CBC News - Montreal - Natives want PM to screen northern Quebec projects

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CBC News - Montreal - Natives want PM to screen northern Quebec projects

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Class, Nation, and Health: with some thoughts about H1N1, and building movement capacity

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What follows is a rough version of a talk i gave at Montreal's Native Friendship Center, at the Anti-Colonial Thanksgiving organized by Frigo Vert last night. Many of the articles and documents referenced here are also referenced on the new Kersplebedeb H1N1 page.

I’m here to say just a few words about health inequalities, with particular attention to this new flu, the H1N1 or swine flu, and some concerns around it.

The flu is something I became interested in earlier this year, when my husband caught it and became very sick. He spent two months in the hospital, most of that time on a ventilator in a medically-induced coma, and he probably would have died if not for the fact that he received excellent medical care.

People say that you have to already have a serious health condition to be at risk from H1N1, but my husband’s only relevant health problems were very mild asthma and the fact that he gets migraines. In fact, they’re saying now that a quarter of the people who have died of H1N1 were in perfect health beforehand.

Now luckily my husband didn’t die, though his seven weeks in the ICU did make me realize some things. For one, it gave me an appreciation of the fact that even though not many people were dying of the flu, an unknown number of people were getting very very sick, and it was only the fact that there were enough ventilators and ICU beds that allowed them to survive. (The clearest figure i could find about this was that for every H1N1 death, there were four people critically ill with the virus who had to be kept alive in an ICU.)

And that got me thinking about health inequalities, and how they might play out with the flu.

By “health inequality”, I don’t mean the fact that some of us are more healthy than others, or that some of us see the doctor more often. I don’t even mean just the fact that some of us have more ready access to medical care, though that's getting closer. What I’m talking about is not an individual thing, but a collective phenomenon. The fact that different groups of people face different obstacles and challenges to being healthy. That the family you were raised in, the neighbourhood you grew up in, the job you end up doing and the place where you end up living as an adult, these factors all affect your chances of getting particular illnesses, they affect how readily you’ll have access to treatment if you do get sick, and as a bottom line, these things all affect how long you’re likely to live.

That’s what I mean by health inequality.

Health inequality is normally the result of some other kind of inequality. It’s not just caused by bad luck or genetics. More often than not, it is a result of financial inequality, unequal power relations, your position in society.

There are many useful ways of looking at this, but two that i find particularly helpful are class and nation.



Class and Life Expectancy: Some Examples from Montreal

If you go out this door, walk down to St-Catherine street and then take a left and walk for an hour, you’ll end up in Hochelaga Maisonneuve, Montreal’s working-class east end. Folks there have a life expectancy in their low to mid-seventies. In fact, bucking the general trend in most countries, the life expectancy for older residents of the neighbourhood actually went down between 1998 and 2008. (By life expectancy we don't mean how old most people are dying now - that's referred to as the "average age of death" and is usually significantly younger. Life expectancy is capitalism's forecast as to how old people born today are likely to live - indeed, the fact that there continue to be such discrepancies in life expectancy is a stark indicator that the 21st century is not intended to be any more egalitarian than the last one was.)

If on the other hand, you were to go out this door, walk down to St Catherine street and take a right, and walk for about an hour, you’d be in Westmount, one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in all of Canada. The folks there, just to use the same measure, have a life expectancy in their eighties.

Now what makes a life expectancy? Lots of things, for instance: how common violence is in your community, what kind of food people eat (and what kind is sold at your local supermarket), what opportunities you have for physical exercise, how stressful or dangerous your job is likely to be, and of course how likely you are to get sick with various diseases due to poor sanitation or overcrowding or pollution.

The thing about these various factors, is they all follow the same contours of wealth and political power. When I was doing a bit of research for this talk, I came across a page hidden like a needle in a haystack on the Quebec government website, in which Montreal was divided up into different neighbourhoods and each neighbourhood was listed along with the prevalence of various diseases, various "quality of life" indicators, and also average annual income. These statistics are not completely honest, engaging in a bit of demographic gerrymandering, by including a few blocks where people are poor into the wealthier neighbourhoods, and including a few middle class blocks in with the working-class neighbourhoods, to dilute the impact of the numbers - but even so, a predictable pattern emerges. The same neighbourhoods – places like Hochelaga Maisonneuve, St-Henri, Montreal North – suffer from higher rates of various health problems, and the same places enjoy better than average health, and those are the wealthier and safer areas. (Although lacking the health information, similar socio-economic statistics can be found on this City of Montreal web page.)

It makes sense, after all, this is one of the big reasons people want to be middle class, or upper class, the fact that they can then afford a healthier and longer and safer and more pleasant life, not only for themselves but for their children, too.

This all is one way of thinking about heath inequality.



National Disparities Within Canada

If class is one useful way to look at injustice, another important concept is nation. The two aren’t the same, but they’re closely related.

Different nations, different peoples, live inside what is called Canada, experiencing very different living conditions, and obviously this leads to differences in health. We may live just down the block from each other, but for all that many of us effectively live in different countries.

Again, to use life expectancy as a bottom line, folks in Westmount might be expected to live into their eighties, folks in Hochelaga Maisonneuve into their mid- seventies, well Indigenous people in Canada, on average, have a life expectancy in their low seventies (high sixties for men, mid-seventies for women). That's all the Indigenous folks counted as such by Statistics Canada, including those who have "made it", including those in communities with more resources: a national average just slightly below that of the poorest of Montreal's neighbourhoods.

Canadian colonialism and genocide create this discrepancy - the Indigenous life expectancy results from different health issues and trends than what is found in the settler community. We're not just talking a little more of this disease or slightly less of that vitamin, but tragically high death rates amongst young people, often due to violence and various forms of substance abuse (See pages S54-S55 of the Revue Canadienne de Santé Publique Vol. 96, Supplément 2). That’s a direct result of genocide, Canada's long term assault on the ability of subject nations to reproduce and maintain themselves in a healthy way.



Looking at Communities

Now these statistics are just that, statistics. They’re all about averages and generalities, they deal with large numbers of people, millions in fact. For that reason, while they're useful as an initial tool, they can also trick you into missing some important details. Just as it's misleading to talk in broad generalities about “Canada” without specifying the different classes and nations here, it’s also misleading to talk in generalities about neighbourhoods or broad national categories like “Quebecois” or “settler” or “Indigenous” without keeping in mind that not everyone in these categories is dealing with the same situation. Definitely not all settler communities are the same, definitely not all immigrant communities are the same, definitely not all Indigenous communities are the same. Ignoring this has real political consequences that can screw us up.

Now a community may be geographic, like Hochelaga Maisonneuve or St. Henri or Kanesetake, but it may be more amorphous than that. Not all communities are found on maps, not all communities have a longitude and a latitude. We may not normally think of them as communities, but in terms of health, your job may provide a community, for instance a factory may be a community. A school may be a community. If you're a sex worker, then that may be a community. And if you’re living on the street that’s a particular community, if you’re living at the Y, or staying at a shelter, then that’s a particular community. If you’re in prison, then you'd better believe it: in terms of your health, that's a distinct community.



Locked Up or On the Street

This does not diminish the importance of nations and classes. On the contrary: if you check out these situations, or if you’re forced to live in them, you see that in fact they’re not separate. In fact, it is in specific communities that nations and classes exist in their sharpest, most intense, form. Like on the street: in Hamilton, Ontario, for instance, where Indigenous people represent 2% of the city’s population, but 20% of the homeless population. Or Edmonton, where Indigenous people make up 43% of the homeless population, though only 6% of those who have homes. (Aboriginal Housing Background Paper, Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation November 2004)

Or take a look at Canadian prisons and penitentiaries: Indigenous people are locked up over six times as often as anyone else in Canada. A few years back they did a "snapshot" study of all the prisons, penitentiaries and jails in Canada, to see exactly who was locked up: in Saskatchewan Indigenous people were imprisoned at almost ten times the overall provincial rate; they were 76 per cent of that province’s prisoner population. In Manitoba, 61 per cent of prisoners were Indigenous; in Alberta, it was over 35 per cent. (Racial Profiling in Canada, p. 81, quoted in Sketchy Thoughts)

So when we’re talking about communities, even when we don’t mean actual geographic communities that you can find on a map, even when we’re talking about something like being on the street or in prison, it should be clear that we’re still talking about something that has very clear class and national characteristics. Not everyone has an equal chance of ending up in these situations, not everyone has an equal chance of getting out of them.

