Preliminary Historical Research on Treaty One

(This comes directly from my thesis, thought I’d share, it was written today and rather rough. Conclusions may change as it is vetted by other scholars)

The Evolution of the Indigenous Negotiating Position

As Jean Friesen argues, in Magnificent Gifts: the Treaties of Canada with the Indians of the Northwest 1869-1876, understanding Indigenous agency is key to understanding how the process of negotiating Treaty One took place and assessing the outcomes of the treaty process is fundamental to understanding its implications and the spirit and intent of the Indigenous peoples. Friesen argues that understanding Indigenous agency helps to provide a fuller picture of what transpired, and prevents the historian from viewing Indigenous peoples as ignorant and helpless victims.[1] To understand the spirit and intent of the Indigenous peoples it is critically important to understand what transpired in the negotiations.

The original Indigenous position that was articulated at negotiations is far different from what they were compelled to settle for or even what makes it into much of the literature on liberal approaches to treaties or recognition. D. J. Hall, in his article “A Serene Atmosphere”? Treaty 1 Revisited, provides as an appendix the record of the negotiations released by the Manitoban on the 5^th and 12^th of August 1871. The Indigenous peoples present at the negotiations initially presented claims for land that totalled almost two-thirds of the provincial land. The reserves were in places of their choice and were very large.[2] The government promised them the right to hunt on any unoccupied lands,[3] and that Métis would receive additional land tenure and compensation, not included in these negotiations.  What is clear from the partial transcript of the negotiation is that the Indigenous peoples entered negotiations with the understanding that they would retain the majority of their lands. Secondly, it is clear that the Canadian government entered negotiations with the position that it had the right to determine how much land would be left for the Indigenous and that it was already inevitable that the settlers would take the land they needed. The Canadian representatives felt they were the ones offering the Indigenous the land, rather than the inverse. The Canadian government essentially threatened a take it or leave it agreement with the Indigenous.[4]  In my analysis this is a threat of annexation without compensation.

Historian Sarah Carter argues that the Canadian government failed to warn or explain the jurisdiction and implementation of the Indian Acts in any of the negotiations. In the case of Treaty One the negotiations made no mention Gradual Enfranchisement Act (1869). Subsequent negotiations did not mention the Indian Acts passed in the later 1870s.[5] What is central to understand is that the Canadian state was asserting jurisdiction over Indigenous peoples inside its borders and in negotiation refraining from informing the Indigenous peoples about legislation it would be subject to that was passed 2 years previous to signing treaty. This racialized legislation which allowed it to govern Indigenous nations inside its claimed territory was hidden from Indigenous peoples at negotiation. The Gradual Enfranchisement Act was the first to contain the imposition of western democracy on Indigenous peoples. This in my analysis does not qualify as a context from which signing was done with informed consent.

So the Indigenous negotiating position was not fully informed of the context in which it would be subject to, and was forced to respond to the threat of annexation without compensation by the Canadian representatives. Within these parameters the Indigenous negotiating position shifted dramatically from one of land maintenance to that of attempting to secure a guaranteed income for its members to smooth the forced transition from a gatherer and hunting society to an agricultural society.[6] The reader has to understand that this was a conscious response on the part of the Indigenous spokespeople when they came to realize that nowhere in this negotiation was there any space for their original demands. What I also want to make sure is clear in my analysis is that this ought not to be considered the spirit and intent of the Indigenous position upon coming to engage in treaty. The spirit and intent of the Indigenous position upon beginning negotiations of Treaty One was to maintain their way of life and the vast majority of their land-base forever. Only upon recognizing that that was not possible in relation to the Canadian state’s position did they change their position.[7] These changes in no way ought to reflect or come to represent the overall intention of the Indigenous or be the only positions studied when determining what constitutes reparations or justice.

It is also important to acknowledge that what made it into the text of Treaty One and what was actually agreed upon differ significantly according to Indigenous peoples, the government, and historians. Hall, Carter, Miller, and Friesen all agree that in addition to the text there were outside promises that were left out of the Treaty.[8] A memorandum from the Minister of the Interior, dated April 30^th 1875, confirms that outside promises were made and provides the Canadian governments strategy for mitigating unrest and disappointment of its failure to honour all the promises it made during negotiations.[9] However, the government refused to acknowledge it had failed to meet its obligations.[10] Much like the residential schools settlement the money accepted by Indigenous peoples for these outside promises came with the condition that they were in the future unable to litigate or demand more compensation for the injustices they suffered. So in sum, the government asserted the right to unilaterally decide on the portion of lands, broke outside promises, and did not fully inform the Indigenous peoples of legislation they would be subject to upon signing. In my analysis I still do not know where the Canadian state’s assertion of jurisdiction comes from other than power. Further research is necessary in developing my understanding of the legal basis from which to articulate how Canada had the right to determine the reserve size before it had signed treaty to purchase the land.

Understanding why the Indigenous chose to sign Treaty One despite the position asserted by the Canadian state’s representatives is central to understanding the terms of Treaty. David McCrady provides a novel interpretation of the circumstances surrounding the Indigenous decision to sign Treaty One. McCrady first argues that to understand Indigenous actions one has to dispense with the national myth of the peaceful west. McCrady argues:

This explanation offers no insight into what motives Aboriginal peoples living in Canada had for maintaining peace. Native peoples are portrayed as the passive victims of the white man’s actions, incapable, it would seem, of affecting the level of violence between themselves and the newcomers. Native peoples made up the vast majority of the population of the Canadian Northwest. Had a single group decided to launch a concerted attack against Canadian immigrants, the result would have been a disastrous blow to Canada’s expansionist goals … they remained peaceful, but not because they were overawed or placated by Canada’s “orderly, well-planned, and honourable policy.” They had their own reasons for establishing peaceful relations.[11]

McCrady’s argument is convincing and it fits with Friesen’s argument about understanding Indigenous motivations in the actual negotiations themselves. Both of these authors are attempting to provide readers with an understanding of Indigenous peoples motivations so that that one can understand what actually took place from both sides. Friesen argues the fundamental intention of the Indigenous was to assure economic security.[12] McCrady broadens the scope of analysis to ask the reader to consider how the wider geopolitics of Mikinaak Minis at the time would have influenced Indigenous strategy in deciding to treaty and on what terms. McCrady argues that Indigenous peoples saw Canada as the weaker of the two European derived states and chose to pursue peace with Canada in the context of the United State’s expansionism and wars against Indigenous populations there, these wars were happening to their relatives right on the plains. Moreover, McCrady argues that Indigenous peoples chose to negotiate with Canada because they were not a military threat at the time of signing. They were pushed into the situation by the actions of the Americans.[13] J. R. Miller’s analysis of Canada’s military capacities at the time agrees with the assessment of McCrady, Miller argues that Canada had neither the money nor ability to project force at the time of signing of signing Treaty One, the Police for instance did not arrive until 1874, nor was there are railway to move troops across the prairies at the time.[14]

Thus, in my understanding of these implications, it was in the interest of the Indigenous to sign a treaty with the Canadians, when the Canadians refused to treaty on Indigenous terms the Indigenous position was also influenced by the need to assure peace in the face of an American aggressor. Accepting Canadian terms was about gaining peace first and working out the problems later. It is important to understand that Indigenous agency played an important role in the situation that led to the signing of these documents, and that part of the intent and spirit of Indigenous peoples was to assure themselves protection against American imperialism. When considering utilizing treaties in contemporary times, understanding the rejection of American expansionism needs to remain prominent in the analysis and future content of political relationships. Considering in contemporary times American corporations are central in the exploitation of Indigenous lands, it seems reasonable to assume this type of circumstance was exactly what the Indigenous were attempting to avoid.

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[1] Jean Friesen, “Magnificent Gifts: the Treaties of Canada with the Indians of the Northwest 1869-1876,” in Richard Price, (ed.), The Spirit of the Alberta Indian Treaties, Edmonton, AB: University of Alberta Press, 1999, pg. 204-205.

[2] D. J. Hall, ““A Serene Atmosphere”? Treaty 1 Revisited,” the Canadian Journal of Native Studies, 2, 1984, pg. 325, Appendix 346-349. Accessible here: < http://www2.brandonu.ca/library/cjns/4.2/hall.pdf >

[3] Hall, ““A Serene Atmosphere”? Treaty 1 Revisited,” Appendix pg 345.

[4] Hall, ““A Serene Atmosphere”? Treaty 1 Revisited,” pg. 325-326.

[5] Sarah Carter, Aboriginal People and Colonizers of Western Canada to 1900, Toronto, ON: University of Toronto, 1999, pg. 118.

[6] Hall, ““A Serene Atmosphere”? Treaty 1 Revisited,” Appendix, pg. 354-355.

[7] Friesen, “Magnificent Gifts,” pg. 212.

[8] Hall, ““A Serene Atmosphere”? Treaty 1 Revisited,” pg. 324, and Carter, Aboriginal People and Colonizers of Western Canada to 1900, pg. 122, and Friesen, “Magnificent Gifts,” pg. 212, and  J. R. Miller, Compact, Contract, Covenant: Aboriginal Treaty Making in Canada, Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2009, pg. 164-165.

[9] Government of Canada, Treaties 1 and 2 between Her Majesty and the Chippewa and Cree Indians, Treaty Relations Commission of Manitoba, 1957, pg. 3-5,

 < http://www.trcm.ca/PDFsTreaties/Treaties%201%20and%202%20text.pdf > Accessed Oct 13^th, 2011.

[10] Miller, Compact, Contract, Covenant, pg. 165.

[11] McCrady, Beyond Boundaries, pg. 88-89.

[12] Friesen, “Magnificent Gifts,” pg. 207.

[13] McCrady, Beyond Boundaries, pg. 93-96, 101.

[14] Miller, Compact, Contract, Covenant, pg. 155-156.

Decolonizing the Occupations: Answering the Challenge posed by Indigenous Activists

There have been some major calls to decolonize the rhetoric and practices of the occupy wall street movement as it spreads.

Thankfully organizers and activists are starting to listen and debates are starting on how to best demonstrate the beginnings of commitment to decolonization in these movements for democracy and against austerity.

If we are actually going to show respect, I want to take beyond the use of decolonize and actually have the organizers reach out and ask the Indigenous community leaders, activist, and revolutionaries if they can use Indigenous languages, such as anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe language) or nehiyawmowin (plains cree language) to rename the event. Here in Winnipeg, I suggested people contact folks like Leslie Spillett , who can point organizers towards people to talk to.

As an example of a decolonized name to use: Biskaabiiyang Winnipeg: Nanaakawiidaa – beside “Decolonize Winnipeg” so it in English and Anishinaabemowin. Add French if you want to rep St. Boniface!  Biskaabiiyang is a word that is similar to decolonize. Nanaakawiidaa ought to mean, lets revolt, but I’m sure my grammar is a bit off, I’m rusty.

Actually publicly using and affirming the need to bring anishinaabemowin, and other Indigenous languages, back into the the public, and allowing our movements to be lead by some Indigenous activists and community leaders is important. We need to work together. We need to show commitment to learning. Reparations for language loss is a key feature of social justice, if we don’t have the power to force policy changes, maybe facilitating the use of Anishinaabemowin in the public is an option that might work. I don’t know, ask the question to the Indigenous activists in your community, and see what they say.

