Damn. I was so getting used to thinking of Canada as Good America, and now they’re stomping all over indigenous rights in order to enable corporations to build more pipelines. Dudley Do-Right would be ashamed of the RCMP. Mexie explains it all.
Times like this, I miss Caine even more.
Oh, we’re friggin’ awful. The fallout from the residential schools will be felt for generations (and we have a senator who made herself famous for telling everyone to look at the bright side of them). Reservations still can’t get clean drinking water. The report on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls was a sham so the federal government wouldn’t actually have to do anything. First Nations people are waaaay over-represented in prisons for pretty much the same reasons African-Americans are in the States.
This happened this century – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saskatoon_freezing_deaths
Oh course here in Canada, this is old news.
We, at least, got out of this last mess without anybody getting killed. And without sending in the army as many of the leading idiots in the Conservative Party wanted to do. Heck, even the Ontario Provincial Police did not shoot anyone—I remember Ipperwash.
I am impressed at the woman’s wealth. She seems to say that she owns property all over most of Southern Ontario if she is a settler on all those traditional lands. /sc
Her first 2:30 minutes are nicely inflammatory but not terribly accurate. The next few minutes are fluff but when she gets into treaty rights she seems to make sense but i find her delivery so annoying I am quitting. Has she discussed The Royal Proclamation of 1763 ?
A good discussion of indigenous rights, treaty obligations and other issues is worthwhile.
I live on traditional Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee Territory, myself.
now they’re stomping all over indigenous rights in order to enable corporations to build more pipelines.
Duh, this is so simplistic that it might be coming from your president.
This set of protests seem have originally been based on very valid issues in Wet’suwet’en territory complicated by internal disputes in the Wet’suwet’en nation leading to a complete balls up.
Canada has a long and distinguished record of attempted (fairly successful?) cultural genocide, discrimination and general exploitation of First Nations peoples but stomping all over indigenous rights in order to enable corporations to build more pipelines. does not apply in this case.
Now we could talk about stealing burial grounds for the golf course in Oka back in the 1990’s, but that started out as a land grab by the municipality in Oka.
BTW, if anyone is interested in what traditional lands they live on in North/South America or Australia see https://native-land.ca/.
@Jrkrideau: I checked the map for Suriname. The Matawai mentioned are not American natives, but marroons – descendants from people who successfully escaped slavery.
The natives are
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples_in_Suriname
Their rights are by no means guaranteed, which causes huge problems because of Brazilian and non-native Surinamese gold diggers and hence mercury pollution.
@ 1 Tabby Lavalamp
we have a senator who made herself famous for telling everyone to look at the bright side of them
I am sure Auschwitz built character!
Did she not, at least, get kicked out of caucus? Even Cons occasionally feel, or feign, shame.
For a horrible never-ending scandal there is Grassy Narrows and mercury poisoning in Northern Ontario.
@ 3mnb0
Thanks but don’t tell me, tell the map-maker!
I think it may have started out as a one-person project and he can probably use all the feedback he can get.
I imagine it gets horribly complicated as peoples migrate become refugees and so on. I think the map maker is Canadians. He can use any local knowledge available.
jkrideau – I just checked and yup, she’s still kicked out of caucus. Also, last month she was suspended without pay from the senate for not completing anti-racism training.
Checking that out, I found this little tidbit… “Beyak said that she identified as Métis because her parents adopted an Indigenous child…”
There aren’t enough fucks to say and not enough volume to say them with.
While I admire this woman’s devotion to her cause, she failed to mention the part where
1) The land holders all agreed to the pipeline before it started getting built
2) The hereditary chiefs, who, as you can tell by the name are not elected, and some supporters of these chiefs acted independently of the elected councils in an attempted shakedown of Coastal Gas-Link to get more money and power for themselves.
3) The Supreme court of Canada weighed in on the side of the elected chiefs and coastal gas-link that the blocking of the pipeline was illegal.
In this case, it’s a good thing the conservatives here weren’t in power, as it likely would have led to unnecessary confrontations across the country. AIt seems to have been dealt with largely without violence- though perhaps it just got overwhelmed in the news cycle.
Canada has a lot to make up for, and continues to bungle its responsibilities to indigenous peoples, but treating these issues simplistically is preventing meaningful progress. Even something as basic as water and housing is very complicated when you have communities that are distant and impoverished, (and yes, this situation was created intentionally by colonialism) and who are looking for solutions that don’t involve changing either location or economy. Situations involving power struggles such as this one, no differently than when you see power struggles in other communities, contribute to the problems they already have.
Should Canadians be proud of their relations with indigenous peoples? – no, we have done, and continue to do much harm, but should we jump on every bandwagon against every corporation? We can do better, but not without actually looking at the evidence.
Canada is good America in the sense of “didn’t have the mass enslavement of people from Africa and the consequences of that”. And some of that is big – for instance, Canada actually has public health care, since they weren’t desperate to keep it away from anyone. But all the other stuff, from genocide toward Natives to internment of Japanese, is pretty much the same.
A few years ago my wife and I were in Cape Breton. The M’iqmaq nation had a museum that we visited. I was astounded that the experience of the First Nations was as horrific as in the US.
I have said this before on these posts. please stop fetishizing canada. we may do some things a little better or at least different but we have serious damage.
Rob Bos: our prime minister has way better hair than his US counterpart.
I’m reading a book called “Blood Moon” about the plight of the Cherokee nation in the 1800’s… It’s a very complex and similar situation where there is one smaller portion of the tribe (who are mostly well-to-do, mixed-ethnicity) seek concessions with the US federal government, and another faction (who are predominately poor, “full-blood”) who refuse to concede at all costs… This essentially enabled the US govt to sign a treaty with the smaller portion, making it “legal” to remove all of tribe, at great cost of life. It also led to a tribal civil war where each faction led reprisals against the other.
Now, it’s not as simple as one side of the tribe was good and the other was bad (according to this one book)… The “treaty” side believed that they were saving the tribe from further harm and ensuring financial compensation, since the individual US States had already been forcibly evicting Cherokee for some time (in contravention of a US Supreme Court decision that Jackson refused to enforce). So the two factions basically arose out of a no-win situation created by the US States and Feds.
I think that’s somewhat similar to the pipeline situation as well with the hereditary chiefs and elected ones. Without a robust way to ensure legitimacy, there will always be aggrieved parties, and often justifiably so. It’s not a situation with simple solutions.
From my perspective, the pipeline should never have been built. It seemed to make sense 15 years ago when oil prices were high enough to justify pulling the stuff out of the ground, but as crude prices have tanked, it’s becoming more costly to extract the stuff than to sell it.. But we have to keep the gravy train rolling, so in steps the government to prop up a failing industry hopped up on cheap money. The Canadian Oil and Gas “boom” is now an albatross around all Canadians’ necks.. Should have been investing in more sustainable long-term industry.