Countering Colonization (and other great books)

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So University of California Press has just made 700 of its books available for online reading (to read on a tablet you have to copy paste into some other program and do some conversions). One of these titles, which i can’t recommend highly enough, is Carol Devens’s Countering Colonization: Native American Women and Great Lakes Missions, 1630-1900 , a title which has been out of print for some time now.

Countering Colonization provides an important snapshot of how some Indigenous women dealt with colonialism and patriarchy in canada, providing rich details of resistance in various forms. Strongly recommended!

on the main Kersplebedeb website: http://kersplebedeb.com/posts/countering-colonization-and-other-great-books/

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Rape and canadian colonialism

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Human Rights Watch has accused Canada's federal police of intimidating and even sexually assaulting aboriginal women and girls in the province of British Columbia.

In a scathing report, which was released on Wednesday, the rights organization documented numerous accounts of women and girls in the province’s indigenous communities finding themselves in a constant state of fear.

"The threat of domestic and random violence on one side, and mistreatment by RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) officers on the other, leaves indigenous women in a constant state of insecurity," AFP quoted Meghan Rhoad, co-author of the 89-page report on the issue, as saying at a press conference in Ottawa on Wednesday.

The report also documented a number of disturbing allegations of rape and sexual assault at the hands of police.

"In five of the 10 towns Human Rights Watch visited in the north, we heard allegations of rape or sexual assault by police officers," the report stated.

The report was the outcome of an investigation into the "Highway of Tears" -- the name used to describe an infamous 800-kilometer stretch of highway in central British Columbia where 18 women have disappeared over the past several decades.

Two researchers, one from Canada and one from the US, spent five weeks last summer in the province’s north, interviewing 42 women and eight girls in 10 communities along the highway that connects the cities of Prince George and Prince Rupert in the westernmost province.

The researchers noted that all of the victims in the report were frightened about possible retaliation within their communities or by police, and insisted on having their identities protected.

“(This report) was about the level of fear that I and my colleague witnessed in the north at levels that we found comparable in conflict situations in post-war Iraq,” Rhoad added.

“It’s about the lack of meaningful accountability for police neglect or police mistreatment which creates an environment of impunity for violence against indigenous women and girls,” she stated.

The report called on the federal government to launch a national inquiry into the murders and disappearances of indigenous women and girls, and called for an independent civilian investigation into the reports of police misconduct.

The RCMP said it took the allegations "very seriously" but that “it is impossible to deal with such public and serious complaints when we have no method to determine who the victims of the accused are."

Indigenous communities in Canada, also known as the First Nations, say they are frustrated with Ottawa’s failure to address the social and economic grievances facing many of Canada’s 1.2 million aborigines.

Many of Canada’s natives live in poor conditions with unsafe drinking water, inadequate housing, addiction, and high suicide rates.

In a report released on December 19, 2012, Amnesty International called on Canada to address human rights abuses in the country, particularly with respect to the rights of indigenous peoples.

The above report is from Press TV.

One can read the complete Human Rights Watch report here (and press release here).

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Zig Zag on Idle No More: "In any liberation movement there are internal and external struggles"

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We are living in exciting times, with large numbers of people clearly fed up and taking action, no longer content to wait for the right moment or the right ideas or the right leadership to tell them what to do. Whether we think of Occupy, the Arab Spring, or the current Idle No More upsurge, spontaneity and taking a stand seem to be the order of the day. For those of us have lived through less exuberant times, it is a welcome change. That said, this new environment that clearly comes with its own potential pitfalls and weaknesses.

In order to try and understand this better, i asked some questions of Zig Zag, also known as Gord Hill, who is of the Kwakwaka'wakw nation and a long-time participant in anti-colonial and anti-capitalist resistance movements in Canada.  Gord is the author and artist of The 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance Comic Book and The Anti-Capitalist Resistance Comic Book (published by Arsenal Pulp Press) and 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance (published by PM Press); he also maintains the website WarriorPublications.wordpress.com.

Here is what he had to say...

K: What are the living conditions of Indigenous people today within the borders of what is called "canada"?

ZZ: Indigenous people in Canada experience the highest levels of poverty, violent death, disease, imprisonment, and suicide.  Many live in substandard housing and do not have clean drinking water, while many territories are so contaminated that they can no longer access traditional means of sustenance.  In the area around the Tar Sands in northern Alberta, for example, not only are fish and animals being found with deformities but the people themselves are experiencing high rates of cancer.  This is genocide.


K: Dispossession has been a central feature of colonialism and genocide within canada. Can you give some examples of how people have resisted dispossession in the past?

