The Dominion - indigenous issues

Infographic: Northern Canada's Frontlines

Tim McSorley — Fri, 20 May 2011 14:42:02 +0000

This infographic 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.

BC Hydro-St'at'imc Authority Agreement Creates a Wave of Opposition

Moira Peters — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 05:17:30 +0000

Deal opens territory to hydro in new ways, say critics

VANCOUVER—A new agreement between BC Hydro, the province of British Columbia and the St'at'imc Chiefs Council was approved in a nation-wide vote last weekend, but a group of St'at'imc community members say they're still determined to stop the deal.

The six-volume agreement is said to have a net-worth of $210 million. It is payable over the next 99 years through a nation-wide trust and individual one-time payouts for each of the 11 St’at’imc communities.

Confidential talks between St'at'imc negotiators and BC Hydro took place over the last 17 years, and the contents of the agreement were released to St'at'imc people in January 2011. It went to a vote on April 9, 2011. An estimated 45 per cent of St’at’imc people participated, 72 per cent of whom voted in favour of the deal.

"The majority of our people didn't even know about [the agreement]," said Roger Adolph, who was chief of the Xaxli'p band for 21 years. “It was initialed off by the Chiefs in December of 2010, then they started having information sessions in January, February and March,” he said.

Mike Leach, Chair of the St’at’imc Chiefs Council, was one of the key negotiators of the agreement.

“It is definitely a good deal, because we're only dealing with one issue—we're dealing with only the impacts of hydro on the territory,” Leach said. “There is no extinguishment of St’at’imc rights to our lands.”

But the agreement does provide BC Hydro with certainty of access and possession to transmission lines and all their facilities on St’at’imc territory, which lies northwest of the Fraser Valley. St'at'imc territory, which has never been surrendered or ceded, is already home to three dams, two reservoirs and four generating stations, as well as 15 transmission circuits that make up 850 kilometres of transmission lines. In addition, BC Hydro has built 160 kilometres of access roads and four recreation facilities in St'at'imc lands.

“The agreement will provide BC Hydro and the Province of BC with operational certainty for BC Hydro’s existing facilities into the future,” reads a press release put out by the company last week.

“As I read it, Aboriginal title has not been extinguished, but it has been limited,” said Adolph, who is a vocal critic of the agreement, and says the recent agreement will change the parameters of struggle against future BC Hydro projects in St’at’imc territory.

"The Chiefs have agreed that if any individual, group or community that advances a title and right issue [against BC Hydro] through direct action, the Chiefs will come down on those people to stop them,” said Adolph.“It's right in the agreement, in the certainty agreement. I call it a gag order.”

A gag order has already been put into effect at the local level: on April 6, 2011, the publisher of the St’at’imc Runner was locked out of the office where she’s worked for the last five years. The reason given was that the monthly community newspaper ran a four-page ad, paid for by individuals, pushing for a “no” vote on April 9. This came just after BC Hydro provided St’at’imc Nation Hydro with a $500,000 “interim payment," upon the Chiefs’ initialing the agreement on December 17. These funds were used to promote and carry out its ratification.

Spokespeople for BC Hydro and the provincial Ministry of Aboriginal Relations and Reconciliation refused to comment on the agreement.

This is the first time that the St’at’imc people have, as a nation, made any kind of agreement with the province. This raises additional considerations: they now must officially form a nation-level government.

“In order to manage this agreement we will have to put into place a St’at’imc government,” said Leach, who at the moment is interim chair of the St’at’imc Chiefs Council. “Once we've agreed on a format for that government, which we're working on now just to be able to manage this agreement, cause there's a lot involved, there will be an election for a chair once that is done.”

“So if I decided to run, I become the chair, right?” he said, pausing for a moment before adding, “or maybe somebody else.”

But for some, signing an agreement before a structure with a mandate to represent the nation exists is putting the chicken before the egg.

“It's 11 chiefs getting together called the St’at’imc Chiefs Council, now they're calling themselves the St’at’imc Authority, and they don't have a mandate from the people to be there,” said Adolph. “The only mandate they have is for their individual communities, where they've been elected by their people under the Indian Act to run Department of Indian Affairs programs.”

As per the new agreement, a new St'at'imc Authority will be formally constituted with recognition by British Columbia, rather than through a St’at’imc process.

