Honorary Haida

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.