In terms of health, in terms of well-being, if you’re in a particularly oppressed community, your reality will be a lot more intense than what you see in the broad reassuring national statistics. To give an example: 1 in 125 people in Canada is thought to have Hepatitis C, a potentially fatal illness. According to a study carried out in 2004, the rate is almost one in four (23.6%) for prisoners in the federal system. To give another example: Canada-wide, just over one in a thousand (0.13%) people were HIV positive in 2004, but almost one in twenty women in prison (4.7%) had the virus. (Moulton, Donalee. "Canadian inmates unhealthy and high risk." CMAJ: Canadian Medical Association Journal. 2004) Similar kinds of discrepancies exist if you’re talking about tuberculosis or many other serious health problems.

Prisoners are one such group, people without good housing are another. A study that just came out this week in the British Medical Journal tells us that in Canada, if you're a woman living in a rooming house at age 25, your life expectancy is less than fifty years of age. If you’re a man living on the street at age 25, your overall life expectancy is less than forty. Less than half the national average. (Hwang, Stephen W., Mortality among residents of shelters, rooming houses, and hotels in Canada: 11 year follow-up study, BMJ 2009;339:b4036)

Understand it: nations and classes find their lived reality in communities. Communities with their own vulnerabilities and peculiarities, their own cultures, their own realities. This is important when thinking about health crises, because when disaster strikes, it will normally strike first in a specific community. Partly because germs and pollutants are distributed that way, and partly because social power and wealth are distributed that way. When there's an outbreak of some disease, most communities will probably be mildly affected, if at all. Oftentimes, there will even be big differences within various oppressed and colonized peoples, as only certain subgroups are made to bear the brunt of whatever capitalism is dishing up this season. (At least at first.)

So we have this obscene situation, that as a society, we’re often moaning about possible disasters that aren’t very likely at all, while people around us are actually living the disaster, or living the crisis, right now before our eyes. But most people choose not to see it.

It’s important to keep this in mind, because if you yourself are in a community struck by disaster, then these big reassuring statistics can make you feel like what's happening to you is exceptional and aberrant, perhaps even your fault or your community's fault. But in reality while it may be exceptional, it is also intrinsic to the system, and more often than not your personal hell has been noted and deemed acceptable by those who claim to be in charge.

On the other hand, if you are lucky enough to not be in the line of fire, then those statistics, by lumping people and communities together in these big categories, can give you a false sense that nothing anywhere is really all that bad. Those cases where people are in a serious crisis, where diseases like tuberculosis and Hepatitis C are not only common but are the norm, those situations end up being hidden, camouflaged by the large numbers of cases where people are managing to hold it all together.



H1N1: Parsing Opinions

This new flu, the "swine flu" or H1N1, it's an easy topic to spin bullshit about, and a lot of people are spinning bullshit about it. It’s easy to spin bullshit because this is a new strain of the flu, and it hasn’t been around during a flu season yet, and so no one can really know how serious it will be. According to some people the flu will wipe everyone out, according to some people it’s harmless but the vaccine will kill you – and all these folks seem to contradict themselves and rely on junk science, but they get a hearing because most of us know we can’t trust the government, and we’re often scientifically illiterate ourselves. If you’re bored, you can make up any old end-of-the-world fantasy story, and someone out there is likely to believe you. (If you don't believe me, just try it.)

But just because we don’t know something, that doesn’t mean that we can’t talk intelligently. Just because any crazy idea will get a hearing, doesn’t mean that it’s pointless to try and be logical and reasonable in seeing what might come.

Within the sane range of opinion, there’s two ways of looking at H1N1, and at what is likely to occur. One way is to point out that most people do not get very sick from it. Only 90 people in Canada have died so far from H1N1, while the regular flu kills thousands every year. This is an important point. According to this view, it's not so much a pandemic as a scamdemic, a fabricated excuse for some big pharmaceutical companies to boost their profits.

But it’s worth keeping in mind that the regular flu normally kills hardly anyone in the summertime or spring, and that’s when H1N1’s deaths have occurred so far. To compare the regular flu's winter toll with that of H1N1 over the summer is to make certain assumptions that contradict what years of epidemiology tell us about when flu infections - and serious illnesses, and deaths - will spike.

The bottom line is we just don’t know how serious or how mild the flu will be this winter, and winter is when the vast majority of flu deaths normally occur.

In the meantime though, we do have the experience of the H1N1 this spring. Then the virus played itself out much like other illnesses: people in less wealthy and more oppressed communities were more prone to catching it, and thus formed a larger proportion of those who got very sick. There was a good article in the Globe and Mail a little while back, in the science section, which made exactly this point; its title was “Influenza has a cure: affluence”.

To give one example of how this worked, in June, 14% of people with H1N1 showing up at emergency rooms all across Quebec were showing up at just one hospital, the Montreal Jewish General. This may in part be because it’s just a better hospital and more proficient at diagnosing people, but it may also have something to do with the fact that it’s located in the middle of Cote-des-Neiges, one of the more heavily immigrant neighbourhoods in Montreal. While Cote-des-Neiges is a mixed class neighbourhood, it does contain pockets of real poverty, bad living conditions, and overcrowding. (This statistic, of 14%, was discussed at an information seminar about H1N1 at the Jewish General in June. i am unaware of it having been published to date.)

But there’s something important to grasp beyond the general fact that the flu will be more prevalent in less wealthy neighbourhoods. Like I was saying, no matter what the picture painted by broad statistics, when you look at the specifics you’re going to always find certain communities dealing with much worse situations.

That is precisely what we saw this spring, in a number of communities, where H1N1 became something much much worse. When it became so widespread that a tipping point was reached. To speak in dialectics, one could say the quantitative – the numbers of people sick - became qualitative, meaning it changed the nature of the entire situation. Local resources were overwhelmed, and the crisis entered a different phase. In Garden Hill, St. Theresa’s Point, Sandy Lake – all Indigenous communities – the flu pandemic got completely out of control, local nursing stations were unable to support people’s needs, and over a hundred people had to be medi-vacced to intensive care units in Winnipeg hospitals. Several people died.

Tipping points are like dominos, when one occurs it always risks setting off the next. In terms of what happened this summer, this almost did happen, as ICUs in Winnipeg filled up with critically ill H1N1 patients and there was a real fear that there would not be enough ventilators. Had that occurred (thankfully it didn't) many more people would have died.

While Garden Hill, St. Theresa's Point and Sandy Lake were the only places we know of where things escalated to that level, Indigenous people across Canada were suffering disproportionately from the flu. According to the way the government measures these things, Indigenous people make up less than 4% of the Canadian population – but this summer by the same measure Indigenous people made up 25% of those who got critically ill from H1N1. In Manitoba, where Indigenous people make up roughly 10% of the population, this summer at one point they were over 60% of those who found themselves on ventilators, struggling for life in ICUs.

Nor is it only Indigenous people. Compared to most places, Canada is a fairly “white” country, but according to a recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, less than 50% of those who became critically ill with H1N1 in Canada this summer were white; the majority were people of color. It’s perhaps also worth noting that that same report found that almost 70% of those who got critically ill were women, which shows this disease has a gender profile that hasn’t been given enough attention.

We may not be able to predict the future, but given what we do know, we can make some reasonable guesses about the flu this winter. It is clear that the incidence of disease will not be random, and that not all communities will fare the same. No matter what the broad, general, abstract “Canadian” experience this winter, it is guaranteed that in some specific communities the situation will be much much worst. Those hardest hit will almost certainly be Indigenous communities, immigrant communities, working class communities.



A Suggestion to My Comrades

At the height of the outbreak in Garden Hill this spring, Grand Chief David Harper asked Health Canada to set up a field hospital in the community, an idea that the government rejected.

Since then, the Assembly of First Nations asked the federal government to send flu kits to Indigenous households across the country – Health Canada didn't see the point, so instead the AFN had to raise money on its own from the provinces and the private sector.

Just a couple of weeks ago Grand Chief Harper was quoted in the newspaper again, saying “By now, we would have liked to have field hospitals set up so our people don’t have to wait to be airlifted to Winnipeg for treatment.”

This is a reasonable request: for months now everyone from local healthcare providers to the World Health Organization has been saying that if a major crisis occurs in Canada, if a tipping point is reached, if the quantitative becomes qualitative, it will most likely happen in one of the many remote and impoverished Indigenous communities. But the government isn't worried.

So it begs a question for me – which of our movements have things like this on the radar? Which of our movements is poised to respond to a request for a field hospital, or any kind of useful emergency intervention? It reminds me of the ice storm back in 1998, when the whole city of Montreal was paralyzed, many without electricity for weeks, and the army was sent in. Many people were relieved to see the soldiers, we felt we needed rescuing. Why couldn’t any of our movements have played that role?

And why does this question seem silly to some of us? As if the ability to respond to a crisis, the ability to serve the people when the people really need serving, as if all of that was beyond the scope of our responsibilities.

