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Some time ago, an artist was offering a free, online workshop about native plants. I signed up, of course. And when it came to actually attending it, I dearly wish I'd made a reaction video of the whole thing. My face surely went through the gamut of expressions.
Since the workshop was being sponsored by some formal institution or another, a representative opened with a land acknowledgment. The mangled pronunciation of the various First Nations peoples made me cringe. I thought to myself, "Well, at least they're making an effort," and suffered through it. I waited for the part of the land acknowledgment where they say what their organization is doing to honour the treaties and to reconcile with Indigenous peoples, but that part didn't come. It rarely does.
The artist then began their workshop, saying they were new to the area, and had read up a bit on the region's history. They discussed how the particular area was important to people here when the settlers arrived, and how it is important to people here now in a "post-colonial" period.
My brain made a screeching sound. Wait. What? We aren't in a post-colonial period. We are in a straight-up colonial period. The colonizers are still busy colonizing.
Nevertheless, they persisted, repeatedly referencing current times as post-colonial. They talked about how everything was basically just a wilderness before and how the Europeans brought agriculture. They then discussed why they had chosen native plants as a subject: the aesthetic appeal. They then announced with a weird sort of glee that not all the plants were just weeds, because some of them actually have uses as food or medicine. They said that no one really knows this sort of stuff. They said their idea was to make a community project where everyone can come in and do a drawing of one of these overlooked and potentially useful plants, and that maybe everyone could come to see that some are pretty and might deserve a place in nature and a bunch of cockamamie nonsense which takes no understanding of ecology into account and what the fuck my brain was just melting at this point. So I logged off.
This is what casual, everyday, inadvertent racism from nice white people looks like. There was absolutely no consideration of the people who lived here before European contact. There was no mention of how folks were already living in the region (aside from the land acknowledgment), or how those people were incredible gardeners with excellent knowledge of companion planting and permaculture. There was no mention of how those first Europeans were doing so poorly in the region that the First Nations people taught them what foods to eat and what medicines to take out of empathy. There was no mention of how there are still people with that traditional knowledge about native plants. There was no mention of how many of these "weeds" were and still are specifically cultivated for food and medicine. There was no mention of the First Nations people who still live in the region. There was no mention.
A land acknowledgment is not a set of magic words which automagically squares everything up with First Nations, Inuit, or Métis. To me, almost all land acknowledgments come across as "this stuff isn't ours, but thanks for letting us steal the lion's share."
And then there's one of the courses I'm in, now. There was a session held during the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. The class wasn't postponed until the next week, but American Thanksgiving, a holiday steeped in genocide, is going to be a day off. I can't help but note this. I try not to feel bitter, but I am. At least I get more time to work on my project.
Since Ontario decided not to make the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation a statutory holiday, the bankers and the politicians got the day off, but Indigenous people did not. Although there was an excellent turn-out for the march and the speeches, I know a lot of people who could not afford to take the cut in pay to offer their respects to survivors of genocide and their families. Meanwhile, glorious leader Justin Trudeau went on a fancy resort holiday in Tofino, skipping out on all the tricksy reconciliation bits. I guess he figured he'd already done his bit by staging a photo-op on the graves of dead children earlier in the year.
One of the reasons I left FaceBook was because of the waves of toxicity drowning me. Not only was I seeing hate speech in the comments sections of CBC/CTV/etc. posts, but I was being attacked by people who I thought were my friends. Some frequently questioned my motives for speaking out against racism. One of them, a friend for almost fifteen years, would regularly imply I was being hyperbolic about racism in Canada, that it wasn't nearly as bad here as it is in the US. But it's all the same struggle. All the while, cops continue to assault or murder people in my community. Abuses are happening all over the world to Indigenous peoples. In Canada, racist nurses killed Joyce Echaquan on a livestream. An Elder contacted me in desperation last year because the OPP had opened fire on women in Six Nations. All this time, I was being gaslit by non-Indigenous people.
This guy unfriended me in a fit of pique, but in a last vicious dig, accused me of being gullible, "woker-than-thou", and maybe even a pretendian. He eased up a little on that last one by saying that he looked into me and I seem to be legit.