In other localities it would be a good exercise for organizers to put the time in to research what language belongs to the land they are on, and then make the effort to build relationships with indigenous community leaders there to be able to ask for permission to use it, through that process, decolonization/biskaabiiyang will be enacted, and it demonstrates your good and respectful intentions. If you can demonstrate an earnest and respectful commitment to decolonization, I’m pretty sure you are going to find some Indigenous activists keen to work with you. At this point, its on you to make sure you give them equal voice and power in organizing the events taking place. Don’t be scared of mistakes or conflicts, as long as you are constantly demonstrating your ability to learn, we’ve got lots to offer each other as we fight austerity, colonization, and capitalism. My hope is we can all organize our communities ourselves and bring some heavy duty weaponry to the fight. Counter-power is the ultimate weapon of solidarity.

Of Spiritual Appropriation, Revolution, and Living Spiritually on THIS Land

I was listening to my own radio show on August 31st. It happened to be hosted by other collective members that day. As I was listening to the show, the advertisement for the Goddess Festival of Manitoba came across the airwaves and I almost threw up. The advertisement listed quite a few different events, ceremonies, and practices. There was a rainbow sweat lodge, tantric yoga sex sessions, a dark goddess temple, and many other things from different spiritual traditions. Some of it honestly sounds made up. Almost too many to really understand what it’s actually about.

I’ve got a really strong reaction to what appears to be spiritual melting pots. Or cut and paste spiritualism, or the new age movement. It really bugs me. Part of that is a reaction to my own younger self who was a cultural appropriator. Having come from that head space and been involved with the Indigenous community here in Winnipeg, I’ve worked through and reflected significantly on my place in this land and secondly who I am as a person and what I’m connected to spiritually. I’ve got some pretty strong opinions on what it means to be a spiritual person when living on Indigenous territory in the northern part of Turtle Island. I’ve heard loud and clear the Indigenous critiques of spiritual appropriation. I’ve especially got some serious opinions on what it means to decolonize as a settler. I also have complete empathy for what it means to be a person dislocated from their identity and searching frantically for some grounding and sense of self in this world. Especially in this maddening oppressive mainstream Canadian culture.

I don’t like capitalist white supremacy, it fucking sucks. Like really, really sucks. I get it. I know what it means to be alienated from our European roots. I get that lots of thoughtful and well meaning people don’t draw strength and self-grounding from Christianity and that if you need faith or spirituality you’ve got to grab on to something. I get it. I’m an atheist, but one who practices spirituality. My academic work is on how settlers can respectfully participate in and learn from Anishinaabeg spirituality and traditional education to influence movements for social change in Southern Manitoba to address climate change. I grapple with these types of questions. I try to ground my work in what is happening and what I, myself, do.

So I’m going to try to explain my journey as a cultural appropriator (thief) to illustrate how we can move away from reinforcing white supremacy and start to have a decolonized anti-colonial spirituality. I hope that people will understand I’m not trying to pretend like I haven’t done these things myself. I’m advising people from the perspective of someone who has already tried to journey down that path, but found a different one instead. I’m actually going to be so bold as to suggest there are some spiritual practices that do and don’t belong. Some we should and should not do, etc. I’m going to be drawing boundaries.

I did not grow up in a religious household, nor a spiritual one, my family was Christian-by-default. We celebrated Christian derived holidays in a way that was not religious, they were consumer. I was never encouraged to pray. Mostly my mother hushed me from yelling blasphemy in the supermarket so I wouldn’t offend others. Every now and then I would get a sense of the more inner Christian remnants in my Dad, mostly when it came to Cubs and Scouts. You had to believe in a monotheistic god to join it. For some reason he supported it. I remember going to one usual religious ceremony at a Christian church and being adamant that I never be made to go back. I hated how downtrodden everyone’s spirit seemed, those ceremonies are so grim. My only reading of the bible came of my own volition. I found a copy of the bible given to our family at the funeral of my Papa (dad’s father). I couldn’t get past the begets part, it was so boring. I tried praying upon my own motivation as I read the bible, I didn’t find any connection or benefit from doing it.

I remember when my Uncle and Aunt’s family began to get more religious upon the marriage of one of my cousins and the birth of her kids. I remember being surprised the first time they insisted we say grace before meal at a family gathering. It felt weird and out of place. I was 18 and hearing grace for the first time in my extended family. I never found Christian funerals to be particularly comforting, nor did I find Christian weddings to be particularly beautiful. If anything these rituals lacked those qualities. To me they lack spirit, the ultimate irony. I never saw room for growth as a person in these institutions.

I’ve always been a fairly independent thinker, I’m curious and I crave data; structure and regimentation for its own sake often bores me. My interest in other cultural traditions comes from my experience in high school. I was regularly kicked out of class and sent to the library to read because I was disruptive. In the library I began to explore books on all possible topics. I tended to gravitate towards reading communist history and eastern religions. I remember reading books on Buddhism, Hindu Mystics, the 5 year plans of Stalin’s soviet industrial policy, the history of Istanbul, etc. At this age I read 3 newspapers a day, the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, and the Sun. I skipped class to study me own choices in books, I read whatever classic literature I could find and spent time reading about Islamic religious traditions, from what I realize now are horribly antiquated texts. Though this self study meant that I bombed my first semester of grade 13, so I had to do an extra one which meant the half a year I gained by being kicked out of grade 8 and sent to high school early was lost. So I finished school in January and had 7 months to wait until university started. In those 7 months I worked at a pet store and as roofer while taking out or buying every book I could on indigenous and eastern spiritual traditions I could in my rural Ontario town of Orangeville. I was absolutely fascinated by the things I was learning. The images of the noble savage struck a cord with my romantic and idealistic youth.

It is pretty common in this day and age for youth growing up in predominately white and upper working class to middle class households that feel alienated from Christianity to search for connection in colonially constructed images of other cultures and their spiritual traditions. I’ve met quite a few wannabe Buddhists, especially in Ottawa for some reason. What was ironic was that all the Indigenous people I had known until then were Christians. Here I was reading about and trying to identify with something they didn’t even practice. Not to mention the fact I was reading more about plains traditions rather than the woodlands where I was.  Its pretty embarrassing, but it gets worse.

One of the things that played into my search for others roots was the fact I never fit in as a kid. I was slightly brown. I got called sand-nigger. Even my friends used to other me. In high school I was called “whole-wheat” along with the tag line “He’s not quite white bred”. For a racial joke it was decently witty. I’ll give them that. It also wasn’t said with any malice, these were actual friends. Most of the people who gave me actual problems would more likely call me a fag than reference my slight brown hue. But the point is the affect on me was to solidify that I should be searching for my lost roots and connectedness outside the usual WASP or Christian cultures. So that’s what I did. But in that search I committed cultural appropriation and spiritual violence, I committed theft. I wear it every day of my life, where everyone can see it like a contemporary colonial Hester Prynne.

The majority of my back is a tattoo that details the political and spiritual influences I gained over the first 19 years of my life. It has a golden eagle carrying a dream-catcher. In the dream-catcher is a militant fist hoisting into the air a peace sign and wagon wheel connected by a chain. On the fist is Stalin’s insignia: a hammer, sickle, and, sword. On my neck I have Chinese orthography that says “Embody the Tao”. These tattoos show the places my mind went, and what I tried to steal. They remain as permanent reminders of my selfish use of other cultures I wasn’t connected to. In a more positive light they are a spiritual-political road-map of my personal development before I left for university.

It was in hindsight rather silly of me to do so. What did I actually know of any of these cultures, well not much. But took them in as part of my identity irrespective of whether or not I might be actually welcomed to them in the real world. It’s a pretty natural reaction. When you powerless to change your own culture, you try to adopt a new one. Considering the counter-culture in my small city: drugs, shitty punk rock like NOFX and metal I had to search outside those boundaries for something that connected with me as something authentic. I didn’t ever meet a real Taoist or traditional native. I just took, borrowed, stole what I could to make myself feel better in terms of my own personal growth. The growth in my ego didn’t change the way I still predominantly benefited from systems of oppression and privilege in relative terms to many others, nor did it change the community around me for the better. It just made me feel a little better at someone else’s expense. I’d say a significant portion of people encounter other cultures in academic and voyeuristic fashion like this or similarly. So I’m taking to task others, but also myself right. So don’t get defensive, honestly assess yourself.

Why didn’t I look to build authentic cultural practices, rituals, ceremonies and events that reflected the basis of my culture? Well that’s because Christianity and the state have allied to destroy European and other alternative religions and spirituality for over 1000 years. Go back and look into the Anabaptists, the Cathars, the Levellers, the Diggers. We used to have resistant Christian sects. There were also tribal peoples in European populations. Why didn’t I go back and try to understands the root of Celtic cultures. I know partially I’m Irish and English by blood but paternally adopted by people who descend from the Scottish highlands. I know my paternal line through adoption goes back into the MacLaren clan, the boars. Though even then we are not reaching a pre-Christian root. We killed them off. Witch hunts, genocides, class wars, and co-optation eradicated the rootedness of the common peoples to the land. I’d check out a few books if you want to further understand this history: Caliban and the Witch, as well as The Many-Headed Hydra and the classic The Making of the English Working Class provide radical social histories of the class conflicts that helped create white supremacy, colonization, and capitalism. It is this history that provides some of the back drop to the lack of substance in the lives of people raised in white, especially WASP culture. We are not going to stop appropriation until we can create our own liberatory, vibrant, rooted and re-indigenized culture that has both spiritual and atheist strands to it. But whether or not we can ever find traditions that pre-dates the mess that is Christianity is a huge question. Or is there a very old Christianity that was more rooted in the land. All that seems to be left of it is some songs and tartans, especially here in North America.

Lets return to my personal development and examine it. After engaging with spirituality for a time, it lessened in my life as I became more politicized in an active way and was captivated by the struggle on the ground. Starting to think less of myself and more of injustice in the world that had to do with man-made things I after sometime became a declared atheist, quit attempting to pray, etc. My tattoos became to me nothing but useful ways to attract attention. But they remained a reminder etched into my flesh of what I believed to get me here. I would eventually come full circle. But at this point I was guided by the precepts of the European enlightenment, and atheism associated with anarchism of European class struggle stock.

I remained interested in Indigenous issues, but more at the level of their struggle for justice, I read a lot about them and wrote a few essays about genocide and Indigenous peoples. From academic work I became more interested in dealing with questions of colonization and genocide in my emerging activism. I organized along with other people in Sudbury a speaking engagement for Ward Churchill on the Genocide against Indigenous peoples in Canada. I helped bring in Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz as well. I started to focus a significant amount of my out of class studies on these types of issues. Eventually, our anti-war and occupation group decided that because we were opposed to imperialism in Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti, and Palestine, we needed to fight occupation everywhere, and that meant here in Canada. That meant beginning to centre our work in anti-colonial struggle and begin to build links with Indigenous activists and revolutionaries. We recognized that Canadian society existed as an illegal, unethical, and imperialist occupation of territories that were supposed to be those of the Indigenous peoples, in our specific case in Sudbury, the Anishinaabeg.

