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Haiti as Empire’s Laboratory

As the United States and its allies push renewed foreign intervention, the uses and abuses of the first Black republic as a testing ground of imperialism offer stark warnings. Haiti still struggles to be free.

NACLA 

August 30, 2023

By Jemima Pierre

 

 

In December 2019, President Donald Trump signed into law H.R.2116, also known as the Global Fragility Act (GFA). Although this act was developed by the conservative United States Institute of Peace, it was introduced to Congress by Democratic Representative Eliot L. Engel, then chair of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, and cosponsored by a bipartisan group of representatives, including, significantly, Democrat Karen Bass. The GFA presents new strategies for deploying U.S. hard and soft power in a changing world. It focuses U.S. foreign policy on the idea that there are so-called “fragile states,” countries prone to instability, extremism, conflict, and extreme poverty, which are presumably threats to U.S. security.

Though not explicitly stated, analysts argue that the GFA is intended to prevent unnecessary and increasingly ineffective U.S. military interventions abroad. The stated goal is for the United States to invest in “its ability to prevent and mitigate violent conflict” by funding projects that mandate “an interagency approach among the key players, including the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Departments of State, Defense, and the Treasury” amid collaboration with “international allies and partners.”

In April 2022, the Biden-Harris administration affirmed its commitment to the GFA by outlining a strategy for its implementation. As detailed in the strategy’s prologue, the U.S. government’s new foreign policy approach depends on “willing partners to address common challenges, [and] share costs.” “Ultimately,” the document continues, “no U.S. or international intervention will be successful without the buy-in and mutual ownership of trusted regional, national and local partners.” The Biden administration has also stressed that the GFA will use the United Nations and “other multilateral organizations” to carry out its missions. The prologue outlines a 10-year plan for the GFA that, according to the U.S. Institute of Peace, will “allow for the integration and sequencing of U.S. diplomatic, development, and military-related efforts.” Among five trial countries for GFA implementation, Haiti is the first target.

Hailed by development experts as “landmark” legislation and, as Foreign Policy reported, a “potential game-changer in the world of U.S. foreign aid,” the act seems to offer a reset of U.S. foreign policy in ways that shift tactics while maintaining the objectives and strategies of U.S. global domination. The act and its prologue clearly articulate that the main goals are to advance “U.S. national security and interests” and to “manage rival powers,” presumably Russia and China. In this sense, especially for governments and societies in the Western Hemisphere, the GFA can be seen as a revamping of the Monroe Doctrine, the 1823 U.S. foreign policy position that established the entire region as its recognized sphere of influence, shaping U.S. imperialism. The GFA deploys cunning language—tackling the “drivers” of violence, promoting stability in “conflict-prone regions,” supporting “locally-driven political solutions”—that hides the legislation’s real intent: to rebrand U.S. imperialism.

In their deliberations on the Global Fragilities Act, U.S. officials labeled Haiti as one of the world’s most “fragile” states. Yet this supposed fragility has been caused by more than a century of U.S. interference and a consistent push to deny Haitian sovereignty. Throughout a long history and complex—though blatant—imperialism, Haiti has been and continues to be the main laboratory for U.S. imperial machinations in the region and throughout the world. It is no surprise, therefore, that Haiti is the first object in the United States’ latest rearticulation of a policy for maintaining global hegemony.

In fact, a review of the actions of the United States and the so-called “international community” in Haiti from 2004 to the present demonstrates how Haiti has served as the testing ground—the laboratory—for much of what is encapsulated in the Global Fragilities Act. The GFA, in other words, is not so much a new policy as it is a formal expression of de facto U.S. policy toward Haiti and Haitian people over the past two decades. Without recognizing these uses and abuses of Haiti, the site of the longest and most brutal neocolonial experiment in the modern world, we cannot fully understand the workings of U.S. (and Western) hegemony. And if we cannot understand U.S. hegemony, then we cannot defeat it. And Haiti will never be free.

Sovereignty Again Denied

Since 2004, Haiti has been under renewed foreign occupation and lacks sovereignty. This is not hyperbole. Take, for example, a series of events and actions following the July 7, 2021 assassination of Haiti’s arguably illegitimate but still sitting president, Jovenel Moïse. The day after the assassination, Helen La Lime, head of the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti (BINUH), declared that interim prime minister Claude Joseph would lead the Haitian government until elections were scheduled. Because of Joseph’s interim status, however, the line of succession was unclear. Days before his killing, Moïse had named neurosurgeon and political ally Ariel Henry as prime minister to replace Joseph, but he had not yet been sworn in.

A few days after Moïse’s assassination, the Biden administration sent a delegation to Haiti to meet with both Joseph and Henry, as well as with Joseph Lambert, who had been chosen by Haiti’s 10 remaining senators—the only elected officials in the country at the time—to stand in as president pending new elections. Despite these competing claims to power, Washington chose a side. The U.S. delegation sidelined Lambert, convinced Joseph and Henry to come to an agreement over Haiti’s governance, and urged Joseph to stand down.

A week later, on July 17, BINUH and the Core Group—an organization of mostly Western foreign powers dictating politics in Haiti—issued a statement. They called for the formation of a “consensual and inclusive government,” directing Henry, as the designated prime minister named by Moïse, “to continue the mission entrusted to him.” Two days later, on July 19, Joseph announced he would step aside, allowing Henry to assume the mantle of prime minister on July 20. The “new”—and completely unelected—government and cabinet was composed mostly of members of the Haitian Tèt Kale Party (PHTK), the neo-Duvalierist political party of Moïse and his predecessor Michel Martelly. In the wake of the devastating 2010 earthquake, the PHTK, with Martelly at the helm, was put in place by the United States and other Western powers without the support of the Haitian masses.

After the U.S. Embassy, the Core Group, and the Organization of American States (OAS) released similar statements applauding the formation of a new “consensus” government, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken affirmed support for the unelected leaders. “The United States welcomes efforts by Haiti’s political leadership to come together in choosing an interim prime minister and a unity cabinet,” he said in a statement. In effect, Haiti’s true power brokers—or what I have called the “white rulers of Haiti”—determined the Haitian government’s replacement through a press release.

Meanwhile, the international community ’s decision-making process completely left out Haiti’s civil society organizations, which had been meeting since early 2021 to find a way to resolve the country’s political crisis as Moïse, already ruling by decree, was poised to overstay his constitutional mandate. These groups adamantly rejected the foreign-imposed interim government and have criticized the international community’s actions as blatantly colonial.

Who and what are the entities making decisions for Haiti and the Haitian people, and how did they claim such prominent roles in controlling Haitian politics? Haitians are not members of the BINUH, OAS, or Core Group. But also central is the question of the country’s sovereignty—or lack thereof. Haiti has been under foreign military and political control for almost 20 years. But this is not the first time, of course, that Haiti has been under occupation.

