On Monday morning I felt anxiety about coming to Indigenous Studies
class followed by tutorial and was down about also having to work that night
and only having a short window to rush home afterwards to eat lunch and then to
ride back downtown. I was depressed about all that until song practice but
singing always makes me feel better.
I finished translating "On n'est pas là pour se faire
engueuler" (We Didn’t Come Here to be Shouted At) by Boris Vian and tried
to sing along once with the recording,
I finished working out the chords for “L’amour prison” by Serge
Gainsbourg and started posting the song on my Christian’s Translations blog.
I did some more reading of the
executive report on the Indian Day Schools class action suit. I noticed that
this more than 500 word pdf is only volume 2 of six.
The anxiety came back on the way to class with a little bit of tension
in my chest because I really hate this course. But it wasn't a cold ride and
the streets were clear. It was like a different world compared to the Monday
before.
I finished the chapter of Ways of Knowing on Self Government and started the one on Indigenous economic
development.
White is still trying to record his lectures although I didn't see any
audio posted of the last one.
He said that our reflection paper and media presentation might be
combined.
We began talking about the common response to Indigenous people that
they should “get over it”. Why get over it? It's about how much money it costs
to not get over it but one can't get over what is still happening.
Thomas King says that reservations are becoming corporations.
The counter-punch to “get over it” is economic. If they want Indigenous
people to get over it then they should pay them what they are owed.
There is a lot to complain about but the complaints are not being
heard. .
Most Indigenous communities are at or below the poverty line.
Some Natives are using basketball and military service as ways to rise
out of poverty.
He said the speech that he read last week is just as applicable now.
The idea of sovereignty is based on western colonial culture.
What is self-determination? Self-determination has roots in political
law. The charter of the United Nations states that people, based on respect for
the principle equal rights and fair equality of opportunity, have the right to
freely choose their sovereignty and international political status without
interference.
Some say that Nixon was one of the more pro-Indigenous presidents. He
returned Blue Lake to the Taos Pueblo in 1970. He signed the Indian
Self-Determination and Self-Organization Act in 1975, which returned power to
the tribes. He was more progressive in that area than Obama but Obama adopted
the UN Manifesto on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. .
John Quincy Adams tried and failed to help out the Creek Indians but he
was outspokenly sympathetic about Indigenous issues his whole life.
Calvin Coolidge made every Indigenous person a US citizen in 1924 but
then desecrated Mount Rushmore.
The first Canadian prime minister to do anything good for Indigenous
people was
John
Diefenbaker, who granted them the vote.
Pierre Trudeau was adopted as an honorary Haida.
Paul Martin endorsed the
Kelowna Accord, which aimed to eliminate the gaps between Aboriginal and
non-Aboriginal Canadians in health, education, housing and economic
opportunity. But Stephen Harper did not endorse it.
Harper issued the apology for Residential Schools.
He says that when the Haudenosaunee lacrosse team used their created
passport it was an act of sovereignty. Here he goes again, Haudenosaunee blah
blah blah. But there is a difference between nations and countries. Haudenosaunee
are a nation like Quebec is a nation. There are no Quebec passports. I don't
think there is a Scottish passport either.
We should acknowledge the privileges and benefits that we have as a
result of the actions of our ancestors.
Reconciliation should not be easy.
Have attitudes changed?
Indigenous people make up 5% of the Canadian population but 40% of the
prison population.
There is an underlying assumption that Indigenous communities are not
capable.
Most people think of Indigenous people as being one group.
In every nation there is a bear, a turtle and a wolf clan. One is not
allowed to date someone from the same clan even if from an entirely different
nation. That seems fucked up, since they aren't even related. The connections
between the same clans of different nations are similar to that between
fraternities and sororities of different universities.
King says land could still be taken away from Indigenous people.
Vancouver is on Native land and rented out to settlers. In 2014
Vancouver City Council unanimously acknowledged that Vancouver is on unceded
land belonging to the Musqueam, the Squamish and the Tsleil-Waututh First
Nations and declared itself a city of reconciliation. They want the government
to pay rent and the Squamish are planning to build eleven towers with 3000
mostly rental units at the western foot of the Burrard Street Bridge.
Indigenous people have a sovereign right to operate casinos but should
they?
There is a myth that Indigenous people go to college for free. Status Indians
can apply for funding but not everyone is approved. They have to re-apply every
year and can lose funding if they miss too many classes and then might have to
wait two years to re-apply.
