The Dominion - Zoe Blunt

Host First Nations Bite the Olympic Hand

Tim McSorley — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 06:51:31 +0000

Will the government meet its funding obligations before the Games?

VANCOUVER—It looked like the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Committee had everything sewn up tight: new venues built to order, ads from corporate sponsors, bylaws against ambush marketing, and smiling Indigenous people welcoming the world.

Now, the committee must be wondering whether it misjudged its First Nations "partners."

Hard on the heels of Indigenous protests during the Olympic Torch Relay, the Four Host First Nations (FHFN) surprised the province and its international partners with an announcement in January. Chief Bill Williams, chair of the FHFN, declared they will use the power of international media to shame the province into honouring its commitments to economic development.

Thomas Leonard, president of the BC First Nations Forestry Council, fired the first shot. In a letter to BC Forests Minister Pat Bell last December, he wrote, "The fact that your government and its federal partner are spending $3 billion to stage the Winter Olympics is merely exacerbating the frustration and anger felt by our communities as they continue to be told that there is no money in the pot to address their situations, which, as you are fully aware, are of a most desperate nature."

Williams explained the consequences for ignoring the FHFN's ultimatum. "There's going to be some 14,000 media people running around [at the Olympics]," he told the Globe and Mail. "Some of them are already contacting us. They want to know, ‘What's it like to be an Indian in today's world? How do you live?' We are going to start letting those reporters know the reality of the poverty we face."

The host nations—the Squamish, Musqueam, Tsleil Waututh, and Lil'Wat Nation bands—signed partnership agreements with VANOC years ago, and until now, they've submitted to the demands of the international committee on everything from cutting old-growth forests to wearing faux regalia. Some, like Kwakwaka'wakw activist Gord Hill, have accused the FHFN of selling out, and cheaply.

Raising the price at this late date doesn't make it right, and Hill calls the latest move an "attempted cash grab" by "native sell-outs."

"What is truly hypocritical is for Williams to now raise the issue of Native poverty, or to express concerns about the social conditions for Native people, after several years collaborating with VANOC and the 2010 Olympics," Hill told The Dominion.

Indeed, with the Olympic spectacle upon us, Indigenous leaders have upped the ante. Thomas said, "Our communities are tired of being told there is no new funding available—and that they might have to make do with even less than they already have—and at the same time being told they should be excited about the 2010 Winter Olympics."

Thomas asked the province for an urgent meeting to resolve the issue, and said if steps aren't taken, "The FNFC and its member first nations will reluctantly, but without hesitation, take advantage of the intense international media interest that will be focused on BC before and during the Winter Olympics."

Along with his position as chair of the FHFN, Williams is vice-president of the BC First Nations Forestry Council. He said the province is overdue in funding $6.2 million for developing aboriginal forestry businesses. According to a press statement, similar commitments from Ottawa for $135 million for mountain pine beetle salvage and recovery were pledged years ago but never materialized. A second letter to Federal International Trade Minister Stockwell Day requested a meeting to discuss the long-overdue funding from Ottawa.

Hundreds of reserves across Canada are mired in abject poverty, and thousands make do without safe drinking water, housing, health care, employment and education. Conditions for Indigenous people have only deteriorated since Vancouver and Whistler won the Olympic bid, Hill said. "During this period, hundreds of Natives have been made homeless in Vancouver, subject to police violence and harassment; yet where were Mr. Williams, the Four Host First Nations and their Olympic toad Tewanee Joseph? Kissing the ass of corporations, government and Olympic officials," he charged.

Investing in forestry is a delicate issue for the Squamish and other First Nations who have fought to preserve the forests of their traditional territory from industrial clearcutting. But in many parts of the coast, unprecedented liquidation of old-growth and second-growth forests is underway, and raw log exports are at an all-time high. Meanwhile, unsettled Indigenous land claims languish in limbo.

Growing nations are desperate for jobs and economic development, and this is the trade-off they face. The Olympics represent development, but at the expense of traditional lands, foods, and wildlife.

Today, neither the province nor the chiefs are speaking to the media—likely because they are attempting to negotiate a truce. The chiefs are certainly aware that when provincial and federal governments are confronted by intractable First Nations threatening action, they often give in to the demands. That's how Indigenous activists have won substantial concessions in the past.

In this case, the FHFN demands are dwarfed by the scale of the Olympic money-pit. The province's $6.2 million debt to First Nations forestry amounts to one-tenth of one per cent of Olympic spending. Ottawa's contribution to pine-beetle salvage in First Nations communities would be a little over two per cent of the budget for the Games. Clearly, the host nations have the position and the leverage to negotiate sweeping changes. But what they stand to win by what some have called "selling out" appears to only be crumbs from the master's table.

Zoe Blunt is a journalism school dropout on Vancouver Island.

For up-to-the-minute Olympics resistance coverage, check out the Vancouver Media Co-op, and the Convergence website. Follow the VMC on twitter!

Chief Bill Williams

"We Better Be Ready"

Tim McSorley — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 10:00:14 +0000

2010 resistance anticipates a rough ride

VANCOUVER—Earlier this year, RCMP officers with Vancouver 2010 security intelligence began knocking on doors in Victoria and Vancouver to interrogate social justice advocates about their plans for the Olympics. The officers had no warrants, no probable cause, and no due process. So far, they've gotten no information. But it appears that this tiny piece of the Olympic security machine has spent thousands of dollars on intimidating local residents.

The cost of security for the 2010 Games will be around $1 billion, and may be more, when the final tally comes due. A billion dollars could feed, clothe and house 20,000 homeless people for a year, or provide clean drinking water to dozens of remote communities.