Legacies of Foreign Control and Occupation

In the summer of 1915, U.S. Marines landed in Port-au-Prince and initiated a 19-year period of military rule that sought to snuff the sovereignty of the modern world’s first Black republic. During this first occupation, as I have written elsewhere with Peter James Hudson, “the US rewrote the Haitian constitution and installed a puppet president [who signed treaties that turned over control of the Haitian state’s finances to the U.S. government], imposed press censorship and martial law, and brought Jim Crow policies and forced labor to the island.” In line with its racist view that Black people do not have the capacity for civilization or self-government, Washington rationalized that it was necessary to teach Haitians the arts of self-government—a view that continues today.

But the most pronounced labor of the U.S. Marines was counterinsurgency. They waged a “pacification” campaign throughout the countryside to suppress a peasant uprising against the occupation, using aerial bombardment techniques for the first time. Dropping bombs from planes onto Haitian villages, the pacification campaigns left more than 15,000 dead and countless others maimed. Those who survived and continued to resist were tortured and forced into labor camps.

The United States finally left the country in 1934 after massive grassroots protests by the Haitian people. But one of the most consequential results was the establishment and training during the occupation of a local police force, the Gendarmerie d’Haïti. For years, this police force and its successors were used to terrorize the Haitian people, a legacy that continues today.

In the years after the 1915-1934 occupation, the United States continued to intervene politically and economically in Haitian affairs. The most notorious of these engagements was the U.S. support for the brutal dictatorship of Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier and Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier. In the first democratic elections after the fall of the Duvalier regime, the United States unsuccessfully tried to prevent the ascension of the popular candidate, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. However, nine months after his January 1991 election, Aristide was deposed in a CIA-bankrolled coup d’état. The coup was not consolidated, though, because of continuous resistance from the Haitian people. By 1994, U.S. president Bill Clinton’s administration was forced to bring Aristide back to Haiti after three years in exile—with more than 20,000 U.S. troops in tow. Aristide was now a hostage to U.S. neoliberal policy. The troops remained until 2000.

Haiti officially lost its nominal sovereignty again in late February 2004. The Western governments, as well as the powerful Haitian elite, never supported the Aristide government, presumably because of its “populist and anti-market economy” positions, as former U.S. ambassador Janet Sanderson later alluded in a leaked 2008 diplomatic cable calling for continued foreign intervention. Thus, when Aristide won a second term in the 2000 elections, just months after his Fanmi Lavalas party gained control of a majority of seats in the parliament, the U.S. and its Western partners worked to discredit the administration. The French ambassador to Haiti at the time, Thierry Burkhard, later admitted that France was concerned about Aristide demanding financial restitution for the immoral indemnity—or what The New York Times has called “The Ransome”—that Haiti was forced to pay for its independence.

The plans for the 2004 intervention and occupation were hatched the previous year at a meeting in Canada dubbed the “Ottawa Initiative on Haiti.” Aristide had been back in power for two years. Canadian prime minister Jean Chrétien and his Liberal Party government organized a two-day conference from January 31 to February 1, 2003 at Meech Lake, a government resort near Ottawa, that brought together top officials from the United States, European Union, and OAS to decide the future of Haiti’s governance. There were no representatives from Haiti in attendance. Canadian journalist Michel Vastel, who got wind of this secret meeting, reported that the discussion in Ottawa included the possible removal of Aristide with a potential Western-led trusteeship over Haiti.

On February 29, 2004, President Aristide was deposed, bundled onto a flight by U.S. Marines, and flown to the Central African Republic. Almost immediately, U.S. President George W. Bush sent 200 U.S. troops to Port-au-Prince to “help stabilize the country.” By the evening of Aristide’s expulsion, 2,000 U.S., French, and Canadian soldiers were on the ground.

In the meantime, at the behest of permanent members the United States and France, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) unanimously passed a resolution that authorized “the immediate deployment of a Multinational Interim Force for a period of three months to help to secure and stabilize the capital, Port-au-Prince, and elsewhere in the country.” In other words, the UN voted to send a “peacekeeping” mission to Haiti. Significantly, Resolution 1529 was passed under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, which, unlike a Chapter VI resolution, authorizes UN forces to take military action through land, air, and sea without requiring the consent of the parties in conflict. That is, the resolution empowered the multinational force to “take all necessary measures to fulfill its mandate.”

The UN mission to Haiti raises four important points. First, Haiti was the only country not engulfed in civil war to receive a Chapter VII UN military deployment. There were certainly local protests during the passage of the resolution, but these were of Haitians demonstrating against the removal of their democratically elected president. The situation in Haiti, in other words, could not be considered a civil war, in the normal sense of the word, that merited a Chapter VII deployment (if such deployment can ever be merited). Rather, through the deployment, the same characters who initiated and consolidated the coup suppressed a people’s protest.

Second, key players in backing and aiding Aristide’s removal were also permanent members of the UNSC, the only body with the power to deploy a multinational “peacekeeping” mission. From the Ottawa Initiative, it was clear that the United States, France, and Canada had conspired to remove Aristide and destroy the Haitian state. Third, and relatedly, to justify the foreign intervention and subsequent occupation, the United States and France concocted a narrative that Aristide had abdicated the presidency. Indeed, UN security documents and resolutions about Haiti during this time, as well as Western media reports, pointed to Aristide’s presumed “resignation” as the reason for the deployment of UN military forces.

On March 1, 2004, the morning after Aristide’s ouster, Democracy Now! broadcasted a remarkable live program during which U.S. congresswoman and chairperson of the Congressional Black Caucus, Maxine Waters, called in to say that she had spoken to President Aristide. “He said that he was kidnapped,” Waters reported. “He said that he was forced to leave Haiti?…?that the American Embassy sent the diplomats?…?and they ordered him to leave.” In the weeks following, Aristide spoke to Democracy Now! about the kidnapping. “When you have militaries coming from abroad surrounding your house, taking control of the airport, surrounding the national palace, being in the streets, and [they] take you from your house to put you in the plane,” he said, “?…?it was using force to take an elected president out of his country.”

Fourth, and perhaps most egregiously, the UNSC claimed that the so-called interim government set up in the wake of Aristide’s ouster had asked for the stabilization force. But that government was illegitimate. In his 2012 book Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti, Jeb Sprague recounts that in the early morning after the Aristides were escorted to the airport, the U.S. ambassador to Haiti, James Foley, picked up Haitian Supreme Court Justice Boniface Alexandre and took him to the “prime minister’s office for consultations in preparation for his ascension to power.” Haiti’s prime minister, Yvon Neptune, later reported that he did not have a say—nor did he participate, as dictated by Haitian law—in the swearing-in of Haiti’s U.S.-installed interim president. Alexandre’s first act as interim president was, on the order of the U.S. ambassador, to submit an official request to the UNSC for multinational military forces to restore law and order. The UNSC immediately authorized the deployment.