So through this work with Sudbury Against War and Occupation (SAWO) I began to encounter more indigenous people and eventually met members (and OGs) of the NYM. We helped support one of their projects about supporting the fight of John Graham for justice. We also attempted to host decolonization and cross cultural sharing circles where we brought Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous peoples together to dialogue about the effects of colonization. I remember sitting in a room of 40 people listening to some heart breaking stories of people’s personal experiences with residential schools and other manifestations of racist oppression. I started to emotionally connect and empathize more so than I ever had with any struggle out of a strong mix of settler guilt, passion for justice, and new comradeship. Unfortunately, my impulsive ever forward, everyone else be damned attitude towards social struggle was definitely not suited to something as sensitive as Indigenous Solidarity can be at times.

After consultation with professors I was close within the political science department, I decided to switch my BA thesis topic from identity in post-soviet space to deal with Canadian colonialism and Indigenous peoples. They advised that I might as well do a thesis on something I was intimately involved in. In hindsight I’m not so sure if any part of this process was a good idea. It ended up turning out horribly and I’m really remorseful about the majority of it. So at first I tried to do my own analysis of Canadian colonialism in general and my project for the majority of the year became seriously unwieldy.  It was too big, too repetitive, and not very original. My supervisors suggested I try to work on one small thing, and we together chose a discourse and content analysis of Native Youth Movement communiqués and writing from Redwire Magazine and online public sources to support this documentation. Anyone with an eye to research ethics can already guess the complications, mistakes, and problems that arose out of this situation.

I chose to put an organization that I was trying to ally with and build relationships under the colonial academic microscope and objectified them as another research subject for my own advancement. Not only that I didn’t communicate properly with them about the work I was doing, nor did I let them vett my work. This may not have been such a problem if I had of had responsible guidance from Indigenous scholars, but instead I was being supervised by two recent European immigrants who were not familiar with the debates surrounding Indigenous research ethics, they were political scientists used to being able to study whatever they wanted. I’m not trying to deflect any responsibility, my work is my own and I take full credit for it as being a problematic piece of ignorant garbage. I didn’t know next to anything at the time about Indigenous ways, and from that position of ignorance, I analyzed the texts of people I wanted to ally with, maybe even “help”. So not only was I ignorant, I also had the messiah complex that is common to people first approaching Indigenous solidarity from outside. Its hard to look back at this in hindsight and be at all comfortable at where I am now, because it is based on this unethical scholarship. There are some statements I might still stand by over 3 years later, but most I would probably disavow in a heartbeat, I’m not sure I haven’t read it since. I can’t it pains me. I betrayed people, and its baggage to this day.

The most ironic part of all of this is that it was this thesis that I hate that set me on my journey to be able to start to know and correct my actions. Or maybe it is fitting. I’m not sure, I’ll let you decide. After presenting my paper at a conference in Sault St. Marie, in an Old Residential School turned University. I was recruited by a professor of the program I’m in now. So I moved to Winnipeg because of this thesis and joined an Indigenous run program that focused on facilitating Indigenous Governance. So here I am the only non-Indigenous guy in the first year of a brand new Masters program, daily hanging around Indigenous folks. It was a requirement that I learn Anishinaabemowin to get my degree as well as take a course on Indigenous Pathways to Wisdom taught by Tobasonakwut Kinew. So I was given access to knowledge that most zhaaganash people had no access to. I was the only non-Indigenous person to actually stay and pass the Anishinaabemowin course. I can now speak like a young child, about the weather and some other random things, I can also create words because some of my grammar is really good. This is more of the language than a significant number of Anishinaabeg people themselves can speak, and my use of it can (but not always) trigger shame and hurt in people I encounter. It does this because they begin to reflect on their own realness as an indigenous person if I, a non-native, can speak better than they can. Its a weird position to be in. Not one I ever dreamed of or imagined. Don’t think they should feel less real, but it can happen anyway.

Through this program I gained an unfair amount of access to the Indigenous community in Winnipeg, because I was surrounded by it and became known through my classmates and professors. I was for the most part treated like I absolutely belonged by everyone I encountered. I actually had to constantly remind people I wasn’t Anishinaabeg or Nehiyawak. Still to this day people are surprised I’m not native with how comfortable and know around I am. This isn’t to brag about how cool I am, but to acknowledge I can pass. I have that privilege in this context. I’m no ginger.

At the same time as working on my MA, I was also beginning to organize with Winnipeg Copwatch. Which happened to be an almost exclusively white collective. Which is unfortunate and problematic because the predominate victims and survivors of police violence in Winnipeg are People of Colour (POC), especially Indigenous people. Our ability to bring in the people most affected by police violence was shoddy at best. I think personally has to do with our ineffective strategic choices in the methods of our organizing. We didn’t do a good job of laying roots in actual neighbourhoods. We tried to cover far too large of areas with only one patrol. Our copwatching was also not directly tied to any other revolutionary organizing or building of radical institutions, therefore it was largely isolated.  While we did good work within the ambit we chose, we did not find a way to grow or root ourselves.

Through my connections cultivated at school, I was connected with an Indigenous-run youth-at-risk gang intervention program. I met with the team leader and started building a relationship and discussed building a copwatch in the central/west Alexander neighbourhood. We visited almost weekly getting to know each other, and he shared with me. He also asked me to attend sundance with him to learn more about Indigenous culture, and be prepared to work with the youth further. It didn’t make sense for me to be working with a cultural revitalization/reclamation program if I myself didn’t have some understanding or experience with the practices of plains spirituality.

So that summer I went for the build and was a fire-keeper at the cultural-camp/sundance associated with that program. It was a rather intense introduction to Indigenous culture beyond a sweat-lodge. I made lots of connections and friendships at that sundance and also solidified an intensely close relationship with the team-leader/spiritual leader and his family.

I can remember struggling to help carry that warrior to the arbour, having the most serious face when the wiindigokanag were bringing people back. I really remember all the laughter, and especially getting laughed at for never being able to drum at the same rhythm as anyone else. Now I just shake the rattle and sing. My most vivid memory of the first year was that two nights before the fast began there was a storm that tore apart the camp, it knocked down every single piece of camp except my tent and one tee-pee. I was the only one to sleep through the the huge storm. Three years later among my sundance family I’m still teased about it. As the one guy who can sleep through a tornado wake up in the morning wondering what happened. I also happened to camp in the long grass at the very edge of camp. So I also always got teased for being the, “white-guy hiding in the grass.”

On top of the relationship I was building with that team leader, I also built an closer relationship with other important native leaders in the community. Through my contacts I was asked to travel to the American Indian Movement sundance in Pipestone, Minnesota. I went there to learn from the elders in AIM about the AIM patrols from the early days. It was connected my organizing in Copwatch. I caught a ride with Terry Nelson, and ended up staying overnight at Dennis Banks house on Leech Lake. Nelson pretty much stopped at every VLT he could otherwise he was on his phone organizing a protest. It was kinda funny. Staying at Dennis Banks house was interesting in its simplicity because the conversation was not about politics whatsoever. We mostly talked about families and dragon boats. His grandchildren were the focus of the evening.  His house was beautiful, it was full of memorabilia from the struggle and beautiful Indigenous art and ceremonial objects.

The Pipestone Sun dance was very important in terms of understanding my relationship to Indigenous solidarity and spirituality. I came to learn a bit more of who I was and, especially, was not.  I got there to witness part of the grand council of AIM meeting and giggled to myself when I witnessed it run using Robert’s rules of order. Sometimes you find some funny contradictions in unforeseen places. At least some of the younger guys I asked about it found humour in it too. I benefited from arriving well before the dance and being able to build relationships with the other men in camp throughout the rebuilding of the arbour.

It was here at this dance though that I actually was challenged with whether or not I was a spiritual person. In moments I felt intense connection, and in others I didn’t feel it whatsoever. During sweat-lodges on my round I felt completely disconnected from my heart and didn’t have much to pray about. During tree day during the Gathering of the Pipes at the three maidens I felt absolutely no connection to the midewiwin songs about water that were sung by the women. They had that sombre sound I remembered from Christianity, not like the other Anishinaabe songs I was used to with their swift beat and positive energy. This contrasted completely with the power of 65 of us singing the AIM song together as we raised the AIM banner over the entrance to camp earlier in the day. That was powerful, and roused my spirit. The actual dance was intense in comparison to the Eagle dance I had attended earlier with my friend the team leader. This one had far more piercing, and pulling of skulls, etc.

One of the silliest things I did, that I still can’t fully explain what compelled me to do it at the time had to do with grandfathers for the sweat-lodge. At Pipestone Warfield was one of the main spiritual leaders of the came. Saying he is a big guy is kind of an understatement, he’s kinda huge. He also likes really big grandfathers for his sweats. So whenever we went to get grandfathers we picked out some that were between 3-4 times the size of a usual sized rock for that purpose. Sometimes I could barely carry them. When I was sweating in the Heyoka for his entrance that day , for some reason I thought it would be funny to put in a few of those Warfield sized grandfathers. Some of them split in three as I was heating them in the sacred fire. So as I brought in all the grandfathers the Heyoka was starting to get a little annoyed since I had what seemed like double the grandfathers he asked for.  Later that day, one of the spiritual leaders asked me about that shaking his head but also smiling a bit, saying “at least you chose that guy to do that to, why’d you get those giant ones.” I never got cussed out or in trouble, he laughed at me in the end.

One thing I really missed at the AIM sundance was the amount of laughter I experienced at the Eagle Sun Dance. There were so many intensely hilarious characters at it that I felt were missing at the AIM sundance. At the AIM dance, people were far more serious and there was a lot more pain in peoples hearts. I’m a generally serious person, I don’t gain healing from it, that’s what laughter is for. I especially missed the Wiindigokanag of the Anishinaabeg version of the Sun Dance, the Heyoka weren’t as funny or as frantic. When I first experienced the Wiindigokan I was surprised that after 3 days of intense ceremony here was this complete joke. I didn’t even laugh, I was actually stone faced and I forgot to give them tobacco. One ran straight at me and its nosed bumped into mine, and I didn’t flinch one bit. After that everyone teased me I’d be getting a burlap suit soon. Those types of jokes haven’t really died down. I’m now constantly made aware and teased for being contrary. The people I’m close to in Winnipeg are mostly contrary. About 80 percent of the Anishinaabeg or Nehiyawak I spend time with or have close connections to are Contrary. I realized that was what was missing for me at the AIM dance after reflecting.

The AIM dance did not feel like a meeting of family like the Eagle Dance did. My favourite part of Sun Dance was hanging out with people and feeling connected and having fun as we had days of hard work. It made it meaningful for me. More so than the actual spiritual practices did. It was here and through the Team leaders family that I felt acceptance and observed the family dynamic that I had been longing for, but not had with my family since I was a pre-teen. More than spirituality, or medicines, what I’ve learnt from my experiences in Indigenous communities has been a stronger sense of family and bringing people into your emotional circle. I’m not particularly a believer in manidoog or spirits that are all about us. However, I did learn interconnection and more about zaagide’win along the way. I also decided in terms of the AIM sundance to give myself to the experience even if I had doubts. I gave flesh, I prayed and danced when I could, I kept fire. I committed.

