Illustration by Hanna Barczyk
There are serious and dangerous consequences to giving platforms to
proponents of white supremacist capitalist patriarchal systems of oppression
and exploitation and packaging social and climate justice issues as a
dichotomous showdown between two equal and equally legitimate parties –
something the white helmed mainstream media in Canada has a hard time
comprehending, perhaps because they too also participate in and benefit from
these self-affirming systems. This false equivalence or the fallacy of inconsistency is a readily occurring phenomenon in modern day journalism that relies on oversimplification, generalization, dominant viewpoints and ignorance to make its points quickly in the blitzkrieg format it is forced to operate in. In this case, journalists would want you to consider the hand-wringing anxiety and rage of a couple of professional white wailers who represent, benefit from and perpetuate oppressive white supremacist, patriarchal and capitalist systems that threaten Indigenous survival and well-being and who have un-ironically appointed themselves as beleaguered, as holding the same weight and as being worthy of the same consideration as the fight for justice and self-determination of historically disenfranchised Indigenous peoples standing against and protecting themselves from the unending violence of white supremacist systems. White journalists in Calgary were unable or
unwilling to identify and call out a freely operating white supremacist troll
in their ranks. When the spewing of toxic untruths and bias is left
unaccompanied and unchecked by a critical frame through which they can be
viewed and broken down, these words are left to resonate as legitimate,
reasonable and accurate in the minds of many. So let’s do something Canadian
media thinks we’re too stupid to do… grab your brains and your metaphorical
scissors, we’re gonna deconstruct some of the egregious bile and bullshit,
filmed, transmitted and left uncommented, that came out of the mouths of angry,
white men at the indecent counter rally that took place in front of the glistening
corporate beacon of colonial spoliation that is TransCanada HQ in the place
white people stole and called Calgary.
A note also before beginning… This
took me an evening to write and contains knowledge gleaned through years of
study, unlearning and examination. I don’t take this burden lightly, it’s
important and necessary work to do. But it is a choice that costs. A lifetime of
writing and reading, some of it excruciating, a lifetime of learning how to decolonize, deconstruct, heal and build
fresh, raw exposure to the pain and alienation caused by misogyny, white wrath, resentment and
denial - this is my daily reality. White people, white men are allowed to contaminate and destroy, self-righteous and
unimpeded as they have always done, as they have been taught is their
historically and racially sanctioned right to do - this is their daily reality. Their pollution is immediate
and hallowed in minute long news segments. Don’t you dare tell me that this is
a just world.
“These people have to
respect the rule of law.”
‘These people’ is textbook othering. Othering allows the speaker to keep
the inherent humanity of those that he others at bay, making the deriding, the
dismissal and the ultimate destruction of their persons and their demands that
much easier to accomplish. Claims that 'others' should be respecting the rule of
law is especially rich coming from representatives of white settler society –
Canadian history is littered with broken treaty promises on the part of the
white settler state and, as we have seen unfold, Canada and its provinces have
repeatedly proven themselves incapable of respecting their own laws, Supreme
Court rulings, undertakings and signed declarations (UNDRIP) where Indigenous
title and rights and law are concerned. Furthermore, white men’s laws and
injunctions have no bearing on unceded Indigenous territory and do not supersede
Indigenous duty to stewardship and protection of the land, the water, their
beings and for future generations. Claiming otherwise is a clear alignment with
white racial and white cultural supremacy theories and views. The settler "legal" system has been wielded against Indigenous peoples and their territories time and time again and must therefore be systematically and critically scrutinized.
“You all came here in
your cars. You all wear Gore-Tex and have phones in your pockets made from
petroleum products. The indigenous heat their homes with natural gas.”
Speak for yourself colonizer! My entire wardrobe on that day, save for
the elastic in my underwear, was made from plant, mineral and animal material
and was made and bought within my fibershed. I have never owned a mobile phone.
I took collective transportation to and from the rally.