Taken together, these realities demonstrate how the entire UN deployment and occupation—based on a coup d’état sponsored by two permanent members of the UNSC, claims that the president had resigned, and the illegal swearing-in of an illegitimate head of state—were fraudulent. At the same time, protests from the Haitian people were dismissed by Western governments and media as “gang violence” and the action of “bandits.” Such characterizations not only tapped into age-old racist stereotypes of Haitians as always already violent, but also gave more pretext for the Chapter VII deployment. To add insult to injury, most of the UN resolutions referred to securing Haiti’s “sovereignty,” as if this sovereignty could coexist with foreign political control and military occupation.

The illegal 2004 coup d’état was both perpetrated and cleaned up with UN sanction. On June 1, 2004, the UN officially took over from U.S. forces and set up the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) under the guise of establishing peace and security. A multibillion-dollar operation, MINUSTAH had, at any given time, between 6,000 and 13,000 troops and police stationed in Haiti alongside thousands of bureaucrats, technical staff, and civilian personnel. In a horrific parallel to the first U.S. occupation of Haiti, MINUSTAH soldiers committed numerous acts of violence against the Haitian people, including shootings and rapes. MINUSTAH soldiers were also responsible for bringing cholera into the country, a disease that officially killed as many as 30,000 and infected almost a million people.

A protest commenorates the 100th anniversary of the U.S. occupation of Haiti and the launch of the people’s tribunal, Port-au-Prince, July 2015. (MARK SCHULLER)

But what most solidified this occupation was the creation and operationalization of the Core Group. An international coalition of self-proclaimed and non-Black “friends” of Haiti, the Core Group was established as part of the 2004 UN resolution that brought foreign soldiers and technocrats to the country. While the group’s membership has fluctuated since its initial formation, it currently has nine members: Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, the United States, European Union, OAS, and United Nations Organization. Significantly, the group has never had a Haitian representative. The Core Group’s stated goal is to oversee Haiti’s governance through the coordination of the various branches and elements of the United Nations mission in Haiti. But in practice, the Core Group represents an insidious example of (neo) colonialism driven by white supremacy.

Imperial Punishment

While there was a formal drawdown of the MINUSTAH mission in 2017, the UN has remained in Haiti through a set of new offices, culminating in the establishment of the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti (BINUH) in 2019. Despite protests in Haiti against ongoing UN presence, the UNSC continues to renew BINUH’s mandate each year. The latest renewal was on July 14, 2023. BINUH has had an outsized, public role in Haitian internal political affairs and is often the mouthpiece of the Core Group.

The overwhelming power of the Core Group is blatantly public. At a special session on Haiti at the UNSC on April 26, 2023, the newly appointed head of BINUH, María Isabel Salvador of Ecuador, took the lead in presenting Haiti in typical racist terms— as a basket case of unthinking and violent gangs. Unelected and unaccountable to the Haitian people, the Core Group is the arbiter of colonial direct rule of Haiti.

Western imperialism in Haiti is a hierarchical structure established through the power of the United States, which then outsources colonial control of Haiti to others. In a confidential 2008 diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks, then U.S. ambassador Sanderson called MINUSTAH “a remarkable product and symbol of hemispheric cooperation in a country with little going for it.” She continued: “There is no feasible substitute for this UN presence. It is a financial and regional security bargain for the [U.S. government]?…?We must work to preserve MINUSTAH by continuing to partner with it at all levels?…?That partnering will also help counter perceptions in Latin contributing countries that Haitians see their presence in Haiti as unwanted.”

Brazil, for example, home to the largest Black population outside of Africa, oversaw the military wing of the occupation since its inception. The nominally leftist administration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva spent more than $750 million to fund this operation. As I have written elsewhere, Haiti was Brazil’s “imperial ground zero.” But there was also buy-in from other marginalized governments from the Caribbean and Latin America. At one point, MINUSTAH’s leadership included a representative from Trinidad and Tobago and an African American attorney and diplomat. And this leadership was accompanied by a multinational military force made up of troops from several South American, Caribbean, and African countries, including Argentina, Colombia, Grenada, Bolivia, Benin, Burkina Faso, Egypt, Cote d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Cameroon, Niger, and Mali.

In addition to Brazil, other neighboring countries’ neocolonial governments have been similarly recruited by the United States to aid in its undermining of Haitian sovereignty. The Dominican Republic, for instance, funded and housed the ragtag paramilitary troops that terrorized Haiti from 2000 to 2004. More recently, in the fall of 2022, Mexico joined the United States last year in advocating before the UNSC for renewed foreign military intervention in Haiti. Washington has urged Canada to take the lead, and in June 2023, Ottawa announced plans to coordinate international security assistance to Haiti, including police training, from the Dominican Republic.

Since Moïse’s 2021 assassination, Haitians have protested foreign support for the illegitimate and corrupt de facto government, rising inflation and fuel prices, illegal weapons dumping, and a dizzying rise in violence. In response, the United States and its allies have continued to push for foreign military intervention in the country. In January 2023, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) supported the call for a foreign force. In July, U.S. Secretary of State Blinken, Vice President Kamala Harris, and U.S. Representative Hakeem Jeffries convinced the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) to reverse its initial course affirming Haitian sovereignty to now call for intervention. At the time of writing, the United States was poised to introduce a UNSC resolution after Kenya expressed willingness to lead a multinational armed mission. It must be noted that it is Haiti’s Core Group-installed Prime Minister Henry who, along with the UN office in Haiti, is insisting on this violent solution to the crisis in the country—a crisis they themselves helped to create.

The Haitian community’s continued protests against foreign troops and Western meddling are a testament to their unwavering courage.

The denial of Haitian sovereignty seems to be, as Sprague has described, “a synchronized effort by cooperating states and institutions bolstered by a global elite’s consensus against popular democracy.” The Global Fragilities Act, then, not only lays out a plan that has already been implemented in Haiti over the last 20 years, but also directly emerges out of U.S. experiences in the Haitian (neo)colonial laboratory. We need to recognize Haiti’s critical place as a testing ground for U.S. and Western imperialism.

But Haiti is also the site of one of the longest struggles in the world for both Black liberation and anticolonial independence. This explains the U.S. empire’s constant reactionary onslaught against the people of Haiti, punishing their repeated attempts at sovereignty with decades of instability designed to secure and expand U.S. hegemony. For two centuries, imperial counterinsurgency against Haiti has aimed to terminate the most ambitious revolutionary experiment in the modern world. The tactics deployed to attack Haitian sovereignty have been consistent and persistent. We ignore how these tactics may be used on the rest of the region at our peril.

 

[Jemima Pierre is Professor of African American Studies and Anthropology at UCLA and a research associate at the Center for the Study of Race, Gender and Class at the University of Johannesburg. She is the author of The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race and numerous academic and public articles about Haiti.]

A Message from Mohawk Women from Grand River Concerning Vaccine Mandates & Freedom

A Message from Mohawk Women from Grand River Concerning Vaccine Mandates & Freedom

Real Peoples Media

February 17, 2022

 

The following is a message from Onkwehon: we Grand River Mohawk women from the Turtle, Wolf and Bear clans to the people standing up for freedom against vaccine mandates.

