The Antisocial Socialist

I am so backlogged with these.

Today's highlighted episode is from canadaLANDBACK, and it's called "Canada Is Hoarding the Land." It features artists Christi Belcourt and Isaac Murdoch, co-founders of the Onaman Collective, talking about their work establishing the Nimkii Aazhibikong culture camp and the history of land theft and the future of what is actually possible in terms of land back.

First of all it's possible that some of my international/non-art-obsessed readers don't know who Christi Belcourt is so go Google her if you don't. Even if you don't listen to the podcast you'll thank me later.

Second of all it's an interesting fact that I heard only recently that 80% of all land in Canada is quote-unquote "Crown Land." Which means like. Canada could just return it tomorrow to Indigenous stewardship and it would not actually affect settlers. Yes, the goal is complete transformation of so-called Canada but this is some low-hanging fruit that doesn't get mentioned nearly enough in discussions of how Land Back could actually happen.

Anyway, it is a really interesting, pragmatic discussion of history and justice, very accessible, and featuring some cool people whomst I admire a great deal. So go check it out!

If you're anywhere near Toronto before March, you owe it to yourself to check out Kent Monkman's Being Legendary show at the ROM.  Monkman is hands-down one of my favourite contemporary artists—he creates some of the most technically spectacular, politically charged, and scathingly witty art I have seen. This is a show of entirely new pieces, combined with critical curation of some of the pieces in the ROM's collection. It's not just amazing paintings—though it would be worth it for the paintings alone—but an interrogation of the concept of museums and museum curation and its long history of colonialism and theft.

Also, I had no idea that Monkman's paintings were acrylic. I'd assumed he was working in oils from the luminous finish of his work. But no. He's just staggeringly talented.

Anyway. It's quite incredible.

Allow me to hold forth on some unstructured thinky-thoughts that have been brewing in my head and came to an absolute boil when I checked Twitter this morning.

The Durham District School Board is currently engaged in a US-style school book banning, and one of the books that it pulled from its shelves is The Great Bear by Cree author David A. Robertson. I haven't read it as it targets a younger age group than I teach, but I have several of Robertson's other works and attended his talks and I can not possibly overemphasize how significant he is as an author and educator. His work speaks to young people, Indigenous and settler, in an accessible, direct, and authentic way. His work is particularly important for young people who struggle with reading. He's an absolute gift to English teachers.

Their rationale for censoring this book (sorry, conducting a fulsome review) is as follows:

An email, obtained by the Star, that was sent by the board to school principals says the books “do not align with the recently updated DDSB Indigenous Education policy and procedure.”

 

Ooookay then. Robertson thinks it's because the main character gets bullied and cuts off his braid. Which is an experience that many Indigenous youth have had. Then he regrows his hair as he gains self-confidence and connects with his culture.

In other words, the bean-counters don't like that a book by an Indigenous author might expose children to a specific trauma experienced by Indigenous children on a regular basis. Won't someone think of the children?


If you know me, you know that I'm quite far from being a free-speech absolutist. But I lean more in that direction when it comes to literature, because in general it's better to be able to have these works accessible and critiqued than to remove them from the discourse. And I am very skeptical when social justice language is severed from its meaning, which is to strive for a better, more just world. I am skeptical that school boards are in any way qualified to determine which texts can be taught in service of achieving that better, more just world. If you are so twisted up in your own rhetoric that you silence marginalized voices in your quest for safety, you are on the wrong side of history.

P.S. I am banning the word "fulsome," though. Along with "kind."

 If you want to understand why this country is so fucked up, just look at the news and compare the following stories.

1. The FluTruxKlan, a convoy of extremist truckers representing under 10% of the industry and endorsed by high-profile sociopaths like Elon Musk, are taking their plague trucks to Ottawa.

2. The Williams Lake First Nation has discovered at least 93 unmarked graves of children, murdered by the Canadian state and their church allies.

Guess which one has been the top story all week?

If you're a settler on the land currently called Canada and you have never done so, I urge you to read the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's 94 calls to action:

Here they are.

Reconciliation Is a Verb. Further reading, including the voices of survivors, courtesy of the Raven Trust.

 I'm never, as you might have guessed, big on Canada Day, or any performative act of patriotism. This year, I'll be spending it at a march to commemorate the children who died at residential schools and to honour the survivors of those schools.

Yesterday, the ʔaq̓am community of the Ktunaxa Nation found another 182 unmarked graves using ground-penetrating radar. As far as I know, it's the impoverished Indigenous communities themselves that are paying for these investigations—both the wealthy Canadian state and the wealthy churches that ran these death camps would be happy to let those kids lie buried and be forgotten altogether.

Anyway. Land Back. Decolonize. Tax the churches and make them pay. Put the surviving culprits on trial for their crimes against humanity. Bring the kids home. Truth first, then we can talk about reconciliation.

I had promised to chronicle the death of every education worker in Ontario who died because of the deliberate political decision by our government to keep schools open during a pandemic.

Vic Thunderchild was in Saskatchewan, not Ontario, but I'd be remiss in not mentioning him. He died yesterday after a two week battle with covid, which he likely contracted at school.

Saskatchewan, like Ontario, is led by a far-right government that benefits from prolonging the pandemic as much as it can. Its Premier Scott Moe killed a woman while driving drunk. He has also been hostile to Indigenous sovereignty, pro-suicide for Indigenous youth, and in favour of ending all human life on earth by maximizing climate change.

I mention this because of the stark contrast between the lives of Vic Thunderchild and the scumbag directly responsible for his death. Vic was a beloved educator and a role model for Indigenous youth. He taught at the same school for 29 years, promoted Indigenous culture and teachings in the curriculum, and led the initiative to develop Cree language education in Saskatchewan schools. From everything I hear, he was a fantastic human being.