“There is no organization, there's no governance structure, there's no bylaws,” said Adolph in reference to the St’at’imc Authority. “They don’t even have an office, and yet the province and BC Hydro recognize the St’at’imc Authority as having the legal power.”

Adolph and others have promised that they will continue to fight the agreement. “There's a group of us and the group is growing,” said Adolph. “This agreement is more than just past grievances [about existing hydro projects],” he said. “BC Hydro got their wish.”

Dawn Paley is a Vancouver-based journalist. This article was originally published by the Vancouver Media Co-op.

St'at'imc power lines

St'at'imc.poster

Saving the Land, Saving History

Tim McSorley — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 06:11:25 +0000

Questions of archeological and spiritual significance rally community to protect Beaver Pond Forest

OTTAWA—On the last day of the first month of the UN-declared Year of the Forests, clear-cutting began on the Beaver Pond Forest (BPF), a section of the sacred and ecologically-unique South March Highlands (SMH) in the west end of Ottawa. Since January 31, 2011, 100-year-old trees have been cut, animals have died, and the living legacy of a potentially 10,000-year-old cultural site is being destroyed.

All this is occurring despite broad-based opposition from a coalition of local residents and community associations throughout the city, Algonquin First Nations communities, and several high-profile national organizations like the Sierra Club Canada and the David Suzuki Foundation.

According to Paul Renaud of South March Highlands-Carp River Conservation Inc (SMHCRC), the SMH is “the last wilderness area inside the urban boundary of Ottawa. It’s an area that’s incredibly biodiverse—it is home to 20 documented species-at-risk. If we cannot protect a small forest that’s unique in the world, [one] that has all these strong and compelling reasons to protect it, what hope do we have for all the other places that are vital to the maintenance of the environment that we require?”

The BPF section of the SMH is being cut in order to turn the area into a subdivision built by KNL Developments, a partnership between Urbandale Corporation and Richcraft Homes. Last-ditch efforts, such as two Algonquin warriors chaining themselves to trees, a sit-in at the mayor’s office, and about 20 activists forming a circle around a tree cutting machine, were the latest in a 30-year fight to protect the forest.

“The [BPF] clear-cutting is a violation of Algonquin law,” said Bob Lovelace, former Co-Chief of the Ardoch Algonquin First Nation. Lovelace, along with Daniel Bernard of the Amikwabe (Beaver) Clan, chained themselves to trees in an effort to stop the clearcutting.

“What we did was a natural response [to] the violence that is actually carried out against Algonquin First Nations, but also against the actual living things in there,” said Bernard. “The hundreds of thousands of animals that are actually living there and hibernating, this is their homes.”

The city is required by its Official Plan to acquire and protect environmentally sensitive areas, but says it does not have the money to do so in the case of BPF. Concerned residents of the area came up with a tentative stewardship plan to buy the land, which the outgoing city council considered as an option, but after a fall 2010 municipal election and with the developers not wanting to sell, the new council gave final approval to the development, saving a mere 80-metre-wide wildlife corridor to link natural areas on either side of the subdivision.

Before the cutting began, revered Algonquin elder Grandfather William Commanda declared, “This is a living temple, a place of Manitou, a special place of nature, and that precious reality also demands immediate protection and reverence.”

Spurred by Commanda’s words, Bernard led a one-day sacred fire ceremony at the forest in mid-January 2011, and a few days later, on January 19, he started a sacred fire at an entry point to the forest, a fire that burned for 11 days and was tended around the clock.

Bernard also held a four-day sacred fire at Queen’s Park in February, taking the message to the doorstep of the provincial government, who many felt had the responsibility to issue a stop-work order to allow for further archeological studies of the forest.

An archeological assessment for the developers was done by archeologist Nick Adams in 2003, as part of the approval process for the subdivision.

Between 11,000 and 9,000 years ago, the BPF area was an island, while much of what is now Ottawa was beneath the Champlain Sea.

Dr Robert McGhee, past President of the Canadian Archeological Association and recipient of the Massey Medal of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, conducted a review of Adams's assessment in 2010 and found what he termed a "fatal flaw": in his study, Adams had dismissed any potential for historical, pre-European-contact archeology on the site. Another review, led by a prominent local archeologist Dr Marcel Laliberte, echoed McGhee's concern and called for further study to be done in the area.

