Why Idle No More is Important for Non-Aboriginal People

This is an intervention I made at a teach-in last weekend in Montreal.     

Because it isn’t just an Aboriginal struggle; it is a problem for all those who are Canadian citizens, above all, and the impact is on the Aboriginal peoples.  The roots of the issue lie not in Aboriginal history but in Canadian history!

    In Quebec we tend to see Ottawa as absent and irrelevant. We couldn’t be more wrong! And this is true also of the issues raised by Idle No More. Bil Cé45, the Treaties, the Indian Act, are all Canadian issues, policies and laws created by the Canadian government that affect all Canadians. And, they have great impact on us here in Quebec.

   Some of us are sovereigntists. We should be aware that the struggle for sovereignty is one more nail in the life of Aboriginal people. To achieve sovereignty without having dealt with its impact on Aboriginal people would be to repeat the history -- and we generally don,t know that history or take it into account when we talk about sovereignty. Simply to cut with Ottawa would immediately cut Aboriginal people loose from a whole history that they turn to instinctively for their survival: the history of the proclamation of 1763, the treaties, the Indian Act. Remove all this and they are at the mercy of an entirely new reality without any reference for their survival.

   Canada is quite unique among States: as far as I know it has the strongest history of establishing treatings with First Nations. While this has created lots of problems, it has also established a framework for working the problems through and has been a guarantee that First Nations had a voice in the discussions about their own future. We are not a that has full title to the land north of the 49^th parallel coast to coast. We share every bit of it and have done so since the first settler arrived. None of that land has been ceded. We are a land of many nations who co-habit -- we just forgot about that.

   There’s another thing we forget about: we are an apartheid nation. In fact we are the model, root apartheid nation. Apartheid may be an invention of the Netherlands, of the Boers. But they got the idea from us, with adaptions and refinements. We too, adapted and refined our own version. But the rock bottom point is that we are an apartheid nation. The sooner we recognise it, the better. And our apartheidism is grounded in the Indian Act. It is a perverse interpretation of the two-row wampum that said that each nation would follow its own path, with dignity, respect and reciprocity. We turned it into an path where we took all and told the others to stay out of the way. And at one point, we even decided simply to eliminate them -- we took the route of genocide. We are a country that has applied genocide on our own territory.

    Finally, there is the question of territory.  Perhaps this is the root issue; the one we really need to deal with. It is at the root also of most of the armed conflicts in the world today. The Western world developed a notion of territory that has upturned everything even we believed up until the beginning of the industrial revolution. At the beginning of that revolution, the industrialists wanted workers for their factories. The factories were in the cities, so they had to draw people to the cities. So they closed the commons. They privatized territory in such a way that most people were excluded. Territory became private property. Ownership became exclusive. The settlers, from the beginning of the 18^th century, arrived with this notion. It has run up against our own earlier tradition and that of Aboriginal people ever since.  Up until 1960, Quebec was a very traditional society in which private property, while it existed, did not pose a threat to the well-being of other Quebecois. There was room for all -- well, except for the Aboriginal people who were shoved out of the way.  But the shift to the industrial and urbanized model of society did not really come about until after the 1950’s. Today it has eaten away at the very fabric of who we are. As large corporations create ever grander projects to devoir the environment in search of oil, gas and metal, Quebecois also have found themselves pushed aside.

    Today there is perhaps an opportunity for Aboriginal peoples and Quebec society to examine together their bonds with their shared territory and their concern about what is happening to it. Both regards are, in my view, grounded in a profound love and respect for the gift that this territory is and an enormous will to care for it. Together, based on that shared bond with the territory, we can perhaps together build a different future. But that will happen only if we come to terms with our shared history also.

Idle No More : Its Strength

For those who think about how to draw strength to continue in the Idle No More movement, how to understand its strength, I offer the following reflection: 

 

     Key to any social movement is its sustainability, its capacity to maintain strength throughout the struggle to attain its goals. If we rely simply on our own personal reserves, it is likely we will quickly abandon or burn out. If we rely exclusively on the collective force of the groups we work with, it is more than likely also that we will, at some point, hit a wall we cannot breach. It is important, to my mind, that we recognize a force that moves us forward that works in us and in our groups, but that is also larger than just us.