The white racial lens
or the white racial frame of reference is universalism on white supremacist
crack and posits that white consumer experience of the world is a centralized, universally
shared experience, the only way anyone experiences the world. I wear Gore-Tex
therefore you wear Gore-Tex. I take my SUV to the Costco and fill it full of
shit I don’t need and so do you. I trash the Earth for profit therefore you
must do the same. Not naming the power that implemented unsustainability as a
forced lifestyle for everyone is not only bad faith argumentation, it serves to
maintain the dominance and the interests of the speaker. Petroleum based
products, fossil fuel energy sources and associated lifestyles are considered inevitable,
inescapable and final whilst still being painted as a choice. If I truly had
choices at my disposal, if ancestral knowledge hadn’t been hammered out of my
lineage through slavery, displacement, colonization, assimilation and
oppression, if life on this planet was not ruled by unequal access to capital,
if I wasn’t obligated to live in the sterile concrete of cities, if cities were
not built of sterile concrete, if the housing stock available to us wasn't systematically outfitted with unsustainable heating and cooling systems, I would not be heating my house with natural
gas.
By not naming industrialisation, forced assimilation and relocation, the stripping of agency away from everyone not identified as white, the foundational violence and politics of erasure of settler societies, Eurocentric notions
of progress, globalization and urbanisation under white supremacist,
capitalist, imperialist and patriarchal systems that ruptured and swept away
older, small scale, local and harmonious land based modes of existence as the
reasons behind our current unsustainable lifestyles, dominant white power and
interests are never acknowledged and challenged, cowing us into submission and
postponing effective exploration of better alternatives. This is something that I often repeat to myself in my textile practice
as a mantra, and is inspired by Kate Fletcher’s work: Realize that things are the way
they are now because dominant cultural conditions intentionally created and
maintained the current set up, squeezing out alternatives or making them appear
unattractive. We deserve better alternatives. The first step towards this is
liberating ourselves from the imposition of unsustainable white capitalist
power and narratives and their insistence that they be our only reality.
“TransCanada has the
approval of First Nations’ along the pipeline route.”
Knowing that the so-called “negotiations” regularly carried out between
Indigenous communities and representatives of the white settler state and
corporate colonialists are never conducted on truly equal footing, the word
“approval” rings with hyperbolic mendacity. Arthur Manuel, in his book,
“Unsettling Canada: A National Wake Up Call” traces a history of capitulation
through coercion, trickery and desperation as the regular modus operandi during
these “termination” table talks. One also has to address the problems within
Indigenous communities of internalized racism and the espousal of white settler
values garnered through state sponsored impoverishment, forced assimilation,
cultural genocide, inter-generational trauma, interrupted knowledge inheritance
systems and flat out “extinguishment” schemes and the problems of compromised and
out of touch Indigenous leadership warped by decades of government and
corporate funding.
One of the Indigenous organizers of the solidarity event in
Calgary declared on camera that for her, consent was “working hard to get a
yes”. When colonial governments and corporations control the outcomes of any
negotiation with First Nations and refuse to change anything in policy or
approach or ends, when the inevitability of capitulation is accepted as a given
on both sides, when opportunistic and self-serving Indigenous leaders and “the
professional Indian negotiating class (…) negotiate to create processes because
processes ensure them jobs and money, since government processes come with
government funding pots” (A. Manuel, “Unsettling Canada”)… we are no longer
talking about negotiation, we are not talking about approval and we are
certainly not talking about consent. This is a tragic vaudeville paid for by
impoverished Indigenous communities punished on all sides. The white man and
those allied to his power don’t get to define the terms of consent. As
explained previously, white men’s laws and injunctions have no bearing on
unceded Indigenous territory and do not supersede Indigenous duty to
stewardship and protection of the land, the water, their beings and for future
generations. White Canada does not have and has never had the free, prior and
informed consent of the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs and therefore has no claims to development
on this land. The approval of elected band members who operate only within the confines of their individual jurisdictions does not supersede or challenge the refusal of the hereditary chiefs. White settler illiteracy in understanding Indigenous hierarchies and the terms of engagement of Indigenous leadership is here greatly apparent.
“We won’t be ruled by
a minority.”