Instead, the government is funding 16,000 police, soldiers, and security personnel. The Games will include helicopters overhead, military vessels offshore, large-scale road closures, miles of security fences, and almost 1,000 closed-circuit television cameras.

Two key figures in the RCMP's Vancouver 2010 Integrated Security Unit have extensive experience in using force to quell dissent.

Readers may remember RCMP Sgt. Maj. Hugh Stewart, nicknamed "Sergeant Pepper" after the 1997 Asia Pacific Economic Conference (APEC) at the University of British Columbia. Stewart won fame for unleashing streams of pepper spray on a crowd of students holding a sit-in outside the Leader's Summit. Stewart is also the master architect of the secret security plans for 2010.

Assisting Stewart in pepper-spraying students at APEC was Sgt. Gary R. "Bud" Mercer. The RCMP has named him chief of the Vancouver 2010 Integrated Security Unit.

Mercer, now an assistant RCMP commissioner, has shown up at crucial moments in other high-profile political confrontations. In 1995, he tracked two people who fled a pickup truck disabled by RCMP explosives outside Gustafsen Lake, where First Nations activists were occupying a Sun Dance ceremony site. That confrontation became the largest paramilitary operation in BC history. After a heavy one-sided firefight and a month-long standoff, the Ts'peten Defenders surrendered and 15 people went to jail.

In July 2000, Sgt. Mercer appeared at the climax of a siege in the Elaho Valley near Whistler, BC. Wilderness advocates were using civil disobedience to block loggers from accessing old-growth forests. Four environmentalists were perched in tree platforms supported by ropes and cables fifty meters up when Mercer pulled in with dozens of emergency response officers, sharpshooters, helicopters, and canine units. Mercer then led the charge to dismantle the blockade, using a long-handled cable-cutter to sever one of the cables attached to the tree platforms, causing them to shift and drop under the four tree-sitters. Branches and backup ropes stopped the platforms from falling further, and no one was hurt, but the action panicked the activists and witnesses on the ground.

One of the tree-sitters made a complaint, and charges of aggravated assault were filed against Mercer. The charges were quickly dropped, however, and the tree-sitter was later convicted of filing a false report—a charge that he and other witnesses still feel is a gross miscarriage of justice.

More recently, a massive 2008 police raid at the Bear Mountain Tree Sit on Vancouver Island may be a premonition of 2010 security operations. There, a protest camp next to a rare cave and endangered wildlife habitat was delaying highway interchange construction. The raid consisted of a small army of SWAT-type officers—armed with automatic weapons, sniper rifles, and dogs—storming the camp before dawn and forcing five terrified campers to surrender at gunpoint. All charges were later dropped. While there is no evidence thus far that Mercer or Stewart was involved, the raid draws from the same playbook they used years ago. Hundreds of military ration boxes left scattered across the site suggest a joint RCMP-military task force was at work.

In July 2009, Mercer spoke to Vancouver City Council about the threats the security police are preparing to handle. He made several references to past incidents of police violence against protesters, according to observers.

Alissa Westergard-Thorpe, an outspoken Olympic critic, found Mercer's speech disturbing. "Certainly all the violent incidents that Bud Mercer brought up to justify the RCMP's security plans—Montebello, APEC, WTO in Seattle—those were all incidents of police violence, not protester violence."

Chris Johnson filmed Mercer's presentation for B-Channel News. He said Mercer's Vancouver presentation was illuminating. "He's talking about police suppressing political demonstrations, not controlling rowdies or preventing terrorism, for example. He's describing their bag of tricks here. So we better be ready."

Zoe Blunt is a Victoria-based writer and environmental non-profit director.

For up-to-the-minute Olympics resistance coverage, check out the Vancouver Media Co-op, and the Convergence website. Follow the VMC on twitter!

Mercer

Briefly, the Olympics

dawn — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 06:20:06 +0000

On savages, skytrains, signs, smiles, speech and sleeping over

Pound's Found Foul

In October 2008, a media firestorm swirled around Dick Pound, yet this key member of Canada’s elite managed to face down the calls for his resignation. Today he remains both Chancellor of McGill University and Canadian representative to the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

It all started with an interview in Beijing conducted in French. Parrying questions about China’s record on human rights, Pound appealed to a colonial view of Canada’s history:

We must not forget that 400 years ago, Canada was a land of savages, with scarcely 10,000 inhabitants of European origin, while in China, we’re talking about a 5,000-year-old civilization.

It took two months for the interview to generate a reaction. Once it did, it took only a week for the IOC to exonerate Pound for a "misunderstanding," claiming he had "absolutely no intention of hurting anyone."

In what he termed an apology, Pound leaned on three points: that his use of sauvages meant something different in French; that he spoke from a basis in historical circumstances; and that his good intentions were all that really mattered.

"I thought that in doing a 400-year-old picture, you use 400-year-old words. If that hurts somebody today, I had no intention of doing that," he said.

By the same logic, Pound presumably would feel free to use "the n-word" to describe African Americans in the nineteenth century.

Olympic-sponsor newspapers the Globe and Mail and the Vancouver Sun quickly closed ranks on the issue. Their columnists offered lengthy contorted pleas for the matter to be dropped. Which it was.

—Joseph Jones

No Critics, Please

New "no-protest" rules will eliminate free speech as we know it through large sections of Vancouver, Whistler, and the Olympic Torch Relay route across Canada.