ZZ: Well in the past Native peoples had some level of military capability to resist dispossession, which ended around 1890.  More recently there have been many examples including Oka 1990, Ipperwash 1995, Sutikalh 2000, Six Nations 2006, etc.  At Oka it was armed resistance that stopped the proposed expansion of a golf course and condo project.  At Ipperwash people re-occupied their reserve land that had been expropriated during WW2, and they still remain there to this day.  At Sutikalh, St'at'imc people built a re-occupation camp to stop a $530 million ski resort. They were successful and the camp remains to this day.  At Six Nations they re-occupied land and prevented the construction of a condo project.

K: The canadian state has an army, prisons, police forces, and the backing of millions of people - not to mention the fact that it is completely integrated into world capitalism, both as a major source of natural resources and as an imperialist junior partner, messing up peoples around the world. What kind of possibilities are there for Indigenous people to successfully break out of this system, and resist canadian colonialism? What is the strategic significance of Indigenous resistance?

ZZ: Indigenous peoples must make alliances with other social sectors that also organize against the system.  The strategic significance of Indigenous peoples is their greater potential fighting spirit, stronger community basis of organizing, their ability to significantly impact infrastructure (such as railways, highways, etc, that pass through or near reserve communities) and their examples of resistance that can inspire other social movements.


K: What are bills C-38 and C-45, and how do they fit into the current global economic and political context?

ZZ: Bills C-38 and C-45 are omnibus budget bills the government has passed in order to implement its budget.  They include significant revisions of various federal acts, including the Navigable Waters Protection Act, environmental assessments, and the Indian Act. These are generally seen as facilitating greater corporate access to resources, such as mining and oil and gas.  The amendments to the Indian Act affect the ability of band councils to lease reserve land.  The move to open up resources, by removing protection from many rivers and lakes and "streamlining" environmental assessments is clearly meant to bolster Canada as a source of natural resources and to overcome public opposition to major projects such as the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline and others.


K: Is this something new, or more of the same old same old from the canadian state?

ZZ: These bills are new in that they're designed, in part, to facilitate greater corporate access to resources, primarily in the changes to the environmental assessment and Navigable Waters Protection Act.  These are measures designed to re-position Canada as a major source of oil and gas for the global market, and particularly Asian markets, while diversifying Canadian exports of such resources away from a US focused one, as the US economy continues to decline.  At the same time they are indeed a continuation of policies adapted by the federal government for many years now, which include major projects such as the Alberta Tar Sands and proposed pipeline projects.  These policies are the result of the neo-liberal ideology that states have been following for the past few decades.


K: What is one to make of this Idle No More movement that has sprung up over the past six weeks?

ZZ: It's similar to Occupy in that it reveals a yearning for social change among grassroots Native peoples, but it is also reformist and lacks any anti-colonial or anti-capitalist perspective.  It is fixated primarily on legal-political reforms, specifically repealing Bill C-45 (which passed in mid-December).  Although it has mobilized thousands of Natives, this is only to create political pressure on the government.  The four women from Saskatchewan who founded the movement are lawyers, academics, and business managers, so it is no surprise that the entire trajectory of the movement has been focused on legal-political reforms.  Another prominent speaker on behalf of INM has been Pam Palmater, a lawyer and Chair in Indigenous Governance at Ryerson University.  Last summer, she campaigned against Shawn Atleo for the position of "grand chief" of the Assembly of First Nations (AFN).

As it isn't anti-colonial or anti-capitalist, it has been a safe platform for many Indian Act chiefs and members of the Aboriginal business elite to participate, and many have in fact helped orchestrate the national protests and blockades that have occurred.  In fact, INM allied itself early on with chiefs from Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Ontario.  It was chiefs from these provinces that made the symbolic attempt to enter the House of Commons on Dec. 4, an event that in many ways really launched INM and built the December 10 day of action.

These chiefs oppose Atleo, support Palmater, and have been the driving force behind most of the major rallies and blockades that have occurred in their respective provinces (with notable exceptions, such as the Tyendinaga train blockades).  

The involvement of the band councils has helped stifle any real self-organization of grassroots people.  The reformist methods promoted by the original founders has included the imposing of pacifist methods and so has dampened the warrior spirit of the people overall. Another factor in the INM mobilizing has been the fast carried out by the Indian Act chief Theresa Spence in Ottawa.  This has motivated many Natives to participate in INM due to the emotional and pseudo-spiritual aspects of the fast (a "hunger strike" to the death).  Despite the praise given to Spence, she revealed her intentions in late December when she made a public call for the chiefs to "take control" of the grassroots.

K: What you are outlining seems to be a class analysis of the INM movement. Some people have suggested that class analysis is incompatible with anticolonial analysis, that it is divisive, or amounts to applying a european framework that is not relevant to Indigenous people. What do you make of this?