In addition, according to Renaud, “In 2005 [archeologist] Ken Swayze published a report showing a significant find adjacent to the KNL property that is estimated to be 10,000 years old.”

The city and province both have legal processes to stop the cutting and order more studies, but neither has acted on any of the post-2004 information, and each states that it is up to the other level of government.

The most recent archeological development is a February 13, 2011, paper from American historian/archeoastronomer William Sullivan, who judges a very high probability that the SMH could be a World Heritage Site, based on its characteristics and an analysis of a circle of stones found in the forest in 2010.

Ottawa is situated on the Kitchissippi (Ottawa) River, which starts over 1,000 kilometres northwest of the city and serves as the Ontario/Quebec provincial border as it flows down to the St Lawrence River. The lower part of the river’s watershed is recognized by many as the unceded and unsurrendered traditional territory of the Algonquin.

The government has a “duty to consult” with the Algonquin under Section 35 of the Canadian Constitution, as well as under the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The courts’ interpretation of the constitutional duty is that the government must uphold the honour of the Crown in consulting with Aboriginals—this responsibility does not rest with the developers. The province, on the other hand, has not consulted at all, and the city has only consulted in efforts to foster dialogue between the developers and the “Algonquins of Ontario.”

The “Algonquins of Ontario” (AOO), who are participating in a land claims process, do not represent all Algonquins in Ontario. Five eastern Ontario Algonquin First Nations not part of AOO sent letters to the government, asserting their own right to consultation, but they were ignored. Even Commanda’s letters to the city and province were only met with generic responses, despite his key position among the Algonquin people and the fact that he was awarded the Key to the City of Ottawa in 2006.

The fact that Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities are uniting over the protection of BPF makes it similar to other instances of resistance to development projects in eastern and southern Ontario over the past few years. This includes protests against a highway through the Red Hill Valley in Hamilton; a dump (Site 41) in Simcoe County, north of Toronto, that threatened the underground water supply; a business park development in Hanlon Creek, Guelph; and uranium exploration in Robertsville, about an hour east of Ottawa.

Shared characteristics of these battles include efforts over many years at dialogue with government (without much success), followed by direct actions in a final effort to stop imminent environmental destruction.

Mireille Lapointe, who became Co-Chief of the Ardoch Algonquin First Nation midway through the opposition to the uranium exploration in their territory, has come to see a bigger picture at work in these situations. “I think that the new colonialism is corporate colonialism, and we are all under this corporate colonialism," said Lapointe. "Where we [Aboriginal people] have experienced colonialism over a long period of time, I think non-Aboriginal people are now experiencing this colonialism and they’re realizing that the laws that are on the books are not really protecting them nor the environment that they want to protect, and I think that a lot of people are bewildered and wondering how this could happen.”

For more information on the efforts to save the South March Highlands, please see www.ottawasgreatforest.com, www.southmarchhighlands.ca, and www.union-algonquin-union.com.

Greg Macdougall is active in education, decolonization and community/activist infrastructure initiatives in Ottawa. His writings, including a printable Aboriginal Understanding booklet, can be found at www.EquitableEducation.ca.

Feather for Beaver Pond Forest

Beaver Pond Forest Drum Circle

Honouring Unfree Friends

Martin Lukacs — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 05:31:11 +0000

Prison solidarity for man charged in RBC arson

TORONTO—It’s two days before Christmas, and it's Matthew Morgan-Brown’s birthday. It’s hard for him to celebrate, however; his friend, Roger Clement, is being transferred to Millhaven Institution, where he will begin serving the rest of his three-year, six-month sentence for the firebombing of a Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) branch in Ottawa in May 2010. No one has heard from Clement for over a week, which isn’t unusual during transfers, but that doesn’t make it any easier for Morgan-Brown.

“It’s that time of year,” Morgan-Brown says. “It’s difficult to be separated from family and friends.”

Clement, a 58-year-old retired civil service employee, is well known to local activists from years of social justice organizing. He was sentenced on December 7, 2010, having pled guilty to the RBC arson, as well as breaking windows and ATMs at a different branch in February 2010. It’s an unusually harsh sentence for property damage crimes, given that both the defense and Crown attorneys acknowledged he took great care to eliminate any possible injury to people.