“At this time I would like to remind you that we are spiritual beings having a human experience. We would like to acknowledge all the ones who listened to their intuition, their gut feeling, in knowing that these vaccines weren’t a thing that resonated with their being.

Thank you for having the courage to say “No” and stand up for what you believe. Continue to be mindful of your thoughts as we enter into these next few days. You are awakened, you are the light, you are the love of humanity. Love will always prevail. Let’s continue to hold each other up as more truth and justice come to light.

This message is for all our sisters, brothers, and allies across Turtle Island and to our honored, age-old international relations.

We send love and gratitude to all of the brave men and women who are holding the line, uniting together with kindness and compassion in their hearts for freedom, so that truth and justice may prevail.

Canada is still a crime scene, and all will be held on genocide. Grand River Mohawks are alive and well. Mohawks still hold the original six international treaties, and we are in the centre of the Covenant Chain.

As women we must remind the Canadian government of their pledge to the Grand River Mohawks and to the Onkwehon: we way of life. The [emergency measures] announcement today by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is a breach of this trust.

Women are the allodial title holders. Even if the courts wanted to, they cannot provide the Canadian Government with a casa somasos.

Universal laws are supreme law of the land and no legislative acts will ever supersede them. A formal notice will be sent to the Honorable Governor General Mary Simon ordering her to uphold her fiduciary responsibilities and invoke the appropriate Criminal Codes that we see fit under Royal Assent and international law. Implicating the Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Christia Freeland, and the Premier of Ontario Doug Ford.

In peace, freedom, and truth, take care, stay safe. We love you.”

+++

Note: the Latin term “Nemo dat quod non habet” that appears as text in the video means “no one can give what they do not have.” It is a legal rule, sometimes called the nemo dat rule, that states that the purchase of a possession from someone who has no ownership right to it also denies the purchaser any ownership title to it. (Source: Wikipedia).

Message from Candy Sero, Mohawk Elder, After Being Trampled by Trudeau’s Henchmen

Message from Candy Sero, Mohawk Elder, After Being Trampled by Trudeau’s Henchmen

February 22, 2022

Candy Sero, trampled Mohawk Elder, has a single message for the world: “Hold the Line”.

Interview with Candy Sero, Mohawk Elder, Prior to Being Trampled by Trudeau’s Henchmen on Horses

Interview with Candy Sero, Mohawk Elder, Prior to Being Trampled by Trudeau’s Henchmen on Horses

February 22, 2022

Candy Sero is a Tyendinaga Mohawk Wolf Clan grandmother. She is fifty-one years old. On Friday, February 18, 2022, Sero, who uses a walker, was among those injured when police, mounted on horseback, charged into a crowd of protesters. Sero has been on the front lines in Ottawa, supporting the protests against vaccine mandates and lock down restrictions, since shortly after they began. Like many others, she slept in in her car, in the freezing Ottawa temperatures.

The short interview by Monique Mackay, an independent Canadian journalist, was conducted prior to the horrific event.

“My heartfelt interview with Candy pleading you all come [] to Ottawa, she’s an Indigenous woman with the Mohawk territory fighting for FREEDOM.” [Monique Mackay, independent journalist: @independent_journalism_, Instagram]

LISTEN: Kanenhariyo (Mohawk War Chief) Discusses Ontario’s “State of Emergency” in response to Truckers Rebellion

LISTEN: Kanenhariyo (Mohawk War Chief) Discusses Ontario’s “State of Emergency” in response to Truckers Rebellion

February 12, 2022

 

“They’re liars. They’re lying. But they’re afraid. They’re weak right now. They’re weak, and they’re pretending that they’re strong. Stand up.”

Kanyenkehaka is a Mohawk War Chief from the Tehanakarineh family of the Bear Clan. His home is in Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory, but he currently resides at the Six Nations of the Grand River Territory (near Hamilton, Ontario). He is an Onkwehon:we (Indigenous) man and belongs to the Kayenkehaka Nation, not the Canadian or English nation. His people have kept their ways and traditions, and despite generations of mistreatment at the hands of the Canadian government, they remain a separate, allied Nation with their own rights and responsibilities to creation.

 

“For all of you who don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, maybe you’re new to this country. They didn’t teach you that Indigenous people own these lands. They’ll tell you that it’s theirs. It’s Canada’s wonderful free place. It was only free because they stole things. I’m talking to all the brown people in the cities that didn’t want to go and support the truckers because they thought they were racist. Well, the Liberal Government’s racist and so is the Conservative Government. The entire government of Canada is racist. And the RCMP are racist. Let’s face the facts the RCMP are just as much a culprit in the in the theft of the indigenous children that got sent to residential schools, because they were the collectors.”

 

 

Addressing Trudeau: “Maybe you didn’t, but I suspect you did, [have] the audacity to encourage the smear campaigns of swastika flags and white supremacy – but Canada’s built on white supremacy. Literally, built on white racism. The Canadian flag, that red and white maple flag has, as nasty of blood and history on it, as a swastika.”

 

 

“… well, it’s pretty simple. They said drop the mandates, and you need to quit. You can do that tomorrow… they want you to resign. They don’t have any confidence in you. You can’t even go anywhere in public without them throwing rocks at you and booing. Your people don’t love you. You can resign.”

 

 

“but that’s still our territory… Doug Ford, you don’t have any right to claim it, and you don’t have any right to make decisions, or to say ‘well, you can have your rights but we’re going to supersede them.'” ” The fuck you will.”

 

Support for Canadian Truckers Skyrockets – Alongside Vaccine Injuries in Canadian Children

Support for Canadian Truckers Skyrockets – Alongside Vaccine Injuries in Canadian Children

February 10, 2022

By Cory Morningstar

 

“Always guide and protect the children.”

 

— 1968, Ghanaian Kwame Nkrumah, political theorist and revolutionary

 

Image

Truckers Protest, Ottawa, Canada, February, 2022

On November 19, 2021, the Canadian Government authorized the Pfizer Comirnaty “vaccine” for  children 5-11 years of age.

As of January 28, 2022 (70 days since approval), there are now 1,453 reported vaccine adverse events (injuries) in children ages 5-17 years on the Canadian Government website. [age 5-11: 226, age 12-17: 1,227]

Of these injuries, in the 5-17 year old age bracket, 330 are categorized as serious. The categorization of “serious” includes death.

[There are 36,164 adverse event reports in total (see chart below). This number is now increasing at a rate of approximately 1,000 per week.]

Figure 3. Number of adverse event reports by age group up to and including January 28, 2022 (n=36,164)

Figure 3. Number of adverse event reports by age group up to and including January 28, 2022 (n=36,164)

 

Figure 2. Number of adverse event reports for people 5 to 11 years by vaccine name and dose number up to and including January 28, 2022 (n=225)

Figure 2. Number of adverse event reports for people 5 to 11 years by vaccine name and dose number up to and including January 28, 2022 (n=225)

Figure 2. Number of adverse event reports for people 12 to 17 years by vaccine name and dose number up to and including January 28, 2022 (n=225)

Figure 2. Number of adverse event reports for people 12 to 17 years by vaccine name and dose number up to and including January 28, 2022 (n=225)

 

Canada’s population is over 38 million. The age bracket of 0-17 years represents approximately 7 million.

