on the other foot, it's like, 'Who cares?'"

According to a Justice for Girls press release on the day of his sentencing on December 4, 2003, Tremblay had originally been charged with 18 counts of sexual assault and administering a noxious substance to five Aboriginal girls between the ages of 13 and 15. Then 38, Tremblay admitted to sexually assaulting and videotaping the girls while they were unconscious in his home. He was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in custody and 18 months probation.

"We are disappointed with the sentence but not surprised by it because the courts rarely treat violence against Aboriginal teenage girls seriously," said Justice for Girls advocate Annabel Webb in the December 2003 press release.

"What is shocking however is the degree of racism and sexism that is tolerated in the defence of men who commit sexual offences against Aboriginal girls," continued the statement.

Media reports indicate that Tremblay did not in fact serve his entire sentence, and that he was released in 2004. Although Justice for Girls advocated for his sentence to include restrictions against contact with minors, their motion was not accepted. Police refused to issue a warning upon his release, and Tremblay has not been included in the Sex Offender Registry in Canada.

Media reports also indicate that between his release in 2004 and his arrest on drug charges in 2011, Aboriginal teenage girls in the legal custody of the BC Ministry of Children and Family Development were living with Tremblay in a house on Pender Island. Not long before his 2011 arrest, a Richmond housemate told CTV that Tremblay was planning to move to Montreal.

"Two girls are dead," said O'Shea, her voice shaking with rage and grief. "It's very sad. I'm a parent. When you look at another parent who's Aboriginal, and their child is dead because of this man, and he's going to get out of jail... It's despicable. It's disgusting. I don't know what to say to them but to cry, because it's so heartbreaking," said O'Shea, tears sliding down her cheeks and mixing with the rain on Main Street.

"At first the police thought they were dealing with two separate cases, but it turned out to be the same case. And, at the time, one of the girls was actually my girlfriend," said Steven, a young Aboriginal who lives in Vancouver and who only wanted to give his first name, to the Vancouver Media Co-op after the rally.

"When this guy gets prosecuted to the full extent of the law, that's when we know our girls will be safe again. That's when we'll know it'll be just this much safer, just to get that one guy off the streets again. That's what I look forward to here," he said. The young man is still hoping for justice almost a year after the murder of his girlfriend and their friend.

The statements of relatives and friends of the young women reportedly sexually assaulted and murdered by Tremblay echo the voices of many others from Vancouver's Aboriginal community, First Nations around the province and Downtown East Side women's organizations.

The inaction of police forces and government agencies in the face of startling numbers of missing and murdered women in British Columbia and across the country is highlighted in the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry this year. Commemorative events are ongoing around the city, leading up to today's 20th annual Women's Memorial March in the DTES.

"March 2 will be one year [since the murder of Kayla Lalonde and Martha Jackson Hernandez], and that's when we'll have our very first celebration; [that's] when I come out of mourning for the first time. It's a long process," explained Bee.

"Keep him in jail forever, because that door does stop eventually," said Bee.

"It has to stop. Now." said O'Shea, as the rain continued to fall in Vancouver's Downtown East Side. "You have to show these youth, these Native youth, that they mean something, that they're not throwaways. And that their people didn't die and nothing happened."

Sandra Cuffe is a contributing member of the Vancouver Media Co-op (VMC) who lives in the Hastings Sunrise neighbourhood, in unceded Coast Salish territory.

This article was originally published by the VMC. A video of the interviews conducted February 3, edited by VMC contributing member Masrour Zoghi, can be viewed on the VMC website. Catch VMC coverage of events related to the BC Missing Women Commission of Inquiry and today's 20th annual Women's Memorial March in Vancouver. Background information on many issues addressed in this article is available from the Vancouver Media Co-op, and from groups such as Sisters in Spirit, Aboriginal Front Door and Justice for Girls.

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The Silence Was Deafening

Moira Peters — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 09:35:46 +0000

BC's Missing Women Commission of Inquiry hears from Downtown East Side

VANCOUVER—Passionate criticism and painful stories rang out at two Community Engagement Forums held at the end of January in Vancouver and Prince George, BC, leading up to this year's Missing Women Commission of Inquiry. Indigenous women spoke up to demand justice for their beloved family members and friends who have been disappeared or murdered.

More than 100 people gathered in a large hall at the Japanese Language School in Vancouver's Downtown East Side (DTES) on January 19, 2011. The Commission's process, content and the naming of Wally Oppal as Commissioner were subject to passionate criticism and scrutiny by those who have been demanding justice for their relatives, friends and colleagues for over 30 years.