ZZ: Under colonization the capitalist division of classes is imposed on Indigenous peoples.  The band councils and Aboriginal business elite are proof of this.  Under capitalist class divisions, there are new political and economic elites that are established and who have more to gain from assimilation and collaboration, despite any movements for reform they may be involved in.  As separate political and economic elites, they have their own interests which are not the same as the most impoverished and oppressed, which comprises the bulk of Indigenous grassroots people.  Middle class elites are able to impose their own beliefs and methods on grassroots movements through their greater access to, and control of, resources (including money, communications, transport, etc.).

For a genuinely autonomous, decentralized and self-organized Indigenous grassroots movement to emerge, the question of middle-class elites, including the band councils, must be resolved.  I would also say that in any liberation movement there are internal and external struggles.  The internal one determines the overall methods and objectives of the movement, and therefore cannot be silenced or marginalized under the pretext of preserving some non-existent "unity."  In fact, only when internal struggles are clarified can there be any significant gains made in the external one, against the primary enemy (state and capital).

K: January 11 was the day that Harper was initially supposed to meet with Spence and other chiefs from across canada. But on the day of the meeting, due to Harper’s shenanigans, Spence and most other chiefs opted to boycott it, and Spence declared she would be continuing her hunger strike. How deep is this split, and does it signify that some chiefs are breaking with the neocolonial setup and developing a radical potential?

ZZ: There have always been divisions within the AFN and between regions.  As I mentioned, some Indian Act chiefs, especially in Saskatchewan, Ontario and Manitoba, have been spearheading many of the Idle No More rallies and breaking from the AFN's agenda.  This shouldn't be interpreted as proof that they are more radical, but rather that they have their own agenda.  "Grand chief" Nepinak of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, the AFN's provincial wing, has been very active in promoting INM rallies and blockades, etc.  But Nepinak's AMC also suffered massive funding cuts announced in early September.  His organization will see their annual funding cut from $2.6 million down to $500,000.  He is fighting for his political and economic career and has little to lose by agitating for more grassroots actions, but that doesn't mean he's now a "radical."  Rather, the band councils and chiefs must be understood as having their own agenda in regards to their power struggle with the state.  Many are easily fooled by militant rhetoric and symbolic blockades, but these are old tactics for the Indian Act chiefs.

Along with chiefs fighting for the maintenance of their provincial or regional organizations (such as the AMC or tribal councils), which is contributing to band council participation across the country in INM mobilizing, the chiefs in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Ontario have a political struggle with Atleo and have their own vision for greater economic development.  It was the chiefs from these provinces that boycotted the meeting between the PM and Atleo, and who called for the January 16 national day of action.

Delegations of these chiefs have travelled to Asia, Venezuela, and Iran seeking corporate investors, especially in the oil and gas industry.  Chief Wallace Fox of the Onion Lake Cree Nation, one of those at the forefront of recent events and an outspoken opponent of Atleo, is the chief of the top oil producing Native band in the country (located in Alberta and Saskatchewan).  Fox and other chiefs have also attempted to gain access to OPEC, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, for partnerships with corporations.  Nepinak and other chiefs also met with Chinese officials in December, also looking for potential partnerships.

The rationale of these chiefs, Palmater and their allies in INM (the four "official founders") is that Atleo is collaborating with the assimilation strategy of the Harper regime.  Meanwhile, it is they who seek to take control of the AFN and impose their own version of Native capitalism, based in part on foreign investment in resource industries.  Ironically of course, many INM participants are rallying to defend Mother Earth, in many ways being used as pawns in a power struggle between factions of the Aboriginal business elite.  Many INM participants, I would say, are unaware of these internal dynamics.  Their mobilization under the slogans of "stop bill c-45," "defend land and water," etc., are positive aspects of INM, and show the great potential for grassroots movements.  But this is something that is in the early stages, and the movement will have to overcome the parasitical participation and control of the Indian Act chiefs as well as middle-class elites for it to advance.


K: There were hundreds of Idle No More actions on January 11. Here in Montreal, roughly three thousand people demonstrated, by far the largest protest related to Indigenous issues i have ever seen in this city. At the same time, the demonstration was overwhelmingly made up of non-Indigenous people, ranging from radical anticapitalists to members of Quebec nationalist and social democratic groups. This seems in line with the INM strategy of framing the movement as representing all canadians. How compatible is this with an anticolonial perspective, and what are the strengths and weaknesses of such diverse support?

ZZ: The first priority and main focus for an anti-colonial liberation movement must be its own people.  This is how it develops its own autonomous methods and practise, free from outside interference.  This helps to unify the movement and establish it as an independent social force.  Alliances are clearly necessary, and while the ultimate goal might be a multi-national resistance movement, colonialism and the unique history as well as socio-economic conditions of Native peoples means they must be able to organize autonomously from other social sectors.