The deaths of children in Canada, with COVID-19, are as follows:

Up to and including February 4, 2022: deaths with COVID-19 (most, if not all, terminal illnesses or multiple co-morbidities), age 0-11 years: 19

Up to and including February 4, 2022: deaths with COVID-19 (most, if not all, terminal illnesses or multiple co-morbidities), age 12-19 years: 10

Here it must be noted that as of February 4, 2022, of the 33,717 deaths in Canada with COVID-19, 16,377 of these deaths (as of February 8, 2022) occurred in long-term care facilities. [1] [May 9, 2021, The Globe and Mail: Patients died from neglect, not COVID-19, in Ontario LTC homes, military report finds: ‘All they needed was water and a wipe down’.]

Figure 7. Age and gender distribution of COVID-19 cases in Canada as of February 4, 2022, 8 am EST (n=33,717)

Figure 7. Age and gender distribution of COVID-19 cases in Canada as of February 4, 2022, 8 am EST (n=33,717)

 

This must be considered a small percentage of the actual injuries (both serious and “non-serious) due to the complicated/difficult task of filing reports and the actual number of reports being accepted or rejected. As this process if difficult and time consuming, one must contemplate if the “non-serious” category itself, is the minimizing of serious events. Here it must be noted that in 2017 the Canadian Government quietly announced that the funding of Health Canada by the pharmaceutical industry would increase to 90%. The fox is not only guarding the hen house, the fox owns the hen house.

According to the Canadian Government website, “an event is considered serious if it:

  • –results in death
  • –is life-threatening (an event/reaction in which the patient was at real, rather than hypothetical, risk of death at the time of the event/reaction)
  • –requires in-patient hospitalization or prolongation of existing hospitalization
  • –results in persistent or significant disability/incapacity, or
  • –results in a congenital anomaly/birth defect”

 

For children and people in their twenties and thirties, COVID-19 poses less risk of mortality than the flu. This has been understood and undisputed since the early days of the said pandemic. No, the “benefits” do not outweigh the risks.

“Under NO circumstances, under ANY circumstances should a young person EVER receive one of these vaccines. Let alone ever be pressured to receive a vaccine.”

 

Dr. Peter McCullough, renowned cardiologist and epidemiologist

 

“The denial of natural immunity after Covid disease is the worst unscientific folly in the past 75 years. How will universities and hospitals recover public trust after that? ”

 

Martin Kulldorff, epidemiologist, former Harvard Professor of Medicine

 

“I’m outraged by the fact, that we want to vaccinate children.”

 

Dr. Luc Montagnier, Nobel Prize-winning virologist

On January 17, 2022, Toronto resident Dan Hartman gave testimony to the Toronto Board of Health (meeting 33). Hartman shared what had happened to his son. After more than a year of lockdowns and restrictions, Sean Hartman, 17 years of age, took the Pfizer injection in order to play hockey. Sean died shortly after. The meeting was chaired by Joe Cressey, a Toronto City Councillor (representing Ward 10 Spadina—Fort York), who expressed his condolences. In an outrageous and cruel act of censorship, Dan Hartman’s testimony was edited out of the recorded meeting (a public document). The Twitter account @Answers4Sean, created by the grieving father looking for both answers and support, quickly vanished from Twitter.

Accounts of injuries and deaths slowly break through the walls of censorship in Canada and beyond. In Texas, Ernest Ramirez’s son, Ernest Ramirez Jr., was only 16 years old when he died, five days after receiving the Pfizer injection. [Testimony of Ernest Ramirez, whose son died of myocarditis following Pfizer vaccination.] In Argentina, Miriam Suárez’s 3-year old daughter Ámbar was injected on December 15, 2021. The toddler died one day later from sudden cardiac arrest. Like so many others, the mother was coerced. Ámbar would not have been allowed to go attend kindergarten without the injection due to a vaccine mandate.

Who will bear responsibility for serious injuries and deaths of healthy children who were never at risk? Members of Parliament that serve capital at the expense of people? Doctors in the pocket of the system? Trudeau in the pocket of the World Economic Forum? A secretariat slash think tank that represents the 100 most powerful corporations on the planet – including Pfizer and the pharmaceutical industry?  The media owned/controlled  by the same entities? Pfizer, in control of Health Canada?

Never have we witnessed such blatant disregard for the emotional and physical well-being of children. The abuse of children re-wrapped in a political veneer of wokeness. We will never be forgiven by them, nor should we.

The injections, proven to be a spectacular failure, continue to be pushed, defended and celebrated. The collective psychological damage is unprecedented. We find ourselves adrift, in a sea of mass mental illness.

 

“Children are the only beings to whom we must accord privileges– they are the flowers of our life and it is for them that we make all the sacrifices so that they should live happily.”

 

— Amílcar Cabral, PAIGC

 

Sources:

COVID-19 daily epidemiology update:

https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/epidemiological-summary-covid-19-cases.html

Reported side effects following COVID-19 vaccination in Canada:

https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/vaccine-safety/

End Notes:

[1]

How the Left betrayed the Truckers

The convoy is despised by those who should support it

Unherd

February 9, 2022

By Malcom Kyeyune

 

A protester walks in front of parked trucks as demonstrators continue to protest the vaccine mandates implemented by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on February 8, 2022 in Ottawa, Canada. (Photo by Dave Chan / AFP) (Photo by DAVE CHAN/AFP via Getty Images)

They call it “The Honkening”. Ottawa, Canada’s capital city, is currently being besieged by a novel kind of protest. Honkening is a fairly appropriate name for what’s going on. Thousands of truckers have driven to the capital, and barraged the city with the noise of truck horns creating a cacophony of sound. Elsewhere, on the border between the United States and Canada, truckers, farmers and cowboys have blockaded traffic.

As the protests enter another week, Ottawa’s mayor has declared a state of emergency. Jim Watson described the truckers — ostensibly protesting against Canada’s harsh Covid mandates — as “out of control”. Watson sees anarchy; the truckers fulminate against Covid authoritarianism. But this battle is really about working-class discontent.

The naive among us could be forgiven for thinking that this protest signalled something auspicious about “late capitalist” society. For decades, the common folk wisdom for both the Left and the Right was that the West’s working classes had been completely neutralised as a political force, and that class conflict itself was a relic of the past.

This idea took hold in the Sixties, when Herbert Marcuse theorised that Western workers had been subjected to a “socially engineered arrest of consciousness”. Their vested interest in the existing capitalist order made them impossible to radicalise. Ever since, finding new theoretical models to explain the unreliability (and stodgy conservatism) of workers has been a recurring activity on parts of the Left. Marxists had made a horrific discovery: the working class were not their foot soldiers. As Joan Didion once put it: “The have-nots, it turned out, mainly aspired to having.”