"Mr. Oppal, this has been a long journey for a lot of us women," said Walk4Justice co-founder Bernie Williams.

The Commission was set in motion in September 2010 by an Order in Council by the BC Lieutenant Governor in Council. The terms of reference instruct the Commission to inquire into the investigations by police forces into the disappearances of women from the DTES between certain dates, inquire into the Criminal Justice Branch's 1998 stay of proceedings on charges against Robert Pickton, recommend changes concerning investigations into cases of missing women and suspected multiple homicides in BC and recommend changes concerning homicide investigations and inter-agency co-operation.

"Why did it take 69 women [in BC], and over 4,000 women nationally [for this to get started]?" asked Williams.

Sold into the sex trade in Prince Rupert as a child, Williams' mother was murdered in 1977. Two of her older sisters were murdered in the 1980s. Williams and other relatives of missing and murdered women out west and across the country have been organizing for decades, demanding justice and, among other things, a public inquiry concerning all missing and murdered women since the 1970s.

"I don't trust this whole Commission. I don't trust it," added Williams, to loud applause by those in attendance.

Many women regretted the choice of date and time for the community engagement forum. It was originally postponed, but then scheduled for one of the worst days possible: Wednesday, January 19, 2011 was a welfare payment day, complicating many local residents' and others' availability to participate.

The terms of reference of the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry were repeatedly called into question.

The inquiry into the way investigations of disappearances of women in the DTES were handled by police forces deals with investigations specifically between January 23, 1997 and February 5, 2002. This narrow window excludes dozens of women who have been murdered or gone missing both before and after the chosen dates. Furthermore, the infamous Highway of Tears—Highway 16 running east-west in northern BC—is not mentioned by name in the terms of reference, despite the fact that young women, almost all of them First Nations, have been going missing along that highway for decades.

"I started a movement in northern BC. My niece went missing on the Highway of Tears," began Walk4Justice co-founder Gladys Radek.

"Our people, our families, they need to know what happened," said Radek, echoing the voices of so many relatives of missing and murdered women. "The system is failing."

"I got home at 1:30 am last night and I checked my email, and there was a 'missing' poster. That missing poster was the mother of someone who went missing on the Highway of Tears five years ago," she continued, choking back tears.

Radek went to school with Maggie Layton, the woman whose photograph appeared on the missing poster in question. The two women walked alongside each other during a previous Walk4Justice—Layton, to demand justice for her missing daughter, and Radek, for her niece Tamara Chipman, and for all of the missing women and their families.

At the Community Engagement Forum in Prince George on January 21, 100 people gathered to speak out about their experiences, stories and their missing and murdered daughters, sisters, mothers, nieces and others. The Commission, and particularly Oppal, was urged to visit the communities along the Highway of Tears. A few speakers at the Vancouver forum echoed the request for the series of cases in northern BC to be dealt with thoroughly, and not simply as an aside to the inquiry into what occurred in the DTES.

"The women of the Highway of Tears need their own inquiry," asserted Alice Kendall of the DTES Women's Centre.

"There is poverty across Canada. There is racism across Canada," she said, but adding that "something happened in this specific neighbourhood [the DTES]."

In large part, the Commission of Inquiry arose out of the explosion of media attention concerning missing and murdered women during Robert Pickton's arrest, the high-profile forensic investigation of his pig farm in Port Coquitlam and his subsequent trial and conviction for the murders of six women. As does the Inquiry, media attention focused on a few sensational cases and issues, ignoring the vast majority of others.

The facts are undeniable. The overwhelming majority of missing and murdered women in BC are Indigenous women. As has often been the case with media coverage and investigations, the terms of reference offer no mention, analysis or instructions reflecting that reality.

With the exception of the sensationalist coverage of the Pickton case, the near complete failure of the police, media and government to take reports of missing and murdered women seriously, or to do anything about them, has continued for decades. Many women denounced the institutional racism of police forces and other institutions, which have resulted in the abuse and derision of families who report their daughters, mothers, sisters and others missing.

"The silence was definitely deafening. We could hear it," said Dianne George.

"How did the Commission of Inquiry come up with the dates of January 23, 1997 and February 5, 2002?" she asked.

The terms of reference arise from the principal goal of the Commission of Inquiry: to recommend changes to improve the investigations of police forces and the judicial system, as well as inter-institutional co-operation in the future. It reflects the Pickton case, but excludes many other women, families, perpetrators and systemic problems. The Missing Women Commission of Inquiry has in fact been dubbed the "Pickton Inquiry" by the media.