I think in principle to frame Idle No More as one representing all Canadians is correct, but the way in which they are doing this waters down and minimizes the anti-colonial analysis that is necessary for radical social change.  By trying to appeal to the "Canadian citizen" it may broaden its appeal but to what end?  In the process it will have weakened the anti-colonial resistance.  Even now you can see the renewed calls for "peaceful" protests from INM'ers, as well as statements from the "official founders" that they don't support "illegal" actions such as blockades.  They're very sensitive to any loss of public support, claiming it is now an "educational" movement and that they don't want to inconvenience citizens.  The reformists might claim that in this manner we can build a bigger movement to defeat Bill C-45, but clearly such bills are just part of a much larger systemic problem we can identify as colonialism and capitalism.  Without addressing the root causes we'll just be doing the same thing next year against another set of bills. And of course, basing one's anti-colonial resistance on the opinion of the settler population will never lead to liberation.


K: We seem to have entered a period of spontaneous upsurges like INM internationally, be it the Arab Spring or Occupy or the recent anti-rape protests in India; in each of these cases masses of people are clearly fed up and willing to throw themselves into action, but for better or for worse they often bypass any of the organized anti-imperialist or anti-capitalist groups or traditions. Is this a sign of a failure on our part, that when circumstances finally give way to revolt we are not connected to those doing the revolting? Or is there something else going on?

ZZ: I would say a part of these mobilizations is the use of social media in spreading information and coordinating actions. Certainly in the Arab Spring, Occupy and now Idle No More, this has been a significant component of the mobilizing that has occurred.  It seems that there are more people who have been influenced by these ongoing social revolts and mobilizations, that then decide to take action of some kind, and the internet empowers them to organize rallies, etc.  They don't need the already existing radical groups to do this, and may not even know of their existence.

This leads to the situation where mobilizations are called, gain traction and then expand -- but they have a very shallow analysis of the system and lack experience in real resistance.  In both Occupy and INM we see inexperienced organizers who believe they have re-invented the wheel, who feel they know best how social movements should conduct themselves, etc.  At best, these mobilizations show that there is a yearning for social change among a growing number of people, but social media enables them to bypass more experienced and radical groups, and their naivete leads them to think that these groups fail because they're too radical. Therefore they appeal to the most basic and populist slogans, the least threatening forms of action, etc.

I don't know if I would characterize it as a failure on the part of radical groups that they are somewhat disconnected from these types of mobilizations.  They're not revolts, they're largely reformist rallies without a radical analysis dominated by liberals and pacifists, middle-class organizers, etc.  Until these movements are radicalized there is little possibility for radicals to be fully involved.  Another aspect of these types of mobilizations is their relatively short duration.  Occupy was largely over three or four months after it began, with some exceptions (such as Oakland).  How long will INM endure?


K: Although their leadership may be neo-colonial and middle-class, surely many of those in the grassroots who are attracted to surges like INM are not. How should established Indigenous anti-colonial groups relate to these mass mobilizations? Are there specific approaches that are more effective than others? And are there things to avoid?

ZZ: I would say Indigenous anti-colonial groups should engage such movements critically, and not simply take the role of cheerleaders. When large numbers of people are aroused and mobilized, it means they're thinking about, and discussing, concepts such as colonialism, tactics, strategies, methods, etc.  So it is an opportune time to contribute radical anti-colonial and anti-capitalist analysis, even though some participants in the movement think that such debate "divides" people. I would avoid denouncing such movements, or opposing them, of course, because there are both positive and negative aspects.  Promote the positive and try to illuminate the negative, the contradictions, etc.  As many participants are new and inexperienced, anti-colonial groups can contribute a lot to expanding and radicalizing the movement.

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Sexual Violence Against Indigenous Women

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i am reposting this horrific news, without commentary except to say that obviously i do not share the authors' insistence on nonviolence, but equally obviously that is not the most important thing here in this post. Sexual violence, from India to Turtle Island, has always been used by the powerful to terrorize subject peoples, just as it has been tolerated and encouraged amongst oppressed peoples as a safety valve for male distress and (more importantly) as a direct attack on women, who have regularly formed the backbone of resistance movements here as elsewhere.

The following press release details the a sexual assault on a woman from the Nishnawbe-Aski Nation in "canada". This takes place not only in the context of the current upsurge known as "Idle No More", but also in the context of the ongoing and longstanding attacks (sexual and otherwise) on Indigenous women across canada:


December 30, 2012 (Thunder Bay) The family of a woman who was brutally attacked on Thursday evening has come forward to issue a warning to people of First Nations descent living in the Thunder Bay region.