Vancouver has already adopted sweeping bylaws banning all forms of outdoor speech—except Olympic ads and "celebratory" signs—across most of downtown and near all Olympic venues (there are about 70 venues and "Olympic areas" in Vancouver.)

According to David Eby, president of the BC Civil Liberties Association, removing protections for free speech could lead to police abuse.

"Until the Vancouver bylaws came out [in July 2009], we wondered if our fears were overblown," said Eby. "Now, we're beginning to realize we may have underestimated the scope of the repression of free speech around the Olympics."

"You can only hold signs that you have a license for," Eby explains, "and the only signs that you can get a license for are 'celebratory' signs or official Olympic sponsors."

—Zoe Blunt

Skytrain Workers Rise

In preparation for the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, approximately 20 workers died, with as many as 1,000 injured, working on Olympic venues. Most of these were migrant workers. During the Beijing Olympics, approximately 3 million migrant and low-skill labourers were expelled from the city core.

In the lead up to the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver migrant workers are being similarly exploited. During the construction of the Canada Line Skytrain route, there were at least 50 workers from Costa Rica, Peru and Colombia whose pay, after long hours, worked out to be five dollars per hour.

Construction of the Canada Line was carried out by an Italian corporation named Seli Tecnologie. The primary contractor is SNC Lavalin, one of Canada’s largest arms manufacturers. In November 2007, the BC Human Rights Tribunal ruled that 30 foreign workers from Costa Rica, Colombia and Ecuador working on the Canada Line had been intimidated and coerced by Seli Tecnologie.

In December 2008 a group of migrant workers won a discrimination suit against SELI Canada, SCNP-SELI Joint Venture and SNC Lavalin Constructors (Pacific) Inc. for substandard pay and housing. The Tribunal found that “for two years the respondents’ treatment of the [workers] conveyed to them the message that they were worth less and less worthy than other employees because they were Latin American.”

Evidence included paying Latin American workers $10 less per hour for similar tasks and being crammed into motels while European workers were housed in upscale False Creek condos. The Tribunal found that “so long as they continued to work on the Canada Line project, they were unable to escape the discriminatory treatment that pervaded every aspect of their working and leisure lives.”

—No One Is Illegal Vancouver

Olympic Housing Woes

In the lead up to the World Exposition in Vancouver in 1986, hundreds of people living in single room occupancy suites in hotels were evicted to make way for visitors to the city. Real estate prices skyrocketed after Expo, and Vancouver’s housing bubble hasn’t lost steam since.

There is little doubt Vancouver’s housing crisis has worsened over the past two decades, and many believe that like Expo before it, the Olympics are to blame.

“As governments have been funding Olympic infrastructure like speed skating ovals and luge tracks, we’ve had an underfunding and setting up of barriers for people to access social assistance, which has also contributed to homlessness,” Am Johal of the Impact on Communities Coalition told The Dominion.

A report by the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) estimates that between 1988 and 2007, over 1.25 million people were evicted, forcibly displaced, or arrested on citations relating to homelessness in Olympics host cities.

But the COHRE report praises the Vancouver Organizing Committee’s “commitments in the field of housing rights,” which according to the organization, “go beyond any previously made by a city hosting a mega-event.”

“I think that’s a total lie,” said Johal. “If they actually think they have met their commitments, why is it that we have a doubling of homelessness since 2002?”

An estimated 1,150 units of low-income housing have been lost over the last six years, but the onus has been on those evicted and advocates to prove evictions are related to the games.

When a United Nations’ Human Rights Council delegation visited Vancouver in 2007, the final report on the mission stated the Special Rapporteur “remains concerned by information he received on the impact that the preparation for the Olympics could have on low-income housing residents, and particularly on low-income single resident hotel units situated in the Downtown Eastside neighborhood.”

—Dawn Paley

When Civil Liberties are ‘Propaganda’

When the Olympics comes to town, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) intends to stand in as the supreme government. This IOC remains unaccountable, issuing no audited financial statements and never paying taxes.

By charter and by contract, the IOC seeks to exert absolute control over the public spaces that it occupies. The primary concern is to block all advertising by competitors to its lucrative corporate partners and sponsors.

At the same time, the IOC shows little concern for how these policies damage civil liberties. Defense against corporate freeloaders seems to extend to brand protection against all criticism whatsoever.

The Olympic Charter leaves the contentious job of overriding fundamental human rights and freedoms to one thin but powerful clause:

No kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas. (Rule 51.3—Advertising, Demonstrations, Propaganda)

When former Mayor Larry Campbell signed Vancouver over to the IOC in July 2003, he consequently agreed to “no propaganda...within the Olympic venues or outside the Olympic venues...within the view of the television cameras...or of the spectators” (Host City Contract—Section 47).

Vancouver City Council followed up by passing an omnibus bylaw on 23 July 2009, spelling out in detail how the host city has altered eleven bylaws to comply with the civil liberties atrocities demanded by the IOC contract.

The sovereignty of the IOC over the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms has already been maintained by a judge who ruled against a legal challenge to allow women ski jumpers to participate in the 2010 Olympics. Even though the judge recognized such discrimination to be unacceptable in Canada, the IOC is considered a “non-party” and remains beyond the reach of the judgement.

To enforce sign and graffiti bylaws, pending BC provincial legislation (Bill 13, Miscellaneous Statutes Amendment Act, 2009) intends to allow officers to enter private property in Richmond, Vancouver, and Whistler with no consent—with minimal to no notice—during the months of February and March 2010.

