Category Archives: Colonialism

Fried Squirrels

It’s a crisp, foggy November Saturday morning in the south side of the city. Seventeen people sit in the large open area at the back end of an organic fair trade coffee shop run by a workers’ co-op inspired by the Mondragon movement in Spain. Meet-ups like this are quite common in this shop.

The male and female co-facilitators move briskly through the agenda with the help of the nodding volunteer maintaining the speakers list. There are sporadic jazz-hand gestures, common from the Occupy Movement, as well as a strict yet comfortable group norm of only one person speaking at a time, and succinctly, because of the elaborately carved talking stick that moves around the room.

Continue reading Fried Squirrels

Day One, Post-Mandela

Today is the first day of our world after the Nelson Mandela era.

We don’t need to canonize him or consider any messiah characteristics, but we should stop today and reflect on what kind of Mandela legacy we want to carry forward.

Here are a few ideas to consider.

Continue reading Day One, Post-Mandela

Are We Good Allies to First Nations?

This is what solidarity looks like; make sure it’s authentic!

Lots of us care about deepening relationships with and social/economic/political justice for first peoples. It’s hard to come in, though, sometimes as a person from an oppressor or settler class. But there is a good checklist to make sure we’re actually contributing effectively.

Continue reading Are We Good Allies to First Nations?

Does Racism Motivate Harper’s Aboriginal Education Funding Stance?

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and other MP's applaud after then-National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations Phil Fontaine, right, spoke in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa June 11, 2008.
The Prime Minister’s slow clap.

It could be racism.

It could be concern that over time too many first nations citizens may get too educated and start demanding more in terms of inter-national justice.

Or…

Continue reading Does Racism Motivate Harper’s Aboriginal Education Funding Stance?

The Occupy Movement Vs. Maquiladoras

Workplace justice: a pipe dream, or something to build solidarity to fight for?
Workplace justice: a pipe dream, or something to build solidarity to fight for?

I had the distinct, and creepy, pleasure of sitting in front of a group of fellows yesterday in, ironically, the cheap seats at the Seattle Mariners game. They were discussing business.

One fellow, who of course may have been speaking out of his butt, detailed a list of business exploits, while the other fellows basked in his glow:

  1. Helping a fellow buy a company from someone later to do time for sideways business practices.
  2. That company making a tidy sum through that company from the US Treasury, via the Iraqi provisional government [a wholly owned subsidiary of the US State Department], with some interesting anecdotes about SUVs driving from Iraq to Jordan, filled with cash.
  3. Another company now that uses a Maquiladora outside Tijuana.
  4. They bring in 40 busloads of workers every day.
  5. They pay them each a solid, firm, unwavering, quite serious $1.20/hour.
  6. They have their own armed militia for payday [it’s all in cash].

If you think the rich aren’t getting richer and the poor aren’t getting poorer, I wish you could have listened to this fellow yesterday while he bragged, and fielded questions.

MexAmeriCanada, Version 2013

Welcome to the United States of MexAmeriCanada. Represent!
Welcome to the United States of MexAmeriCanada. Represent!

I was just thinking a few days ago how I haven’t used the MexAmeriCanada tag for a while. Did I cause this to happen, in some cosmic kind of way?

In the old days it was Canadian Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin negotiating the post-911 deep integration of Fortress North America with President George W. Bush.

Now we have “opposite” governing bodies in the two nations, though they’re barely different. North America is still strolling towards a 1984/Brave New World/V For Vendetta kind of soft fascist near-future of corporate “human” rights inside a surveillance society that we’re increasingly complacent about.

  1. Will we wake up?
  2. Do we care who our overlords are?
  3. Does it matter that we are different countries?
  4. Are we even different countries?
  5. Would it make any difference if we merged?
  6. If the Chinese stop propping up the US dollar and the North American economy becomes a branch plant of Beijing, would it matter if Canada were a sovereign nation?
  7. Is anyone writing dystopic futurist novels about a new world order with the Yuan controlling everything, like a 21st century Man in the High Castle?
  8. If a tree falls in a forest and the majority of citizens either don’t vote or put much thought into voting, does the lack of actual democracy make a sound?
  9. Does anyone really notice the problem that the political parties run elections in the USA,  and in Canada, the Conservative Party can commit electoral fraud and have no legal or electoral consequences?
  10. Will we be one step closer to a de facto Homeland North America, or one step closer to authentic democracy in both nations?

That’s all for now.

You may put your answers in the comments below. If there’s nothing but crickets, beware!

Is Harper’s Canada a “Genocide”-Free Zone?

The CMHR: a genocide-free zone.
The CMHR: a “genocide”-free zone.