Again that year I was tested by the thunders. Much like my previous sleeping through a sever thunderstorm and almost, if not actual tornado. This time it was during the middle of the day, when it was intensely hit and some dancers were starting to really feel the heat. I had been called away from the fire to care for some dancers.  Just before the next round started the clouds which had been moving in really started to let loose. It began to pour and pour, full tanks of water. I’m not sure I’ve ever been in that hard of a storm. All the fire keepers met up at the fire and started to build it as big as we could. We also got a tarp to hold against the incoming water being carried by a strong southwesterly wind. 6 of us were the ones forced to stand in the rain to keep the fire going during the downpour. I had to dig a trench around the fire to prevent a puddle from snuffing out our fire’s core. It had started to hail and the hail size grew towards golf ball size. I held the shovel over my head to relieve the discomfort of dropping ice chunks from the sky. After it was over I realized i had singed my hair with the shovel because I had been digging with it so close to the fire and got teased for that by my fellow fire keepers.

Sun Dance is a central part of plains Indigenous cultures. I’m still trying to find a plains tribe that doesn’t have some form of the Sun Dance. Sun Dances belong to the land, they belong to the plains. When you come to the plains you learn to sundance. The Anishinaabeg learned the Sun Dance from the Nehiyawak and the Dakota when they came to the plains. When the Anishinaabeg weren’t on the plains they had other ceremonies that were made for connection and renewal of the ecosystem they inhabited at that time. To fit into the land they began to inhabit they needed to learn the natural law and human responsibilities of that place. They maintained the other facets of their culture that were transferable, but they adopted and developed for themselves new rituals and practices suited to their new ecological reality.

I remember my Sun Dance leader saying to me that every human-being has a right to Sun Dance. At the AIM sundance whites were allowed to dance as long as they were adopted by a native family that was a member of that ceremonial group. Through my own learning I’ve come to the conclusion all human groups on the plains may actually have a responsibility to Sun Dance. I understand it this way because of how I saw in history how all groups that came here on the plains before the whites adopted the Sun Dance in one version or another dependent on the visions of their spiritual leaders and elders. As I’ve continued researching my thesis I’ve come to understand that everything humans are responsible for is based on where they live. We are supposed to learn the particular ways of living that particular lands require of peoples. If whites were to practice the sundance it would be one that members of their community fasted and sought a vision for.

My understanding of being Indigenous, in this land northern Mikinaak Minis, is that you are supposed to spiritually seek how to live within natural law specific to the territory. The place and those that inhabit it will guide you, rather than your own ego, or desires. It is about nature and spirit telling you what you are supposed to do. In Indigenous North America from sea to sea, the fast or vision quest is the most common way to begin ones ardent and committed search for connection and responsibility to the land. In Anishinaabemowin nigii’igoshimo, I fast for a vision. On the west coast in the language of the Nuu-chah-nulth it is called oosumich. In Lakota Hanblecheyapi, crying for a vision. Everywhere one goes it is varied in some way, but generally the idea is the same, one humbly shows how pitiful one is and begs the great mysterious essence of creation to show us our path and provide us with some tools to carry out those responsibilities. Humanity’s purpose being to help maintain and renew a harmonious and balanced creation through the mediums of communication (ceremony) and stewardship, in concert with all other beings. Each individual pursues learning their particular role in facilitating the collective responsibility of humanity in a particular ecosystem.  Sun Dancing itself is a variation of fasting, that is woven into a more elaborate and collective ceremony for the benefit of the people in cultivating the knowledge and unity they require to live their responsibilities to place.

In this land when the Anishinaabeg arrived here, they were adopted into the territory by Nehiyawak and Nakota who already lived here. They became kin. It is Anishinaabeg Aki because of this. They were taught the sun dance by vision and communication with the peoples who lived here before them and the spirits of the plains. They needed this ceremony to become of this place. This practice is similar all over the plains. In Treaty 6 territory, Zhaaganash were adopted as a community and given responsibilities required to live there as relatives. Harold Johnson writes about this in his book, Two Families: Treaties and Government. But because of colonization never as a community received the necessary teachings and support in becoming of this place. Instead we actively fought against these responsibilities. Access to territory on the plains has always been developed through kinship in the forms of adoption, marriage, treaty, or on going relationship. It was only with colonization that we have records and testimony of it happening on a national scale.

I’ve for a long time questioned what right I have to be in these places I’ve been and the experiences I’ve had. But I recognized as I dived deeper that this according to the Anishinaabeg has been our two cultures paths for a long time. If we go way back into the Niigaanachimoowinan of the Midewiwin, we are provided with a picture of what our goal should be in anti-colonial struggle. The Prophecy of the 7 or 8 Fires provides the basis for moving forward and understanding the whites relationship to Indigenous spirituality. The prophecy in its simplest form provides narrative of how we and the four races of humanity are destined to become a spiritual nation or perish because of materialism. The light-skinned race, the whites, are those that have the fundamental impact on the outcome of the North America. The 7th and 8th fire call for a transformation of European culture using Indigenous teachings. The basis of Indigenous teachings are to attune our cultures to place in both scientific and spiritual terms. We cannot hope bring the spiritual methods of another continent here to this land and expect them to function out of their context, just like it would be absurd to think Inuit knowledge would be sufficient in surviving in the Southwestern deserts of the Gichi-Mookoomanag.

The goal has to be remaking the dominant culture. But this needs to be done under the spiritual leadership of authentic and real keepers of Indigenous knowledge along with their warriors, the Oshkimaadiziig. It has to be a person who debwe. White people only have the right to practice Indigenous spirituality if they also take up the responsibilities it entails to the territory and the peoples that live here. If you are going to fight industrialization, ecocide and white supremacy, then you should feel okay about participating in communal practices with those peoples you are allied with when they invite you to. The spirituality has to be connected to the struggle to free the land from capitalism and colonization. I need to be transformed by the people I am struggling beside. That’s when spiritual transformation is real in the context of colonialism. Rainbow gatherings and hippyfests are generally at best spiritual tourism, they are very distantly related to the struggle for human empowerment in the context of ecological balance and the fight against global oppression. Spirituality has to take place in a long-term connection to a community and a piece of territory. Its about personal responsibility to collective purpose. Not about your own singular egotistical needs. In the old days I’ve been told, very few people asked to receive a vision or to become a spiritual leader, it was scary, it was all about responsibility to carry it out. I don’t know too many hippies searching for visions of how they can dedicate their lives to justice. I see them searching for ways to make their ego feel better. We need to consciously shift this approach. If we take spirituality seriously, then we have to practice it as it is meant to be here, in Anishinaabeg Aki Mikinaak Minis.

We will not be carbon copies of past Indigenous communities unless our visions deem that that is the way to go, but all observation and reasons suggests that will never be the case. The ecosystem has been drastically changed, new plants exist and old ones are gone. Animals are located in different numbers and proportions from the old days. New animals are here now. Our goal is to fast and vision then mobilize collectively to re-indigenize this territory. The original peoples have got to lead that, since they are the ones that have the primary means. This has been what people like Vine Deloria, Jr. have been calling for since the dawn of red power. To remake this continent using science under the direction of Indigenous spirituality.

In terms of the goddess festival, I’m not sure how its relevant to pray to spirits of other lands and pretend to partake in bastardized versions of Indigenous and eastern spiritual practices. If you seek the knowledge locked in our hearts, its time to partake in these things in a good way, and stop playing games. Spirituality has always been a political practice of the collective. Time to return it to that. We need to look at the context of our history and see many of our treaties were signed as documents that were meant to also be alliances against American imperialism.

I don’t profess to know much at all. I look for direction daily from Indigenous spiritual leaders, scholars and revolutionaries on how to move forward the anti-colonial struggle. All I’m trying to share is my somewhat jaded trajectory of understanding as I’ve tried to walk the path from appropriator to a militant. I don’t even profess to be an ally, at most I’m as supportive as I can be.  I have loved ones and friends who this is truly about our lives, and the struggles that burn in our hearts. I hope that all those folks out there who want to support Indigenous struggles will understand what I’m throwing out here. We can discuss pushing the struggle against white supremacy further as we walk that path. I’m totally open to engagement on this.

The Revolution Starts At Home: Developing Community Accountability in Winnipeg

revolution starts at home – zine version.

The Revolution Starts at Home from Facing Out on Vimeo.

Coming out of the 2nd International Copwatch Conference (held in Winnipeg) one of the central concerns of participants was how to build communities that are self-determining and independent of state power. Central to these concerns were how to properly, ethically, and effectively address issues and situations which require community accountability. Whether it is mental health, intimate partner violence, oppressive behaviour/unchecked privilege, or sexual assault we need to develop more grounded and structured (along with supportive and successful) ways of developing both institutions of transformative justice and militants who are socialized to be self-accountable, mindful and reflective. These were problems posed that we didn’t have answers to. They were the burning questions in my mind.

The Revolution Starts At Home, recently released through South End Press, provides insight into the last 10 years of accountability organizing in radical and oppressed communities. For an able-bodied generally-straight man who can pass as white a lot of the time this book was really interesting, and impactful because it provided insight, stories, feelings and intuitions that are based outside myself. Coming from perspectives I have a hard time imagining. When you struggle putting yourself in another’s shoes, these types of books can be really important.

My interest in transformative justice comes from my experience of having to hold myself accountable for concerns of others in the movement. It has been a slow, hard and confusing journey to begin to even start to address my privilege, patriarchal behaviour and just general personality quirks that become problematic in organizing.  To be honest, I find it hard to put myself in the shoes of someone who doesn’t have people telling them they fucked up. Or someone who doesn’t have people saying something they are doing is in need of correcting. I know I’m a generally polarizing type of guy and I shit disturb on a constant basis. Its both a strength and a weakness dependent on my control of my behaviour and my level of consciousness of its affect on other people.

I’ve experienced political group accountability processes as the one being confronted and worked with for their problematic behaviour. My interest in these issues and questions comes from that of someone who has ideas on what it takes to become more self-aware, and begin to piece together what it takes to change to be a more pleasant, ethical, useful and anti-oppressive member of  a radical political community. There are things I’ve done that people justly distrust me for. Sometimes I wish there were more clear ways we could account and make up for our behaviour with. When there’s no clear community process, it becomes a very subjective experience, where with every single individual has a standard they are holding you to and its sometimes hard to figure out. Standards of conduct in the radical community are often unspoken, and unwritten. It can make it hard to understand how people relate to an outsider.