As long as there is one to sing, one to dance, one to tell stories and
one to listen, culture will continue.
I wonder if some traditions, like hereditary chiefs, are merely held
onto as a type of psychological resistance. Just because an Indigenous person
thinks that an electoral system might be better it doesn’t necessarily mean
that the idea is coming from a colonized mind. It might have arisen from
independent thought. It's possible that if contact had never occurred that some
nations might have electoral systems of government now.
The government doesn’t compensate reserves if they have to buy bottled
water.
The Navajo signed over their coal rights to Peabody that had promised
they would keep the water clean. Now the water in a desert area is
contaminated.
He talked about the Alaska land deal. The Indigenous people got $963
million but they still need food flown in.
He said a greasy spoon breakfast in Toronto is $7 but in anchorage it’s
$25 because the potatoes, eggs and flour are all flown in.
He asked how much it costs for a bottle of water at Disneyworld and a
student answered $5.75.
He says the formation of Nunavut reduced the community to a corporation
and the people became shareholders. But reserves turned to corporations are
sometimes successful. Corporations need self-sufficiency. Nunavut has surface and
some sub-surface rights.
We live beyond our means.
Jefferson said the best way to get land is for Indigenous people to be
in debt.
In the 1700s one could live as one wanted on a reserve but by 1800 it
became confining.
The corporate model is completely anti-Indigenous. I doubt if that’s
true. The large southern Indigenous empires had merchants. The Aztecs sometimes
used a type of currency. There is no reason to think that if they hadn’t been
crushed by Spain they might have developed into corporations.
In the Australian fires maybe a billion animals died.
Western history is linear.
Indigenous women are three or four times more prone to being victims of
violence.
The Steven Kummerfield jury was instructed to take the victim Pamela
George's profession as a sex trade worker into account.
Evo Morales was the first elected Indigenous president. Some critics
say that Morales has some European ancestry. Former president Enrique Penaranda
had a significant degree of Indigenous lineage.
In the case of Ex parte vs. Crow Dog in 1877 a drunken man killed
someone but tribe worked it out. The District attorney of South Dakota said it
wasn’t enough. It was ruled that the state court had no jurisdiction over the
reserve.
Many outlaws used Indian Territory for their hideouts because no local
or state law existed there.
Someone said that Canada had been a penal colony but the British only
sent two shiploads of convicts to Newfoundland. They didn’t find it to be a
successful endeavour. The first settlers from France were a convict colony on
Sable Island in 1598. France sent prisoners mostly to Louisiana.
Aboriginal justice was the death penalty, a fine or enslavement to the
victim’s family. Among the Huron the victim of a thief might be allowed to go
to the thief’s family home and take whatever they wanted. This compelled
families to enforce good behaviour among their kin. Treason or refusal to
compensate victims might result in the death penalty. Killing someone of another family could result in a blood
feud and such feuds were considered worse than murder. Revenge was discouraged
and the resolution was usually arrived at in a circle in which the victim and
perpetrator were a part. They each had to face one another and discuss how to
make things right without mentioning the actual crime.
In Aztec society anything more than petty theft of the possessions of
one’s peers was treated more severely. If one of one’s family couldn’t pay back
what was taken the punishment was either death or enslavement.
The original mission of the North West Mounted Police was to protect
Indians.
He said the tomahawk chop is living proof that Indigenous people are
seen as less than human.
Marc Miller, a non-Indigenous politician member of parliament who
speaks Mohawk better than some Mohawks. Last year he made a speech in Mohawk in
parliament. After the election brought the Liberals back into power Trudeau
made Miller the Minister of Indigenous Services.
I headed to tutorial. My bike was locked on top of the same but much
more shrunken snow bank as last week. I rode down to 300 Huron, locked my bike,
went inside, down to the basement and through the double doors. On the other
side, just as room 75 was in sight I remembered the email that we’d gotten from
Safia last week telling us that the tutorial location had changed. Nicole and
another young Indigenous woman were just coming down the stairs and I told
them. Nicole didn’t think she’d gotten an email about any change but then she
checked her phone and found it. Another Native student came down the stairs and
Nicole informed her as well. The started walking over to the Centre for
Indigenous Studies and I took my bike. They got there almost as fast as I did I
guess because they knew a shortcut.
