Necar Zadegan

            On Monday morning I posted my translation of “Rock Around the Bunker” by Serge Gainsbourg and I sang along once with “SS in Uruguay”, the last song on Gainsbourg’s 1975 “Rock Around the Bunker” album.

            The workers renovating the downstairs for Popeye’s have started using something that’s sending fumes rising up through my floor. It was making me dizzy. When I left for class I noticed that the door was open downstairs. I saw the man in charge nearby and complained about the fumes. He told me that they are only working with dry materials there and there's no "smelly stuff". I couldn't smell any fumes inside the future Popeyes and so I wondered where the odour was coming from. Maybe they had been gluing something in the Japanese restaurant next door and the fumes had risen and crossed through the walls.

            I was overdressed for my ride to class. At the first stop light on Brock I took off my winter gloves and put them in my backpack. At another on College I unwound my longest scarf and stuffed it into the front pocket of my hoody. But as I rode along I didn’t notice the scarf was snaking out of my pocket until it got caught in my chain. I had to stop and pull it out but then I had to reset my chain and on the first few tries it didn’t work until I hooked it onto the big sprocket wheel and it found its proper place on the one below.

            There are three weeks left in the course.

            Our exam is on April 13 from 9-12.

            We will be given a list of all of the exam questions but they will be hidden in a longer list. So to be sure we know the exam questions we have to study all of them.

            The short answers will require two sentences but there will also be short essays.

            He uploaded the TRC and RCAP reports and we can skim them rather than read hundreds of pages.

            He began his lecture with more US stuff.

            The United States equivalent to RCAP was the 1928 Meriam Report but Meriam was a one shot deal buried afterwards whereas RCAP went on for years and was only wrapped up in 97.

            TRC was done in 2015.

            He says Meriam was honest in its finding of poverty, famine and disease.

            Boarding schools were criminal child abuse.

            RCAP is very broad whereas TRC is specifically about residential schools.

            Navajo communities still have their own residential schools because the territory is so big that it’s not practical to send the kids home every day.

            Boarding schools were thought of as charitable. Kill the Indian, save the man.

            How many pages in RCAP? 4000.

            The reports are paternalistic. Most say that RCAP moves away from previous paternalism.

            Indigenous people were wards of the state and therefore childlike.

            White named a US official that hated Indians. He asked us to name a Canadian equivalent. Someone said Duncan Campbell Scott, who is one of Canada's historically renowned poets but was also a top official at Indian Affairs from 1913 to 1932 and was a powerful advocate for assimilation.

            White claims that people were paternalistic about the pipelines. He doesn't seem to think that Wet'suwet'en people are capable of independent thought.

            He asked for the average Indigenous unemployment rate in Canada and claimed the stats are now the same as they were years ago or higher. It’s currently 19.1%. It rose from 10.4% in 2008 to 13.9% in 2011. The rate for non-Indigenous people rose from 6% to 8.1% in that time period.

            Power lines run through Indigenous land. 

            He said there is a stereotype of Indigenous people being violent but later he admitted that Mohawks are violent and also related how he almost punched a friend for calling him "chief" even though he might not have meant it in that way.

            Missionaries are still active in Indigenous communities.

            There is the idea that Indigenous people are not fully human.

            RCAP begins with the phrase, “Looking Forward, Looking Back”. He thinks it implies, "Let's get over it." I think it's saying the future vision is more important but it depends on the understanding of the past.

            It begins with a thanksgiving address.

            He speaks about this stuff being hard to listen to.

            Canada has always presented itself as a human rights advocate, but then Oka. I’m not sure what the human rights abuses at Oka were. I doubt if the land grab itself was a human rights abuse. Maybe food and medicine was blockaded. Someone has said that over 2000 human rights violations were documented by Quebec Human Rights and the International Human Rights Organization but I can't find either organization. Canada rates number three in the top countries for human rights.

            He speaks of the Mohawk blockades as Mohawks fulfilling their mission as guardians of the east.

            The Quebec premier François Legault said the Mohawks at the blockades had AK-47s. He might have meant there are some in the community.