Some of us have the skills, and i know many of us would love to see these capacities developed, but the question is a collective one, not an individual one. We need to explicitly decide as a movement that that’s where we’re going. We need autonomous structures, separate from (and ideally hidden from) the state, in which those with medical skills can frame their work, even if they may be operating within a hospital or a community health organization. We need to become scientifically literate, so that we don’t fall for the latest ridiculous conspiracy theory. Even if not everyone has the interest or the proclivity to get a grasp on "hard sciences", as a movement we need to value that kind of thinking, to appropriate it, to make it our own.

Most importantly, we need to think in terms of filling the role that the state plays, dealing not only with healthcare, but also with everything from garbage disposal to sewage treatment to conflict resolution. If we claim to be against the state, then that becomes our job. If we fail at it, if we fail to do a better job than what's being done now, then even if we do someday drive out the state, even if we do establish no-go areas, sooner or later it will be the people themselves who will demand the enemy's return.

H1N1 may or may not play itself out as a disaster this winter. I certainly don’t believe it will be some Canada-wide cataclysm, but I think it’s likely that in certain specific areas it will be a serious problem, and some people will suffer. If tipping points are reached, if the surge capacity of particular communities is overwhelmed, it won't be pretty. I can tell you from personal experience that the disease can be horrendous.

We know the Harper government is ideologically predisposed to letting poor people die. We know capitalism and colonialism will only make the situation worst. Knowing this, I would argue that our movements have a responsibility to think beyond zines and blogs and lobbying, that we have a responsibility to start doing what we can to build our capacity to offer real help to people whenever and wherever a crisis does occur.

Tags: h1n1 health canada indigenous first-nations poverty prison homelessness

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October 29: Anti-Colonial Thanksgiving

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Next Thursday in Montreal. Click on the image to see the full-size PDF.

ANTI-COLONIAL THANKSGIVING
Films, Speakers & Feast!

Thursday October 29th
6pm @ The Native Friendship Centre
2001 St. Laurent Blvd. (Metro St. Laurent)
Free: Event, Food and Childcare.
Wheelchair Accessible Space.

Speaker: Tracey Deer
Film: Club Native
In Club Native, Deer looks deeply into the history and present-day reality of Aboriginal identity. With moving stories from a range of characters from her Kahnawake Reserve - characters on both sides of the critical blood-quantum line - she reveals the divisive legacy of more than a hundred years of discriminatory and sexist government policy and reveals the lingering “blood quantum” ideals, snobby attitudes and outright racism that threaten to destroy the fabric of her community. Tracey Deer will present her film and be available for discussion/questions after.
Speaker: Billie Pierre NYM/OG

Film: A Quiet Struggle
Update on Indigenous organizing focussed on the resistance to tourism and development as it’s related to the Winter 2010 Olympics in BC.

Speaker: Karl Kersplebedeb
Brief talk about medical apartheid and the politics of the H1N1 epidemic’s effect on low-income communities.



Missing Justice is a grassroots solidarity collective based in Montreal that works to eliminate violence and discrimination against Indigenous women living in Quebec. Our goals are to raise public awareness and create a safer environment for Indigenous women by tackling issues of systemic racism, sexism, classism and negligence that are present in the media, the justice system and police forces. We recognize that the causes of racialized and sexualized violence are linked to Canada’s colonial policies of the past and present.



Presented by:

le frigo vert
2130 rue mackay
514-848-7586
www.lefrigovert.com

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October 6: An evening with Chrissy Swain of the Grassy Narrows First Nation

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Young Defenders
An evening with Chrissy Swain of the Grassy Narrows First Nation
Preceded by the film: ‘The Scars of Mercury’

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 6, 7pm
2149 Mackay
(between Sherbrooke and de Maisonneuve)
metro Guy-Concordia

FREE! Donations appreciated.
Presentations in English; whisper translation into French.
If you need childcare, please contact us by phone 48 hours before the event.

Chrissy Swain of the Grassy Narrows Anishnabe First Nation in northwestern Ontario will speak about ongoing efforts against logging and mining in her community. Chrissy helped to begin a logging blockade in 2002, and will have just completed the 2nd Walk for Mother Earth from Grassy Narrows to Ottawa, an 1800 km journey undertaken with youth.

‘The Scars of Mercury’ (40 minutes) explores the processes that threaten the destruction of a traditional and contemporary Indigenous hunting, fishing and gathering way of life, through residential schools, relocation, treaty violations, and clear-cutting, with a special focus on mercury poisoning.

Presented by the Indigenous Solidarity Committee, a working group of QPIRG Concordia, and No One Is Illegal-Montreal.
INFO: indigenoussolidaritymontreal@gmail.com - 514-848-7585

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"We have been waiting for medical supplies and here all we receive is body bags"

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H1N1 prevalence around the world

The news today that the canadian federal government has sent body bags to First Nations in preparation for this fall's H1N1 hit, is a stark exposition of the fact that the "swine flu," while expected to be mild in wealthier countries, could devastate many poorer nations.

And those lying maps notwithstanding, "canada" is home (like a jailcell) to many such nations, that Third-World-in-the-First, the nations and lands of Indigenous people, surviving centuries after conquest.

Earlier this year, as thousands of people across Canada were confirmed to have contracted H1N1 (the real numbers probably being in the hundreds of thousands: if you had the flu this summer, chances are you had the swine flu), generally with only mild symptoms (notable exceptions notwithstanding, a parallel, much more ominous, epidemic hit several First Nations, most notably Garden River and St. Theresa's Point in Manitoba and Sandy Lake First Nation just across the border in Ontario.

At its worst, Indigenous people comprised two thirds of those being kept alive by ventilators in Manitoba, even though they only make up 10% of that province's population. A consequence of the extreme poverty and overcrowding that exists on some reserves (i.e.only half of homes in Garden River reserve have running water), partly due to outright racism (the government had stalled sending alcohol-based hand sanitizer to affected areas because of fears of drunken Indians) and partly demographics (the virus hits the young hardest, and two thirds of Indigenous people in Manitoba are under 25 years of age, a trend matched amongst Indigenous people across Canada).

After weeks of trying to call attention to the worstening situation, the Assembly of First Nations, the main neocolonial body "representing" Indigenous canada, eventually declared a state of emergency.

This was part of H1N1's spring-summer hit, which is expected to be dwarfed this fall. This is not because of mutation (which happens all the time with flu viruses, and does not necessarily make them more dangerous), but because the air is significantly more humid in the fall, and this facilitates transmission of flu viruses. It is expected that up to a third of people in North America will become infected, but that in the vast majority of cases the sickness will be relatively mild. The death rate, in a worst case scenario, is still expected to be well under 1% of those become ill.

However, there is little comfort to be had in such class- and nation-neutral statistics, as people live in specific communities with definite features. H1N1 will follow the trajectory of other diseases, flowing around the contours of power and privilege, hitting the oppressed hardest. The serious cases, and deaths, are likely to be concentrated in the Indigenous nations; within the rest of Canada, there are likely to be most concentrated in the most oppressed and marginalized - often heavily immigrant - sections of the working class. Those reassuringly small statitistical chances of serious illness or death will not reflect everyone's reality.

The health deficit in Indigenous communities is just one dimension of ongoing national oppression and erasure. As was pointed out earlier this year by Margo Greenwood of the National Collaborating Centre on Aboriginal Health, "Their health status is not a product of biological determinants, but of social conditions and access to societal resources."

Regardless of the subjective intentions of those who work within them, the various neocolonial bodies like the Assembly of First Nations function as a lubricant to facilitate this process. Go-betweens with the oppressor state. Their task is often not an enviable one, as white canada often fails to see the need to include them or give them their due. Indigenous reality is an afterthought - nothing personal, you know. Indeed, the AFN has had to take it upon itself to solicit donations for flu kits for many reserves, the federal government failing to see the point.

To give another example: just the other day First Nations chiefs had to complain, to bring attention to the fact that they were not on the guest list at an international H1N1 preparedness conference, held right in Winnipeg. Can you imagine holding a conference so close the canadian epicenter, and not inviting those who are supposed to be in charge of those most affected? But that's what happened... business as usual in the "great white north."

It is in this context that the Health Canada has begun sending body bags to certain Indigenous communities. Perhaps a "mistake", clearly one that is causing the government some embarassment, because the message it sends is an all too accurate reflection of realities on the ground. To quote the Globe and Mail, "The shipment is another blow to native leaders, who fear they are among the least prepared for another wave of the flu and that the federal government isn't properly responding to their needs."

As Garden Hill chief David Harper put it, "This says to me they've given up [...] We have been waiting for medical supplies and here all we receive is body bags." Or in the words of one internet blogger, "For once our government was honest with the First Nations. They’d obviously rather see them dead than help them in any sort of effective way."

