Canada police begin clearing Wet'suwet'en land defender camps

iamthatis, it is indeed noble of you to highlight this plight. Similarly, yet different, was with Oka back in the Mulroney days whereby a legal territory was protected against the military then, as you may recall. This was close to home back then and then the media drummed up a big tale. Then, error after error compounded by Mayor of Oka, the Quebec police and finally Mulroney was emboldened enough to bring in the tanks, just like Trudeau did in Quebec much earlier. Messy stuff.

Writing about Indian affairs in Canada is difficult enough, and no clear view is possible; such as Nationhood, which is tribal and loosely knit, and territories not yet resolved in law (not that some claims and treaties should not be respected). What's going on here has a different flavor, osit, as this whole country appears to be on the verge of being taken down - divided and divided every which way, while money flows in to key groups while the press (more or less unified and woke as they are) opens up the court of public opinion. Climate people and Native people meshed together opposing what many in the latter group actually want for their people. Their people, and many know it, are trapped in reserves under Federal Act & Policy and some corrupt chiefs, while the Feds are playing the long game, as they always do.

This time around, the climate people have their boots in this mess and are doing what they are doing here, in Canada (BC and elsewhere) just as they are doing all over the world to disrupt. There are so many on this climate express that its inevitable wreck, if it is allowed to stay on its tracks, cannot be fathomed - it will hurt everyone baddy, notwithstanding natives, and many natives are well aware, and some not or, they are thinking they will emerge unscathed.

Anyway, it's complicated as always and is being played out in so many directions that are geared to either pull at heart strings, save the world or inflame anger.

Fwiw, here is 'John Ivison: Canada is turning into a mob city while Trudeau remains silent'

John Ivison: Canada is turning into a mob city while Trudeau remains silent

From Ivison's story

"“From their point of view, I’m not sure that Canadian law matters,” said Newman. “One of the challenging things (the Wet’suwet’en case) is exposing is that there are a lot of protestors who take the view that something other than Canadian law should be determining a lot of issues within Canada.”"


While the story is obviously against this indifferent perspective, I find it telling that the people are fed up with how laws are persistently twisted to serve those with outrageous wealth. IMHO Part of Reconciliation should be respecting the laws, customs & cultures of these various nations. It's very hard for me and others like me to ignore just how corrupt the chiefs and councils are and its very easy to scoff at these laws.

Edit:
I've grown up hearing stories about some of these chiefs from various bands in BC that will make your skin crawl. Pedogate tier tales. Im more than certain many in protest have as well.
 
Apparently this is now the longest rail strike in Canada's history. I can't remember exact figures, but I recall rail transport moves about 30% of Canada's 'stuff'.


And it's been a lifetime since I've watched Democracy Now, but there's an interview up with one of the Wetsuweten spokespeople (Molly Wickham) and the famous Native lawyer Pam Palmater. Haven't watched yet, putting it here to view later.

 
From Ivison's story

"“From their point of view, I’m not sure that Canadian law matters,” said Newman. “One of the challenging things (the Wet’suwet’en case) is exposing is that there are a lot of protestors who take the view that something other than Canadian law should be determining a lot of issues within Canada.”"


While the story is obviously against this indifferent perspective, I find it telling that the people are fed up with how laws are persistently twisted to serve those with outrageous wealth. IMHO Part of Reconciliation should be respecting the laws, customs & cultures of these various nations. It's very hard for me and others like me to ignore just how corrupt the chiefs and councils are and its very easy to scoff at these laws.

Edit:
I've grown up hearing stories about some of these chiefs from various bands in BC that will make your skin crawl. Pedogate tier tales. Im more than certain many in protest have as well.

Yeah, you bring up a good point. Natives are people - just as corruptible as any other people. The 4th Way understanding applies here - "people lie - all the time." Hearing those stories can really break the 'noble savage' myth, which I recall many of us young university students were party to back in the day. The activist scene on the West Coast of BC is rife with surly identity-based programming, coming straight out of the universities. I say this being one who has been through that confusing social minefield, and managed to get out and shake it off. If this moment in Canadian history is going to take off like the Yellow Vests, it hinges on the ability of activists cliques to move beyond their social scenes, open up to a broad networking approach with working people who may have (gasp) different opinions than them. If a 'queer anarcho-punk' can somehow stand beside a 'normal-guy firefighter' and if they manage to get the PTB in their sights (and not fight each other, as the program dictates) - that would be almost unprecedented in Canada.
 
Yeah, you bring up a good point. Natives are people - just as corruptible as any other people.

Yes, and they can be manipulated just as any other people.