When accountability is unstructured, it can lead to a person never being able to relearn their place because there is no objective or inter-subjective standard to aim for. There is a need for explicit goals that constructively demonstrate to all involved that a person deserves there full membership or respect back back. For instance, when I was organizing with copwatch I had an incident where I endangered the patrol by acting too aggressively with a security guard. Then far too uncommunicative with my fellow patrollers. This understandably angered my comrades. Combining this with some of my more obnoxious expression of privilege in terms of hetero-patriarchy produced a situation where the other members of the group needed to confront me about my behaviour. The majority of the members of the group expressed their concerns well and provided me the opportunity to acknowledge and apologize for my behaviour. It was important and useful that members were given a space to directly tell me how they feel about how I had acted. What didn’t come from this experience was a concrete and explicit way I could demonstrate that I was transforming. There was no agreed upon standard for me to be able to regain my role as a patroller. Especially in terms of privilege it is hard to pin down what is an acceptable and unacceptable manifestation of male and straight privilege for a member of a radical group.

I find it hard to determine because all members of society in some ways express privilege and internalized oppression that can be problematic for the functioning of an ideal anti-oppressive group, or revolutionary organization. So we need to ask the question, “to what degree of oppressive behaviour or language is acceptable to be a  member of our group?” Another important question to ask ourselves as militant activists is: “to what degree of oppressive behaviour are we willing to endure from other members of the movement in our mass organizing?” another question, “to what degree of transformation/decolonization/self-reflection does a person need to have accomplished to join the fight to end global oppression?”

I ask these questions because I have never met a person free of the dominant oppressive logic in some facet of their behaviour, language, or actions. I actually don’t believe in perfect people. I don’t try to be perfect, I try to correct whatever it is in the moment I’m doing that is problematic. I often need others support to do so. I try to hold myself accountable to the degree that I can be a successful, responsible, and useful member of movements for radical and revolutionary change in society. I know from my own past I’m going to fuck up. I fuck up. What matters is how I hold myself accountable and how I learn from those hard lessons. Maybe I can even help people not make the same mistakes as I did. Or help others learn to change themselves and be self-accountable. Being a truly self-aware person, isn’t that a life’s journey?

So if we all acknowledge that no one is free of oppressive behaviour whether it stems from privilege or internalized oppression, then we need to start to ask ourselves what the standard of behaviour ought to be to belong in the different organizing spaces, groups and projects. We don’t need to require survivors to work with perpetrators of sexual violence, but someone has to take responsibility for working with them, or nothing is going to change. How could it if we don’t help people build the skills of self accountability and have people understand our framework and ideological understanding of oppression.

You have to believe that people can change, and that at our cores we are all similar. I know people can change because I have. I have committed sexual assault and intimate partner violence.  It was back in my teen years before I was introduced to radical politics and understood the meaning of my actions in the way I do now. I’ve spent the last decade unlearning those behaviours. The things I get called out for are less and less problematic in terms of their danger. When I was a kid I could get called out for not knowing what positive consent was, or for being physically violent as my first response to conflict situations. Now I’m getting called out for being patriarchal in attitude, from where I started, its a step up. So much for small improvements. It has to do with how I grew up, and who I learned from.   The fact of the matter is that radical activists need to stop pretending like they are a breed apart from everyone. Violence happens in our communities because the majority of us grew up and internalized fucked up logics and behaviours. It doesn’t mean any of them are okay, but we need to acknowledge its a process to transform and be able to include people where they are at sometimes as well. We need to have multiple spaces, some safe, some not as safe because more types of people can come there.

If we abandon everyone who is oppressive how many people would that leave us? So if we can’t abandon everyone who is oppressive and violent, we need to set clear standards of what type of people can be in certain spaces and what type of people should be in certain types of groups. If we start to acknowledge by our behaviour and who we gravitate towards informally, we will recognize we are already doing this. Wonder why so many anarchists scenes are punk rock ghettos? Why do only certain people belong to our organizations? Its because we choose people based on where they are at. We actively seek out those folks already on our end of the spectrum rather than work with people to show them the truths of our perspectives. How many problematic behaviours and unchecked privileges do you think the white suburbanite male has? We need to organize as many people as possible, and we need to learn to organize those folks.

I personally want to work with people who are on the road to healing their problematic behaviour and build a stronger, more rooted and conscious community. I think I can have empathy for people being called out to transform. I’d love to hear from people also interested in providing that type of support and accountability. Until we change the people who are acting problematically there will continue to be survivors and victims of predatory, patriarchal and oppressive behaviour. Honestly accounting for how we are embedded in oppressive systems through understanding kyriarchy can allow us to be more effective organizers, friends, family members and comrades. This book speaks to that experience as well as the organizing and support for survivors and victims. I’m beginning to think about what types of structures and workshops we can have to build this type of thinking and create accountability skills in our community to rely on them when we need them.

Sometimes the best organizing we can do is an honest assessment of who we are, where we came from and where we are going. Sometimes people need help walking their talk. I think everyone can be redeemable in the right circumstances. Let’s get together and create those conditions. Read this book and zine to start.

Radical Childcare Collective for Winnipeg Resources

I’m trying to get a sense of who would be interested in getting together to develop a radical childcare collective, fundraise and solicit donations for toys/resources, and find spaces in or near where our radical events take place.I’m also wondering what parent’s would want out of the collective. Also for folks to connect kid-friendly radicals with me @ alexrevpaterson@gmail.com

Suggestions on what relationship existing Winnipeg groups would have to the group.

Mutual aid possibilities.Advice welcomed!I’m thinking a collective that administers and coordinates and volunteers to provide childcare at all A-Zone political events and group meetings. To begin with. Please pass on the word.

anarchafem – children – DontLeaveYourFriendsBehind <—- Download this document.

Join this facebook group

Concrete Things You Can Do to Support

Parents and Children in your Scene

1- Give Children Attention. Say something to them: just be your true

self, whatever you are thinking, they are open to that. Children act

better when they get attention. In the beginning of a meeting if a

group gives the children some attention, they are often happier and

better behaved for the rest of the meeting.

 

2- Develop childcare as an ongoing relationship with a child – it

takes some time to get to know a child before they are comfortable

with doing stuff with you away from their parents.

 

3- Offer a slot of time, to spend time with a child on a weekly basis.

 

4- Integrate children and adults: it’s more pleasant to watch children

with other adults to talk to; it’s more pleasant for the children to

see adults enjoying each other and not feel a burden to them.

 

5- Include children in the planning of any activity, like a sewing

workshop for instance.

 

6- Doing something child-friendly? Ask a kid if they want to come

along. (Lizxnn has been taking Siu Loong for critical mass rides for

three years and she loves it.) Children can benefit from activities

their parents don’t do and parents can benefit from the time to

themselves.

 

7- If a baby is crying because it needs to be held and the parent has

their hands busy and can not hold it; offer to hold the baby.

 

8- If a child is making a disturbance in an area, offer to go outside

with the kid so the parent doesn’t have to leave the event.

 

9- Meet parents at their level: come visit them at home or where ever

their spaces are. Let parents talk about being parents: realize having

a child is like having the most intense love affair you have ever

known (says one parent. Another says – not.)

 

10- Acknowledge children: don’t treat them like they are invisible

 

11- To announce that we are OK with children making noise (at meetings

we wish to make parent-w/small children-friendly), we can talk over

them, and value mothers and children sticking around. The announcement

can help put mothers at ease.

 

12- Give us a smile!

 

ALSO – When providing child care at political events (and every event

should have child care!)

 

13- Visit the children and childcare providers in daycare – and say

“Hi!” Childcare providers can feel isolated from others at the event.

Have a cup of tea with them! (suggested by Siu Loong, age 5)

 

14- Parents with different aged children have different needs. Parents

with younger children or children who aren’t comfortable leaving their

side yet would benefit from childcare that was off to a side of the

same room or more central to the main events. Parents with older and

more independent children benefit from having them in a different room

or floor. Either way, childcare must be assessable.

 

15- Parents need to give more input to the day-care providers, about

their and their children’s needs during the planning of the event, in

order for the childcare provider to better assist them. At least tell

them you are coming and the age of your child/ren.

 

16- It’s comforting for parents to know childcare is available, even

if they don’t use it

 

AND – Contemplate

 

17- How much work/consuming being a parent is: 24/7; in the beginning

years it’s hard to even think straight: one is still adjusting to

being a parent and young children’s needs are very intensive

 

18- That radical parents don’t fit in at mainstream places, like their

children’s schools – so when they go to an anarchist gathering and

don’t feel supported by their own culture – how bad that feels.

- – -

These suggestions are from the “Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind:

Anarcha-feminism & Supporting Mothers and Children” workshop at La

Revolta! To get a copy of the 22 page workshop handout: you can

download it from:

http://bengal.missouri.edu/~maxwellr/DontLeaveYourFriendsBehind.pdf

 

The Death of Jack Layton and Sentimental Reflection

After watching the outpouring of mourning from progressives today over the death of Jack Layton I have a few thoughts to share on both the way people are portraying him and what Jack Layton meant for social democracy and socialism more generally.  I want to send my condolences to his family, friends and supporters. I know personally how hard times like these are, and what it means to lose someone before you feel they should pass on to rest with your ancestors. My childhood best friend died of medical complications at the age of 26. It was absolutely devastating, but also a time to reflect and renew my commitment to what was important to me. I think honest reflection and avoiding false valourization are important in times of death. We can often learn more from a person’s failures and troubles than we can from their success, but most especially the false images people inflate a person to upon their death.

The night that I found out my best friend had died I was due at a accountability meeting for some of the patriarchal behaviour I had been enacting among one of the activists organizations I was working with. I found out exactly 35 minutes before the meeting was going to start, through a phone call from my father saying that my friend’s family had decided to remove his life support. It was very intense to be over 1000km away from anyone else who knew him. There was a sombre and ironic connection though between his death and my patriarchal behaviour. It was this friend and his father(referred to here) that I would say I learned a lot of the patriarchal ideology that has manifest itself in my actions. This was the guy in my youth that everyone looked up to for how many women he had been with, who introduced me to pornography. We were friend’s since we were around 5 years old (its hard to tell exactly), we met at our fathers’ work Christmas Parties. Our fathers worked  on the same shift for the fire department in Mississauga, ON. His family moved in a block away from my house  in Orangeville within 2-3 years of my family moving there in summer 1991. At least one of every three childhood memories I have Andrew is in. I loved him, I never said it when I was young because boys don’t do that. But I really did, I realize it now. Absolutely true bromance. We would hang out for two weeks straight and then get in a fight over video games and be mad at each other for a day or two but after that want to spend time together again. Andrew himself engineered some of my very first sexual experiences by using his sweet talking ways to convince girls to make-out or fool around with me because I was shy and awkward with them as a young guy. I can see the companionship and the weird patriarchal dynamic that exist in these relationships. But despite their compromised nature they still bring me warmth, he cared about me and went out of his way to provide me with the experiences I wanted.

What I’m trying to get at is that we need to and can look at people for the compromised individuals they are and both the good and bad that they bring our lives. We need to reflect on the real human being, the contradiction. See beauty in the deeply oppressive flaws and learn from them. That’s what I’d like to see from Layton’s supporters. Instead I saw mostly group think and sentimentality that did not actually reflect his accomplishments and his failures. The people who have loved me the most have always readily acknowledged my flaws, and I hope they never stop. So I want to have a conversation about Jack Layton.