Several women came forward at the Community Engagement Forum to speak about their own experiences with Robert Pickton and other suspected perpetrators. They told harrowing stories of their interactions with Pickton and others, their sisters' and friends' visits to the infamous pig farm, and their treatment by the police when they came forward.

"I was treated as though I was making stuff up, as though I was delusional," recalled Terry Williams, adding that one police officer once told her that if she kept reporting information, she would be committed to a psychiatric institution.

The stories shared included experiences and incredibly detailed information, including the license plate of the van used by Pickton and others to abduct women, an Oregon license plate of another van seen abducting women and the location of Pickton's pig farm. Almost invariably, the response women and family members received echoed a comment made by Williams: when she had a license plate number of a van and a description of the man that she had seen abducting a woman from the DTES, "The cops would not take the information."

The history and experiences do not all relate to Robert Pickton. They do not all relate to the years between 1997 and 2002. Most of the women who spoke at the Community Engagement Forum expressed their frustration or anger at the exclusion of so many missing and murdered women, but also at their own exclusion from the process itself.

"What I think everyone here is saying is that those terms of reference are too narrow," reiterated Beverley Jacobs, emphasizing that she was not speaking as legal counsel for the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs (UBCIC), but as an Aboriginal woman.

"You have the authority, Commissioner Oppal, to change...those terms of reference," added Jacobs.

"We understand the dissatisfaction that has been shown here today," said Commissioner Wally Oppal, speaking on behalf of the Commission of Inquiry. "We want to see constructive changes made."

As the Community Engagement Forum came to a close, it was clear that relatives, friends, colleagues and neighbours of the missing and murdered women in Vancouver's Downtown East Side have been proposing constructive changes for years. Beyond their critiques and proposals for the official Commission of Inquiry, which is set to begin within a few months, they continue to organize and mobilize in the DTES, in northern BC and across the country.

The 20th annual Women's Memorial March for Missing and Murdered Women will be held again this year on February 14, 2011—Valentine's Day—in Vancouver's Downtown East Side. Everyone, of any gender, is invited to gather at the Carnegie Community Centre Theatre at Main and Hastings at 12:00pm, where relatives of missing and murdered will speak before the march begins at 1:00 pm. Two weeks of commemorative events began last week, on January 30, 2011.

Other Women's Memorial Marches, Sisters in Spirit vigils and rallies for justice will take place on February 14 in Edmonton, Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and dozens of other communities across the country.

Relatives and supporters will be joining the Walk4Justice once again this summer, walking across Canada to honour the missing and murdered Indigenous women from coast to coast, to raise awareness, and to demand justice. The Walk4Justice will reach Ottawa on September 19, 2011.

Sandra Cuffe is a contributing member of the Vancouver Media Co-op and based in Vancouver, in unceded Coast Salish territory. This article was originally published by the Vancouver Media Co-op.

Deafening Silence.Presentation

Deafening Silence: Crowd

"Everybody has a Voice"

dru — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 01:18:10 +0000

Images from the Mohawk community of Akwesasne

KAWEHNOKE, AKWESASNE, MOHAWK TERRITORY–As part of a national border security plan slated for 2016, the Canadian government is arming all Canadian Border Service Agency (CBSA) agents.

The Canada-US border runs through the Mohawk community of Akwesasne. Like many other communities, the Mohawks have never given up their rights to the land, maintaining traditional government and sovereignty separate from the Canadian state.

Months ago, community representatives contacted the government to express concerns about giving 9mm guns to CBSA agents. In the past, instances of harassment and racial profiling have been reported, but the response was minimal. In June 2008, CBSA agents violently arrested two Mohawk grandmothers, one of whom suffered a heart attack. Both refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Canadian court in Mohawk Territory. Charges against one were dropped and the second was released with conditions.

After the government refused to reconsider its position, the community set a deadline of midnight on May 31 for a resolution to the conflict.

The government of Canada responded to the deadline by presenting the community with an ultimatum shortly before midnight. Akwesasne could either accept the arming of the CBSA or face the immediate closure of the two bridges—and the international border. Approximately 400 Akwesasne community members gathered around a sacred fire and announced their united decision: "No guns for the CBSA in Akwesasne!"

Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan has not backed down from his position. "They'll have to accept armed border officers there. What we're looking at is a potential long closing, and as a result we are right now examining the long-term viability of that particular port of entry...and that includes moving it."

Sandra Cuffe is a vagabond freelance journalist, photographer and organizer originally from Coast Salish Territories. She is a contributing member of The Dominion and Media Co-op, and Honduras correspondent for UpsideDownWorld.org.

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