You know, looking around just now, realize that there is a lot of back and forth on the subject of elected chiefs vs hereditary chiefs in the media - it's being played up; the former modeling coming out of the Indian Act while that latter posits a long linage (yet not always) in the passage of time discussed by some tribes, yet not all tribes have a hereditary linage. None of this is a measure of mental fitness, and a leader, hereditary of not, can be destructive.

Here is a read from this guy on Indigenous Corporate Training.

However, a fusion of the two, elected vs hereditary is often discussed, yet all this is more complicated given history and territorial claims (and on what basis is the claim and who maketh). Then there is the reliance on Government funding issues of the reserve systems (the yoke that it is), too, and who benefits and who does not. It is further complicated due to the term Nationhood, and if anyone has looked at a map of BC alone, they will see the concentrations of different tribes, and unification is not strong, in fact many don't like each other and some were not 'original' to the areas and they are reminded of this by other tribes.

And to further complicate, a reminder of colonialism is the push back mechanism that carries heavy guilt, much with some merit, yet painted wide due to the lack of understanding, on all sides, of the ponerization processes that caused much of this historical and institutional mess in the first place.

Given time and will, things can be agreed upon and worked out, yet a lot of cleansing needs to take place, and Indians do not need the government backed climate people muddying the waters with their enviro-games. These games, externally funded, are at the heart of the matter currently, with many climate people jumping onboard in Gustave Lebon fashion of joining a crowd that they have not clearly thought out the reasoning for doing so, which is confusing and entropic.

Here is 'Hereditary' chief, Helen Michelle discussing the pipeline while helping to raise her people up with opportunity rather than keep her people down with 300 year old thinking and hate etched on their minds.

This is from APTN News (Helen is on video here also, yet can't embed it).

Note: this was at the end of 2018, so a little over a year ago, yet 5 days ago she
Tweets "“A lot of the protestors are not even #Wetsuweten".

Hereditary chief in B.C. says community needs LNG pipeline
Laurie Hamelin
APTN News


A hereditary chief in British Columbia says people standing in the way of the LNG pipeline need to step aside and let the project get up and running.

I’m just getting tired of hearing about it,” she says. “I’m just waiting for the shovel to get into the ground , let’s get on with our lives,” says Helen Michelle.

Michelle has been a hereditary chief for 43 years.

When the Coastal GasLink pipeline project was proposed in 2012, she says she made sure to participate in the consultation.

Our elders told us that when you have opportunity with good business we are not prejudice,” she said. “If there is opportunity, work with them and this is the first opportunity we have ever had to work with a company, and they worked directly with us.”

The pipeline will run 670 kilometres from Dawson Creek, B.C. to a processing plant in Kitimat on the coast. There, the fractured gas will be liquefied and shipped to Asian markets.

190 kilometres of the pipeline will run through the Wet’suwet’en’s traditional lands.

Michelle grew up fishing and picking berries in the area.

She says she isn’t worried about damage to her territory.

But there are now two camps that have been set up within the territory to stop the pipeline.

In that territory, there are six different First Nations. Michelle is from the Skin Tyee Nation.

She says the pipeline will benefit her people.

“We as a small band are really struggling and we want better education and economic development for our young generation and also we have housing problems,” she says.

Michelle says negotiations with Coastal GasLink have been going on with elders and elected council for years.

She says the deal they signed with the company is good.

“This talk with Coastal GasLink didn’t start yesterday, it’s been years in progress. We supported it,” she says.

“We walked the line where Coastal GasLink was going to go, we were on the ground.”

The pipeline has the backing of elected leadership – but five Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs don’t want the project and say the band council doesn’t have the jurisdiction to give consent.

Michelle doesn’t agree.

Myself and my hereditary chiefs and my elders and our community we worked with our young chief, and we worked with him to make this happen.”

Michelle says if the pipeline doesn’t go through, millions of dollars and many jobs will be lost for the Wet’suwet’en Nation.

At the moment, the gate Unist’ot’en camp on the Morice River Road bridge is still in place despite an interim injunction announced Friday by a B.C. judge. Access past the gate would allow the company to start work on a section of the pipeline.

A new checkpoint was built 20 kilometres down the road by another clan of the Wet’suwet’en Nation that is currently blocking access to the Unist’ot’en camp.
 
Here is 'Hereditary' chief, Helen Michelle discussing the pipeline while helping to raise her people up with opportunity rather than keep her people down with 300 year old thinking and hate etched on their minds.

This is from APTN News (Helen is on video here also, yet can't embed it).

Note: this was at the end of 2018, so a little over a year ago, yet 5 days ago she
Tweets "“A lot of the protestors are not even #Wetsuweten".