Genocide is a pretty serious word. It invokes the Holocaust, Pol Pot, Rwanda and some other high profile human eradication attempts.

But Canada, being Canada these days, is loathe to admit that it had any part in any kind of genocide. No. Not us. We’re so nice.

But the Canadian Museum for Human Rights will not be using the word when it comes to our historical “treatment” of the first peoples. Since the museum is part of the federal government’s propaganda wing, I can understand why it is avoiding the word. While a museum spokesperson said the Harper-appointed board did not make that call, staff did, this would not be the first instance of federal civil servants engaging in self-censorship during the Harper regime.

A number of commenters at the article make some interesting points.

  1. One notes that if our definition of genocide is too broad (like presumably the UN’s), then we will have to acknowledge too many genocides which will make the word meaningless. The last part is a non sequitur. What if there actually have been dozens or hundreds of genocides attempted? That wouldn’t make any one genocide attempt less significant, but more broadly indict our race as genocidal, thereby more likely leading to more awareness of why we are so sick as a species. We don’t have to have merely a few genocides for them to be important. We don’t need to preclude others from being genocides out of fear that those affected by the Holocaust, for instance, would be offended.
  2. Another person suggested that it isn’t genocide if there are no death camps. If this were a reasonable standard, genocidal maniacs would merely need to skip actual death camps in their mass slaughter.

One thing I keep in mind when people argue that Canada’s treatment of the first peoples is not genocidal is to consider how much people could be using separate arguments to avoid having to deal with the extent of destruction our nation visited upon people. If it’s uncomfortable to our self-concept that we tried to eradicate a people/culture/etc., we can sometimes come up with other arguments, like the semantic ones above.

It’s hard to know what’s in people’s hearts, but it’s easy to check to see if they appreciate the gravity of the issues they sometimes dance around.

“What matters in genocide is not that it’s a lot of killing,” said University of Manitoba sociology Prof. Andrew Woolford. “What matters is that it’s an assault against a group, on their ability to persist as a group.”

Underlying the genocide question are persistent allegations — some made by former museum staff — the CMHR’s federally appointed board routinely interferes in content decisions in an effort to tell more “positive,” politically palatable stories.

[Spokeswoman Maureen] Fitzhenry said the decision to avoid the word “genocide” was made by senior staff, not the board.

She said the museum will not shy away from exploring Canada’s colonial legacy, including the epidemic of missing and slain aboriginal women, the disastrous relocation of Manitoba’s Sayisi Dene people, land and treaty rights and residential schools.

– from CMHR rejects ‘genocide’ for native policies

The Most Racist Thing I Have Ever Seen Published

Educate First Nations to be modern citizens

Don Olsen, The Daily News

Published: Wednesday, March 27, 2013

via Educate First Nations to be modern citizens.

This is the most racist thing I have ever seen published.

The Nanaimo Daily News published a document either as an editorial or a letter to the editor [likely the latter] that is so vile and hateful, I will not reprint it here. I can’t stand the thought of this filth being on our website.

The link is above. I encourage you all to read it to get a sense of what some people think of the First Nations, and what can get published by a community paper.

And I want to know who is this racist Don Olsen.

Watch for updates. I’ve sent an email to the editor. If you’d like to contact the editor and publisher, here is their information:

Hugh Nicholson, publisher
HNicholson@glaciermedia.ca
250-729-4257

Mark MacDonald, managing editor
mmacdonald@nanaimodailynews.com
250-729-4224

UPDATE:

The disgusting post has been removed, but it has not been replaced with an apology or explanation. But you can read most of it with some good analysis here, and a screenshot of it is here.

9:51am A non-apology has shown up on their website. It is a typically cynical “we’re sorry that you were offended” piece of junk. I don’t accept that. It’s garbage and a further insult.

There is also a Facebook group planning action/response against the paper and its ignorant ways.

Vancouver Island University Board of Governors wrote an amazing, constructive, and future-focused letter about why the Don Olsen letter was a mistake and how the newspaper MAY help heal its involvement in community.

The students of the UBC Graduate School of Journalism also wrote an amazing letter to the Nanaimo Daily News.

Rising rhetoric of a new “yellow peril”

1921's Yellow Peril
The 1921 “Ethnic Outreach” Campaign
(Courtesy Past Tense Vancouver)

The complaints are familiar – “Asian immigrants are taking our jobs,” “Asian immigrants are buying our property and keeping us out.”

Instead of being complaints found in the Richmond Review’s letters-to-the-editor section, however, these are the complaints that were found in a Liberal Party advertisement in 1921 that was posted on a Vancouver history site.

Our history – the history of Vancouver, BC, and Canada – especially that of Asian immigration is one fraught with historical wrongs. The Chinese head tax, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Japanese internment, the Komagata Maru, all are racially-based historical wrongs that we continue to live with today.