There is no crystal-ball-certain way of knowing how the H1N1 pandemic will play itself out. In a few months we may be looking back at a calamity, or at no big deal at all. But what is clear is that in the latter case, it will have been a near miss. The chances of devastation in pockets of North America are there, and to all appearances, the appropriate response is not.

& what, dare i ask, are our movements prepared to do?

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Aboriginal nurses concerned about impact of H1N1

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A.N.A.C. [the Aboriginal Nurses Association of Canada] is particularly concerned with the impact of treating cases of H1N1 will have on small and remote First Nation communities. Many Aboriginal people in these communities live in overcrowded conditions and over 100 First Nations still do not have running water. The issue is also related to nursing support needed for severe cases of H1N1 which can lead to extended hospital stays and lengthy home support in the community after hospital discharge. There is a shortage of nursing support staff in rural and remote areas.

Read the whole article on Wataway News Online.

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Ward Churchill On Colonialism as Genocide; Thoughts About

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The above is a video recording of Ward Churchill Speaking On Colonialism as Genocide at Concordia University in Montreal last Wednesday, recorded by Maximilian Forte on Vimeo.

i was tabling so i missed the talk, which makes me extra-grateful to have this video available. i certainly don't agree with all of Ward Churchill's ideas, but i find them consistently thought-provoking, and he is at least dealing with the real questions: colonialism, genocide, and how to get out of this mess.

Ironically, it is on the former two of these questions that i find myself reticent to fully embrace Churchill's argument. i'll go into a bit of detail here as to what my reticence is all about. These are painful, and somewhat disgusting, things to discuss, but i think it's important to clarify our terms, because when we're talking about genocide and colonialism, we're really talking about the capitalist present and future. So we can't afford a lack of clarity here.

Drawing on French Maoist-existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre's 1967 essay On Genocide, Churchill argues that colonialism always leads to genocide, and that all genocides are by their very evil nature equal.

On the face of it, these propositions seem sensible enough, and to take issue with either one seems to be the height of bad taste at best, if not actually skirting with some kind of holocaust denial. Indubitably, the propositions of "always" and "all are equal" have a strategic use, for the most oppressed are routinely described by the oppressor as being those with the least to complain about. So saying "all our experiences are equal" not only has a nice ring to it, it can also serve as an antidote to the racist double-standard consistently applied to the victims of colonialism and genocide.

But is this enough to make it true? i would say not.

Churchill rhetorically compares the Nazi Holocaust with the Conquest of the Americas by Europeans, daring us to say they're different. The reason behind this comparison is easy enough to see - the imperialist consciousness industry routinely holds up the Nazi Holocaust as the greatest evil to ever occur, while denying any genocide ever took place in North America. Hypocrisy beautifully laid to waste in Churchill's own book, A Little Matter of Genocide.

So i grant it, the rhetoric has a strategic logic that cannot be denied.

But does it prove the case? i would argue that the comparison is too difficult to make here, as we're asked to weigh a genocide carried out between peoples (euro-goyim and Jews) who had lived interpenetrated for centuries, using tanks, machine guns and poisonous gasses - i.e. 20th century tech - with a genocide carried out on not one but on hundreds of nations and peoples, by means of primitive germ warfare, cavalry on horseback and primitive firearms. Not only that, but the genocide in Europe against Jews is no longer going on, while the genocide in North America does continue, albeit using primarily psychosocial and economic rather than military weapons.

The historical and technological gap is so great between these two disasters that any comparison is moot. All any honest observer can say is that these are two tragedies that defy the imagination. Clearly it is not a question of better or worse, but of gaping difference which makes detailed comparison meaningless. Not incommensurable in the sense of "lacking a common quality", but in the sense of "impossible to compare".

However, we do have other examples we can choose from. Examples which serve as a better test.

Here in Quebec, we live in a euro-society that is the result of several colonizations, one of which was intra-european: the Conquest of New France, which after decades of brinkmanship and shoving matches occurred in 1763. While most of us have heard of James Wolfe who bested Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham, it is worth also remembering another man, the military commander who captured Montreal: Jeffrey Amherst.

New France was indubitably colonized, and the european people who lived here - some 70,000 christian souls - were certainly changed by the experience. According to Churchill's definition, maybe they even suffered "genocide" - though it's worth pointing out that by my (and most people's) definition they did not. Although a genocidal Durham Report (1839) was commissioned by the British crown after the rebellions of 1837, its proposed forced assimilation was never put into effect aggressively enough to succeed. As for Amherst, as one historian has written of his rule immediately following the Conquest:

Amherst's kindliness to the French civilians was more than a military gesture. He had a warm sympathy for the countryside, an interest in people and the way they lived. "The Inhabitants live comfortably," he observed in his journal, "most have stone houses.... ....

This humane attitude was reflected in his rules for the governing of Canada. As its de facto military Governor-General he established a temporary code ... a program of tolerance and regard for colonial sensibilities...

***

Perhaps most statesmanlike of all was Amherst's recognition of the French law, ... a recognition which permitted change of national loyalty without social upheaval.

[J. C. Long, Lord Jeffrey Amherst: A Soldier of the King (NY: Macmillan, 1933), p. 137, quoted here]

Two-and-a-quarter centuries later, there is still occasional anguish and anxiety over national identity in Quebec, but as a collectivity people can trace their identities and families and culture back to New France in a trajectory that "makes sense", that has integrity, that was never extinguished even as it survived at-times brutal exploitation and repression at the hands of the British.

Churchill raised the important component of genocide meaning that a group is "no longer the same people". This is an essential characteristic, but formulated as such it is open to confusion. No people remains the same people over time, just as no individual remains the same individual, identical today to how you were ten years ago. Indeed, to even create the illusion of remaining permanently unchanged requires ever-increasing social and psychological resources, and eventually proves itself always untenable. Furthermore, none of us - either as individuals, nor as peoples - have even partial control over how we will change, or what things will change us. This is a fact that no appeals to a mythic right to self-determination can broach.

So i would say that genocide is not simply a process that leaves us "not the same people" - because life itself does that - but one that disrupts and extinguishes any thread connecting who we are from who we were. A break that occurs within a discrete period of time. A trauma that inflicts the societal equivalent of grave mental illness, a loss of any sense of self.

The colonization of New France by the British was certainly a crime, and led to immense suffering, but it did not lead to any consistent programme of genocide, nor any such trauma-induced societal forgetting. Those of us (such as myself) who mainly speak and live in english even though we are descended from New France's colonists are not the results of genocide, just of the chance and variety that makes up life.

Today "colonialism" and "genocide" of Quebecois takes the form of having to tolerate our neighbours speaking different languages and practicing different religions, and of not having an internationally recognized state of our own. Whoopedy-doo. Indeed, the only folks here today that claim that genocide is taking place against Quebecois are members of the far right - our local equivalent of the American neo-nazis who claim genocide is being waged against white people there.

It is instructive - keeping in mind Churchill's claim that all colonialism always leads to genocide, and that all genocides are equal - to compare the fate of the French following the Conquest to those other peoples that Jeffrey Amherst was sent to subdue. For in 1763, the very year that New France fell, Amherst turned his attention to the many Indigenous nations that remained sovereign in the Great Lakes region. With the other euro-power in the area vanquished, Amherst considered that these First Nations should now be crushed.

As these belligerent intentions became clear, an international peacekeeping force including warriors from over a dozen nations took action in an attempt to forestall or even turn back the tide of British aggression. Soldiers from the Delaware, Shawnee, Wyandot, Mingo, Miami, Wea, Kickapoo, Mascouten, Piankashaw, Odawa, Ojibwa, Potawatomi, and Huron nations all participated in this effort, knows in our history books as Pontiac's Rebellion.

Smashing these allies and terrorizing their peoples was one of Amherst's first tasks following the defeat of New France. Besides the obvious immediate threat in the Great Lakes region, the spectre of international cooperation against euro-colonialism posed a threat to the settler enterprise across this continent. Amherst's weapon of terror was genocide, and his method was blankets infected with smallpox. Biological warfare, aimed at combatants and civilians alike, in an effort to "extirpate" the Indigenous resistance.

Although the Indigenous nations were not defeated by Amherst's biowarfare - indeed, there resulted a military stalemate and the British crown had to resort to diplomatic and political methods to get what it wanted - the intent and attempt to carry out genocide was clearly present.

i want you to note that although New France was also colonized, i know of no genocidal corollary to the smallpox-infested blankets there.

In other words, not every case of colonization does lead to genocide. It's always an idea at the back of the colonizers' head, but it is not always one acted upon. The relationship between the two is similar to the relationship between smoking and cancer - one does not always cause the other, it simply increased the chances of it occurring.