On Thursday evening Angela Smith (not her real name to protect her identity) was walking to a store in the city of Thunder Bay, Ontario.  Two Caucasian men pulled their car up along side her as she walked on the sidewalk and began issuing racial slurs while throwing items at her from the car.  When she continued to walk, the car stopped and the passenger of the vehicle got out of the car and grabbed the woman by her hair and forced her into the back of the car where she was held her down in the back seat by one of them and driven out of the city.

They drove her to a surrounding wooded area where they brutally sexually assaulted, strangled and beat her.  During the attack they told her it wasn’t the first time they had committed this type of crime and added, “it wouldn’t be the last.”  They also told her “You Indians deserve to lose your treaty rights.”  Making a reference to the current peaceful protests being undertaken by First Nations in Thunder Bay and throughout the country under the banner of Idle No More.

Left for dead in the wooded area, Angela managed to walk for four to five hours back to her home, where police were called.  She was taken by ambulance to the hospital and the crime is currently under investigation.

Speaking from her home in Thunder Bay on Friday, Angela said, “The only thought that came to my mind were my children.  I thought I would never see them again.”

She said she also wanted to get the information out to community members in Thunder Bay,  “It’s a cruel world out there and right now with the First Nations trying to fight this Bill (Bill C-45) everyone should be looking over their shoulder constantly because there are a lot of racists out there and to be careful.”

Her mother added, “We felt it was important for us to get the word out because we are very concerned about the safety of our women in the community.  And as well we want to tell people that even though this happened to my daughter, we are not the violent ones.  We want to tell people not to get angry or to be violent.  Its very important that the Idle No More movement to remain peaceful.”

Angela is a member of a community of the Nishnawbe-Aski Nation in Northwestern Ontario.


-30-

Contact:
Christi Belcourt                                                                       Tanya KappoEmail:
christibelcourt25@gmail.com                                                  tanyakappo25@gmail.com

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Anti-Capitalism and Violence: Gord Hill Interviewed by Kersplebedeb

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The opening graphic in The Anti-Capitalist Resistance Comic Book is striking, showing a Black Bloc member squaring off against a cop, each as representatives of the clash between Empire and free peoples from centuries past. To what degree do you feel that the clashes at today's summits represent a continuity with the history of anti-colonial resistance?

To start with, I wouldn't limit the concept of anti-colonial resistance simply to counter summit mobilizations. But in general, I do think there's a connection in that free, autonomous societies have always resisted the rule of civilization and its empires, which the graphic you refer to was meant to depict. Looking at just the summit protests, however, they are in some ways the equivalent to battles fought against empire by tribal peoples, including forms of self-organization, autonomy, even tactics. For example, tribal peoples in Western Europe fought in a somewhat chaotic autonomous manner, while Roman legions were in massed units, lines of heavily armoured troops, etc. You can see similar forms of struggle among social movements opposing state security forces today, the Black Bloc being somewhat similar to the "barbarian" tribes fighting Roman soldiers (who look very similar to modern day riot cops).

In the section of your comic book where you talk about the fall of the Roman Empire, you show how assimilated tribal chiefs took advantage of the power vacuum to establish their own kingdoms. Some comrades argue that we're now in a period of the decline of imperialism, but is there anything we can do to prevent history from repeating itself, and today's "assimilated tribal chiefs" in the neo-colonies from similarly filling the power vacuum as warlords to set up their own fiefdoms?

The "assimilated tribal chiefs" are already circulating and jockeying for position within our social movements, if we consider the collaborative role of union bureaucrats, political party members, pacifist ideologues, etc. Internally, we make efforts to keep our autonomy and decentralized manner of organizing while defeating those that would control and contain us. In the event of a systemic collapse, what would prevent warlords as such from rising? Organized resistance capable of defeating such forces, the seeds of which must be planted now so that when the crisis matures so does the resistance. it should also be noted that even among the European tribes collaborator chiefs were targeted with death and there was significant internal struggles among tribes in responding to both the advance of the Roman empire and its collapse.

k: The Anti-Capitalist Resistance Comic Book focuses almost exclusively on clashes at protests that have occurred in the media spotlight. Do you consider these protests, which some people have criticized as "summit hopping", to be particularly strategic? Is there a particular importance in telling these stories?

gh: The summits depicted in the comic are historical events that involved tens of thousands of people directly in the streets, and which affected many more (via corporate and alternative media, etc.). They inspired many and showed the power of the people when mobilized, despite the vast deployment of state security forces. This is a strategic gain that is absolutely necessary for resistance movements. In regards to telling these stories, it is up to us to maintain our history of resistance, no one else will do it for us. It is in fact in the interests of the ruling class that such histories be erased because they are such "bad examples." I personally don't like the term "summit hopping" as it belittles the efforts of organizers attempting to mobilize against such events in their areas. It also arises from the false belief that we either organize "locally" or "summit hop," a division that doesn't exist in reality.