While we don’t quite have an Asiatic Exclusion League actively campaigning today against Asian immigration today, the complaints that prompted the Liberal Party of 1921 to pledge to keep British Columbia “white” are still around, and they seem to keep rising in strength. Indeed, it appears that there is a rise of a new rhetoric of “yellow peril.”

Property speculation: They’re taking our land!

The new yellow peril rhetoric is immediately observable in Vancouver’s perennial hot-topic debate: the housing crisis and property speculation. It has almost become vogue to enter the debate on the housing crisis with the argument that one of the primary reasons that people cannot afford to live in the Lower Mainland is because our market has been distorted by foreign buyersproperty speculators from places like Hong Kong, from China, from places that are Asian and have Asian people living in them.

Continue reading Rising rhetoric of a new “yellow peril”

Inconvenient Truths for White Men

Men, especially white men, sleep too easily at night while women earn 70 per cent of what we do. Secretly, I think we’d prefer to not have to talk about this much. Sure, March 8 and December 6 are days we set aside for reflecting on this, but, most likely, we don’t want to be bothered with it every other day of the year. Plus, the NHL is back.

One conversation I have never had, goes like this. I’m in the lunchroom at work with a group of men discussing workplace realities. The topics drifts around to how women in Canada make less than men, on average. We then happily discuss how unionized workers suffer less gender-based wage discrimination than non-unionized workers. We comment on how women take time out of the workforce to bear and raise children. Then we conclude that pay equity programs can help bridge the gap, recognizing structural discrimination. Finally, we end up talking about how, as men, we need to find ways of being willing to take less money in raises to allow women to make more, until they are on par with men.

While most of that conversation seems realistic, the ending has never happened. I have never had a conversation with men about what kind of sacrifices we need to make, individually and collectively, so that women can reach wage parity with us. Why is that?

Here are a few generalized assertions that I believe will help explain our acceptance of continuing widespread pay discrimination. Brace yourselves, fellow white men.

First, I believe many people still think women actually don’t deserve to make as much money as men. Maybe we rationalize this by saying that men have traditionally been the main wage earners, as women used to not work so much outside the home. This is a compelling explanation, but it’s still sexist. And I think it’s still widespread today, even when so many women are now in the paid workforce.

Second, men still may have a sense of entitlement, which leads us to resent women taking “our” jobs. We can rationalize this by saying that, for thousands of years, women were domestic and men worked outside the home. But I think men still act from this entitlement.

Third, people think it is not fair for a woman to continue to earn full pay and accrue seniority while on parental leave. Strictly speaking, in a meritocracy, people ought to get compensated for what they actually do.

On the surface, there may appear to be some common sense to this sense of “natural justice.” It is, however, absurd and chauvinistic. No one questions the accommodations we make to allow people to stay home with full pay and seniority accrual for a variety of other things: having a sinus cold; recovering from cancer; celebrating Canada Day; and, in more progressive workplaces, caring for sick children or elders. We champion these benefits, but many of us still balk at loudly fighting for full pay and seniority for women on parental leave.

Fourth, capitalists don’t like women and they especially don’t want to work for one. Every January, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives reminds us of the grotesque income inequality in Canada between CEOs and average workers. And the CCPA’s 2013 report revealed that only one of Canada’s top 100 CEOs was a woman. Many think the brutally competitive world of capitalism is a testosterone arena where women don’t belong: one that would undermine the femininity men enjoy in our minds when we think of women taking part.

Fifth, whatever gender entitlement men feel, is compounded when we look at racial entitlement: the idea, common among white men like me, that our white European settler ancestors created this “Canada” despite the people who were already here. The predictable defensive backlash against the Idle No More movement reflects this lingering sense of white entitlement.

And this has been a two-directional racial entitlement. White Europeans settled “Canada” and marginalized the people who were here because those people were inconvenient to the settler agenda. Going forward, white “Canada” has been brutally racist towards other new people who have arrived in this land we currently rule.

Canada may no longer charge the Chinese a head tax and we no longer turn back Komagata Marus. Now, instead, we detain and deport migrants on ships that approach the West Coast. And, in B.C., in a disturbing echo of the exploitation of Chinese labourers brought to Canada in the late 1800s to build our transcontinental railroad, we are importing Chinese coal miners under the Temporary Foreign Worker Program to operate new mines.

It is uncomfortable to speak of such blatant systemic and cultural racism and sexism. I think most white men still have a blind spot when it comes to these subjects, or are simply too complacent when it comes to economic discrimination based on gender and race.

We need to drop this blind spot, or complacency, now.