As to the second proposition, that all genocides are equal, again on a gut-level this feels right, but i fear it can be very misleading. For as political activists, the term "equal" meaning "equally abhorrent" must be distinguished from "equal" meaning "equivalent" or the same. In the lived experiences of the oppressed, differences that lead to different capacities of resistance, different chances of survival, different options of accommodation, are all worth keeping in mind.

Again, to best test the statement, i think examples should be chosen occurring in roughly the same historical epoch and cultural-political matrix. This is a fairly standard method used in science to control for various factors (i.e. make sure they are the same or else equally irrelevant) in order to be able to compare what is essential to the question. Comparing the Vendéens and the Moriori - tragic though each case may be - simply involves too many contextual differences to be meaningful.

i will not compare between various genocides experienced by various Indigenous nations in North America simply because i don't have more than a cursory knowledge, and the nature of the comparison is already extremely distasteful - like comparing different forms of rape or child abuse. Superficially, i will point out that there seems to be a difference between the eventual fate of the Beothuk and of the Lakota, although each certainly suffered (and the Lakota still suffer) genocidal violence on the part of the colonizers. Neither one may be "better", but nor do the two seem identical.

(Indeed, i would guess that in fact i have less disagreement with Churchill than this post may imply. In his talk about thirteen minutes in he himself does differentiate between the colonization of the Marshall Islanders by the Japanese and the genocidal nuclear tests carried out against these people by the united states.)

Looking at Europe, where i feel more comfortable making my point, using Churchill's broader definition i would agree that there have been many genocides, but in human and political terms i maintain that they are far from equivalent.

The Basques suffer colonization to this day, but their experience in Spain and France - horrible though it has been, with death squads assassinating independence activists and aboveground political parties banned - is not "as bad as" - as in not as deadly as, not as politically determining as - the genocide that befell Europe's Armenians or Jews in the first half of the twentieth century.

Similarly, Ireland has been decimated for centuries by English colonialism, often incredibly bloody and murderous in intent. Using the United Nations definition, certainly at certain times a policy of genocide was carried out. But again, the scope of intent, the political centrality of the strategy, and as a consequence the body count at the end, were not of the same order. The Irish people have suffered incredibly at the hands of colonialism, but their experience remains qualitatively different from that of the Armenians, or for that matter the Roma.

None of this is to excuse any genocide. Each case of genocide, indeed each case of colonialism, is an open sore on the body of humanity, and as Churchill so eloquently pointed out, in many places - including North America - genocide remains a crime committed every day with impunity.

But the antidote to the capitalist denial of some genocides is not the liberal insistence that all genocides are equal, or that each and every case of colonialism has resulted in genocide. That's an intellectual shortcut that glosses over some important, and painful, variations within our common human tragedy.

To take such a shortcut, i fear, would lead to our blunting our theoretical tools, and to confusion in distinguishing the different natures of different claims.

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An Historic Non-Apology, Completely and Utterly Not Accepted

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An excellent response to Prime Minister Harper's recent "apology" to Indigenous people on behalf of the canadian state:

An Historic Non-Apology, Completely and Utterly Not Accepted

The Maze of Rhetoric

We hope our title is sufficiently unequivocal to convey our reaction to the events of Wednesday June 11, 2008. Maybe by example we can show how one must approach issues which require the utmost clarity. On the other hand, this probably won’t work, especially when it’s clear the predominant intention behind a communication is to obscure. Whatever… in any event, for us, sitting on a spiky metal fence is uncomfortable posture.

We listened with attention to what Stephen Harper had to say yesterday, and we did not hear what we needed to hear. Instead, again we watched and heard one more opportunity being thrown away, this one with more ceremony than those preceding it. We watched and heard the studious avoidance of truth, in what we can only regard as the hope that the repetition of a lie will somehow substitute for reality, a concept now reduced to another mantra (as is nowadays the case for, for example, “truth” or “reconciliation”).

To those surprised or appalled by our reaction, or to people who simply have no idea that there’s an issue here at all, let us begin by pointing to at least a few of the facts we had to keep in mind when listening to the statement of the current head of a political process that has, since it origin (Confederation in 1867), had the elimination of aboriginal peoples as its consistent policy:

(1) the “settler” population of Canada has had, from the point of its inception, a qualitatively different relation with indigenous peoples than the remote colonial bureaucracy that preceded it: for England, the Indian Nations were allies (who, arguably, saved Canada on more than one occasion); for the newly-formed Dominion of Canada, they were impediments to expansion, like swamps and vermin. However, in the transfer of authority, the Dominion was honor-bound to respect them, their rights, and their historical status.

(2) with legal and ethical limits placed upon their treatment of indigenous nations (so that, for example, the Dominion couldn’t just set out to slaughter them all, as became the policy in the United States), tactics had to be adopted that had the effect of extermination without giving its appearance (and the British empire had many models to emulate, particularly Tasmania). A simple but accurate characterization of the array of government programs, policies, and laws aimed at indigenous peoples and nations, then, is that they were a range of “carrots” and “sticks” deployed to turn those of us (if any) who survived these artifices from “Indians” into “Canadians” (or, after the era of multiculturalism began, “Indian-Canadians”). Residential school was only one of those programs, one that was heavy on the “stick” and light on the “carrot.”

(3) church officials and government officials have, from time to time since the mid-1980’s, offered what they (and others) have characterized as “apologies.” These have not been apologies. An apology is not made an apology by the person offering it saying it is an apology; it is only an apology when those who have been offered it accept it as an apology. The fact that the rhetoric of pseudo-apologies has become more twisted as time has gone on should make all of us vigilant against immediately accepting what sounds like an apology without careful examination of exactly what was said, how it was said, and what was not said. And repetition is not an argument.

So, what happened Wednesday afternoon? Stephen Harper described the history of actions undertaken by the government of Canada against the children of indigenous peoples, specifically, their forcible removal from their families and communities and their placement under the unsupervised control of four major Canadian churches. Various aspects of these actions, characterized as “abuse” (including physical, mental, and sexual abuse), were enumerated, followed by variations on the refrain of “for this, we apologize” (or “we are sorry”) and “we were wrong” (or “this should never have happened”). That it happened was attributed to bad, arrogant attitudes of superiority. Finally, when mention was made concerning where “we” go from here, the upcoming work of the so-called “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” was proffered as the most appropriate forum. Afterwards, this performance was, by-and-large, repeated by the leaders of the other political parties.

The presentation was offered with every indication of honesty and sincerity. We do not doubt the honesty of what was said, for reasons we will give below. But for those who take honesty as evidence of truth, it would be good to remember what Marx once said: “The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” Groucho Marx, that is.

So what’s our problem? Actually, we have several: we did not hear an apology, we dispute characterizations that were made, and we do not believe the putative mechanism of resolution (the “Truth and Reconciliation Commission”) will resolve anything useful.

An apology has at least three characteristics (some people will say there are more, some will list more specific traits… this doesn’t matter for present purposes). The absence of any of these three characteristics immediately disqualifies a statement as an apology: a sincere expression of remorse for the behavior, the promise never to repeat the behavior, and the undertaking to undo, as far as possible, the damage done by the behavior.

“Well,” we hear some say, “the first conditions was obviously met… we all heard Mr. Harper recount a comprehensive list of offenses, halting at each one and saying ‘Canada apologizes’ and ‘it was wrong,’ didn’t we?”

Suppose, after beating his wife to the point of hospitalizing her, a man attempted to make amends in the following manner: “I’m sorry I gave you a black eye… it was wrong; I’m sorry I chipped your teeth… it never should have happened; I apologize for breaking your arm… it never should have happened; I apologize for bruising your ribs… it was wrong;” and so on.

Does this sound odd to you? It does to us. Why would anyone choose to express his remorse in such a fashion? In “apologizing” to his wife, has the man adopted this manner of speaking, perhaps, to be more thorough (the list could go on and on…)? We think not. In this instance, the specificity of the list helps him avoid saying something, something more comprehensive, something more general, but in this case, something much more accurate: “I’m sorry I physically assaulted you. It was a criminal action on my part.”

We don’t believe Prime Minister Harper adopted this obscurantist form of address to be more comprehensive; we believe he did so to avoid saying I’m sorry the Canadian government committed genocide against you. It was a criminal action on our part.

(Of course, Mr. Harper was unauthorized to avoid saying something similar on behalf of the churches; they’ve been doing their own artful dodging for years.)