k: I think what you're saying there is really borne out by what we're seeing at the moment in Quebec, where some of the same people who were involved in the militant actions at the G20 or even at Montebello before that, have been participating in the present mobilization.


gh: Ya, I've heard the same thing about the #Spanish Revolution, which Occupy Wall Street was modeled after.  Many of the organizers were 'veterans' of the so-called anti-globalization movement.

k: In your comic book, you show the Mohawk uprising and the Zapatistas in 1990, but then skip ahead to APEC in 1997 and then J18 in 1999. In many cities, the 90s were a decade where militant antifascist politics became an important area of action. Do you see any connection between the antifa activism of the 90s and then much broader antiglobalization movement that followed?

gh: Yes, certainly, in that many of the Anti-fa militants were key organizers in some of these mobilizations and also promoted militant tactics such as Black Blocs over those years. But I had limits on how much of the story could be told, and the anti-APEC and Zapatista rebellion more directly influenced the so-called anti-globalization movement with the focus on neo-liberalism, which I think really made people aware of the global restructuring then underway.

k: In Toronto there was Anti-Racist Action, and in Montreal we had the somewhat pathetic example of the "World Anti-Fascist League" and then (much better) RASH and SHARP; what kinds of groups were active on the West coast at the time?


gh: In Vancouver there was less of a fascist threat during this period.  There were smaller numbers of neo-nazis organized around Aryan Nations, and there was an Aryan Resistance Movement, as well as Tony McAleer's "Canadian Liberty Net," mostly a telephone line that had racist messages and info.  As a result there wasn't an active ARA chapter.  We did set up a group called Anti-Fascist Info, which was mostly an informational group that organized film screenings, forums, etc.  There were numerous autonomous anti-fascists who would show up at anti-racist rallies, for example in 1993 I think the Canadian Liberty Net attempted to organize a forum with Tom Metzger from the White Aryan REsistance (WAR).  This meeting was shut down after militants learned of the meeting place.  There was also a liberal reformist group called the BC Organization to Fight Racism (BCOFR) which had formed in the early 1980s when the KKK was more active here.

k: Your work over the years, both as an activist and a movement artist-intellectual, has focussed on Indigenous resistance struggles, which have been going on uninterrupted for over five hundred years. Yet you also obviously have an affinity for some of the traditions of resistance that emerged much more recently in Europe, especially the German Autonomen. There seem to be glaring differences between the circumstances that have given rise to these resistance struggles - to what degree do you see them as being compatible, or perhaps more to the point, what how do you see them as being relevant to one another?

gh: Yes, my main focus is anti-colonial and anti-capitalist resistance. As capitalism arose from Europe's colonization of the Americas, I see the two as intertwined. The imposition of capitalist relations among Indigenous peoples has resulted in class hierarchies, today manifested in the Aboriginal business elite and their collaborator political organizations. I think decolonization must include an anti-capitalist analysis or it risks simply being another form of assimilation (neo-colonialism). And since we have to develop anti-capitalist resistance it makes sense to study and understand such movements both historically and current. The Autonomen, as an autonomous and decentralized political force/social movement, share some qualities with Indigenous tribal society and also serve as a model for radical anti-capitalist resistance in a modern industrialized nation-state.

k: In the 1970s, at the time when the Autonomen were first developing in West Germany, and during the second wave of Autonomia in Italy, there was the related phenomenon of the "Urban Indians" - was this just a racist rip-off, or do you see there as something positive in this kind of identification, especially as the people who identifies this way may have been anti-imperialist, but really had no connection or contact with the anti-colonial Indigenous struggles here?

gh: The "Urban Indians" were probably sincere in their efforts to "decolonize" from Western Civilization, but ya it is a kind of racist appropriation of culture which would not go over very well here in North America.  The ironic thing is they could have reached back to the tribal history of Europe itself--the Vandals, the Goths, Celts, etc. all resisted their colonization by the Romans and had numerous military victories, including the sacking of Rome itself on a few occasions, which seems like a great historical legacy of their own ancestors engaging in anti-colonial resistance.

k: At the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair, one of the best moments for me is when a guy came over to my table and was excited because he recognized himself in your comic - he had been arrested at the G20 and his story and\ made it into your pages. Other people i know also get a grin when they see someone who might be them. Leaving aside the question of how autobiographical your book may be, what is the significance of using art to keep alive the stories and anecdotes from these events?

gh: Tribal peoples have always used to art to maintain their histories and culture, as have social movements. In regards to the historical events depicted in the comic, I hadn't seen too much artwork attempting to maintain this history, for example with comics, which I find to be a great form of communication.