OTTAWA, CANADA, FEBRUARY 3: Truckers continue their rally against coronavirus (COVID-19) measures and vaccine mandate in Ottawa, Canada on February 3, 2022. (Photo by Amru Salahuddien/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

 

Many on the Left came to believe that without their corporatist union structures, and without their shop stewards and political organisers, the working classes were done for. They were little better, to paraphrase Marx, than a “sack of potatoes”.

Without proper leadership, the workers would be too inert and stupid to do anything about their plight. As such, the decades after the fall of the Soviet Union (and the defeat of the strike waves of the Eighties) saw many Leftists indulge a wistful nostalgia for a time when the workers stuck it to the powers that be. Celebration of the good old days of the Left, and of “working-class power” in general, was thus central to the aesthetics of the now completely defunct wave of Left populism in the 2010s.

With that backdrop in mind, the explosion of worker militancy over vaccine mandates — and, on a related note, high fuel taxes in Europe — ought to have been greeted by enthusiasm by the Leftist activist and organiser set. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. The truckers in Canada have instead triggered a primordial sense of dread in the hearts of the urban classes, in the people who Canadian trucker Gord Magill has dubbed “the email job caste”.

 

This sense of fear and dread at the machinations of the proles is hardly something unique to Canada. Indeed, even the United States saw a large increase of worker militancy and wildcat strikes over oppressive vaccine mandates. Like their compatriots in Canada, America’s various professional friends of the working class responded with horror and scorn. The well-known Marxist economist, Richard Wolff, was mobbed on Twitter for suggesting that workers striking over mandates were actually part of something called “class struggle”, rather than merely an expression of “fascism”.

Ottawa’s truckers are a symptom of the massive class divide that is opening up across the West. Marxists are sticking their heads in the sand about this generational moment, or papering it over with absurd topsy-turvy leaps. In one recent display of moon logic, the Canadian activist, writer and self-described socialist Nora Loreto complained that “labour” was invisible in the resistance to the “fascist” truckers that had occupied Ottawa. An exasperated comrade chimed in with a story of being a shop steward for a teamster (truck driver) union, and — horror of horrors — the painful truth was that many teamsters were more likely to be in the protest themselves than protesting against it.

The exchange is modern Western Leftism in a nutshell. Is there a single better illustration of the contradictions of the moment? An “activist” and organiser” recoiling in horror at a bunch of truckers — people who work in the real, material economy, ferrying the foodstuffs and goods we all depend on to survive — staging a political protest, only to then ask “but where is the organised working class in all of this?”. Isn’t it obvious to the point of parody that the workers are the people inside the trucks?

It’s easy to laugh at this sort of absurdity, but the lesson here is anything but a joke. The divorce between “the Left” and “the workers” is now complete and irrevocable. Nora Loreto may not be a person with calloused hands, and she may very well belong to Gord Magill’s “email jobs caste”. But for the longest time, the political rhetoric and worldview of the Left depended on the idea that the trucker and the activist were merely two sides of the same coin.

Without the activist and the “organiser”, the trucker would never be able to know how to organise himself and his fellows politically; without the trucker, the activist and the organiser would not have a cause for which to organise. Now it seems that the trucker — and by extension, the pilot, the garbage collector, and the bus driver — does not need or want this caste of self-appointed leaders.

Paul Aubue: ‘This whole thing has been going on for two years and it seems everyday there’s something more. We don’t need a vaccine passport.’ Photograph: Amru Salahuddien/The Guardian

This divorce has happened all over the world in recent years. After the massive rejection by Red Wall voters of Jeremy Corbyn and his activist base in the smart, urban, and highly credentialed parts of Britain, one started to see a rhetoric of open loathing for the dumb, uneducated gammons and proles. In Germany, the Left party Die Linke has endured several rounds of severe internal fighting and strife. As in the UK, the younger, more urban, more credentialed parts of the Left have fought a running battle — and thrown pies — against pro-worker “racists” such as Sahra Wagenknecht.

In Canada, that loathing has now turned into fear — and into outright hatred. The problem of the truckers is not really the honking (which the Guardian sniffily calls “crude behaviour“), because sooner or later, that honking will stop. The state of emergency will end. But the protests, significantly, have shown how confused and weak the opponents of the working classes are today.

During the pandemic lockdowns, the email jobs caste loved to talk about essential workers, and luxuriated in public displays of gratitude for them. But this caste of genteel urbanites never realised that this choice of nomenclature was in fact much more meaningful — and ominous – than they understood. Some people, it seems, simply are critical to the functioning of the economy, pandemic or no pandemic. Once those people — and truck drivers are perhaps the most critical of them all — start to demand to be listened to, they have ways to make those demands felt.

For the Left, the problem of the truckers is their newfound political independence. Nostalgia really is a thing of the past now; the dinosaurs that were thought long extinct are back now, and they are hungry. Gone are the halcyon days of dreaming about halcyon days – where serious working class militancy was just a distant myth.

The real danger of any trucker’s strike, or any pilot’s walkout, or any fuel tax protest in Europe, is that every new confrontation sets a precedent: a precedent that says that the Gord Magills are done taking orders from the Nora Letos of the world.

 

[Malcom Kyeyune is a freelance writer living in Uppsala, Sweden]

Now is the Time for Mass Resignations from Within the Ruling Class

Now is the Time for Mass Resignations from Within the Ruling Class

Brownstone Institute

January 30, 2022

By Jeffrey A Tucker

WKOG: Fueled by working class rather than foundation money – the growing global resistance is distinct/free from chains of non-profit industrial complex. Scores of those that attempt to undermine the resistance are tied into this very complex – willing instruments of their own oppression. To be fair, many confined within this complex are not willing instruments, rather they are oblivious to the invisible hand that feeds, that colonizes the mind and spirit. Mass resistance outside the control of the non-profit industrial complex is a true fear of the ruling class. No war but class war.

If there is a historical precedent for the truckers’ revolt in Canada, and the populist protests in so many other parts of the world, I would like to know what it is. It surely sets the record for convoy size, and it is historic for Canada. But there is much more going on here, something more fundamental. The two-year imposition of bio-fascist rule by diktat seems ever less tenable – the consent of the governed is being withdrawn – but what comes next seems unclear.

We now have two of the most restrictive “leaders” in the developed world (Justin Trudeau of Canada and Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand) hiding in undisclosed locations, citing the need to quarantine following Covid exposure. Streets globally have filled up with people demanding an end to mandates and lockdowns, calling for accountability, pushing for resignations, denouncing privileged corporations, and crying out for a recognition of basic freedoms and rights.

Note too that these movements are spontaneous and from “below:” they are populated mostly by the very workers whom governments shoved to face the pathogen two years ago, while the ruling class hid behind their laptops in their living rooms. It was the lockdowns that sharply divided the classes and the mandates that are imposing segregation. Now we are facing a modern allegory to the peasants’ revolt in the Middle Ages.