Consequently, if we’re right the sincerity of what was said evaporates as an apology for residential schooling. Thus it was no apology at all, but bluff and continued evasion. We believe he said what he said honestly; that is, that he sincerely believed in what he was saying, but only because, for the governments and individuals he was representing (past and present), he had to craft an evasive statement that he could, in all sincerity, endorse. Did Mr. Harper, all on his own, come up with this muddied, tortured declaration right off the cuff, or perhaps just a few minutes before he came down the stairs with his escorts in tow? Well, since Indian Affairs Minister Strahl has been telling us for weeks now what Harper was going to say, we doubt it. We also doubt that the Conservative party didn’t have a team of lawyers, rhetoricians, and spin doctors, if not writing the statement, at least agonizing over every phrase, every word, every revelation in the evolving document, considering in detail every implication and weighing each possible consequence. Someone was even counting the number of words. No, what we saw was carefully considered, and when such a carefully prepared and comprehensively vetted document does some things (and not others) it is no accident.

So then, is our “belief” about what Mr. Harper was evading correct? We had no trouble seeing through the Prime Minister’s tortured prose because we’re well aware of related issues (such as the ones we began this essay with) that are no part of what the average Canadian is supposed to know and what government and church officials know all too well: the United Nations Genocide Convention and Canada’s role in it.

Take a moment and judge for yourself: go online (if you’re not online already) and find the text of the UN Genocide Convention. If you know anything about the internet you’ll have no trouble finding it; we give the text of Article II below:
Art. 2. In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Many of you will be reading this for the first time. You aren’t supposed to be reading it at all. We call attention to sections (b) and, especially, (e), which we call the “Slam Dunk.” If pressed we’d be willing to argue the entire list, but we don’t have to: the Article says any, not all. Even Mr. Harper in his statement comes perilously close to the Slam Dunk a couple of times:

“…very young children were often forcibly removed from their homes…”

and

“…it was wrong to forcibly remove children from their homes and we apologize for having done this.”

Was he, in subconscious guilt, aping a phrase he had read a million times before with the understanding he must avoid it at all costs? … or, perhaps, intentionally teetering along the edge of a precipice, in order to mock the dozen or so of us who were waiting to see if he used the correct word? We don’t know. He creeps into another neighborhood (b) once again when he mentions:

“…emotional, physical and sexual abuse and neglect of helpless children…”

but that’s as close as he gets to any of the other categories of acts constituting genocide in international law. It isn’t crucial, however; we already have the Slam Dunk.

Well, isn’t there some way around this… this… embarrassing fact? No. One of the contributors to the current document wrote a book 14 years ago that established the genocide that was Indian residential schooling, and the absence of ways around it was thoroughly dealt with there. However, no one read it then and no one is going to read it now (although it’s still available in print form, and free on the internet at www.nativestudies.org), particularly when we’ve gone and spoiled the ending for everyone.

But then, is there no “responsible” authority (not just a dozen or so Indians, and worse, Indian-lovers, who can read and add and reason) who can tell you, our present readership, whether our “interpretation” is right or wrong? (Over the years, time and again, work on this issue has been slighted by phrases like “X believes that the residential schools were genocide,” or “In X’s opinion, Canada and the churches are guilty of genocide,” like it was some disputable quirk on X’s part that is at issue. Well, it’s the United Nations “opinion,” as expressed in the black-and-white of the Convention, that Canada and the churches committed genocide, and the UN is the body that in 1948 got to say what genocide was.) Okay. In support of our “interpretation,” we call what all must agree is a “responsible” authority… the government of Canada.

Also available on the above web site is a paper that provides more detail and references concerning Canada’s disreputable collusion with the United States in gutting a form of the genocide convention that would have been much more explicit with respect to the point we’re making. The current convention is a watered-down version of the proposals of Raphael Lemkin (the man who coined the term “genocide” in 1944), but even watered down it is sufficient. So sufficient that, when it came time to implement the Genocide Convention in Canada’s criminal code (which was what each nation of the United Nations was supposed to do), Canada omitted entire subsections of the UN Convention (by 1970, (b), (d), and (e) were gone, Canada telling anyone who asked that the laws against murder and manslaughter already banned genocide – reducing genocide, as they discussed in the early 50’s, to outright killing). No less an authority than eventual Prime Minister Lester Pearson had suggested that surgery had to be performed on the UN Genocide Convention, or otherwise Canada and its churches would be in violation of it… and, for heavens’ sake, Indians might someday learn to read!

It’s true that even the Convention as articulated provided sufficient wiggle room to allow countries to adopt modified versions of it. But, as remarked by a commentator who first encountered the Convention last Wednesday, Canada’s excisions and elisions betoken a guilty conscience about what it had been up to. After all, this is what the US, with Canada’s aid, had forced through the conference dealing with this particular issue, and if it was good enough in principle for everyone else in the world, why was it inappropriate for Canada?

Finally, sometime in the late 1990’s, Canada quietly, surreptitiously, and without ceremony removed genocide as a chargeable offense from its criminal code, leaving mention of it now solely in the provisions against hate crimes.

We find it interesting how closely the vaporization of genocide in Canadian law coincided with rising consciousness in Native America on the distance between what international law said and what governments had done, and with a government-commissioned secret study that warned the Chrétien government that Canada was liable with respect to the “genocide issue” and recommended it bite the bullet and ‘fess up. As always, Canada provided itself with some explanatory “wiggle room” about why they did what they did, but we would certainly like to ask some direct questions of the officials involved, as well as examine documents and internal correspondence on these subjects (but see below). But, to summarize in a fashion both short and blunt, the history of Canada’s involvement in the creation and implementation of genocide law, nationally and internationally, betokens an overriding concern with its culpability and liability with respect to its treatment of indigenous peoples in general, and its operation of Indian residential schools in particular.

So, Canada itself agrees that our reading of the UN Genocide Convention is correct, and that it accurately characterizes its behavior towards Native Peoples.

Okay, you might say, Canada’s behavior is at variance with international genocide law… but didn’t implementing what they did, however maimed and deformed, into Canadian law remove all future problems? After all, aren’t their actions simply a version of what the United States, also worried about the possibility of being charged with genocide, undertook… adopting a limited version of the Convention, finally, at the end of the Regan administration, and then subjecting it to interpretation by American courts?

It’s true it was pure evasion, but it isn’t true that it lets Canada off any hook. Apart from the “guilty conscious” their behavior evidences, putting aside any question of legal liability that might or might not be attached, and forgoing any discussion of what jurists have long ago established concerning the priority of international law (e.g., that countries and government officials can’t exempt themselves from accountability to international law); instead of all that, just ask yourself: was it merely the failure of the corrupt powers of Rwanda (or Slobodan Milosevic) to exempt themselves (or himself) from the Genocide Convention that got them (or him) into trouble? Suppose the Genocide Convention was in force during the Holocaust… would Hitler’s declaring himself and his chums “immune” have rendered it inoperative? Is that the length the average Canadian is willing to have her or his government go to avoid having to deal with its genocide of indigenous peoples?

It has taken us some time, but Mr. Harper’s statement:

“…it was wrong to forcibly remove children from their homes and we apologize for having done this.”

…must be amended to say:

“…it was wrong for the government of Canada to forcibly remove children from their homes and we apologize for having done this. And it was a crime.”

Bank robbers, thieves, drunk drivers… all criminals, in fact… don’t get to erase their crimes by saying “I’m sorry,” regardless of how sincerely they might say it.

Genocide on the Table

A television snippet from country-wide reaction on Wednesday featured Diane Blair crying out “It was genocide! Why not just admit it?!”

A fair question, and one well-put. As we have seen, Mr. Harper could have used the term, and it was a deliberate act not to. What motivated him? Without too much thought we can see several reasons, grounds sufficient for us to have anticipated long before Wednesday’s circus that what we weren’t going to hear would be a genuine apology. To answer the woman’s question, first, keep on reading the Convention; immediately you will find:
Art. 3. The following acts shall be punishable:
(a) Genocide;
(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;
(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
(d) Attempt to commit genocide;
(e) Complicity in genocide.
Art. 4. Persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in Article 3 shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.
So we have Reason 1: rulers, public officials, and private individuals, criminals all, prefer to avoid being punished for their actions. It is very common, we think, for criminals to not want to be punished. In most cases, however, and unlike the case under consideration (i.e., the Indian residential schools), criminals are not in charge of the political, economic, legal, and journalistic controls of a nation. Journalistic control, of course, is particularly necessary if one is going to maintain the manufactured ignorance of multiple millions of Canadians.
Reason 2: Canada has held other nations accountable to a standard of international law that it has itself evaded. That is hypocrisy. Canada wants to complain to China about its human rights abuses; it does not want its own abuses thrown back into its face.
Reason 3: Assaults, rapes, and every other form of abuse expire in national law, perhaps even in international law, according to their Statute of Limitation. Genocide has no Statute of Limitation.