Jack Layton was a passionate politician right up to the moment of his death. No one can deny that, and I wish more people on the left were as passionate and tireless as he was. I know we could use way more people like him in that regard. Jack Layton also lead the NDP to its greatest victory on the federal political stage in its history as a party. He did that with strong leadership and connecting with people. You can see how well he connected with people from the outpouring of honest grief that we have witnessed. I hope I can connect with as many people as he did, and learn from what was actually a very positive position on politics. This is something the radical left needs to examine and learn from. How Jack Layton was able to connect with people. How his leadership and personality connected with quite a few Canadians.

Where I differ from many other progressives is in a view of his record and his valourization. Jack Layton was a decent human being. I’ve heard some people say he was a hero, I’m not so sure that’s really the case. Jack Layton oversaw the steady shift of the NDP to the left-centre of the political spectrum. Under his leadership there was a move to remove socialist from the party constitution. Layton argued for increased policing in communities. He proposed that we shift the funding for new fighter jets to new navy vessels instead (that is still militarist capability). These to me are not exactly the policies of a hero. Don’t get me wrong in the grand scheme of things he was a really decent guy. His politics were of his day. He’d still probably be a centrist in a Scandinavian country. But in the Canadian context he was asking for the minimum of what the average working Canadian needs to survive. I’m not sure that qualifies someone as more than a decent human being.

Jack Layton defended public health insurance and tried to push forward a green agenda, but he also consistently compromised with a minority conservative government which has turned out to be a substantially regressive force in Canadian politics and culture. He had his good and he had his bad. He played politics, and most of the times when you play politics peoples lives are caught in the balance. Layton consistently took a stand against the war and occupation of Afghanistan. Which was an essential move for any authentic leftist party. He also oversaw the NDP filibuster to support the continuation of negotiations between Canada Post and CUPW  to avoid back to work legislation. Now some folks would say that is more than enough, but I expect more from my leaders. I expect my leaders to be committed to going beyond the usual. I would have liked to see Jack Layton call for NDP supporters to take aggressive political street action to deter the Harper Government from pushing through back to work legislation on top of using parliamentary means. Sometimes true heros need to go beyond the pale of the normal and established methods. Jack Layton played by the rules and lost that fight for the NDP and CUPW, and maybe all public service workers in the years to come if the claw backs continue under the name of austerity.

What we can learn from Jack Layton and the NDP’s failure during that occasion is that if we want the Canada of our hopes and dreams we need to fight harder, swifter and with more reckless abandon than even Jack himself ever dreamed. We need to move beyond parliamentary methods as the be all and end all. We could have won that fight for CUPW if we had of been all in. The NDP itself is a party caught up in an incomplete class war. Social democracy itself is made for the Keynesian welfare state, as that state has eroded, so has social democracy and the socialist legacy of the NDP, Jack Layton was the leader that oversaw these adaptations, for better or worse he was the most significant leftist of the last decade in Canada, and he bears a lot of responsibility for the outcome.

I don’t mean to be hard on the guy, but if he really was our leader, the leader of the most significant credible leftist alternative to the liberals and conservatives, doesn’t he bare a significant portion of the responsibility for what has become of social democracy and socialism more generally in this country?

When I was cycling to my accountability meeting crying from the loss of my friend, the connection between my patriarchal behaviour and his life was present in my thoughts. I try to be honest about my connection to others. Beside love and grief there was an honest assessment of the failures and flaws our relationship represented. I don’t think its wrong to point these out. If anything remembering people for who they truly were is an honest act of love. No one is perfect, pretending they were is weird to me. I’m not even sure I believe in heroes.

For a politician in Canadian politics I liked Jack Layton, I could actually stand to hear his voice and he was pretty witty at roasting Harper in debates. I don’t think he was our saving grace, I can even imagine better. He was a decent guy who did an okay job from all accounts I’ve heard. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Its up to us with an honest assessment of his record to do exactly what he asked the youth to do. Move forward with a better vision of Canada and learn from the older generations mistakes. I’d say one thing we can learn from Jack Layton’s last year is we need to do more than what a political party currently does to defeat the Harper Agenda. We need to rebuild our working class institutions and stop playing by the master’s rules. We need to fight to win. Not elections, but actual control of our country.

Problematic Definitions of Patriarchy Lead to Problematic Feminisms

I just want to say this is my reaction at this point, I’m open to other opinions and totally see contradiction in my own thoughts Let’s discuss this with humility. I’m expressing these thoughts for the sake of conversation and to learn.

So back during the organizing of the Rebelle’s second pan-canadian gathering there was a fairly lengthy debate about the inclusion of trans-men in what came to be a women-only-space. Many things were said and debated. I want to just point out I agree with women’s shelters and centres having women’s only spaces, I agree with women’s caucuses. I’m specifically interested in the fact the 2nd Pan-Canadian Young Feminists Gathering excluded men-identified people. I’m interested in broader questions of participation in the feminist movement. It has to do with even the terminology of young feminist being women-identified only. It hits on the question of whether cismen and transmen can be feminists?

After reading the debate a year later I’m struck by the definition of patriarchy being used by the Rebelles (linked by one of their members during the online debate), in the document called Why Womyn-only spaces available for download on the page.

The document is very reductionist to the extent it misidentifies patriarchy. They write in the very first line: “Patriarchy is a system of domination of men over women.”

Patriarchy is a system of domination of men over women – that is, a system in which men are privileged and women are marginalized and oppressed  à différents degrés [in varying degrees] – which is manifest in numerous ways in both the public sphere (the workplace, the schools, the institutions, etc.) and the private sphere (the home, in heterosexual relationships, in the family in general, etc.).  Patriarchy is a hierarchical system by which women are marginalized in ways both visible (ie. experiencing more violence, poverty, receiving lower pay for equal work, etc.) and more subtle (ie. Unequal sharing of house-work, having their sexuality dismissed or exaggerated, sexism in language, socialization, etc.).  Like racism and heterosexism, patriarchy has been a primary characteristic of most human societies throughout history.

This definition is very misleading, and leaves much invisible. Patriarchy is about the dominance of some men over some women. Some women over some children (of any gender). Some men over some other men (fathers over adult sons). In certain cases some women rule over some young men (female house heads have power sometimes) , or servants in a household (especially historically). It cannot be simply reduced to men’s power to dominate women. It has to do with the full structure of households as well as the institutions of the public sphere, and how gender relations are organized in those spaces in particular moments. Calling patriarchy the domination of women by men, is limiting the definition to the experience of some women who are unfortunately not looking at the whole picture. Its okay to say that central to patriarchy is the domination of men over women, and the systematic privileging of men, but it is not the whole story.

If we eliminate patriarchy from discussions of the oppression of queer men, because it is defined as dominance of men over women, it leaves us blind to understanding how patriarchy is central to both gender and sexual regulation. The oppression of queer men by straight men is central to patriarchy because it is the policing of manhood (excellent bell hooks article). It is central to the construction of the supposed oppressor. In other words, patriarchy is just as much about the internal politics of men as group as it is about the relations of men to women as very broad based groups. Similarly, patriarchy could be understood to be an important axes of oppression to deal with concerning the gender and sexual regulation of politics internal to women as group as well. Patriarchy operates as a instrument or social force in the development of femininity for women, even in terms of relations between mothers and daughters. Logically, doesn’t it seem possible that patriarchy operates along with white supremacy and capitalism to regulate the relations between white women and women of colour? So logically we could conclude that women’s only spaces are definitely not a way to escape patriarchy because it is a force in the relations between women.

Feminism is a political project and a social movement seeking to dismantle Patriarchy and create sexual and gender equality.  In recent history, owing to the contribution of Black Feminism, feminists from the Global South, and feminists fighting poverty, the struggle against all forms of oppression experienced by women (such as racism, classism  and heterosexism) has also become an important goal for the feminist movement.

So stemming from what I would call a rather crude and reductionist definition of patriarchy emerges a rather crude reduction of the movement of feminism to a movement primarily concerned with the position of women as a broad group. Rather than a movement concerned with the dismantling of patriarchy as it manifests itself anywhere. This isn’t to at all disparage the gains feminism and feminists have made for women, but it definitely means we need to look at where we are going. In a certain way it reveals that men need to step up and say feminism is for us too, we need to be part of the conversation about what patriarchy is, how it shapes our lived experiences, and how we need to address its destruction. I would say much of this problem with definitions of patriarchy is because men have not entered the feminist conversation to such an extent that our voices are on equal footing in defining patriarchy. If a space or conversation is made up of women, its probably going to discuss women’s experiences of patriarchy. Did the gathering in Winnipeg have a panel with young women discussing the experience of men with patriarchy in a way that broadened the definition of patriarchy to explicitly include the diverse ways men experience patriarchal oppression, both from other men and the women in their life? I definitely didn’t hear about. If it didn’t doesn’t it seem like that is a huge hole? A lot of men have had their gender and sexuality policed by their mothers and other women in their lives, this is patriarchy. It wasn’t my father that called me a girly man when I got ear rings, it was my mother. That’s patriarchy, exercised through a woman on a man. What else would we call it?

I personally don’t think that women need to do that type of work for us. Its on men to put the effort in to respectfully join the feminist conversation, whether you are trans or not. Doesn’t it seem like from a broader definition of patriarchy the conversation might have been enriched? Could we not be discussing how to dismantle or smash patriarchy in its broadest sense? I’m not even sure women will achieve the elimination of oppression of women without men joining their ranks in far larger numbers. I’m not sure excluding allies from gatherings is necessarily going to help gain those alliances. But I don’t know much on this subject. I still respect people’s right to do so, even if I’m unsure about the need to do so. Maybe feminism ought to be just for women, as long as they acknowledge that their fight is only one aspect of dismantling patriarchy. Men, trans people, two-spirited people, and everyone else can join the conversation under some broader heading. Its possible, but we need to be more precise, more transparent and open to these conversations taking place. I’m suggesting that the 2nd Pan-Canadian Young Feminists Gathering may have been the opportune spot for a conversation like this to take place.

We do need to acknowledge the need for safe spaces. Some men (inclusive) and women(inclusive) ought to be excluded from any gatherings until they have been held accountable and demonstrated transformation. Doesn’t it seem just simple that a woman known to commit intimate violence against women she dates ought to be excluded too? Why can’t men everyone knows is a solid feminist be invited personally? It goes back to the fact patriarchy is active in every relationship we have. Its not just men. Sure its in us a lot. But that doesn’t mean you should exclude all of us. Some of us might be better allies than some women out there if you really think about it. I’m not sure I’m personally there yet, but some guys I look up to most definitely are worthy comrades.
I want to acknowledge the silencing argument as well. Though I’m not sure I buy it or understand it. I haven’t even touched on the questions of gender and its elasticity and fluidity. Consider the descriptions of gender expression as performance and script, not so much an actual solid state of being and the question of man-identified and women-identified becomes an even murkier category from which to base participation.