The historical silencing of oppositional and marginalized voices by
those in dominant positionalities is nothing new. How does this claim work? Accustomed
to being top dog, anything contravening what is deemed as the natural order,
the unassailable status quo, is met with aggressive silencing tactics and
rationalization of oppression. Here, the threat is clear – settler whiteness
painted as the right kind of majority will put its righteous boot in the face
of the wrong kind of minority brown-ness. The numbers game is used to
legitimize certain views and dismiss those who do not share in these views and
stand opposed to their unhindered continuation. A perceived white majority can
bowl over the claims of a perceived brown minority and their unwashed hippie
allies because this sort of oppression is seen as human nature and inescapable,
reinforced by history told through a white racial frame of reference and white
supremacist socialization. The perceived reversal of this status quo is
considered heresy, unnatural and translates the terror of white men at losing
their dominant positionalities. White men in power, white men with money will
do whatever it takes to maintain that power and that money and the systems that
produce that money and that power at the expense of those that they see as
expendable. They will also not hesitate to be bad at math – a couple dozen corporate
clowns and underlings and their political overlords vs. a country up in arms and
a world discovering Canada’s true trappings does not a majority make.
“They use the courts when it suits their
purpose and get angry when it doesn’t work.”
White settler society needs to understand that Indigenous peoples are
not beholden to white legal frames. Colonial legal recourses are used, and
often at great cost to Indigenous communities, when they are seen as beneficial
to upholding Indigenous rights and title. This is illustration enough of the
insidious ways in which white supremacy operates – that those whose
responsibility is chiefly to the land and to future generations and to all life
forms, must make their plight fit into short sighted, anthropocentric white
legal and cultural frames of reference in the hopes of being heard, respected, understood
and frankly, left the fuck alone by white settler society’s grubby, grabby,
capitalist hands. The inability by the white settler state to respect the rulings
of its own colonial courts – the landmark Delgamuukw-Gisday'wa ruling that recognized continued Indigenous
proprietorship over their territories and the Tsilhqot’in decision that
recognized Aboriginal title on the ground to almost two thousand square
kilometres of Tsilhqot’in territory by the Supreme Court of Canada and the
signing of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
by Canada in 2016, is proof that white people’s words aren’t worth the paper
they sully. Indigenous peoples are rightfully angry and tired of being
repeatedly bullied and discounted by the hypocritical, ethnocentric white
settler state.
Article 40 of UNDRIP states: “Indigenous peoples have the right
to access to and prompt decision through just and fair procedures for the
resolution of conflicts and disputes with States or other parties, as well as
to effective remedies for all infringements of their individual and collective
rights. Such a decision shall give due consideration to the customs,
traditions, rules and legal systems of the indigenous peoples concerned and
international human rights”. In short, Indigenous peoples have right of access
to fair and just legal procedures. There is no downside to Indigenous peoples
seeking justice and demanding that we respect their right to
self-determination. We are all saved (often from our own damn selves) by this. Those
who have been serving as stewards of the land for thousands of years, who have
that knowledge and commitment woven into their cosmologies and cultures, the
very things that we lack or have been divorced from, are the ones best suited
to build a better, fairer, sustainable world for all of us.
It is important to
note the white victimhood at play in this statement – when white people don’t get
their way, they lash out or start crying, and as any black or brown person
knows, white tears are toxic and burdensome and potentially lethal. White
victimization – the ability of dominant groups to swap the cloak of power for
the one of persecution at will whenever their unending stream of privileges is
interrupted or threatened - insulates white society from taking a hard and long
look at itself and addressing the ugliness of its truth. Whiteness also has a history of whitewashing its crimes. The media has played a central role in the amplification and the justification of this, normalizing the white racial frame and pushing white perspectives and writers, racist ideology and the justification of racist animus to the fore. White settler interests paint themselves as benign, at worst, and usually beneficial and legitimate. Any challenge is therefore seen as an unforgivable attack, necessarily illegitimate that must be quashed at once. This statement
invalidates Indigenous peoples seeking justice by reducing this quest to some
sort of game stacked against self-appointed white victims. Relaying it, providing a platform for its free and unchallenged expression demonstrates complicity and vested interest in the racist status quo. The need to entertain the opinions of neon nazis and angry corporate colonizers should always be resisted.