For a long time, the workers complied bravely but have been forced to accept medical shots they neither wanted nor believed they needed. And many are still being denied freedoms they took for granted only two years ago, their schools non-operational, businesses wrecked, places of entertainment closed or severely restricted. People turn on the radios and televisions to listen to lectures by ruling-class elites who claim to be channeling the science that always ends in the same theme: the rulers are in charge and everyone else must comply, no matter what is asked of them.

But then it became screamingly obvious to the world that none of it worked. It was a gigantic flop and the sky-high cases of late 2021 in most parts of the world put a fine point on it. They failed. It was all for naught. This clearly cannot continue. Something has to give. Something has to change, and this change probably will not wait for the next scheduled elections. What happens in the meantime? Where is this going?

We’ve seen what revolutions look like against monarchies (18th and 19th century), against colonial occupation, against totalitarian one-party states (1989-90), and against banana-republic strongmen (20th century). But what does revolution look like in developed democracies ruled by entrenched administrative states in which elected politicians serve as little more than veneer for bureaucracies?

Since John Locke, it is an accepted idea that people have the right to rule themselves and even to replace governments that go too far in denying that right. In theory, the problem of government overreach in democracy is solved by elections. The argument made for such a system is that it allows for peaceful change of a ruling elite, and this is far less socially costly than war and revolution.

There are many problems with matching theory and reality, among which that the people with the real power in the 21st century are not the people we elect but those who have gained their privileges through bureaucratic maneuvering and longevity.

There are many strange features of the last two years but one of them that stands out to me is how utterly undemocratic the trajectory of events has been. When they locked us down, for example, it was the decision of elected autocrats as advised by credentialled experts that were somehow sure that this path would make the virus go away (or something like that). When they imposed vaccination mandates, it was because they were sure that this was the right path for public health.

There were no polls. There was little if any input from legislatures at any level. Even from the first lockdowns in the US, occurring March 8, 2020 in Austin, Texas, there was no consultation with the city council. Neither were citizens asked. The wishes of the small business people were not solicited. The state legislature was left out entirely.

It was as if everyone suddenly presumed that the whole country would operate on an administrative/dictatorship model, and that the guidelines of health bureaucracies (with plans for lockdowns that hardly anyone even knew existed) trumped all tradition, constitutions, restrictions on state power, and public opinion generally. We all became their servants. This happened all over the world.

It suddenly became obvious to many people in the world that the systems of government we thought we had – responsive to the public, deferential to rights, controlled by courts – were no longer in place. There seemed to be a substructure that was hiding in plain sight until it suddenly took full control, to the cheers of the media and the presumption that this is just the way things are supposed to be.

 

Klaus Schwab, Founder, World Economic Forum: “What we are really proud of now, [is] the young generation. Like Prime Minister Trudeau, the President of Argentina, and so on. So we penetrate the cabinets. So yesterday, I was at a reception for Prime Minister Trudeau. And I know that half of this cabinet, or even more than half of this cabinet, are actually [World Economic Forum] Young Global Leaders of the world.”

Years ago, I was hanging out in the building of a federal agency when there was a change of guard: a new administration appointed a new person to head it. The only change that the bureaucrats noticed was new portraits on the wall. Most of these people pride themselves in failing to notice. They know who is in charge and it is not the people we imagine to elect. They are there for life, and face none of the public scrutiny much less accountability that the politicians face daily.

Lockdowns and mandates gave them full power, not only over the one or two sectors they previously ruled but the whole of society and all of its functioning. They even controlled how many people we could have in our homes, whether our businesses could be open, whether we could worship with others, and dictate what precisely we are supposed to do with our own bodies.

 

Whatever happened to limits on power? The people who put together the systems of government in the 18th century that led to the most prosperous societies in the history of the world knew that restricting government was the key to a stable social order and growing economy. They gave us Constitutions and the lists of rights and the courts enforced them.

But at some point in history, the ruling class figured out certain workarounds to these restrictions. The administrative state with permanent bureaucrats could achieve things that legislatures could not, so they were gradually unleashed under various pretexts (war, depression, terror threats, pandemics). Moreover, governments gradually learned to outsource their hegemonic ambitions to the biggest businesses in the private sector, who themselves benefit from increasing the costs of compliance.

The circle has been completed by enlisting Big Media into the mix of control via access to the class of rulers, to receive and broadcast out the line of the day, and hurl insults at any dissidents within the population (“fringe,” etc.). This has created what we see in the 21st century: a toxic combination of Big Tech, Big Government, Big Media, all backed by various other industrial interests who benefit more from systems of control than they would from a free and competitive economy. Further, this cabal leveled a radical attack on civil society itself, closing churches, concerts, and civic groups.

We’ve been assured by David Hume (1711-1776) and Etienne de la Boétie (1530-1563) that government rule is untenable when it loses the consent of the governed. “Resolve to serve no more,” wrote Boetie, “and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall off his own weight and break into pieces.”

 

That’s inspiring but what does it mean in practice? What precisely is the mechanism by which the overlords in our time are effectively overthrown? We’ve seen this in totalitarian states, in states with one-man rule, in states with unelected monarchies. But unless I’m missing something, we’ve not seen this in a developed democracy with an administrative state that holds the real power. We have scheduled elections but those are unhelpful when 1) elected leaders are not the real source of power, and 2) when the elections are too far in the distant future to deal with a present emergency.

One very easy and obvious path away from the current crisis is for the ruling class to admit error, repeal the mandates, and simply allow for common freedoms and rights for everyone. As easy as that sounds, this solution hits a hard wall when faced with ruling-class arrogance, trepidation, and the unwillingness to admit past errors for fear of what that will mean for their political legacies. For this reason, absolutely no one expects the likes of Trudeau, Ardern, or Biden to humbly apologize, admit that they were wrong, and beg the people’s forgiveness. On the contrary, everyone expects them to continue the game of pretend so long as they can get away with it.

The people on the streets today, and those willing to tell pollsters that they are fed up, are saying: no more. What does it mean for the ruling class not to get away with this nonsense anymore? Presuming that they do not resign, they do not call off the dogs of mandates and lockdowns, what is the next step? My instincts tell me that we are about to discover the answer. Electoral realignment seems inevitable but what happens before then?

The obvious answer to the current instability is mass resignations within the administrative state, among the class of politicians that gives it cover, as well as heads of media organs that have propagandized for them. In the name of peace, human rights, and the renewal of prosperity and trust, this needs to happen today. Bury the pride and do what’s right. Do it now while there is still time for the revolution to be velvet.

[Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown. He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture. tucker@brownstone.org]

This Reconciliation is for the Colonizer

Indigenous Motherhood

June 13, 2017

By Andrea Landry

 

“Indigenous based child-rearing in today’s generation resides in watching the restoration of unfaltering kinship in our Indigenous family systems unfold and allowing that to reside in the raising of our children with the knowing of who they are, and where they come from, wildly and unapologetically.”

 

Artwork by: Votan Henriquez 

 

This reconciliation is for the colonizer.

This settler-colonial reconciliation branded by the government is artificially sweetened with handshake photo-ops and small pockets of money buying out silence on real issues.