k: I imagine your art will continue to serve this function for the movement in the years to come. Do you have any future projects along similar lines that you'd like to tell us about?


gh: Not at the moment, perhaps you have some ideas?

k: Ha! Well, you could always come to Montreal, lots of interesting things happening here these days...

k: Violence is central to your stories, and the idea seems to be that the more of it, the better. Why is violence so important, and what do you have against peaceful protest?

gh: I would say violence is central to the stories I depict because they are a critical moment in the social conflict out of which they arise. It isn't every day that the state mobilizes thousands of cops and soldiers, or when thousands of militants converge on a specific battlefield as it were. In regards to levels of violence I think this is a tactical question that is very much dependent on conditions and context. In Seattle 1999 there was a fairly low level of violence engaged in by protesters, certainly in the downtown core where it was much more of a classic "police riot." In the Capitol Hill area there was more sustained street fighting, but of course the most spectacular impact arose from the small Black Bloc action in the downtown which saw a fairly low level of violence (there were no confrontations with riot police with a good amount of property destruction carried out). I have nothing against "peaceful protest" and have participated in many more such protests than "violent" ones. It's a question of tactics and strategy. I would say, however, that I am opposed to pacifist ideologues attempting to impose their beliefs on others while undermining militants.

k: Various writers have argued that violence against the oppressor can actually be psychologically liberating for people, a way of dealing with and healing from the violence of everyday day life under patriarchal colonial capitalism...


gh: Ya that was the message of Franz Fanon.  I would say it can be psychologically liberating, and an important part of that is showing that the oppressor is not omnipotent, that they can be fought and even defeated.  Without this people feel powerless, which contributes to apathy.  People need a fighting spirit and the will to resist, and I don't think pacifism is very inspiring to a lot of people.

k: In the context of the antiglobalization movement, which you literally illustrate in your comic book, there were debates about nationalism, about cooperating with the right (i.e. Pat Buchanan, Ralph Nader, etc.), about conspiracy theories - but the only debate that appears in your comic book is the debate over violence. Did you purposefully decide to highlight this one question?

gh: Yes, I think it's a much more critical debate than those over larger strategic ones at this time, such as nationalism or conspiracy theories. I think within more radical social movements there is already an understanding around nationalism and the right-wing, a consensus of sorts that generally rejects these concepts. But within this there is a division over the question of violence and militant actions that must be resolved to some degree before greater unity of effort can be achieved. As for conspiracy theories, they certainly had an impact on the Toronto G20 due to the involvement of some conspiracists promoting the idea that the Black Bloc was a police operation, and maybe some debate on this should've been included, but by the end of the G20 comic I was seriously pressed for space...

k: This spring in Quebec there has been a student strike which has developed with strong anticapitalist politics and a rapid escalation on the streets. A lot of the protest tactics which were pioneered by small, even tiny, groups over the past fifteen years are now in the headlines every day, and being taken up by much larger numbers of people. How much potential do you see for this kind of urban militant resistance to spread in North America? Do you see any potential pitfalls?

gh: I think it can spread very far and wide in a very short period of time. I began to realize the potential for this after reading a report from Greece on the 2008/09 rebellion there, where a similar phenomenon of thousands of youths adopted the tactics and methods that had been used by smaller numbers of anarchists for years. This wasn't simply natural intuition--these kids and many others in Greek society have watched the anarchists in action for over two decades now. It's like "monkey see, monkey do" and that's the importance of showing examples of militant resistance and serving as a model of how it can be carried out. The Canucks Riot of 2011 here in Vancouver was similar--during the 1994 hockey riot there were no cars arsoned. In 2011, over 16 or 17 cars were torched, including 4 police cars. I'm sure many of these youth rioting had seen some coverage of the Toronto G20 and the four burning cop cars that resulted. The Occupy movement, whatever its shortcomings, shows that a large segment of the population believes that some form of social change is necessary. They weren't willing to join the Occupiers, but they're sitting there and observing all this social mobilization and conflict going on in the world. It might only take one incident or issue to instigate social revolt, and as conditions continue to deteriorate this potential grows. The potential pitfalls are greater repression of social movements and an increase in police controls over the population, but that's part of the process of resistance.

k: If or when things do fall apart, isn't there a risk that the racism, patriarchy, and capitalist values that people have internalized might lead significant sections of the oppressor nations, especially its middle classes, to veer to the far right?


gh: I'd say it's a very real possibility and one that we can see occurring even now, with the right-wing Christian patriot militia movement in the US.  This movement expanded during the 1990s but then declined after 9/11 when the so-called "War on Terror" began.  In 2008 however, when Obama was elected amidst an economic crisis, the patriot militia movement expanded rapidly with part of it mainstreaming as survivalism (itself a sign of the times).  As of yet this right-wing has not coalesced into a unified movement, although all the ingredients are there for fascist style paramilitary organizing on a large scale.  But the thing about the declining economic conditions is that significant segments of the middle-class may become working class, as occurred in Argentina during the 2001-02 economic crisis there.