            Can we forget the past? The past is painful.

            All non-Indigenous people benefit from what was taken whether they took it themselves or not.

            He urges us to wash our hands and to not touch our faces. I deliberately touched my face several times during the lecture.

            Other than Oka was Iperwash. He says he doesn’t know much about it, proving once again he should not have been hired by U of T to teach Indigenous Studies. Iperwash was in 1995. The military were using land on the Stony Point First Nation. Protesters occupied it. Several protesters entered and occupied Iperwash Provincial Park. Dudley George was killed. Some protesters advanced on the soldiers and a sergeant fired because he thought Dudley George had a weapon. The soldier was charged with negligence.

            Loaders dumped rocks on Indigenous protesters. I can't find any confirmation of that.

            TRC was meant to lead to reconciliation with residential school students. White says it was a bit of a feel good movement.

            Traditional healing practices existing parallel to modern methods. One student says there is a sweat lodge at Toronto East General.

            How many students at U of T. The St George campus has 70,000. His school back in Hooterville had 10,000.

            He was snacking on what looked like puffed cheese snacks during lecture. He's mentioned that he's diabetic so maybe his blood sugar was low.

            One of the students behind me was knitting a sock during lecture. She mentioned earlier to the other student behind me that she’d finished one of them and was so excited she wore it even though the other one wasn’t finished.

            The Iroquois were dragged into the American Revolution. They saw it as a civil war and couldn’t see why the English were fighting each other. Most eventually decided that the British would win and they would have a better chance of keeping their land if they helped them.

            Of residential schools, Pratt might have come north and gotten ideas from Canada.

            He asked us to respond to the statement that reconciliation is dead. I said it’s stupid to say reconciliation is dead since there are hundreds of issues to reconcile with hundreds of nations. To say one situation is the death knell of reconciliation is just dumb. He responded that he wouldn’t say it was “dumb”.

            Then he returned to his favourite topic of food. He said that if you want to set New York state residents against one another just get them into an argument over whether it’s called “pop” or “soda". Then he talked about arguments people have over hoagies, subs and submarines. The woman knitting said she had never known that “subs" referred to submarine sandwiches. She'd always thought they were called subs because they were shaped like subway trains. Then he talked about the garbage plate, which is a featured dish at Nick Tahou Hots in his hometown of Hooterville. It consists of garbage food with a base of fries, macaroni and beans with hot dogs and cheese on top. He said it’s delicious if you’ve been drinking.

            He sure does like to talk about food.

            He said he has yet to try poutine. He said they do an imitation of poutine in Hooterville but they deep fry the cheese curd. The knitting student protested that if you do that it wouldn’t melt in the gravy.

            What does TRC want to achieve. He seemed dismissive of it as another paternalistic thing but the student behind me pointed out that TRC was led by Indigenous people.

            By contrast the Meriam report had no input from Indigenous people.

            The knitting student said the Meriam report was about the present while TRC was about the past. The student behind me corrected her that a section of TRC covered the present.

            Repealing the Doctrine of Discovery in Canada. At the beginning of European conquest the conquerors were given a decree called the papal bull, which said that Christians could take land for the sake of Christ. Even though we no longer take orders from the pope we still possess the land we gained under the doctrine of discovery. Ruth Bader Ginsburg invoked the doctrine of discovery to rule against the Oneida in 2005.

            More stuff about the US.

            Helen Hunt Jackson wrote A Century of Dishonour in 1881. It protested the treatment of Indigenous people.

            Felix Cohen wrote The Handbook of Federal Indian Law in 1941. The book showed how all the treaties were part of a consistent government agenda. He was fired.

            White thinks the Wet’suwet’en community will not benefit from the pipeline. There are already $ millions in the bank for the bands that signed on and more to come, plus that will be doubled by the Indigenous businesses that would benefit. Then there is also the job training that would result.

            TRC and UNDRIP are important for the test.

            At tutorial there were seven students. Four of them did media presentations.

            Someone mentioned that a Canadian died from the coronavirus.