Its also important to think about how you cannot pull patriarchy out of global oppression (much like it seems a bit odd to isolate women’s experiences of patriarchy) and look at it as an isolated thing and dissect it and hope to understand it as a linear relationship between oppressor and oppressed. The world doesn’t operate like that. Patriarchy is infused with every other oppression and exploitation on this earth. It is mixed into a toxic cocktail of intellectual and institutional poison. I think we need to remember that this is kyriarchy (thanks Graham), a system of global apartheid with shifting subjective locations. This is what Andrea Smith is talking about when she discusses hetero-patriarchy and the pillars of white supremacy in her entry in the Incite anthology.

Pulling patriarchy out of that organic compound and isolating it makes us think male privilege is always dominant, which is not the case, very often class and race will make male privilege have negligible effect in a conflict. Think about who the police will listen to if there is a dispute between a poor native man and a middle class white woman. Do you really think his male privilege is going to trump the intersection of those other axes? That is not how it works in Winnipeg at least.

Following from a reductionist definition of patriarchy it becomes sensible to have reductionist views of the solution, reductionist views of feminism and its movements. So until we have a more relational and intersectional definition of patriarchy and its relationship to everything else in that pungent cocktail, we are going to be limited in our ability to untangle the mess. This problem can be solved by more men and trans people getting involved in the conversation and not allowing only half the picture to be painted.

Colonization, Settlement and Housing

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The effect of and continuing colonization of Indigenous peoples can be traced as an underlying force in the development of housing and neighbourhoods that do not meet the unique cultural needs of Indigenous peoples. Permanent housing in Canada has been developed in a largely Eurocentric paradigm based off the needs and desires of the non-indigenous population. This reality is the result of the process of totalization.¹ Totalization is the assimilatory process of commodification, objectification and assimilation experienced by Indigenous peoples articulated in the works of Peter Kulchyski. He developed his understanding of totalization through the works of Jean-Paul Sartre and Nicos Poulantzas, among others. Kulchyski defines totalization as a state driven process to bring social groups into the dominant social formation, capitalist production.² This requires a reshaping of their society both in terms of material change and transformations in consciousness. ³

The present capitalist-industrial economy requires settled life; accumulation beyond subsistence in general requires settled life. This mode of production is based upon sedentary existence. Preceding colonization, the vast majority of Indigenous peoples in the land that became Canada enacted a ceremonial and productive cycle⁴ that relied upon a non-sedentary form of production. Materially it was the state that generally relocated and settled Indigenous peoples such as the Inuit into homes and locations that were based on a new mode of production. The state-sponsored settlement pattern was chosen and developed to be convenient for the state and its economic priorities and interests. Settlement was based on the values and culture of Euro-Canadians.⁵ Similarly, it was the state that funded the transformation of consciousness that came from the criminalization of ceremonies and the forced internment in residential schools.⁶ In the Canadian context, colonization is the process of preparing for and maintaining the necessary context for capitalist accumulation.⁷ Colonization can be understood in the Marxist terms of primitive accumulation or enclosure,⁸ both historically based ideas of how capitalist markets are created, although these terms to not express the breadth of the process of colonization.

Capitalist settled life was predicated on a change in household production⁹ in Indigenous societies from extended kinship networks to nuclear family reproduction transformed through the introduction of European hetero-patriarchy, the domination of men and privileging of heterosexuality. European-derived patriarchy is one of the fundamental bases of the holistic colonization of Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island.¹⁰ This process of re-ordering gender-relationships is not to unique to the colonization of the Americas but has also been documented by numerous Maori scholars in their works on Aotearoa.¹¹ When planning housing it is often assumed that all inhabitants will have a household of the European-derived patriarchal model, otherwise known as a hetero-normative family. Much of the literature on Indigenous housing use proves otherwise, that some Indigenous peoples still retain a unique spatial use due to their preferences related to kinship and family structure and its effect on household production. The home and neighbourhood are the site of the family and therefore integral to both colonization and decolonization. If a home is not designed for the needs of Indigenous peoples it spatially supports European-derived lifestyles over that of Indigenous peoples. Simply put it gives the spatial advantage to the maintenance of colonization.

The results of colonization, thus far, have been decisive. Leroy Little Bear describes the results of colonization as follows:

Colonization created a fragmentary worldview among Aboriginal peoples. By force, terror, and educational policy, it attempted to destroy the Aboriginal worldview – but failed. Instead, colonization left a heritage of jagged worldviews among Indigenous peoples. They no longer had an Aboriginal worldview, nor did they adopt a Eurocentric worldview. Their consciousness became a random puzzle, a jigsaw puzzle that each person has to attempt to understand. Many collective views of the world competed for control of their behaviour, and since none was dominant modern Aboriginal people had to make guesses or choices about everything. Aboriginal consciousness became a site of overlapping, contentious, fragmented, competing desires and values.¹²

Little Bear argues there are fragmentary worldviews where there once was unity. He posits that colonized consciousness competes with Indigenous worldviews when Indigenous people make social decisions. The same can be seen to happen when governments and social agencies make decisions for Indigenous peoples. Little Bear’s comments however seem to suggest colonization is over and the results have been tabulated, rather than colonization being a process that is reaffirmed with every decision that supports European-derived worldviews and institutions. If one understands colonization as an ongoing process, it becomes easier to understand how not developing culturally appropriate housing can be a barrier to Indigenous cultural revitalization. Taiaiake Alfred argues in his book Wasáse, that defaulting or accepting European-derived cultural practices without critically evaluating whether or not they lead to the end result of Indigenous self-determination and cultural revitalization is a form of self-termination of indigenity. He calls this form of self-defeat and acceptance of colonization aboriginalism.¹³ Both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples can be aboriginalists when they make choices that consequentially undermine Indigenous peoples, whether through processes or results. Seeing this reality requires the researcher, the civil servant, the community activist, or the citizen to prevent oneself from relying on seeing with their imperial eyes,¹⁴ and have empathy for those Indigenous peoples attempting to maintain and revitalize their cultures in an urban context.

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1 Peter Kulchyski and Frank Tester, Tammarniit (Mistakes): Inuit Relocations in the Eastern Arctic 1939-63, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1994, pg. 4-7.

2 See Peter Kulchyski, Like the Sound of a Drum: Aboriginal Cultural Politics in Denendeh and Nunavut, Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2005.

3 Peter Kulchyski, “Primitive Subversion: Totalization and Resistance in Native Canadian Politics”, Cultural Critique, 21. Spring 1992, pg. 174-178.

4 Tom Holm, et al., “Peoplehood: a Model for the Extension of Sovereignty in American Indian Studies”, Wicazo Sa Review, 18:1, Spring 2003, Pg. 14

5 Kulchyski and Tester, Tammarniit (Mistakes), pg. 6-9.

6 Katherine Pettipas, Severing the Ties that Bind: Government Repression of Indigenous Ceremonies on the Prairies, Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1994, pg. 18-20, 46-47.

7 Kulchyski and Tester, Tammarniit (Mistakes), pg. 5.

8 Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1: a Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, New York: International Publishers, 1967, pg. 762-763. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, Boston: Beacon Press, 2000, pg. 17-20. John S. Milloy, A National Crime: the Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879-1986, Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1999, pg. 13.

9 Household production is the labour and reproduction in the home that allows other modes of the social relations of production to exist. According to Cox all societies are at least the combination (or social formation) of household production and one other mode of the social relations of production. Pre-contact Indigenous societies were according to Cox based on the relationship between household and subsistence production. Changes in this mode of production are perceived as changes in family structure. Robert W. Cox, Production, Power, and World Order: Social Forces in the Making of History, New York: Columbia University Press, 1987, pg. 48-50.

10 Karen Anderson, Chain Her by One Foot: the Subjugation of Women in Seventeenth-Century New France, New York: Routledge,1991. pg. 192-195. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women the Body and Primitive Accumulation, Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2004, pg. 97-100. Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and the American Indian Genocide, Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2005, pg. 12-17. Smith Andrea, “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy: Rethinking Women of Color Organizing”, from Incite! Women of Color Against Violence, Color of Violence: the Incite! Anthology, Cambridge, Mass: South End Press, 2006, pg. 71-73.

11 Makere Stewart-Harawira, “Practicing Indigenous Feminism: Resistance to Imperialism”, in Joyce Green, ed., Making Space for Indigenous Feminism, Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2007, pg. 124.

12 Leroy Little Bear, “Jagged Worldviews Colliding”, in Marie Battiste, ed., Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision, Toronto: University of British Columbia Press, 2000, pg. 84-85.

13 Taiaiake Alfred, Wasáse: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom, Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2005, pg. 125-127.

14 ^ ‘Imperial eyes’ is a phrased used by Linda Tuhiwai Smith in to describe how western researchers rely on their specific values, customs and prejudices when studying Indigenous peoples. She articulates that the way the west sees Indigenous peoples is developed out of a cultural archived that developed with imperialism and colonization. See Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, New York: Zed Books, 1999, pg. 42-45, 60.

Grassy Narrows, Dave Brophy and Treaty Relations

Rev – a member in exile v1.1

Anyone who has travelled on the prairies knows the meaning of a big sky. It is here that the heavens look  their grandest. It looks like the horizon never ends. It is really interesting to imagine what it would like when there was no hydro lines scattered towards the far off horizon. These Great Plains were the sight of significant historical resistance to capitalist accumulation by oppressed populations. Here is where many Indigenous nations made their stands against imperial domination. Métis, Nehiyaw (Cree), Anishinaabe, Dakota (Sioux) all have a history of resistance here. Maybe it’s the fact the world seems limitless on the plains. Our destination is past the tree lines, amongst the boreal forests. We are going to the community of Grassy Narrows, an Anishinaabe reserve known for one of the longest blockades in Canadian history. This community has fought hard against exploitation of its traditional treaty territory.

Grassroots activists in Grassy Narrows have a strong relationship with members of the Winnipeg activist community. This trip is dedicated to honouring those relations, it is a time of remembering the relationships made and the people returned to the earth. In particular, this trip is to honour Dave Brophy. Brophy was one of the original solidarity activists involved with Friends of Grassy Narrows and a dedicated supporter of Indigenous resistance. Brophy is talked of as a mainstay and his loss in the community is still felt. This trip was to honour his memory, to wipe each others’ tears, but to also renew the relationships between people left behind.

The trip to Grassy took us through the Great Plains and into the Shield which many in the land known as Ontario recognize so well. To many others this land is known as Treaty 3 Territory. We drove through Kenora, Ontario which is known as the Mississippi of the North. Kenora is known for its history and present of racist violence steeped in colonialism. It was here in 1974 the Ojibway Warrior’s Society took over Anicinabe Park. In this small city the Indigenous population is brutalized by racist police and racist residents on a constant basis. A public meeting was held two days earlier to initiate a grassroots response to this consistent trend of brutality and disrespect.

After a short break to catch a bite to eat we begin our trip up the regional highway that starts in Kenora and ends in Grassy. Highway 671 is a driver’s dream: it has sharp turns, lots of rolling hills and beautiful cascading views of fall yellows and deep blue lakes that only the shield can provide to the onlooker. It is like the propaganda paintings of group of seven members, which we use to hide Canada’s ugly realities. At the end of this picture perfect road we are coming to an Indian Reserve. Indian reserves are patches of land all across Canada designated for Indians to live on. They are essentially the remnants of segregated communities produced by the combination of deeply held racism and liberal attitudes of humanitarianism. Indian reservations are often places of extreme poverty and poor health quality. Most reserves in the north of a province are under boil water advisories and have poor sewage systems. They are rural post-colonial ghettos, where people hope for freedom but are marginalized from the slim luxuries of Euro-Canadian industrial civilization.