That same legislation also intends to alter the Vancouver Charter (Section 333) to increase bylaw offence penalties to a draconian maximum fine of $10,000. Continuing offence could see the $10,000 fine multiplied by each day of offence, plus imprisonment for up to six months. (The existing provision for continuing offence is a maximum of $50 per day.)

—Joseph Jones

Smile, Vancouver

When the last of the Olympic athletes ski, skate and slide out of town, Vancouverites will be left with an unexpected legacy: 970 cameras.

“Security investment always leaves a good legacy of security for the country,” International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge told media gathered last February in Whistler, marking the one year countdown to the Games.

A March 2009 Vancouver city report includes the total cost of installing Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) systems. The Vancouver 2010-Integrated Security Unit (V2010-ISU) will pay $2.1 million, in addition to the $435,000 the province is contributing. But all costs do not appear on the balance sheet. There are also social costs, such as the diminished personal privacy in public spaces.

Although the Vancouver City report Privacy Games: The Vancouver Olympics, Privacy, and Surveillance points to the cruise ship terminal and entertainment district as key areas the cameras will be installed, the City of Vancouver and the V2010-ISU have not been specific regarding locations for all CCTV systems.

Andrew Pask, director of the Vancouver Public Space Network, cautions that CCTV cameras should only be seen as a “tool of last resort.”

The pattern of Olympic cities, including Athens, Turin, and Beijing, has been to retain surveillance cameras after the Games.

The City of Vancouver has admitted the $435,000 worth of cameras will not be temporary, but part of a “redeployable unit.”

—Francesca Galasso

Road Kill

dru — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 07:43:15 +0000

New highway blocked by protesting "Raccoons"

Yellow plastic sunflowers, two graffitied TV sets and an oversize truck tire line a meter-wide trench just past the pavement's end. They mark the boundary between the city and a protest camp occupied by a new generation of Canadian environmental protestors: the Raccoons.

The Raccoons are a ragtag mob of irregulars holding back a major highway interchange project designed to service Bear Mountain, a sprawling golf resort in Langford, just west of Victoria, BC. A few dozen dumpster-diving, trash-talking anti-authoritarians with a passion for undisturbed natural places have built a camp in the path of the new highway. The proposed interchange cuts through a pocket of forest packed with natural and cultural rarities: a sacred First Nations cave, a seasonal pond, garry oak meadows, arbutus bluffs, red-legged frogs and chocolate lilies.

Right now the Bear Mountain Tree Sit looks like a gloomy, swampy hobo camp, dotted with tents, tree forts at dizzying heights overhead, and a giant teepee covered with tarps. "A tarpee," notes one of the campers.

"This is the only example of eco-anarchist action in Canada right now," says Ingmar Lee, a Victoria environmentalist and camp supporter. "This is the grassroots, and it's a totally different kind of protest." Hundreds of people in the community directly support the camp with donations of food, camping gear, and funds for legal defense.

Almost all the Raccoons are under 25, and some are veterans of the Cathedral Grove treesit protest, which lasted two years and ultimately defeated a BC Parks plan to cut down giant trees to build a parking lot. Here, the first platform went up in April. Five more followed, and they are staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Kicking the protest camp off public property is a sticky legal issue, and so far no one has moved to start a court case. But Stewart Young, the gung-ho pro-development mayor of Langford, is ramping up his criticism. The mayor's rumblings peaked with Young accusing the campers of poaching deer and rabbits at the site.

Young said bylaw officers found a deer carcass near the camp in the woods. "We've respected their right to protest, but killing deer and rabbits is absolutely disgusting," Young told the Goldstream News Gazette in December. The city directed the RCMP and conservation officers to investigate and lay charges if they find out who is responsible. No one has been charged.

Two neighbors who live adjacent to the forest said it's not the campers who are killing animals. "There's been poaching in this area for decades," said an elderly neighbor on Goldstream Avenue who declined to give his name.

"We've called the conservation officers about deer carcasses a couple times a year ever since I've lived here," said Ron Rayner, a long-time resident who lives just north of the camp and the TransCanada Highway. "It's an ongoing problem."

Langford resident Bob Partridge is "skeptical" about the mayor's claims. He writes, "[J]ust now, as construction is supposed to begin on the Spencer Road Interchange, the protesters/activists who have previously been requesting donations of whole grains, have apparently suddenly become carnivores, slaughtering innocent animals in the woods of Langford?"

"Are we certain they are also not sleeping on duvets stuffed with spotted owl feathers?" Partridge asked sarcastically.

Some of the campers admit they eat deer, rabbits and even raccoons – but they insist they are not hunting . The meat is road kill collected from the TransCanada Highway, one tree sitter told A Channel News. Another pointed out the hypocrisy of building a highway that will result in many more animal deaths, while simultaneously trying to cast the environmentalists as bunny killers. A third wondered aloud if Stewart Young was vegan.

RCMP and bylaw enforcement officers tell us the Raccoons are "guests of the city of Langford," and they even allow them to have a campfire without a permit. Back in April, Young huffed to reporters, "They are on provincial land right now and it's going to be a year or so before we get to the point of having to go there, so they can sit there as long as they want." The protestors took him at his word and set up a kitchen, where they cook raccoon stew, venison steaks, and bunny burgers.

The tree sit is a thorn in Young's side, but the blustery mayor has bigger fish to fry. Langford City Council, in a "special" meeting convened two days after Christmas, made the unusual move of adopting two new bylaws, rather than just giving them first reading. One bylaw authorizes borrowing $25 million to build the interchange, while the second exempts the process from the usual counter-petition process, which gives citizens the right to challenge a decision.