    We mobilize to defend Mother Earth from the devastation that we two-legged creatures are inflictin on her. This incentive to come to the defense of Mother Earth comes from within, but it is ultimately Mother Earth herself who inspires it. Mother Earth and the Spirit that guides Mother Earth, the Great Spirit herself, provides us with the strength to engage the struggle. It is crucial that we be very clear on this point. The source of our strength lies deep within that Spirit, within Mother Earth herself and is given to us. How to we maintain contact with that force?  By paying very close attention to what Mother Earth is saying to us. And how to we listen?  Mother Earth speaks through her creatures, all of them who come to us. They speak and we need to be attentive, to know how to hear and to interpret. These creatures include the air, the water, the earth, the plants, birds, trees, the water creatures and even the two-legged ones -- at times. They all have a word to say, if we know how to interpret their language.  Especially if we are new to these languages, we may need help to know what is being said. It is a collective effort.

     And how to we engage the conversation with Mother Earth’s creatures?  Through the heart first of all. We need to open our hearts to gratitude. It is the spirit of gratitude that opens the doors so that the creatures can speak and be heard. Gratitude to them and to their gifts is key. The key. We need to turn to them constantly, every day, several times a day, in gratitude. This is ancient wisdom.

My totems

This blog entry is very personal. I share it with some trepidation. I think of it a witness, in some way, to a spirituality that deserves enormous respect and from which I draw strength.

     A couple of decades ago I experienced a time of “hitting the wall” that included several months of intensive therapy. At one point during that period I engaged in a process of creating a “Medicine Wheel” arrangement of totems. This consisted in spending periods of time (actually throughout a week) in selecting cards representing animal totems drawn from indigenous traditions of the Americas. The impact was, for me, extremely significant.

     This morning I returned to my cards and the arrangement. It should be understood that a medicine wheel arrangement is not intended to be a permanent one. It represents where I was at that time. To my surprise, it continues to speak to me very deeply. I hesitate to speak of something as personal as this but the time seems right.

     Let me, first of all, explain that the Medicine Wheel is a way of expressing the order of “Turtle Island” (the Americas especially North America). It has four directions which can be interpreted in many different ways. Most often, the directions indicated are East, South, West and North. (The order in which they are spoken may differ.) The meaning of each direction is also quite varied and I will not go into that. The important thing is that each animal totem is drawn in relation to one or other of the directions. Then there is a central or “mountain” totem that integrates all of them. The result is a picture of who you are at a given moment in your life.

     The search for the totems may take many forms. The Medicine Wheel seeks five. (The total number of totems is often considered to be nine. So, I only searched for five of those nine and at a given point in my life, but one that was a crucial “turning point” as I worked in therapy to create a new self from the ashes of what had gone before. And indeed they were ashes. Overnight, I had been forced to give up a life I had built for myself (in Latin America) and stop everything I had been doing for more than a decade. My family had disintegrated. My mother had died a painful death of cancer and my youngest brother had committed suicide. (Later, two of my sisters also did the same.)

      Drawing the totems in this context was, for me, a profound act of faith in the Spirit, who guides us; it was an effort to listen to what the Spirit was calling me to.

     At the time, I made a drawing of the layout of the results. About a year ago, I threw it away: perhaps a mistake. As a result I cannot recall the ordering of the four directions. This would have added another dimension to the significance of the totems. However, it does not seem to me to be crucial.

    So, the animals drawn were: the turtle, the mountain lion, the weasel, the moose and the bat. A strange combination. Each one came to me on a different day, so there was time to try to digest what they meant. When the whole came together they painted a picture for me of where I was, what my strengths were and where my path lay. I still think this was a significant moment in my life, even though, apart from the turtle and the bat, I have never actually “met” these animals. 

     Without going into great detail I would like to say something of the meaning given to me by each of the totems. (They are drawn from a work prepared by Jamie Sams and David Carson called Medicine Cards and published by Bear & Company, in New Mexico (1988), now republished by St. Martin Press.