They are places where racially coded poverty is plain to see for everyone brave enough to come and look. At the same time these are the only places where Indigenous peoples get recognition of ownership of the land by the Canadian government. Reserves exist because our families, our communities and our nations-states stole the land from the Indigenous families and we didn’t give the Indigenous families enough to survive on. The legacy of this treachery and banditry lasts to this day.

As we arrive on the reservation we are greeted by comrades and companions who have also travelled to honour Brophy. This is a time when people are open and honest and simply speaking from the heart. It is one of those rare times when conversations are true and there is no awkwardness and people can be in the moment. People share their stories, their ideas and their dreams. It’s painfully funny how it takes this occasion for many people to be real. I am here to honour someone who walked the pathway before me in my newly chosen home. It is a very Indigenous way of thinking to truly honour those who came before you. It is one concept I really have respect since my introduction to Anishinaabe ways of knowing.

There are a lot of things that people are forgetting to honour. I think one very important thing to honour is the treaties signed between Indigenous peoples and the settlers who came to live in this land. Harold Johnson, an Indigenous Lawyer, describes the treaties as the adoption of the European family by the Indigenous peoples. He insists that the right of Canada to exist stems from the treaties signed with Indigenous peoples. Harold Johnson’s explanation stems from his discussions with Nehiyaw elders of Treaty 6.

Johnson insists that the right for the settlers to live and grow on this land, in other words, settler nation’s sovereignty stems from their treaty rights. This was the settler Europeans’ initial acceptance of the supremacy of the Creator’s law. Johnson insists that his family, the Cree people, never accepted the authority of the Canadian government over them because their law does not recognize abstractions, paper, or crowns as holding power. Treaties were about making relations between equal peoples, nations, families. He insists much like the Two Row Wampum, of the Haudenosaunee, that these are treaties of non-interference in each other’s affairs. They are treaties of friendship and cohabitation, they are treaties of companionship.

The meeting of friends and allies at Grassy Narrows to honour Dave Brophy highlights how the treaties intended us as peoples to interact. We have different laws, different customs, different lives but we can be friends and have relations as equals. We can share experiences of loss, of happiness and of healing. We can hold each other tight when we grieve and smile as the pain begins to go away, we can eat from the same cup and share our stories together. We do not need to have the same family structure, same political structure or the same cultures to be equal and have meaningful friendships. This is the meaning of peaceful coexistence. Dave Brophy’s memory lives on and reminds us of how we were intended to live together settlers and Anishinaabe.

As we stand on the edge of the pow-wow grounds, a tree in honour of Dave is being planted where a tee-pee once stood during the blockading days. A tree to symbolize his commitment to the protection of Grassy Narrows, a tree to symbolize his friends and families love of him for all he was, and a symbol of respect. Planting a tree can also symbolize what we as settlers and Indigenous peoples need to begin to do together. Rebuild and renew our connections to the Earth and each other. We need to reclaim the original intent of the treaties and begin to walk in a good way. We need to plant many more trees of friendship and let the roots grow strong.

As activists, anarchists and supporters, we need to do well to honour the treaties that give us our entitlement to exist here on Turtle Island; we need to honour these relations. In our theories and our daily practice we need to develop a practice of anti-colonial organizing. We need to daily think about challenging the government’s authority over Indigenous communities, and still keep our covenants with the other peoples of Turtle Island. When we tear apart the state and end capitalism we still have the treaties and our relationship to the original peoples to deal with. A revolutionary organization based in the settler community still needs to deal with the treaties and displacement of Indigenous peoples. This problem will not disappear with the end of capitalism. This issue of land supersedes any change in state or economic system. As long as we do not reconcile the principles of social equality with prior occupancy of Indigenous peoples there will be the possibility for conflict.

As supporters of Indigenous struggles we need to remember they are in part struggling against communities we are a part of. We need to remember and be mindful of our relations to those who oppress and benefit from the oppression of Indigenous peoples. We need to be conscious of how our lives are related to oppressing Indigenous communities. This means attention to organizing in our community. Supporting Indigenous struggle is directly linked to reform, revolution and change in our community. We need to be able to restrain corporations and government from breaching Indigenous sovereignty. The way to do this is to gain control of our communities and do anti-colonial education to gain support for our collective liberation. Organizing our own communities for resistance is the way we can best conduct true solidarity organizing. This is the pathway of action we must take.

This article was written in the fall of 2008 and kept until now to pay respect to the friends comrades and family of Dave Brophy.

Rev is an exiled member of Common Cause and an anarchist militant involved in organizing against Police Violence in Winnipeg, Manitoba and an organizer in the IWW. From these groups he supports Indigenous Struggles.

Further Reading:

Deborah Simmons, “Farewell to a Comrade” – http://www.newsocialist.org/index.php?id=1314

Harold Johnson, Two Families: Treaties and Government, Saskatoon, SK: Purich Publishing, 2007.

Howard Adams, Prison of Grass: Canada from a Native Point of View, Calgary: Fifth House Publishers, 1989.

Peter Kulchyski, Like the Sound of a Drum: Aboriginal Cultural Politics in Denendeh and Nunavut, Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2005.

Robert Williams, Linking Arms Together: American Indian Treaty Visions of Law and Peace, 1600-1800, New York: Routledge, 1999.

Taiaiake Alfred, Wasáse: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom, Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2005.

Waziyatawin, What Does Justice Look Like? The Struggle for Liberation in Dakota Homeland, St. Paul: Living Justice Press, 2008.

Apology for Residential Schools: an Anarchist View – Redux

This is a rewrite of the the article originally published for linchpin, it ties things together better and adds new information that better contextualizes res-schools.

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On June 11th 2008, the Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, claimed to apolo­gize for residential schools and the govern­ment’s plan to destroy the cultures of In­digenous peoples in Canada. This apology came after a similar apology was given to in­digenous people in Australia. Residential or boarding schools were part of colonial policy in New Zealand, Australia, the United States and Canada. Harper’s apology talked about the abuses and cultural assimilation of Indig­enous peoples in Canada by the Canadian government, especially the forced removal of children from their families. However, there is so much that Harper did not say. What he left out was that the residential schools were just one aspect of colonization.

On September 25^th 2009, before the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced that Canada had no history of colonialism. According to Harper, this made Canada the envy of the world. So in just over a year Harper has shown that in the eyes of the government residential schools can be viewed as a single event, an abnormality of Canadian history, rather than as an institution that symbolizes the basic policy of Canadian state towards the majority of Indigenous peoples.

Residential schools were run by churches, led by the Department of Indian Af­fairs for most of their existence. They focused on a total approach to assimilation: physical, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual. The In­digenous children stolen from their families were to be made into Canadians by force. The curriculum was created to allow the de­struction of Indigenous ways of living on the land. The idea of “killing the Indian and saving the man,” was really about making way for capitalist ways of liv­ing on the land. In essence, residential schools aimed at handing over Indigenous land to corporations and turning Indigenous people into workers. Since Cana­dian society was based on private property while most Indigenous communities held the land in common, residential schools taught skills for private property ownership and taught the values of a capitalist society to the children. In the mind of the churches and the government, the Indigenous person was to become a settler and worker for the ruling class. But always these workers were expendable if they took jobs from white workers.

The residential schools were first called Manual Labour or Industrial schools and this says a lot about their actual pur­pose. The schools spent a half day teach­ing lessons in the classroom, the other half was spent learning trades or housework. The schools aimed to produce workers that were able to be exploited for wages or for their crops. The students were taught to be hard working and obedient like all good white Christian workers. Or in other words, to re­spect the authority of the church, state and the capitalist bosses. This is the same idea as the workhouse or poorhouse in Europe, to discipline and create the working class. In other words, to develop a mentality that accepts being ordered and is comfortable with submission.

Authority and fear were central to the goals and methods of the residential schools. Indigenous societies were very free and equal. European society on the other hand used discipline and power to control people. Residential schools used power and violence to train Indigenous peoples to sub­mit to settler society and the figures of au­thority in it. Indigenous peoples were taught to behave like white people or face punish­ment, just like all settler children are taught to behave or face punishment. Those who ran residential schools argued that Indigenous parents did not exercise proper authority over their children.

The residential school curriculum tried to destroy Indigenous languages in order to remove the people from the land. This created a cultural barrier between successive generations of speakers and non-speakers which severed the transfer of knowledge in how to live traditionally. The elimination of this knowledge through the teaching of English imposed settler ways of living, because the necessary knowledge to live Indigenous was lost or not transferable. These policies were so successful that language loss is now an experience that is almost universally Indigenous.

Residential Schools also taught sexism and the rule of men over women (patriarchy). Girls were taught to be do­mestic and remain in the home, while very often Indigenous women had more freedom and could do many jobs outside the home. Women were taught that Christian marriage was right rather than be brought up in a clan system where women’s solidarity and col­lective power protected women from male oppression. Women were taught to be infe­rior and this destroyed the backbone of the gender equality in Indigenous societies. This inequality was essential to the development of the working class in all European societ­ies. The production of the Christian nuclear family is the linchpin of capitalist society.

At the same time as being Indigenous children were being put through residential school their families were experiencing the displacement and dislocation of other Indian policies administered by the federal government. Indigenous ceremonies such as the Sundance and potlatch were made punishable because they were very important to the redistributive/prestige economy of particular Indigenous peoples. People would travel great distances to attend ceremonies and often leave their farming responsibilities to participate. The federal government found this behaviour to be a barrier to the civilization of the Indian. The government instituted a pass system which prevent Indigenous people from travelling off their reserves. This served many purposes, including preventing families from visiting children at residential schools, but also to prevent attending ceremonies.

The federal government also continually failed to protect the livelihood of Indigenous people as they attempted to survive in the emerging capitalist economy. They consistently adopted policies which benefited the settler population at the expense of the Indigenous. Whether it was fishing regulations or timber laws, commercial enterprise of the settler was privileged over Indigenous subsistence economies. The federal government through a process of displacement forced Indigenous communities to rely on welfare as they slowly eroded all of the communities’ alternatives and resources to combat poverty independently. The goal was to give Indigenous people two options wage labour or dependency on relief. Residential schools existed as an institution in this overall scheme of destroying the Indigenous societies that used the land before Canadian capitalism.

To wrap up, residential schools were a project to spread capitalism. Residential schools were meant to turn Indigenous peo­ples into settlers and make them workers and peasants for the capitalist system. Harper will never apologize for the real goals of the residential schools. Many Indigenous peo­ples, such as the Assembly of First Nations, are even scared to admit how colonized they remain. Really discussing decolonization will require the unsettling of capitalism. Recog­nizing that colonization and capitalism are the same process shows us that the struggle for Indigenous freedom from the authority of bosses and the government is a natural ally with the anarchist struggle for freedom.