Sam George

[sabotabby]

I would be amiss in my blogging duties if I didn't take a few minutes to mention the passing of Sam George today. He was the older brother of Dudley George, the Ojibwa man murdered by the OPP under the orders of then-Premier Mike Harris for having the audacity to defend his people's land.

As you know, indigenous people in Canada are not afforded the same rights and privileges as settlers. The historical genocide perpetrated against them, the rapes and murders and disappearances, continues to this day in the denial of land claims, the incarcerations, the, well, rapes and murders and disappearances. They are, quite simply, non-persons in the eyes of white Canadians. I mean, you wouldn't see anyone standing for destroying a settler graveyard to build a golf course, but no one thinks anything of it when indigenous lands are expropriated for that sort of thing. And in most cases, a cop can still kill a First Nations person and get away with it.

Well, in the case of Dudley, the murderers got away with more than they'd get away with had it been a white man they'd gunned down in cold blood. But they would have gotten away even cleaner had it not been for Sam George, who stood up and insisted that his brother was a human being, deserving of all of the respect that other human beings take for granted, that the people responsible, no matter how powerful, had to be brought to justice. There would have been no Ipperwash Inquiry without Sam's activism.

He sought truth in the face of monstrous injustice. We all ought to aspire to so much.

R.I.P.

Comments

[lienne.livejournal.com]

After repeated unanswered appeals from the protestors for the police to call an ambulance, George was finally loaded into his sister's car and driven to hospital. They were arrested and delayed for over an hour en route to the hospital.

...Goodbye, my faith in humanity. It was nice knowing you.

[sabotabby]

It's nice not having very much to begin with.

[lienne.livejournal.com]

Mine will be back by tomorrow. I am incorrigibly naive.

[jamie-miller.livejournal.com]

Is there a Canadian book equivalent to Zinn's "A People's History of the United States"?

[sabotabby]

Not really. There are some books that cover certain historical periods in a critical manner. And there's "A People's History of Canada," which is not the same thing at all.

[erinlin.livejournal.com]

I want to know: what can I, a somewhat clueless white chick from suburbia, do about this stuff? Other then building a time machine, going back and smacking people? Because right now I'm just alternating between hyperventilating and yelling "Stop the country I want to get off!"

[bcholmes.livejournal.com]

I don't think there's an "easy win" answer, but one answer is talk about these kinds of issues. I think that our governments get away with these things because people just don't really bother to pay attention. Raising awareness doesn't have that immediate "we did it!" feel to it, but I think it matters.

So: have conversations with friends, blog about the issues, mention them in passing to co-workers, that sort of thing.

(And if you're looking for a good resource on the topic, Peter Edwards' book, One Dead Indian is a good resource. (It was also made into a made-for-TV movie)

[bcholmes.livejournal.com]

Thanks for posting this; I had missed it.

I used to spend a lot of time tracking the Dudley George case (I wrote most of the original Wikipedia entry about him), but I missed this.

[bcholmes.livejournal.com]

Also: can I link?

[sabotabby]

Of course!

[outcastspice.livejournal.com]

thanks for posting this. i remember when it happened, my boyfriend at the time's father was one of the lawyers on the First Nations side (or maybe the only lawyer? i'm not sure, and i could'nt find it online).

[ginny-t.livejournal.com]

Hell, there's an active bill right now to protect unused cemeteries from that very thing. But y'know, I don't remember any First Nations burial grounds being mentioned in the debate.

On the other hand, there was a nice tribute to Sam George yesterday.