The community's response has been a roar of outrage. Many residents of Langford, it seems, are more irate about the apparent abuse of process than about the imminent loss of green space, wetlands, and rare species. Dozens of volunteers are joining forces to canvass the city with a (non-binding) petition to reject the bylaws.

Steven Hurdle of Langford is organizing the petition drive. "While Langford may have found a legal loophole in declaring the interchange a 'Local Service Area' to let them avoid the referendum, we can still win the political war," he writes. "Langford council might find this an albatross that's unexpectedly hanging around their neck as this issue drags on."

Back at the camp, tree sitters and visitors are critiquing the City of Langford's annual levee tour. Every New Year's, politicos across the region open up their offices to the public, with free booze and food for all.

Well, not quite all. "They only had bag lunches for like 25 people," one complains. "I got there at the end and there was no more food. So I took all the tea bags that were left."

Another camper pipes up, "That punch was weak."

"Yeah, the punch was watered down, so we had to drink more of it to get a buzz."

"Yeah, that's why we brought our own cups. We did it up proper with the cups."

"We asked if we could take their poinsettias with us, but they said no. Then after a while, they gave us the poinsettias just so we would leave."

This article originally appeared in Only Magazine.

Barricade

Tarpee

Reaching the Breaking Point

dru — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 21:05:47 +0000

Mixed results on First Nations Day of Action

By any measure, highway blockades upstaged the marches and rallies on Canada’s Aboriginal Day of Action in June. Weeks of high-profile controversy climaxed on June 29, when small groups of protestors took over roads, rail lines and the country’s news headlines.

In the media, open conflict between “radical” and “moderate” indigenous leaders got plenty of airtime, although the underlying political issues received little attention. The issue of “violent” and “illegal” protest was the top story.

As early as May 15, Prime Minister Stephen Harper was warning that “violence —- or the threat of violence —- will kill any public sympathy for getting on and fixing this problem.” On June 28, Phil Fontaine made a last-ditch appeal to aboriginal people and non-aboriginal people not to use the national day of action as an opportunity for “violent confrontation and illegal road blockades.” But despite all the warnings, at the end of the day, no incidents of violence were reported.

Nonetheless, newspapers across the country tagged Shawn Brant, the leader of the Tyendinaga Mohawk blockade in Ontario, as a “hothead” (National Post), “rogue” (CBC) and “militant” (Canadian Press). CP went further, calling Brant a “lone voice advocating militancy” —- ignoring the dozens of Mohawks standing with him and hundreds more behind barricades across the country.

Against this backdrop, the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) were positioned in the media as moderates. The national organization formed in 1982 as a way for chiefs and bands to advocate for treaties, land rights, education, development, health, housing and more. But the AFN doesn’t represent all indigenous people: non-status natives are left out, for example.

The AFN initiated the Day of Action last December when the Special Chiefs Assembly passed a proposal calling on Canada to “respect the fundamental human rights of indigenous peoples to ownership and legal recognition of a rightful share of all natural resource wealth in Canada.” Chief Terrance Nelson of the Roseau River First Nation in Manitoba sponsored the resolution. By May, Nelson and the band were promising to block the CN Rail lines through the Roseau River Reserve.

In the weeks leading up to the protest, Phil Fontaine, the Grand Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, tried to rein in the blockaders. But Fontaine himself had to admit he couldn’t control what individual chiefs and bands choose to do. “Many of our communities have reached the breaking point. The anger and frustration are palpable,” he told reporters in May.

Fontaine, along with Harper, argued that blockades are counter-productive because they don't win support from the public. There is much more than public image at stake, however. Fontaine and other AFN leaders may have been aiming to win the hearts and minds of Canadians, but for the blockaders, the day of action had a different goal: to squeeze the government and corporations until they are willing to make real change. Blockades are economic actions, not media stunts, but they still got the lion’s share of the camera time.

They also got the government’s attention. Threats of action spurred the government into moving to resolve outstanding issues that have festered for generations.

On June 12, Harper, Fontaine and Indian Affairs Minister Jim Prentice announced a proposal to overhaul the native land claims system. One week later, the Conservatives settled the Roseau River land claim, prompting the AFN’s action leader to cancel the CN Rail blockade in Manitoba. And on June 30, the government designated former diplomat Janet Zukowsky as a special representative to the Barriere lake Algonquin community, days after members of that First Nation set up camp on Parliament Hill.

Astute observers will note the new initiatives do not address widespread poverty on reserves, and they don’t provide help for employment, health services, drinking water, or education. The announcements also fail to address a key demand of First Nations: implementation of the Kelowna Accord to address living conditions on reserves.

First Nations leaders warn if the status quo doesn’t change, many more protests are on the way.

“What Shawn Brant did is nothing compared to what is going to happen in the future if we can’t give our people hope for the future,” Nelson told delegates at the Alliance of First Nations annual general meeting in July.

In fact, a second wave of protests started only days after the National Day of Action. Writers for Warrior Publications, a West Coast-based group, slammed the AFN as colonialist collaborators and called for a boycott of the Day of Action. They organized Anti-Canada Day protests against a system they describe as corrupt –- a system that includes treaty negotiations, the band councils and the AFN itself.

Activists in Montreal, Guelph, Vancouver and Saanich, B.C., organized more blockades and protests on July 1, although on a smaller scale than those seen two days earlier. The Anti-Canada Day protests, however, lacked the media punch of the Day of Action protests, coming as they did after editors had moved on to other news priorities.