Reason 4: Canada presents itself as a good world citizen, a paragon of virtue. However, a country that bears comparison with Nazi Germany is a paragon of virtue like Charles Manson is a boy scout leader.

Reason 5: Speaking like a psychologist for a moment, abusers frequently tell themselves they have good grounds for the abuses they perpetrate. Often they repeat the lie to themselves with such regularity that they come to believe it.

Reason 6: This is a reason the head of the United Church gave us in a public meeting in 2002: “genocide” is such a harsh word that the membership of his church would be upset by its use, however appropriate. Thus, it’s better to perform genocide than give it its proper name. So perhaps Canada is similarly just thinking about the tender sensibilities of its real citizens, and not those of its pseudo-citizens against whom the genocide was implemented.

Reason 7: The lengths Canada has gone (first, to limit the definition of genocide, and second, to obstruct every way there might have been for indigenous peoples to even raise it as an issue) shows the fear that, if the governments and churches show “weakness,” Indians will treat them with the same rapacity Westerners show weaknesses detected in one another. That is, that Indians will behave like Westerners (the irony that this transformation is what the residential schools were trying to institute has not escaped our notice). It is to our credit that there is no evidence at all that we would behave in such an inhuman manner. More than for any other reason, the moves that have been made toward litigation have been motivated by the government and churches closing off any other ways of seeking redress. From the beginning, all the survivors wanted was a genuine apology, along the criteria we’ve mentioned at the beginning of this commentary.

Reason 8: For us, Reason 1 and its first cousin, Reason 7 are is the overriding motivations behind avoiding the word “genocide.” But it takes not a moments reflection to appreciate that, once “genocide” is on the table, its application across the entire range of policies and programs affecting Native Peoples, historically and contemporaneously, must be considered.

Let’s briefly look at some specific cases in light of Reason 8. So; how well does “genocide” fit the various incentives manufactured over the years for Indians to enfranchise themselves or to be enfranchised? Perfectly, we think. So; how descriptive is “genocide” concerning the 60’s and 70’s Scoops, where uncounted numbers of indigenous children were adopted out, some overseas, to non-Native foster parents? Flawlessly, in our opinion. (Sterilization? Who said that?) Or, can “genocide” accurately characterize the current status of suicide in aboriginal communities? It can and it does, we would argue.

And on and on. Maybe some of you would prefer to argue the point, but that’s our point: the Indian residential schools were not isolated idiosyncrasies of a few members of a governmental department or two. Genocides involve a host of interrelated and interwoven policies and programs, the understanding of which requires sustained effort and the application of all 5 of the specific headings given under Article II. The Nazis, for goodness’ sake, made it illegal for Jews to own parrots!

Bringing genocide to the table would take the churches, but more centrally the government of Canada, into the exhaustive examination of additional regions of its policies and programs with respect to indigenous peoples, regions that, up until now, it has successfully avoided (or at least, as it is now trying to do with residential school, managed to isolate from other policies). And, what is perhaps even more important, establishing that Canada’s policies toward indigenous peoples constitute an historic and ongoing genocide rules out Mr. Harper’s statement as an apology, since such would violate the second feature of a genuine apology; someone who is still doing it can’t be promising not to do it again.

If Genocide, Why?

So far we have only dealt with why what Mr. Harper said on Wednesday was not an apology (to summarize, he meticulously avoided using the proper term “genocide” to characterize Canada’s actions, thereby impugning the sincerity with which he had worked so hard to infuse his words). But at the outset we objected to more than the non-apologetic nature of his statement; we took exception with characterizations he made of the actions of the churches and governments.

We don’t dispute his repeated assertions that “it was wrong.” For us, this was a no-brainer: genocide is wrong. Mr. Harper’s pathetic attempt to insinuate mitigating circumstances (“While some former students have spoken positively about their experiences at residential schools…”), another evasion which disqualifies his statement as an apology (just try to apologize for killing someone while driving under the influence of alcohol by saying “I always do silly things when I’m drunk”), also boomerangs when we consider the irrelevance of the specifics of a genocide to decide upon its “wrongness.” After all, some Jews learned a useful trade working as slave labor in concentration camps; some made new friends; many lost weight; and some even had their metabolisms re-set, so that they were able to maintain a healthy weight for the rest of their lives! But when you make the moral decision that genocide is wrong, you don’t have to listen to sophistry that tries to turn the task of making moral judgments into an accounting of the “goods” and “bads” of a particular program.

There are numerous other places we could be picayune. Calling residential schools “educational institutions” grated on us, for example. But in at least one more point the presentation descended much too far into pure fiction for us to leave it uncommented. With genocide now revealed as the accurate term to characterize the governments’ and the churches’ actions, the question of why arises. Even Mr. Harper, in evading the issue of genocide, still felt compelled to provide his listeners with an historical vignette of the underlying cause of creation and operation of the schools:

“Two primary objectives of the residential schools system were to remove and isolate children from the influence of their homes, families, traditions and cultures, and to assimilate them into the dominant culture. These objectives were based on the assumption that aboriginal cultures and spiritual beliefs were inferior and unequal.”

There you have it; the objective was to assimilate Indians, because we were believed to have inferior cultures (spiritual beliefs are an expression of culture, and thus redundantly included in Mr. Harper’s statement). This was “wrong,” “caused great harm,” and has “no place in our country.”

We have no doubt about the “great harm” part of his statement; however, you should notice how it leaves the agents of all this misery unnamed. It was “the residential school system” that had objectives (and not people working for the churches and governments), and the “inferiority assumption” apparently just hung in mid-air during the years of operation of residential schools, unattached to anything identifiable as a human being wearing a frock or business suit.

Are things any better when we supply warm bodies to this dodge? Well, inserting human beings into all this would at least make explicit that it was people who had the objectives of (1) removing Indian children from their forms of life and (2) insinuating them into mainstream culture, and that people had the (now more obviously racist) assumption that Indians were inferior. So now, our agreeing that this was “wrong” allows us to encapsulate and restate this part of Mr. Harper’s little history lesson into “people did harmful things to Indians because those people were racists.”

But anyone who thinks we are satisfied with this rendering is much too used to bad movie scripts, where bad people do bad things because they are bad. As if the clergy and governmental officials responsible were all wearing black hats. Life is not so simple.

First, the image that in Indian residential schools an “inferior” culture was being replaced with a “superior” culture (which thinking, thanks to the P. M., we now know has “no place” in Canada) is simply wrong. Indian children were not being taught to drink tea with their pinkies extended, speak with an affected English accent, or appreciate poetry and opera; they were being taught to perform as menials (domestics, farm hands, cooks, etc.) for members of the superior culture (and even the not-so-elevated members of that culture). If they were expected to learn anything in residential schools, it was to learn their place; to perform, without question and with dispatch, the commands of their betters. If this was assimilation into “dominant culture” it was into its lowest, most wretched, most disposable stratum, where the inhabitants moiled to eke out a marginal existence. It was alright that these serfs would be Indians; after all, our “betters” have never really concerned themselves with the color of their peons.

Second, attributing this all to “the racists” (who, thank heaven, no longer have a place in Canada) erects a faceless, nameless straw man we’re all supposed to take a turn at pummeling. But this piece of misdirection insinuates that ideology determines actions, rather than actions determining ideology. This is too big a subject to go into here, but ideologies of race, race inferiority, and sub-humanity arise from the material needs to dispossess and expropriate, and not vice versa. Canada’s wealth has arisen from the willingness of the settler society to simply take what they want from indigenous populations (just ask the Lubicon, the Cree of Northern Quebec, and the Labrador Innu, for recent examples). It’s in casting about for some excuse to justify satisfying a material agenda that Canadians have had to create and then invoked the non-humanity of the real owners of Canada.

Consequently, holding anonymous racists responsible for the woes of Indians and assuring us they no longer abide here is nothing but additional falsification on a heroic level. For banishing faceless and nameless spirits to some vasty deep does no such thing as long as the material need to do away with Indian rights and claims continues to abide here. Thus Mr. Harper’s history lesson is nothing more than another kind of bribe… like the forthcoming Truth and Reconciliation Commission. “Just let us insinuate a comic-book version of Canada,” it says. “We don’t have to name the ghosts in the story; we all know who they were anyway. We’ll just pretend they’re all gone now, so you can sleep better at nights. And we get to pretend there’s a clean and complete split with this admittedly reprehensible past.” But the past is present, and it seems, the future.

Resolving Anything Useful?

For a “clean break” the events of Wednesday leave an enormous number of loose ends (some thicker than the Atlantic Cable) flailing around, at least for us. Even several of the leaders of the other political parties, in their responses to Mr. Harper’s statement, noted on Wednesday that it was short on detail. That may be true; however, directly by Mr. Harper’s words and indirectly by implication the upcoming Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been accorded the task of sorting out the remaining specifics.