He died as a result of reckless disregard for the lives of workers, and particularly for the lives of Indigenous, Black, and other racialized workers.

His last tweet:

Thank you @PremierScottMoe for not thinking we’re essential workers, as I sit in the @PAHealthDept Vic hospital recovering from Covid-19. Get my fellow teachers vaccinated, before this happens to anyone else.

— vic65tc (@VicThunderchild) April 5, 2021

Don't forget, don't look away, and always remember that this was a choice.

 Not as sick as I am of him, though. 

Apparently despite this province very clearly not being the UK or we would have Gregg's vegan sausage rolls and it would be easier for me to "accidentally" wander onto the Doctor Who set, Ford quietly—with the agreement of the Liberals and Greens—instituted a mandate to have the Ontario Legislature sing “God Save the Queen” (not the Sex Pistols one, the other one) on the first Monday of each month that the government is sitting.

(Fortunately, the government doesn't sit very often, as they took seven months of vacation last year.)

Three Indigenous MPPs (all NDP, with the support of their caucus), refuse, and here is why if it's not obvious.

It's bad enough that anyone sings the Canadian national anthem when Canada is reneging on its reconciliation promises and obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples but this is ridiculous. He's tossing money to American firms to murder poor people, instituting educational cuts modelled on failed American models. Now he thinks he's BoJo, which in fairness it's easy to confuse them, but this is taking things a little too far.

It's important to remember that when Indigenous activists (or my F6 ass doing my best to amplify their voices) say that things are bad, they're really bad, they've always been bad, no, worse than that—they are not exaggerating.

Case in point: The RCMP—yes, those quaint friendly Mounties that the Americans find adorable for whatever reason—just said the quiet part out loud. The Guardian broke the story and now it's spreading.

From the article:

Notes from a strategy session for a militarized raid on ancestral lands of the Wet’suwet’en nation show that commanders of Canada’s national police force, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), argued that “lethal overwatch is req’d” – a term for deploying snipers.

The RCMP commanders also instructed officers to “use as much violence toward the gate as you want” ahead of the operation to remove a roadblock which had been erected by Wet’suwet’en people to control access to their territories and stop construction of the proposed 670km (416-mile) Coastal GasLink pipeline (CGL).

In a separate document, an RCMP officer states that arrests would be necessary for “sterilizing the site”.

 

Another important thing to remember is that most of what Canada calls British Columbia is unceded territory, meaning the Indigenous people there never gave up possession of the land to European settlers. The government decided to build a pipeline through their land anyway. The land defenders were not using violence but even if they were, it would have been completely morally justifiable in the same way that if someone tries to break into your house in the middle of the night, you basically have the right to defend yourself and your property. Except in this case they're not just defending their community but the entire world, where we descendants of European settlers also—surprise!—have to live. But the RCMP acknowledged that while they did have firearms for hunting, there was zero indication that they intended to use them against the people violently invading their territory in violation of UN conventions.

And the RCMP planned to shoot them anyway. Including Elders and kids. Or at least shoot the adults and kidnap the kids.

This is under the shiny Liberal government of Prince Justin of the Nice Hair, by the way, who promised a nation-to-nation relationship (unless he really wanted to build a pipeline, like, really badly).

The fact that I'm not in any way surprised about this in no way lessens my utter disgust and contempt for the rotting and fetid colonialist project called Canada.

Quebec gonna Quebec, and the new CAQ government is wasting no time in reminding me of why my family got the fuck out of there. They passed two new bills, Bill 9 and Bill 21, both of which could just be called "Fuck the Muslims" because that's the intent. Bill 21 bans religious symbols (but we're really talking about hijabs, and turbans because Sikhs are always swept up in Islamophobic nets) for public service workers and officials. That's teachers, cops, lawyers, judges, you name it. Anyone in the public sector can't wear a religious symbol. Unless it's a cross. Because as much as CAQ keeps making noise about removing the giant-ass crucifix hanging in the National Assembly, we know that Quebec "secularists" are really just Christians who want to sleep in on Sundays. Of course it's already being challenged because it's blatantly unconstitutional, but we're all just tossing around the Notwithstanding Clause like it's nothing these days.

Bill 9 tosses out 16,000 skilled immigrant applications and lays the groundwork for a "values test" to become a permanent resident. Which amounts to a Muslim ban, of course. That, they need federal permission to do, which isn't likely to happen even once the fascists take power in the fall. But they can still be dicks about the rest.

Not all Quebecois, of course. There's pretty strong opposition in Montreal. But this is some fashy-fash bullshit that they're getting away with for reasons.

Lest you think anything's better on the federal level, the Liberals proclaimed a climate emergency. Which, obviously, it is, so of course today they rammed through the Trans Mountain Pipeline, over the objection of Indigenous communities that are in the path of the inevitable oil spills. (Note: They could reroute it but nope. Right through Indigenous land and water supplies is always the bestest place to build a pipeline according to government engineers.) Did they do meaningful consultations? Nope, they'll do that later, you know, like after the thing is built. 

If you're wondering how they can get away with that after weeping so many tears about the injustices done to Indigenous peoples over the course of Canada's bloody history—not to mention the fact that carbon emissions are turning our entire planet into a smoking hellscape, and Canada is really central to that destruction—just check out this lovely poll which suggests that Canadians are worried about the fact that we only have a few years to fix this fuckery, but not so worried that they're willing to pay a bit more in tax or make lifestyle changes or anything like that.

It's very hard to maintain a positive attitude, y'know?