As summer temperatures climb, First Nations unrest continues. In B.C. alone, three more civil disobedience actions began in the first week of July. Members of the Sechelt Band occupied their band office, demanding the chief resign after he accepted an apology from RCMP officers who pepper-sprayed a crowd of soccer fans. In Lytton, band members blocked the highway to protest the loss of a ferry service, which left a community isolated. And a long-simmering dispute within the N’quatqua First Nation erupted again when protestors blocked an old-growth logging operation in Blackwater.

What the National Day of Action achieved was a flash point —- a focus and an impetus for activists. But as Fontaine learned, once people are galvanized into action, they may not be willing to fall into line behind their leaders.

Burning Flag on Anti-Canada Day

A Clearcut Answer?

hillarybain — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 01:23:33 +0000

A year after the Great Bear Rainforest deal was struck, some wonder if the political compromise was worth it

In February 2006, the “Big Greens” -- Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, Rainforest Action Network and ForestEthics -- along with many of their supporters celebrated a historic agreement to bring an end to the “war in the woods” in the Great Bear Rainforest in coastal British Columbia, Canada. But a year later, observers say the Big Greens’ agreement -- made under the campaign umbrella of the Rainforest Solutions Project (RSP) -- may be unravelling. Timber companies have ratcheted up the rate of clear-cut logging to unprecedented levels and guidelines for sustainable logging are not being implemented.

Ian McAllister of the Raincoast Conservation Society says the sudden increase in logging on the Central Coast is “unprecedented in 15 years."

“It’s unbelievable,” McAllister says. “It’s still just cut and run."

“Talk and log,” says Qwatsinas (Ed Moody), hereditary chief of the Nuxalk Nation. “It is not a victory; everyone loses.”

What’s at stake is the largest intact coastal rainforest in North America -- home to thousand-year-old red cedars, wolves, moose, mountain goats, grizzly, black bears and the rare white spirit (Kermode) bears. Protected from logging and development by formidable mountains, this wild and mountainous coastline stretches hundreds of miles, from the tip of Vancouver Island to the Alaskan panhandle. Whales and orcas swim through the channels and inlets. Indigenous communities, who in Canada are known as First Nations, fish, hunt and gather berries, as they have done here for thousands of years.

The Great Bear Rainforest deal was trumpeted as a wilderness legacy for our children and our children’s children in 2006. But reports from the grassroots suggest this “success story” has already turned sour.

Twelve years of campaigning

It was members of the Nuxalk Nation who first invited non-native environmentalists to their traditional territory to witness large-scale clear-cut logging in 1994. The following year, Greenpeace teamed up with the Nuxalk and other environmental groups to launch the campaign to save the place they named “the Great Bear Rainforest.”

By 1997, Nuxalk members and their allies -- Greenpeace, Forest Action Network, Bear Watch and People’s Action for Threatened Habitat -- were blocking logging operations on Roderick Island, King Island and Ista, which is sacred to the Nuxalk as the place where the first woman came to earth.

At dawn on June 6, 1997, workers for International Forest Products (Interfor) arrived at Ista to cut trees as usual. Thirty protesters -- including Nuxalk chiefs in full regalia -- greeted the workers with a blockade and a huge tripod towering over the middle of the road. One protestor was locked down to a cement anchor buried in the road, while two more were perched at the apex of the tripod.

In total, 55 people took over the road and shut down Interfor’s logging operation for 19 days. Twenty-four people, including six members of the Nuxalk Nation, were arrested when police arrived to enforce a court injunction.

In the 1990s, massive industrial clear-cutting was already taking place -- without the permission of First Nations -- under the auspices of the province, which simultaneously hosted a process called the Central Coast Land and Resource Management Plan (CCLRMP). The process was widely condemned as a “talk and log” exercise, until Sierra Club and Greenpeace set their sights on the planning committee. The groups won a moratorium in 1998 to suspend logging in intact rainforest valleys in the Central Coast while they participated in the CCLRMP process.

Meanwhile, environmentalists organized an international boycott of B.C. wood products around the world. As the boycott campaign picked up steam, companies like Home Depot and Ikea dropped their B.C. wood contracts, and the pressure was on to find a compromise.

“Customers don’t want to buy their two-by-fours or their pulp with a protester attached to it. If we don’t end it, they will buy their products elsewhere,” Bill Dumont, chief forester at Western Forest Products, told the Vancouver Sun in May 2000.

Also in 2000, the Rainforest Solutions Project (RSP) made a decision that changed the course of the campaign. According to Qwatsinas and others close to the Great Bear Rainforest, it was a serious strategic error.

While negotiating the Great Bear Rainforest agreement, the RSP formally agreed to end their protests, blockades and marketing campaigns. For the duration of the agreement, there would be no more high-profile blockades of logging operations on the B.C. coast, no lobbying international wood buyers and no hardball criticism of the process to the media.

Qwatsinas believes environmentalists gave up their only bargaining chip.

“They made the Central Coast an environmental-protest-free zone,” Qwatsinas says. “They’ve given away too much. It takes time to get the market campaign, the boycott campaign going again. Think about those strengths that were given up -- the power that they had in making demands, but it’s gone now. What else can they use?”

The Science of Compromise

RSP forged ahead with negotiations about how much land to protect and how to log the rest. With the Joint Solutions Project, the eco-groups collaborated with industry, government, communities, labour groups and First Nations to establish interim agreements, logging moratoriums and other small victories.