I don't think I have the words for how violated that made me feel. That some white dude, who I thought was my friend, decided to research whether or not I'm actually worthy of being anti-racist. That he implied I'm a fake. That I'm only pretending to be Inuk because it makes me one of the cool kids.
The only people who have a right to tell me if I'm Inuk or not are Inuit.
I know people who are out on the land, defending land and people and water from acts of war. I do not use the word "war" lightly. The cops being sent in to fix the "Indian problem" come with assault rifles and armoured vehicles and attack dogs. Resource depletion companies are pay-rolling the RCMP. While dead children are being exhumed from unmarked graves, pipelines are buried in their place. RCMP used to kidnap all the children to take them to concentration camps where they were starved and horrifically abused, and more likely to die than a WWI soldier. Now the RCMP are all soldiered-up and attacking Land Defenders. At Fairy Creek, they especially like targeting Indigenous women and trans folks, using sexual violence and pepper spray to make them comply. A couple of days ago, they ran down an Elder at a crosswalk, leaving him lying there and saying that since it wasn't caught on video, it never happened.
A couple of days ago in Wet'suwet'en, they grabbed Logan Staats by his braids, slammed him face-first into the ground, punched him in the ear, and kneed him in the spine. He was hugging a 70-year-old Matriarch at the time, an Elder who'd been denied her heart medication for days by heartless cops. The folks in that community were cut off from the outside world. The RCMP wouldn't even allow their medication to be brought in. Their power, radio, and internet were shut off. They were in their houses, and cops broke their way in with chainsaws and axes. It's right out of a goddamned slasher movie. How would you react to having your house broken into by an ax- or chainsaw-wielding cop?
Many of these stories aren't making it into the news, and this is by design. Journalists are being jailed. Indigenous peoples are under attack. Prepubescent girls are taken from their families, fitted with IUDs, and put into foster care where it is known they will be raped. This is happening. This is the reality in Canada. We are not safe here. We cannot be safe unless we protect one another. I am so grateful for the Land Defenders. They give me hope.
There's a solidarity march tomorrow in uptown Waterloo. I plan on being there. We need to let the people know that we are not going to quietly vanish beneath waves of greed and hate and racism. We are still here, and we're finding peaceable ways of fighting back.
Since the workshop was being sponsored by some formal institution or another, a representative opened with a land acknowledgment. The mangled pronunciation of the various First Nations peoples made me cringe. I thought to myself, "Well, at least they're making an effort," and suffered through it. I waited for the part of the land acknowledgment where they say what their organization is doing to honour the treaties and to reconcile with Indigenous peoples, but that part didn't come. It rarely does.
The artist then began their workshop, saying they were new to the area, and had read up a bit on the region's history. They discussed how the particular area was important to people here when the settlers arrived, and how it is important to people here now in a "post-colonial" period.
My brain made a screeching sound. Wait. What? We aren't in a post-colonial period. We are in a straight-up colonial period. The colonizers are still busy colonizing.
Nevertheless, they persisted, repeatedly referencing current times as post-colonial. They talked about how everything was basically just a wilderness before and how the Europeans brought agriculture. They then discussed why they had chosen native plants as a subject: the aesthetic appeal. They then announced with a weird sort of glee that not all the plants were just weeds, because some of them actually have uses as food or medicine. They said that no one really knows this sort of stuff. They said their idea was to make a community project where everyone can come in and do a drawing of one of these overlooked and potentially useful plants, and that maybe everyone could come to see that some are pretty and might deserve a place in nature and a bunch of cockamamie nonsense which takes no understanding of ecology into account and what the fuck my brain was just melting at this point. So I logged off.
This is what casual, everyday, inadvertent racism from nice white people looks like. There was absolutely no consideration of the people who lived here before European contact. There was no mention of how folks were already living in the region (aside from the land acknowledgment), or how those people were incredible gardeners with excellent knowledge of companion planting and permaculture. There was no mention of how those first Europeans were doing so poorly in the region that the First Nations people taught them what foods to eat and what medicines to take out of empathy. There was no mention of how there are still people with that traditional knowledge about native plants. There was no mention of how many of these "weeds" were and still are specifically cultivated for food and medicine. There was no mention of the First Nations people who still live in the region. There was no mention.