Is it up to the task? Not even in the cartoon world Mr. Harper has created, much less in the real world.

As already mentioned the statement not only said things we dispute, it left unmentioned a host of issues we needed to see addressed. Let’s run through a few of the omissions:

(1) Genocide. Is the commission going to bring this up? And so what if it does? Canada has already demonstrated it will simply ignore the charge if it’s made, and has been careful to eliminate any possibility of treating the matter in a serious way. Minister Strahl, for example, stated repeatedly in the run-up to Wednesday that nothing Mr. Harper would say would prohibit an ongoing, aggressive investigation into crimes associated with the residential school. But he knew, as we did, that the central crime had already been removed from consideration. Even if Indian after Indian stands before the commission and charges genocide, nothing will happen about it. Most of all, such repetition will only dispose the “average” Canadian, who is supposed to be getting an education on these things, into the familiar stupor of “there go those damned Indians again, always complaining about something.”

(2) The Cover-Ups. Once “wrongs” are correctly identified as “crimes,” can anyone else see that Canada and its churches have been covering up the crimes of the residential schools for quite some time now? The pattern of responding to charges made by former prisoners of Indian residential schools was predictable and familiar: stonewall, then impugn the testimony and motives of the victims (“those troublemakers just like to make noise, or they’re looking for another handout”), then admit that maybe, just maybe there was a “bad apple” here and there in a gigantic barrel of nice apples (“some bad things may have happened, but it was all done with the best of intentions”), then throw a sacrifice (preferably one already dead) to a dissatisfied and growing crowd of lawyers, and then go back to stonewalling (“Hey, enough already! The issue has been settled!”).

Canada and the churches have worked long and hard to avoid admitting anything (in 1998 it was estimated that the Anglican Church, for one, had spent the overwhelming bulk of their budget for dealing with residential schooling on advice from publicity agencies), much less general and specific criminal acts. As anyone paying attention could probably guess, here the government has long ago moved to limit its own possible damages from colluding in knowingly hiding crimes and hindering investigations, so that, for example, while it’s illegal in Canada to destroy documents needed for criminal investigations the people who do the destroying can’t be charged with anything (the “Naughty-Naughty” Principle).

But the churches have long looked out for their own, with known pedophiles in their ranks given a “time out” and then transferred to a new assignment without the inconvenience of having to face a criminal charge. By the way, isn’t this what Becket and King Henry were arguing about back in the 13th century? Eventually, didn’t English law come down on Henry’s side? We have to agree with Henry on this one.

The victims of abuse at residential schools have had to endure not only the original abuse, but the vituperation and calumny of criminals and those assisting criminals in evading disclosure and prosecution. And, for parliamentarians and bureaucrats, even if they’ve removed themselves from the possibility of formal criminal charges under the existing criminal code, justice demands an accounting and acknowledgement of the cover-up as much as it demands them of the original crimes.

(3) The Secret Histories. Attention has been focused so much on church and governmental abuses that there is a clear and present danger that an additional unknown number of malefactors will slip through the cracks. It has already been acknowledged that, for example, in the 50’s the Canadian Medical Association asked for, and received, permission to study the distribution and growth of tuberculosis in “human” populations by giving unpasteurized milk to the children in residential schools. Around the same time, the Canadian Dental Association asked for, and received, permission to study the lifelong development and growth of caries (tooth decay) in “human” populations by giving “sham treatments” to Indian children in residential schools. Here, not only are the people who “authorized” these child abuses culpable, so are the people who ask for them. Both these cases, of course, took place long after the Nuremburg Protocols for ethical research with human beings had been articulated and accepted.

Nor does it end here. The notorious Dr. Cameron, who, while in the pay of the Central Intelligence Agency, used electroshock and mind-altering drugs to experiment on innocent Canadians (a chapter in Canadian history immortalized, so to speak, in a CBC movie), also had some kind of involvement with Indian residential schools, mainly in the Prairie provinces. Rumors abound (since at least the early 90’s), but there has never been enough hard evidence to sustain charges. Doesn’t this bear investigation?

In fact, with a captive population and a supervening authority at best indifferent to their well-being and without any mechanism of complaint or due process available to the victims, what could not have happened? On this subject our imaginations have already been far outstripped by what everyone admits actually did happen; what a broadly-thrown finely-gauged net might dredge up is, in our opinion, anybody’s guess. The (now, finally, at last) movement to start digging in church graveyards and remote, unmarked locations is merely the tip of an iceberg, one that could well nail, even for those Canadians at the utmost levels of denial, the concept of genocide to Canada’s treatment of indigenous peoples.

There’s more (Sterilization? Who said that?), but this is enough for now. These three loose ends, rather than “details” that can be dealt with summarily, are, we predict, Hydra’s Heads that will sprout hundreds or even thousands of additional inquiries if pursued with due diligence. We have a number of problems with the upstart commission, but our question here is: Is the “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” equal to this task?

This commission can (1) subpoena no witnesses, (2) compel no testimony, (3) requisition no document. It cannot find, charge, fine, or imprison. Thus far, the only ones lining up to testify are members of groups who have already testified (the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples generated thousands of pages of testimony from school survivors, a corpus, we must add, that has not in the slightest way entered into the consciousness of the average Canadian in the 12 years since its publication) and those who still maintain sufficient plausible deniability to publicly defend its inactions (the RCMP, for example). Those most obviously culpable have already stated their intentions not to bother showing up.

Will, somehow, the victims of residential schooling show up dragging bales of documents proving abusive actions, abusive policies, collusion, cover-ups, etc. on the part of ministers, bureaucrats, clergy, professors, bag-men, pedophiles, and the full host of assorted miscreants? They’d better, for the “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” won’t have them.

Or maybe we just need to pray for our own version of a governmental or ecclesiastical “Valachi,” who will show up and rat out the Dons, all the way up to and including the Capo de Tutti Capi. However, not only is this an extremely thin thread upon which to hang our hopes for truth (and more importantly, JUSTICE); what “witness protection program” is going to protect him or her?

“Truth” is an odd name for a body that can trade not at all in that particular commodity. “Reconciliation,” too, is an odd word for five years of allegations that can be either scorned or ignored, according to the tastes of those who are its subject. It invokes the same fantasy world Mr. Harper constructed, where Canadian and indigenous peoples are returned to that happy state of mutual respect and cooperation that existed before the bad old residential schools came along and ruined everything. In “truth,” however, there never has been any “conciliation” to “re.”

Conclusions

We don’t know about you, but we’ve been unable to swing a dead cat since Wednesday without whacking someone telling us about how the “apology” has “closed a painful chapter” and signals “a new beginning in relations” between “Canadians and Indian-Canadians” (sic). Like someone tearing apart a picture of a former boyfriend or girlfriend, spitting on it, and walking away from the pieces tossed over the shoulder, however, we’ve been witnessing a made-up ceremony, one where the participants, for various reasons, are trying more to convince themselves they’ve dealt with all the serious issues rather than actually putting an end to them.

Canada has, once again, missed a truly historic opportunity, putting paste on display rather than an authentic diamond, because the diamond, in someone’s estimation, would have been far too expensive. Already, after the patina of ceremony has worn off, there have been some rumblings, primarily around the fact the Mr. Harper’s statement was long on being sorry and short on being active. And as we pointed out at the start, a real apology promises to undo, as far as possible, the damage done. But now that the statement is revealed as just another evasion, we must caution against whatever action the governments of Canada would propose; as we’ve tried to make clear, the “action” Mr. Harper’s statement endorses, the “Truth” and “Reconciliation” Commission, is no action at all. And someone who steals your car, wrecks it, and is unrepentant about his/her actions is most definitely not the person you’d choose to repair it or replace it.

But that person most certainly at the very least would be responsible to pay the costs of repair or replacement. If this be genocide, the role of Canada’s government (and churches) is to make it possible for us to once again make ourselves whole, nothing more and nothing less. How should we do this, how long it will take us, where do we start… these questions and more crowd in on us all. But they are questions we must identify, discuss, and answer ourselves.

Those of you who saw clearly and immediately the farce that was being played out; those of you who felt in your heart of hearts that the whole orchestration was out of tune but couldn’t identify the offending instruments until now; and those of you who were misled until you brought the powers of your own intellect to the examination of this exercise in rhetorical excess; whatever your history is that led you to complete this overlong commentary; we invite you to join in the task of building what ultimately must replace this charade, some kind of response authentically committed to truth in this history and justice in its resolution.

Roland Chrisjohn
Andrea Bear Nicholas
Karen Stote
James Craven (Omahkohkiaayo i'poyi)
Tanya Wasacase
Pierre Loiselle
Andrea O. Smith

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