In 2006, the final agreement was announced with fanfare by a provincial government eager to paint itself Green after years of cutting park budgets and opening wilderness areas to development and logging. However, the Great Bear Rainforest agreement only commits to a "conservancy" designation for 32 per cent of the land -- part of which is open for mining and all of which may be open to roads, hydroelectric projects, tourism and other uses.

The parties pledged to base the agreement on the best independent science available and the province requisitioned a scientific review of the Central and North Coast flora and fauna to make recommendations about habitat protection. In 2005, the Coast Information Team found that a minimum of 44 to 50 per cent of the land area would have to be set aside to save ecosystems and wildlife. The decision to protect only 32 per cent may end up sacrificing the survival of the spirit bear.

Sierra Club campaigner Lisa Matthaus admits, “The protected areas alone are not sufficient, but this is a political compromise. You need to have a lot of parties in agreement. We wanted to meet the recommendations of the scientists [on the Coast Information Team], but we couldn’t.”

According to the deal, if one-third of the land base of the Great Bear Rainforest is protected, two-thirds will be logged. How it will be logged is still the subject of debate.

The logging industry agreed to phase-in new ecosystem-based management (EBM) logging practices by 2009. The RSP website describes "lighter touch practices" that would "protect old growth, wildlife habitat, sensitive watersheds and salmon streams."

Instead of starting to adopt gentler practices, it appears that some -- if not most -- timber companies are stripping the land as fast as possible before the 2009 deadline.

Even spokespeople for the RSP are expressing concern. An RSP press release in September noted that “some forest companies” still have not begun the eco-logging practices they promised three years ago.

Merran Smith of ForestEthics says, “These agreements are now at risk because a cornerstone of the agreement, ecosystem-based management, is faltering. We are tired of big talk with no action."

Division in the ranks

Qwatsinas calls the Great Bear agreement an “empty box.” Essentially, he says, the deal is only a framework. Ecosystem-based management is one of the details left undefined. Even when a set of practices is eventually spelled out, the definition will be subject to change.

The David Suzuki Foundation, one of Canada’s largest and most respected environmental groups, wouldn’t endorse the Great Bear agreement for this reason. “There are no guarantees that acceptable EBM practices will be adopted,” the foundation’s Bill Wareham said.

Other groups dedicated to the Great Bear Rainforest have walked away from the table, including the Forest Action Network (FAN), the Spirit Bear Youth Coalition, Valhalla Wilderness Society (VWS) and Raincoast.

Valhalla Wilderness Society has been collecting scientific data and working to protect the coast for 18 years. In a 2004 memo, society Chair Anne Sherrod blasted the RSP:

“In the future, while logging the unprotected ecosystems, timber corporations on the mid-coast will enjoy the signed agreement of two of B.C.’s largest groups, Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, as well as the U.S.-based ForestEthics and Rainforest Action Network. The groups that will continue working on additional protection on the coast -- such as VWS, Raincoast, Forest Action Network and David Suzuki Foundation -- will be blocked by the B.C. government and timber industry, using the agreement signed by the RSP groups as a ’done deal.’

"In the last few years, some environmental groups and activists have lost patience with this. After 15 years of seeing this happen, there should have been more learning, more awakeness to the crisis of what we are losing and how we are losing it. Instead we have the rhetoric and delusion of ’win – win’ agreements.”

First Nations people are also divided in their response to the agreement. Even within the Nuxalk Nation, the band council supports the process, while traditionalists like Qwatsinas and the House of Smayusta vehemently oppose it. Their dissent is further fuelled by the fact that the agreement fails to respect a protocol with the Nuxalk members who first invited Greenpeace to their territory in 1994. The protocol between Greenpeace and the House of Smayusta stated that no deals would be made without the approval of the First Nations partners.

“It was a bold move for Greenpeace Canada to ignore the protocol and make the [Great Bear] agreement without our approval,” Qwatsinas notes. “The sovereignty of Nuxalk lands and rights in our sense took a back seat.”

Elsewhere on the coast, the Kitasoo Nation has signed the deal and now plans to reap the benefits by logging Green Inlet, part of its traditional territory. Although almost half of Kitasoo land is protected, and Kitasoo Forest Products is cutting trees selectively instead of clear-cutting, the project has brought the wrath of Simon Jackson, founder of the Spirit Bear Youth Coalition.

The coalition says that the agreement has protected only two-thirds of the spirit bear’s crucial habitat and that the province is back-pedaling on its commitment to protect the rest. Jackson says the deal fails to protect the small spirit bear population, estimated at about 200 animals.

“Everybody thought the white bears were protected with that announcement,” he says. “A lot of great steps were taken . . . but it didn’t protect the spirit bear.”

Buying Silence?

Observers report that one of the conditions imposed on the negotiations was a ban on any public complaints or criticisms aimed at the process or any of the participants. The parties involved are not disclosing details about any such restrictions.

Qwatsinas suggests that more groups should be speaking out about the agreement’s shortcomings, but, “I don’t think they can. Some of their hands are tied, and the gag order is in place,” he says.

Besides the health and survival of the ecosystem, a substantial financial package is at stake for the Great Bear Rainforest agreement participants. The government and various foundations have pledged $120 million for First Nations sustainable economic development and conservation projects. Judging by the amount of glossy, self-serving literature generated by their offices, the RSP’s high-profile campaign, with the spirit bear as its mascot, appears to be serving the groups well.

Forest campaigner Ingmar Lee says that a cost-benefit analysis of the money spent on the Great Bear agreement comes up short.

“We’ve found organized, institutional environmentalism [in B.C.] has failed over the last four years to accomplish anything,” he says. “The successes have come from individual grassroots efforts that have basically bypassed the entrenched, bureaucratic, environmental institutions that have been sucking up the enviro-buck and just not getting the kind of accomplishments we need.”