      The turtle is very close to the Earth and with a tough protective surface, like the Earth. Also, it is an animal that moves slowly and carefully. Then there is the mountain lion: powerful leader who takes initiative without imposing on others. It is vulnerable to considerable criticism by others for its actions. Then there is the weasel. I was not terribly happy to have found that one. However, on reading and reflecting, I discovered that the gift of the weasel is to penetrate the enemy and discover what is really going on. The weasel knows beyond the surface. Then there is the moose, a creatures with a confident self-esteem that stands its ground and bellows its feelings for creating life. It is above all an animal of profound wisdom.  And finally, the central totem, the one that surprised me the most, was the bat. At first I was dismayed. A bat!  As a central totem?  Not very attractive! Yet, I found, it is a Mayan symbol proper to the shaman and involves death and rebirth into a new self by which shaman wisdom is born. However, There is an initiation undertaken by the Mayans through this spirit enters.  This involves actually going through a ritual death by being placed in the earth for an entire night in the forest sometimes with a blanket covering the hole.

     Interestingly enough, as part of the therapy of those months, there was a group exercise one day to act out a funeral and I found myself in the position of the one who had died. There I was, laid out in the middle of a small circle of people who attempted to express their feelings on seeing me lying there “dead.” For me, it felt like that shamanic death moment.

      There you are. You can imagine that these totems provided me with an intense feeling for the path that lay ahead, of the qualities I was being called to respond to, of where the Spirit was leading me. I want to note too that each totem has a contrary that points to the dangers that may be involved in holding to each of the totems and failing to pay attention to their message. Even today, as I review them, they touch me in a very deep place.

Arms Economy

For the past 20 or more years, the Latin American Agenda has been a singificant reference for many people. It is published in Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Italian and English. For the last 5  or 6 years I have undertaken the printing and distribution of the English edition through Dunamis Publishes. Each year 50 writers provide short reflections on a major topic of global interest. In 2013, the Agenda examines the economy. I was asked to write something about arms production. Now that the Agenda is out, here is my contribution:
 

    At the current rate of production of bullets in the world today (16 billion per year), you have 33 bullets waiting for you if you are 20 years old. That may seem an exaggerated production but the arms industry doesn’t to think so. And with the production of small arms running around 1 million per year and with their longevity of 50 years, there are more than enough weapons to aim those bullets in your direction. The problem is not restricted to those countries of Africa and Asia engaged in armed conflict or Honduras with its armed repression.  Wherever you live in the world, you are a potential target for amred violence either through social conflicts, repression or crime.

    Approximately 1 ½ trillion dollars are spent each year on the production of arms of all sorts. This is sufficient money to eradicate poverty from the entire world as well as to provide decent housing, food security, safe drinking water, sewage facilities, electricity, universal education and health care to everyone in the world who lacks these essential services. There would even be enough left over to tackle global warming! Still, the production continues and for a very strong reason: profit. There is an enormous amount of money to be made from producing and selling arms. The industry embraces a wide spectrum of production that branches out into all aspects of dealing with conflict through arms. We are perhaps more easily conscious of the production of nuclear arms—which continues at a great pace and involves increasingly more countries—as well as that of conventional arms. This is the “heavy machinery” of the game of war and includes everything from tanks and artillery to all the various forms of aircraft including the newly developed drones. The industry is at the cutting edge of technology. Billions of dollars are invested every year in research to perfect existing weapons as well as to develop entirely new forms of waging war such as sophisticated sound and microwave arms that can destroy people while leaving buildings and other objects intact.

    The less well known aspect of the arms industry is that of small arms: anything a single person can carry. This includes everything from rifles, shotguns and sub-machine guns to mortar and land-to-air antiaircraft rockets. Currently there are about 24 areas of the work considered to be in armed conflict. Most of the people killed in these conflicts die because of the use of small arms and these are largely women, children, youth and the elderly.

    One of the factors that is important in the continuation of the arms industry is the “market” that is available outside formal structures. While nation states account for a large part of arms purchases, there is also a considerable sector devoted to supplying arms to those who are tagged as “freedom fighters,” “rebels,” or “terrorists.” It is also true that, while the major suppliers to these latter groups are the same as those who supply governments—there are a number of ways to circumvent the efforts to control international transfer of arms—an extensive array of informal suppliers also exists through (relatively) clandestine workshops that are able to produce high quality small arms in particular. Northern Pakistan and Colombia are, for example, producers of quality small arms through small clandestine workshops.