k: Still thinking of Quebec, after a few weeks of demonstrations in which police were repeatedly sent running, both the federal government and the city of Montreal began drafting legislation and changing bylaws to criminalize wearing masks and increase penalties for even being present during a militant demonstration. With potential consequences of up to ten years in prison and thousands of dollars in fines, the movement is now going to face significantly heavier repression in the courtrooms, and perhaps in the prisons too. On top of that, the provincial government has passed Law 78 which criminlizes a broad range of protest activities, and is clearly meant to break the back of the movement. What will be necessary for radicals to break through this escalation on the part of the State, and what effect will this have on our struggles?

gh: People join resistance movements for a variety of reasons--some ideological, some for friendship, some for financial reasons or personal security. But an important factor is the potential for victory--only those committed ideologically will join a group doomed to failure or defeat. If movements surrender or abandon a struggle after the first act of repression many will see it as weak and impotent. If a movement overcomes this repression and continues to advance, it will more likely gain new members and inspire others. But it also depends on the context--what is the struggle and how much emotion is invested in it by the participants? Is it a matter of life or death, is it a significant part of the core beliefs of the participants, an important matter of principle? In regards to the Quebec student strike, it seems that many participate or sympathize because it is a matter of principle (the right to education, or the right to assembly and protest). They seem to be able to mobilize the numbers necessary to defy the ban on protests and masks for the moment, but the real question will be how social movements without such a large base will fair. To answer the question more directly, I would speculate that mass disobedience of the new law would be crucial to show that the movement cannot be intimidated and controlled so easily. The disruptions resulting from the protests can create political pressure to repeal the legislation, just as they did to create it. But the movement might have to raise the level of struggle to one that it cannot maintain, given that its base, even though large by our standards, is ultimately limited. The law itself will undoubtedly contribute to the radicalization of even more people, just as the student strike itself has.

k: What do you think of the North American left today?

gh: It has great potential considering the worsening socio-economic conditions, the convergence of ecological and economic crises, etc. In general, at the moment it seems weak and fixated on intellectual efforts rather than physical activities, dominated by middle-class social democrats and their suffocating pacifist doctrine, and likely to turn tail and run at the first sign of aggression by our class enemy. The only hope lies in the radicalizing influence of militants, which is why the state sees the bogey-man Black Bloc as the greatest threat, and not those sectors of the left which can be easily co-opted. Furthermore, I think many people don't join "leftist" struggles because they see little potential for victory, and little that actually inspires them. 

The N. American left today largely inspires middle-class liberals and reformists, and the last thing they want is radical social change. The left or social movements in general will become far more effective when working class people actually join and participate in significant numbers, which I think will happen as the economic conditions decline further. I believe this is one of the reasons we must promote a diversity of tactics within out movements, because many working class people intuitively understand that radical social change requires some level of conflict, as opposed to middle-class reformists who seek to avoid both.

k: Violence aside, can you think of any other strategies or tactics that people are using presently that might challenge middle-class control of the left?


gh: I'm not sure, but I think some examples may be found in Occupy Oakland, where more people of colour and working class people were involved and radicalized what was a predominantly white middle-class movement.  Another example might be the Wet'suwet'en in central 'BC' who are resisting the Enbridge pipeline as well as the Pacific Trails Pipeline, a couple of years ago they severed their connection to mainstream environmental NGO's and began working with grassroots resistance groups.  But overall I think middle-class control will be undermined as social conditions continue to decline and more working class elements become mobilized in the resistance.

k: In the time that you have been involved in resistance movements, we have experienced numerous battles on multiple fronts, with both surges forward as well as defeats. What do you think we need to prepare ourselves for over the next ten years?

gh: Preparation must be based on our analysis of what may occur over the next ten years. Worsening economic conditions, ecological crisis, increased state repression... and potential systemic collapse in localized areas. Typically under such conditions there arises the need for greater solidarity and mutual aid to be practised, greater efforts at self-sufficiency (including food production, shelter, etc.), physical self-defense, survival skills, and better education on security culture. Given the growing cynicism with the current system, anti-capitalist resistance should find fertile ground for mobilizing. Anti-fascist or anti-racist efforts may become more important in some areas as well, as the state and ruling class typically resort to fostering fascist movements and racist sentiment among the population in times of crisis.

************************************************

 The Anti-Capitalist Resistance Comic Book
Paperback
96 pages
Published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2012
ISBN 9781551524443

available for $12.95 from leftwingbooks.net

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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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