Lee is not surprised that the RSP groups are getting “stabbed in the back” by government and industry apparently reneging on the spirit of the agreement.

“I just believe that we should be working together against these incorrigible forces of destruction rather than working together with them,” he says. “I have always advocated a broad spectrum of environmentalist effort, but the grassroots activist community has been excluded from the project from the start.”

Qwatsinas also makes a distinction between the grassroots groups and the “Big Greens”: “I’m glad there are some out there -- groups like Raincoast -- trying to make an honest effort, protecting the environment, who are not handcuffed by the process.”

Spirit Bear

First Nations Activist Dies after Release from Jail

hillarybain — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 21:33:57 +0000

In memory of Harriet Nahanee, age 71

A Vancouver Island community is in mourning following the death of an elder who fought to defend aboriginal rights and the environment. Activist Harriet Nahanee died at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver on Saturday, February 24, one month after she was sentenced to 14 days in jail for protesting the destruction of a wetlands for the Sea-to-Sky highway upgrade in the Coast Mountains of British Columbia.

The woman who once said that natives need an “aboriginal Malcolm X” to restore their pride will be sorely missed by many, including her husband, Ron Perry, her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Nahanee, age 71, was weak from the flu and asthma in January when B.C. Supreme Court Justice Brenda Brown ordered her detained at the Surrey Pre-Trial Centre. She was hospitalized with pneumonia a week after her release from jail. Doctors then discovered she had lung cancer. A news release on Sunday, February 25, briefly announced Nahanee’s death from pneumonia and complications.

Fellow activist Betty Krawczyk, age 78, was among those who attended a prayer vigil for Nahanee the night before her death. The women connected at the Eagleridge Bluffs blockade. “We were the only great-grandmothers there. It was up to us to bring it forward.”

In January, Krawczyk urged Justice Brown not to send Nahanee to jail. “I am very worried about Mrs. Harriet Nahanee,” Krawczyk wrote. “Mrs. Nahanee is not well. She has asthma and is suffering the after-effects of a recent bout of flu that has left her very weak.”

“Harriet believed Eagleridge Bluffs belonged to the Squamish Nation and she felt her band – the elected chiefs – were trading the land away for development,” Krawczyk said on the phone from Vancouver. “She wanted the land preserved for her great-grandchildren. She put her life on the line for that.”
Krawczyk wrote in her blog that Nahanee was “challenging the right of the elected chiefs of the Squamish Nation to negotiate away traditional Squamish Lands off the Squamish Reserve, lands that include Eagleridge Bluffs. This action potentially has serious ramifications for the entire band concerning who has the right to negotiate away traditional Squamish Indian lands.”

Nahanee was born on the Pacheenaht Indian Reserve on Vancouver Island in 1937. Along with the other children on the reserve, she was taken from her parents at age five to live at the Ahousaht Residential School. Five years later she and 300 others were transferred to Alberni Residential School. In 1998 she testified about the horrific abuse she and other native children suffered there, including beatings, rape and murder.

According to Lloyd Dolha, writer for national native publication First Nations Drum, Nahanee reported that children were punished for singing their traditional songs and speaking their own language. They were so poorly fed that they resorted to stealing vegetables from the root cellar. They were consequently beaten.

On December 24, 1946, Nahanee witnessed an altercation between Rev. A. E. Caldwell and a female supervisor at the top of a staircase at the school. They were arguing about a little girl who was running up and down the stairs.

“Mr. Caldwell was always drunk. You could smell the liquor on his breath all the time,” Nahanee recalled.

“He kicked the little girl and she fell down the stairs and died. That’s murder. There were other kids in the infirmary who had their appendix burst. That’s murder. Other children were beaten so badly they died. That’s murder. No one bothered to take them to the hospital.”

“The worst part of it was the loneliness. When you’re a little kid and you can’t reach out to your mom for a hug – it really hurts. It’s a wound for a lifetime,” said Nahanee.
Nahanee disclosed that she was sexually abused for four years in the school.

“I didn’t bring it to mind until 1984, when my daughter committed suicide. Then I began to look at myself. Why was I addicted to alcohol? Why wasn’t I a good parent?” When Nahanee visited a psychiatrist, she told him: “I think the church and the government did this to us deliberately in order to take the land and resources. It was all about keeping us dysfunctional, to keep us dependent.”

On February 23, the day before Nahanee’s death, the Indigenous Action Movement held a rally and prayer vigil for Harriet. Almost 100 people gathered outside the Supreme Court for a ceremonial walk to St. Paul’s Hospital.

The group prayed with drums and sang the Women Warrior’s Song outside Nahanee’s hospital room to give her support and strength. They brought flowers, cards and a large-scale photo of the Larsen Creek Wetlands at Eagleridge Bluffs before the wetlands were demolished.

Nahanee’s memorial service at the Squamish Nation Recreation Centre on Feburary 28 was attended by hundreds of friends and supporters. Her casket, adorned with the family regalia, was carried from the centre to begin the journey back to the Pacheenaht reserve.

On March 5, Justice Brown sentenced Krawczyk for her own part in the Eagleridge Bluffs protest. Krawczyk will serve 10 months at Allouette Correctional Centre.

In the weeks since Nahanee’s death, her name has become a rallying cry for justice in the treatment of natives and those who stand up to protect the land. Nahanee inspired generations of people who are determined to carry her legacy forward.

Harriet Nahanee