    The arms industry is not restricted only to the production of arms that propel explosives and to the munitions (bullets or rockets) they use. There also exists a wide array of products essential to the warmaking venture that are associated with war making and specifically designed to complement the impact of the arms themselves. We can include in this category things like carrier vessels (including everything from aircraft carriers to trailers for artillery). Also important are training tools (including aircraft simulators), targeting devices (including night-sight devices and guidance systems for rockets and well as all the (very expensive) gear combatants wear to protect themselves. And we cannot overlook the enormous intelligence systems set up to track movement, survey communications and provide information to military headquarters. The development and deployment of such systems, in the United States alone, runs into many billions of dollars every year.

    Most of the profits from these gadgets go into the pockets of a few major international arms producers in the United States, China, France, Russia and England. Some of these companies have a direct history back to the time of the Second World War. These arms producers are also linked closely to major sectors of the world economy such as transportation, energy (oil in particular), communications and finances. This interlocking of interests makes it almost impossible to separate out the military interests within current globalized economy. This is much truer today than when President Eisenhower invented the term “militaryindustrial complex” back in the 1950s

    Arms respond to no basic human need. Yet, they are, in proportion to their utility, among the most expensive items a society can produce and the largest single cause of environmental degradation in the world. Still, in the name of security, we not only continue to allow them to be produced, we and our governments buy them up in great numbers.

    For several decades now there is a constantly declining curve in the number of armed conflicts in the world. Yet, the numbers of victims in those conflicts amounts to tens of millions of men, women and children since the Second World War. The number of soldiers who are victims to armed violence in the world also shows a constant decline. Today it is women, children and the elderly who are largely the victims.

    Then there is the question of nuclear arms. With all the talk since the Second World War about disarmament, you might have the impression that nuclear arms are no longer an issue. However, we cannot forget that there are more than 22,000 armed nuclear missiles still stockpiled throughout the world. Some are in roving submarines with multiple warheads. The great powers are still in a position to destroy most of the population of the world at any moment. They are well aware that a nuclear device can be manufactured from enriched uranium and transported rather easily anywhere in the world. Yet the production of enriched uranium for nuclear energy and for armaments continues. We tend to think of a nuclear war in the framework of something like Hiroshima. However, already there are many armed conflicts in the world where arms containing depleted uranium—to harden the shells and give them more penetration—are being used. The radiation is affecting the health of soldiers and civilians alike. In this sense, the major armed conflicts in the world are all “nuclear” conflicts.

    There have been major international efforts to bring this lucrative industry under control. There are international nuclear disarmament treaties (that have to be renewed every so often and at great risk of collapsing altogether); there are treaties to control the production and sale of conventional military weapons (heavy artillery, airplanes, tanks, etc.) and right now there is a major effort to create an international small arms treaty that would establish norms for the production and international transfer of small arms (those that can be carried by one person alone). The United Nations meets every two years to review world arms trade practices and to strengthen those practices that effectively reduce the risk of arms falling into the hands of non-State forces. In practice, the international transfer of these arms is, all too often, a sophisticated dance around international restrictions with holes in them as big as barns. Many of the most effective measures for controlling the arms market are resisted by major industrialized nations under pressure from their military-industrial sector. Who are the greatest arms producers in the world, those who manufacture and export the most arms? They are precisely the permanent members of the Security Council of the United Nations who have the right of veto: The United States, France, Great Britain, China and Russia.

    Nevertheless, there are signs of movement and slow steps forward. The effort to establish international norms for production, inspection and transfer of arms, the efforts of the United Nations to provide alternatives to armed conflict through negotiation, the fragile efforts to supervise cease-fires, while inadequate, are setting precedents for new international practices. While the wheel turns very slowly, it does turn and the decreasing number of armed conflicts is one indicator.

    Any effort to come to terms with major changes in the world economic system, and its financial institutions, will have to take into account the ways in which the arms industry is central to the structures of economic activity.

