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.