Morgan-Brown’s own arson and mischief charges in the May 18 RBC firebombing were stayed due to lack of evidence. He is now taking an active role in Ottawa Movement Defense (OMD), a group originally formed to support the three people arrested on June 18: himself, Joseph Roger Clement, and Claude Haridge. Haridge, who was never charged with arson but with careless storage and handling of ammunition, had his final day in court postponed in December 2010.

In addition to returning to his job at Ontario Public Interest Research Group (OPIRG)-Ottawa and devoting his spare time to OMD, Morgan-Brown says he is grappling with the psychological scars of the arrest and months of uncertainty. “I often put my emotions on hold, and then try to find time to deal with them later,” he says. “It’s just not a skill that I have. I don’t know how to deal with what happened. I know that it was a traumatic experience.

“It was also a learning experience. It was the first time I’d ever been in prison...other than two or three days when I challenged some conditions I’d been given. That was scary in itself, not knowing what was going on, what it would be like. I’d be a lot more prepared if I had to go to prison again.”

Morgan-Brown spent two months inside, including the addition of a 20-day sentence for participating in a Barriere Lake First Nation blockade on Highway 117 in 2008. Algonquins from that impoverished community in north-western Quebec are struggling to protect their land and environmental resources.

Morgan-Brown has long been an active member of Indigenous Peoples Solidarity Movement (IPSM)-Ottawa, a grassroots organization that directly supports Indigenous peoples in diverse struggles for justice. “Not being able to organize was really shitty. It’s very important to me,” says Morgan-Brown, who had limited communications with colleagues due to his bail conditions. “The day they lifted my conditions I started organizing again.”

His number one priority these days is supporting his friend Roger Clement. Morgan-Brown encourages activists to write to Clement and connect with him, as a way of showing support. “[Clement is] quite limited about what he can say,” he says. “I expect that he feels he can’t comment about his politics, which I know are super-important to him.”

One way to honour Clement, Morgan-Brown says, is to learn about and discuss subjects that are important to him. As a communist, he is passionate about the Cuban revolution. “I know that he’d like to see people becoming engaged, learning about different issues,” says Morgan-Brown. “He’d be happy if people were finding out about what’s going on in Cuba now and how to support [the Cuban people].” In this way, supporters can keep Clement involved in everyday organizing and dialogue.

As with writing to any prisoners, it’s extremely important not to speculate about illegal activities, or to act on behalf of a prisoner without their guidance. “He’s got a parole board hearing coming up,” Morgan-Brown cautions.

Complicating matters, the issue of police infiltration in Ottawa activist groups has been a source of rampant rumours. "As far as we know from the disclosure the lawyer saw, and from what we heard in [our] bail hearing, there’s no evidence he was involved in either of the actions Roger pled guilty to,” says Morgan-Brown.

Meanwhile, Morgan-Brown still finds it challenging to speak freely, although a publication ban on the case has finally been lifted. He’s on a relatively short leash, as his charges have only been stayed, not dismissed; the Crown still has a year in which it can reinstate them. “It’s definitely something I’m more mindful of than I usually am,” he says. “Hopefully I can find something positive in it, step back in certain situations where I would usually step forward, and encourage people to take on roles that I enjoy.” An avid public speaker, he is working to help other group members develop those skills.

Morgan-Brown was already familiar with prison issues through his activist work, but witnessing first-hand the ways in which imprisonment is so blatantly tied to race and class, he says, was eye-opening. “So many guys were in there just because they didn’t have the resources to get bail.”

Moving forward, Morgan-Brown aims to link his Indigenous solidarity and prisoner justice work more closely, starting with support for people arrested from Barriere Lake. “There are so many Indigenous people in the criminal justice system, and so many people being arrested for resistance,” he says. “I feel more emotionally connected to prisoners than I did [before], and I hope that Ottawa Movement Defense will find a way of connecting with other people who are supporting political prisoners, and the G8/G20 defendants.”

Sara Falconer is a Toronto-based journalist. She helps publish Certain Days: Freedom for Political Prisoners Calendar and is a member of Toronto Anarchist Black Cross, which produces www.4strugglemag.org, a zine of analysis by and for political prisoners.

For more information about supporting Clement and Haridge, visit http://www.exilebooks.org/en/links/ottawa-movement-defense.

Solidarity for friends