    Meanwhile, those 12 billion bullets and one million small arms continue to be produced each year; 1 ½ trillion dollars continue to go into military spending and someone is shot somewhere in the world every minute. ❑

 

The Great Plague of the 21st Century

I warn you that the following is not a glowing report of hopes for the future grounded in New Year optimism. It is, in fact, rather apocalyptic.. In any case, what I say here needs to be said and even repeated.



Found at http://hoocher.com/Charles_II
_of_England/Charles_II_of_England.htm

    A strong link exists, it seems to me, between the growing inequality in the economic world (where relatively few individuals now control the majority of the world’s economy) and the obvious crisis for humanity represented by the rapidly advancing phenomenon of climate change.  At the same time, it is important to underline from the start that climate change does not represent a crisis for the planet. Earth is quite capable of dealing with the impact of the various devastations posed by human economic and military adventures. It will adapt and continue to foster life. More than that, Earth will deal with the impact of human presence as it does with any other extreme phenomenon by eliminating the cause. It is humans who are in crisis of extermination. Moreover, I am convinced that the wealthy and powerful of this world are, consciously or subconsciously, aware of this and have, for a long time now, been taking measures to deal with it in their own way.      This tiny but privileged group is aware that the current economic and political trends are suicidal and so, true to their nature as controllers and dominators, have determined to make sure that they, at least -- if no others -- will survive. They have confidence that their immense economic and political leverage will assure that, when push comes to shove and when the economic, geophysical and political structures fall into chaos, they will be able to provide a “bubble” to protect themselves. Even under the direst scientific predictions, about 10% of the population should be able to survive. They want to make sure that they are included. Theirs is a huge gamble but, as a group they are the ultimate gamblers.
     This tiny group of hugely influential individuals believe in their privileged capacity to surround themselves with the security provided by gated communities, military and paramilitary protection as well as all the infrastructures to assure that they need not worry about anything that happens to the planet. While I do not believe there is an overt conspiracy here, I do believe that their reliance on the power to control leads them inevitably toward a logic that leads to a conviction that power over economic and political process is the path to ultimate security. There is also a corollary: To hell with the rest of the world!  What is worse, I also think there is a chance that may be right.
     There is still another layer to this: Much of the world, especially the Western world, believes this also and, even though they are excluded from the securities provided to the rich and powerful, they are convinced that, given the right circumstances, they will be able to assure their place inside the bubble. Instinctively they realise that those few super-rich individuals will need people around them who sustain and support their survival. They want to be part of that bubble when it arrives. For this reason, most of the population of North America and Europe is ready to “go along with the system” and hope that the bubble will be large enough to cover them. As a result, the political and economic process continues regardless of its obvious consequences for vast regions of the world. The greatest danger to the survival of humanity lies with this internalized subjugation within the minds of the vast majority of the population. Moreover, the educational and media industries reinforce this internalized mentality day after day.
     The picture painted here is quite sombre and could easily lead to despair about the future and our ability to shape it for the good of all. We are in a time when faith and hope are faced with a darkness unlike anything society has known in past centuries -- except perhaps in Europe during the time of the Great Plague.
    In fact the experience of the Great Plague in Europe is worth exploring. At that time people experienced a terrible devastation that took tens of millions of lives without understanding where it was coming from or why. It took decades of persistent investigation to pinpoint the source of the problem, then more decades to convince society to deal with it. In the meantime the devastation continued. What is hopeful in all this is that eventually reason prevailed and, while it was the poor who suffered the brunt of the disaster, eventually the process wore itself out and people began to organize to protect society as a whole from the menace. There is a difference however, the plague was an epidemic. Epidemics have a life, it would seem, of about twenty years. By then the immune has adapted, to a large extent, to resist the attack. Unfortunately, in our current situation, there does not appear to be any immune adaptation foreseeable.
    If the worst scenario is to be avoided, it won’t happen without considerable effort and enormous losses along the way. We have an option before us: confide in the richest and most powerful to protect us, or dislodge the destructive trend -- against all odds, with a faith and courage that is not diminished by the enormity of the odds.