            The first presenter was Kaia and she talked about Devon Freeman’s suicide. His body was found hanging seven months after he was reported missing. She said that APTN covered it in more depth than the mainstream media.

            Safia mentioned that they are changing the name of Equity Studies to a much longer name. They changed the name of our course from Aboriginal Studies a couple of years ago.

            Another student presented on Indigenous Funding and how it was covered in the news by CBC versus APTN.

            Another talked about the overrepresentation of Indigenous people in prison and the media comparison was between Global and APTN.

            Another talked about the BMO incident in which the 70-year-old man and his 11-year-old granddaughter were arrested when he tried to open a bank account for her. The CBC left out the fact that the grandfather had made an appointment. She said that the comment sections were for a change sympathetic on Twitter. Safia asked us why we think that everyone sympathized. I said that this is a situation where no one could claim that Natives brought it on themselves. She asked if it was because it was a grandfather and a child. I said that makes it more powerful.

            I went to Robarts after tutorial. I went to one of the computers to search for a book but I realized that I hadn’t memorized my new UTOR id. My former one had only been six figures long and so I knew it for years but now I have to refer to where I’ve written it down at home. My computer has it memorized. I had to go to the Ask Me desk on the second floor where a librarian told me where to find the book. I went to the tenth floor and walked around for about five minutes until I found the right letter and numbers. I found The Federal Indian Day Schools of the Maritimes, which was what I was looking for, but nearby was Indian School Road about the Shebanacadie residential school in Nova Scotia, so I decided to grab that too.

            On the way home I stopped at Freshco where I bought five bags of grapes, two pints of strawberries, two jugs of orange juice, broccoli, green onions and two cans of peaches.

            I had a bowl of spicy, greasy soybean soup for lunch.

            I felt like going to sleep but I resisted the urge because it was too late in the day to take a short siesta.

            I worked on typing my lecture notes.

            For dinner I had the last of the soup with some steamed broccoli and a green onion added. I watched episode five of Star Trek Picard.

            Spoiler alert!

            As usual this story begins with a flashback to thirteen years before. Seven of Nine is part of a group of vigilante rangers trying to bring justice to the Delta Quadrant. She tries to stop black-marketeer Bjayzl from steeling the Borg implants from Ichab, who had been one of the Borg children rescued by Voyager. She had served as a surrogate mother for Ichab and the others. She arrives too late to prevent the extractions and she has to kill Ichab out of mercy. Bjayzl escapes.

            The La Sirena arrives in orbit around Freecloud, which is a kind of futuristic Las Vegas with more of the vice than the shows. They learn that Bruce Maddox is being held for ransom by Bjayzl and her cronies. Seven of Nine offers herself as bait because she knows that her Borg implants are far more valuable to Bjayzl than Maddox. The plan is for Picard and Cristobal to come disguised as black market traders offering Seven of Nine in exchange for Maddox. One is expected to dress and behave in a tackily flamboyant manner on Freecloud. Cristobal is dressed as a pimp and Picard is all in black with a beret, an eye patch and a horrible French accent. Seven of Nine is wearing fake handcuffs and she has not told Picard that her real plan is to kill Bjayzl in revenge for the death of Ichab. She has her hand on Bjayzl’s throat but Picard convinces her to let her go so they can beam up to La Sirena with Maddox.

            Maddox has been tortured and so he is taken to sickbay. He tells Picard that he created Dahj and Soji and sent them to Earth and the Borg Cube to uncover the conspiracy against synthetic humans. Picard leaves Maddox alone with Doctor Jurati, who it turns out is Maddox’s lover, But she has learned information about Soji that makes it necessary in her mind to kill Maddox.

            Seven of Nine takes her leave of Picard, borrowing two phasers from the ship’s arsenal. She says she is going back to join the rangers but instead she returns to Freecloud and kills Bjayzl.

            This episode was directed by Jonathan Frakes, who played Riker on Star Trek the Next Generation.

            Bjayzl was played by Necar Zadegan, who has an honours degree in English Literature from the University of California. She played Dalia Hassan on 24.