A land acknowledgment is not a set of magic words which automagically squares everything up with First Nations, Inuit, or Métis. To me, almost all land acknowledgments come across as "this stuff isn't ours, but thanks for letting us steal the lion's share."
And then there's one of the courses I'm in, now. There was a session held during the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. The class wasn't postponed until the next week, but American Thanksgiving, a holiday steeped in genocide, is going to be a day off. I can't help but note this. I try not to feel bitter, but I am. At least I get more time to work on my project.
Since Ontario decided not to make the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation a statutory holiday, the bankers and the politicians got the day off, but Indigenous people did not. Although there was an excellent turn-out for the march and the speeches, I know a lot of people who could not afford to take the cut in pay to offer their respects to survivors of genocide and their families. Meanwhile, glorious leader Justin Trudeau went on a fancy resort holiday in Tofino, skipping out on all the tricksy reconciliation bits. I guess he figured he'd already done his bit by staging a photo-op on the graves of dead children earlier in the year.
One of the reasons I left FaceBook was because of the waves of toxicity drowning me. Not only was I seeing hate speech in the comments sections of CBC/CTV/etc. posts, but I was being attacked by people who I thought were my friends. Some frequently questioned my motives for speaking out against racism. One of them, a friend for almost fifteen years, would regularly imply I was being hyperbolic about racism in Canada, that it wasn't nearly as bad here as it is in the US. But it's all the same struggle. All the while, cops continue to assault or murder people in my community. Abuses are happening all over the world to Indigenous peoples. In Canada, racist nurses killed Joyce Echaquan on a livestream. An Elder contacted me in desperation last year because the OPP had opened fire on women in Six Nations. All this time, I was being gaslit by non-Indigenous people.
This guy unfriended me in a fit of pique, but in a last vicious dig, accused me of being gullible, "woker-than-thou", and maybe even a pretendian. He eased up a little on that last one by saying that he looked into me and I seem to be legit.
I don't think I have the words for how violated that made me feel. That some white dude, who I thought was my friend, decided to research whether or not I'm actually worthy of being anti-racist. That he implied I'm a fake. That I'm only pretending to be Inuk because it makes me one of the cool kids.
The only people who have a right to tell me if I'm Inuk or not are Inuit.
I know people who are out on the land, defending land and people and water from acts of war. I do not use the word "war" lightly. The cops being sent in to fix the "Indian problem" come with assault rifles and armoured vehicles and attack dogs. Resource depletion companies are pay-rolling the RCMP. While dead children are being exhumed from unmarked graves, pipelines are buried in their place. RCMP used to kidnap all the children to take them to concentration camps where they were starved and horrifically abused, and more likely to die than a WWI soldier. Now the RCMP are all soldiered-up and attacking Land Defenders. At Fairy Creek, they especially like targeting Indigenous women and trans folks, using sexual violence and pepper spray to make them comply. A couple of days ago, they ran down an Elder at a crosswalk, leaving him lying there and saying that since it wasn't caught on video, it never happened.
A couple of days ago in Wet'suwet'en, they grabbed Logan Staats by his braids, slammed him face-first into the ground, punched him in the ear, and kneed him in the spine. He was hugging a 70-year-old Matriarch at the time, an Elder who'd been denied her heart medication for days by heartless cops. The folks in that community were cut off from the outside world. The RCMP wouldn't even allow their medication to be brought in. Their power, radio, and internet were shut off. They were in their houses, and cops broke their way in with chainsaws and axes. It's right out of a goddamned slasher movie. How would you react to having your house broken into by an ax- or chainsaw-wielding cop?
Many of these stories aren't making it into the news, and this is by design. Journalists are being jailed. Indigenous peoples are under attack. Prepubescent girls are taken from their families, fitted with IUDs, and put into foster care where it is known they will be raped. This is happening. This is the reality in Canada. We are not safe here. We cannot be safe unless we protect one another. I am so grateful for the Land Defenders. They give me hope.
There's a solidarity march tomorrow in uptown Waterloo. I plan on being there. We need to let the people know that we are not going to quietly vanish beneath waves of greed and hate and racism. We are still here, and we're finding peaceable ways of fighting back.