The fad and conversation of reconciliation that our people are playing a role in is immobilizing “leadership” and converting indigenous peoples into colonially operated marionettes.

This type of reconciliation is a distraction.

Instead of being idle no more, we are “reconciling some more” with present day Indian act agents whose hands are choking out our voices for land, water, and our children’s minds.

This type of reconciliation is for the ones who want to be “friends” with the Indians for land commodification reasoning, for the ones who whisper the words “im sorry” as they watched the priests and nuns rape our children, for the ones who shut their eyes and turned away when genocide was bleeding into their forts, for the ones who defy Treaty daily- without remorse, and it’s for the ones who beat you, apologize, and beat your daughter and their daughters in the coming years.

This type of reconciliation is for the professors at universities who are pro-Trudeau and believe “decolonizing” universities looks like mandatory Indigenous studies classes yet those very same professors still belittle, marginalize, and see themselves better than, smarter than, and superior to every indigenous student in their classes, shaming them for their brown skin and indigenous minds.

This type of reconciliation is for the professionals in work-spaces who want to aid in repairing the settler-Indigenous relationship in their work places but when an Indigenous women brings her children into that space because her sitter didn’t show up that morning, the mother will be told that her children need to leave because they’re laughter doesn’t line up with colonial workplace standards.

This type of reconciliation helps elderly white woman carry their groceries to their vehicle, but later follows a single indigenous woman with 3 children in the store, aisle after aisle, under the suspicion that she will shoplift.

This type of reconciliation will have dollars for moccasin making and small “cultural” events, but those accounts will be “out of money” the moment those events begin to engage in conversations and action around indigenous liberation, sovereignty, and nationhood.

This type of reconciliation sponsors powwows through companies like Potash and Shell, hoping the 1000 first place special will buy out a few hundred acres of indigenous land more easily.

This type of reconciliation claims residential schools are over but maintains a superior and oppressive power dynamic between settler adults and indigenous children at its own convenience.

This type of reconciliation declares “no foul play” to the bodies of young indigenous youth found in the riverbanks in this country’s most racist cities but later claims they celebrate the lives of indigenous peoples.

This type of reconciliation organizes a national inquiry for missing and murdered indigenous women but neglects to do any actual work by configuring the timeframe to benefit the colonizer and showing that bringing justice to murdered indigenous women is something that can go on summer vacation.

This type of reconciliation invents a “new nation to nation relationship” and teaches our people that the only way we can access our treaty rights is if we have a status card, completely negating from the truth that we, as indigenous peoples, do not need a new “nation to nation relationship,” as ours is with the crown “as long as the sun shines, grass grows, and water flows,” and those status cards have nothing to do with our treaty rights.

This type of reconciliation was born by the colonizer’s TRC and will die on the very same shelves as those documents in the halls and walls of colonial buildings. For their benefit.

This type of reconciliation claims they are not racist but makes degrading comments about the braids on your sons and the skin of your daughters in public spaces.

This type of reconciliation will say it wants to bring justice to our women but is raping the very land our mothers were birthed on for generations.

This type of reconciliation will say there are no funds for following through with Jordan’s principle, none for the lack of clean drinking water in communities, zero for decreasing the price of food in northern communities, and nothing for the mouldy housing and schools that indigenous children must learn in everyday, but will spend half a billion dollars on Canada 150 – a birthday party founded and based upon genocide.

This type of reconciliation claims to “love” indigenous peoples but expects your indigenous child to sing “oh Canada” in their classroom every morning, standing up.

This type of reconciliation is “making space” for indigenous peoples in writing and editorials but later compiles money together to create an appropriation prize.

This type of reconciliation is “putting an end” to indigenous young people killing themselves but only provides enough money for communities to bring in guest speakers and concerts rather than full time therapists equipped with all the tools needed to aid young people in full-blown crisis.

This type of reconciliation “seeks” to decrease the numbers of indigenous peoples in the criminal justice system but will place a young indigenous male in solitary confinement for 4 years for no real reason other than being an Indian in “Canada.”

This type of reconciliation wants to build better relationships with indigenous peoples but is building better ways to commit treason, genocide, colonization, and prejudice with nice hair and a smile of lies.

This reconciliation is for the colonizers.

This is a time of pseudo-reconciliation for continued colonization.

This reconciliation is colonization, disguised with dollar signs and white-skinned handshakes.

This reconciliation is not our reconciliation.

Because.

The only reconciliation that exists for us, as Indigenous nations, is the reconciliation we need to find within ourselves and our communities, for agreeing and complying to this madness for so long.

The only reconciliation that exists for us, is the reconciliation needed to forgive our families, our loved ones, for acting like the colonizer.

The only reconciliation we need. Is a reconciliation that doesn’t involve white skinned handshakes and five dollar handouts for our lands.

The only reconciliation we need is indigenous reconciliation. Free of money. Handshakes. Photo-ops. Inquiries with summer vacations. The continued rape of our women, our girls, our lands, and our babies. Highway of tears and roadways of fears. The continued murder of our women, our girls, our lands, and our babies. Free of shaming our boys out for being indigenous boys with indigenous hair. Free of shaming our girls for being indigenous girls with indigenous skin. Free of support for the colonizer’s version of indigenous “culture,” yet no support money for liberation. Free of supremacy. Trickery. Fake it til you make it syndrome. Indian agents. Sir John A Macdonald governments disguised as Trudeau. Colonial chiefs. Free of the continued manipulation, colonization, degradation, and humiliation of Indigenous people. Free of colonially written documents claiming to “save” us, viewing us always, as victims. Free of the lyrics of Oh Canada for breakfast for our children.

Instead of us living in times of reconciliation, we are living in times of recolonization.

And it will only happen if we allow it.

This reconciliation is for the colonizer. And we need to leave this conversation.

We need to reconcile with ourselves. With our families. With our nations.

For our babies.

Because I want our children to to learn about our own liberation, rather than the colonizer’s reconciliation.

And I want our children to know that
Indigenous liberation will always overthrow colonial reconciliation.

Because having our homelands is more important to me than a photo-op and handshake with government officials named Trudeau.

 

[Andrea Landry is Anishinaabe from Pawgwasheeng (Pays Plat First Nation) but currently resides on Treaty Six territory in Poundmaker Cree Nation. She holds a Masters in Communications and Social Justice from the University of Windsor. Full bio.]

WATCH: Biomass – an Ecological Facade | A Massive Threat to the World’s Forests

WKOG disclaimer: Keep in mind while watching this film that while Dogwood Alliance may publicly denounce Enviva’s biomass (the burning of trees) practices, Dogwood Alliance has partnered with Coca-Cola along with other corporations and NGOs to create the Carbon Canopy Group – a coalition “that seeks to leverage markets for ecosystem services” [Source] and “offset” pollution via carbon credits. More false solutions. In fact, one could easily argue that biomass stands to cut into future profits to be made by the expanding commodification and privatization of trees/nature by Dogwood Alliance, Coca-Cola, Staples et al. (You can read more about this is the upcoming segment of the ongoing Divestment series.)