Tutorial was in the lounge on the second floor and the comfortable
chairs were all in a circle facing one another. Safia said that’s the way
seating is usually arranged in Indigenous classes.
Somebody asked if it was really true that the North West Mounted
Police’s original mandate was the protection of Indigenous people. I reminded
her that at the time the NWMP were formed Indigenous people were extremely
important to the Crown economically.
I could smell the sage smoke left over from a smudge in the air. It’s a
strong smell that borders between pleasant and unpleasant for me.
Safia said that Canadian mining companies are some of the world’s worst
human rights violators. De Beers Diamonds bought crappy mobile homes for the
Inuit people in the community where they mine for diamonds.
She mentioned the pass system again and said they had it in Kenya too.
She brought up the Pamela George murder trial of 1995. The killers got
off with a light sentence because the judge brought up the fact that Pamela’s
community was a violent place.
Safia said that Indigenous communities before contact had no theft
because there was sharing. That’s probably true for small items and things like
food and clothing but I think she’s oversimplifying again.
Indigenous justice is restorative justice whereas the European system
is retributive. Indigenous society is non-hierarchical and there is dialogue
and negotiation. She said there was no written law. That may be true in Canada
but the major laws of the Aztec were laid out in pictographs. They were just
beginning to codify their laws when the Spanish destroyed the manuscripts.
She said there were no lawyers. There were Aztec judges elected by
communities to hear small criminal and civil cases. There were three levels of
courts. Only the neighbourhood courts had elected judges. The highest court had
a judge appointed by the emperor and that top judge appointed the judges for
the middle level courts.
She said there were no politicians. But there were elected leaders at
the various community levels. Even the royal family apparently elected the emperor
from within the family and leadership of the empire didn’t automatically go to
the oldest son.
The percentage of female Indigenous inmates is increasing.
Nicole talked about the Gladue Principle in which some judges are asked
to consider aboriginal background before sentencing.
Restorative justice can only work with self-government.
Self-determination for a community means making its own laws.
In Christianity one is born in sin while in Indigenous spirituality one
is born oneself.
Nicole gave the example of someone finding their snowmobile gone and
concluding that someone else must have needed it. I wonder how many people
really think that way.
I asked about the outline for our essay. We are supposed to present a
150-word proposal but also an outline. There is nothing to indicate how long
the outline should be. Safia asked White as he was walking by. Without looking
at me he just said that the outline is standard going back to high school. I
didn’t finish high school but I don’t recall outlines when I was in Grade 10 a
hundred years ago. University English and Philosophy papers don’t have outlines
and so he's basically saying that Indigenous Studies is a high school course.
That's been my impression also from the way the teachers behave.
I rode home and had an hour and fifteen minutes before I had to leave
again. I had lunch and then I went to bed and slept for twenty minutes.
I worked that night for Nick Aoki in the Design Department at OCADU. It
was just a basic sitting pose for the whole night and he took a few minutes a
couple of times to show a video and some slides. During my breaks I worked on
typing my lecture notes.
Before leaving for work I’d partially boiled a potato and so when I got
home I boiled it a little longer, heated two drumsticks and some gravy and had
a late dinner while watching Zorro.
In this story Diego discovers that Zorro’s horse Tornado is missing. He
had first found Tornado wild in the hills and he guessed that perhaps Tornado
is homesick and has decided to go back for a visit. But while Diego is looking
for Tornado his Uncle Esteban finds and captures him. Tornado let Esteban ride
him and showed himself to be the fastest horse he’d ever ridden. There is an
upcoming charity horse race and Esteban begins to take bets that his new horse
will win. He shows the horse to Sgt Garcia and Cpl Reyes and they tell him that
he has Zorro’s horse. Esteban, with the help of Garcia and Reyes, plots that
after he wins the race he will let the horse go and follow it back to Zorro in
order to collect the reward for his capture. But when Esteban brags to Diego
that his black horse is the fastest he's ever seen, Diego realizes that his
uncle has Tornado. Zorro follows Esteban to an old winery where he has been
stabling Tornado. Zorro manages to sneak in under their noses and escape with Tornado.
They don’t explain how Tornado was taken care of while Diego and Bernardo
were in Monterrey for a few weeks. They also don’t explain what happened to the
white horse, Phantom that Zorro had adopted in Monterrey.