It could be that the issue you raise is less complex than the MSM and Premier Horgan would have us believe:


"The Wet’suwet’en are not a nation divided, they are a nation with differing opinions on the best route to a better future after history of oppression. The band councils have sought opportunity, and funding, where they can find it. But based on Wet’suwet’en and Canadian law, it’s ultimately the hereditary chiefs who have jurisdiction to the territory, and they have been clear about their aim—to assert self-governance over their land and demand a nation-to-nation relationship with Canada. It’s a move that would benefit all Wet’suwet’en. Each set of leaders has unique jurisdiction, in the same way that municipal and provincial governments do. The band chiefs, who were imposed by the Indian Act, govern their reserves, while hereditary chiefs predate Canada, and govern the entire Wet’suwet’en territory. It’s worth noting that they are not anti-industry and have long held logging agreements."



The band councils were created to govern the reserves, which for many years (and in many cases today) are essentially open-air prisons. A corollary that comes to mine would be an Israeli-appointed government to make decisions on behalf of Palestinians. With this thought, I'm keeping in mind the reserve system was the model for South African apartheid.
 
Here is a very clear 'explainer' by two lawyers of the First Peoples Law Corporation - if anyone is interested in delving into the depths of it. It directly addresses the hereditary vs band council issue.

"First, the Wet’suwet’en, like many Indigenous groups in Canada, are governed by both a traditional governance system and elected Chiefs and Councils.

The Chief and Council system exists under the Indian Act, a piece of federal legislation. It was introduced by the federal government in the 19th century as part of Canada’s attempts to systematically oppress and displace Indigenous law and governance.

The Wet’suwet’en hereditary governance system predates colonization and continues to exist today. The Wet’suwet’en and Gitxsan Hereditary Chiefs, not the Indian Act Chiefs and Councils, were the plaintiffs in the landmark Delgamuukw-Gisday'way Aboriginal title case. They provided the court with exhaustive and detailed evidence of the Wet’suwet’en and Gitxsan governance system and the legal authority of Hereditary Chiefs.

Unless otherwise authorized by the Indigenous Nation members, the authority of elected Chiefs and Councils is limited to the powers set out under the Indian Act. The Indian Act does not provide authority for a Chief and Council to make decisions about lands beyond the boundaries of the First Nation’s reserves.

By contrast, the Hereditary Chiefs are responsible under Wet’suwet’en law and governance for making decisions relating to their ancestral lands. It is these lands that the Hereditary Chiefs are seeking to protect from the impacts of the pipeline project, not Indian Act reserve lands."

 
A corollary that comes to mine would be an Israeli-appointed government to make decisions on behalf of Palestinians. With this thought, I'm keeping in mind the reserve system was the model for South African apartheid.

Not to wavier on the theme of this thread (which is outside money and climate people stirring the pot, imo), go back a number of years to see when Israel swooned Canadian Chiefs with lovely trips to Israel to see their specialness in full native dress (hope this is not lost on your above quote):


“I’m here to say that we support Israel and that we personally invite the Deputy Minister to northern Canada when he comes there, and we’ll show our full support with other chiefs,” Grand Chief Harper told the cameras after the tour.

“I’ve come here before and I’ve been blessed, and I know I’ll be more blessed this time,” Harper added.

Deputy Minister Kara stressed the importance of the relations with Canada’s native population.

“They know how important Israel is for the liberal side of the world,” he said. “Israel is at the front of the fighting against the Islamization led by Iran. It is important that the entire world come to Jerusalem and be part of Israel for a few days. G-d will bless everyone who supports Israel.”

Fortunately, Chief Harper does not represent all chiefs, and yet he was not alone over the years. However these chiefs bring back to their people tidings and joy from the boarders of Palestine and how there aims are adjoined as long as they can't see the Palestinian peoples.

Then you get Chief Ron Evans:

“Our aim is to develop the next generation of First Nations leaders by looking through the lens of Israel’s inspiring story,” he said. “Israel is first and foremost the land of the heritage of the Jewish People, who have achieved self-determination in a modern democracy and diverse state. Those of us from First Nations communities can appreciate the fascinating balance between modern and ancient that we see in Israel, and especially the sense of connection to the land of one’s ancestors.”

There is also a spiritual connection between his people with their Christian faith, and the land of Jesus as well as of the Jews, he said. “We learn the stories of the Bible. Therefore, a visit to Israel will resonate more with my people than a trip to a theme park such as Disneyland.”

Self determination indeed, just as long as the Chief did not wander into Gaza territory will it resonate, and yet he would not be blind.

Unless otherwise authorized by the Indigenous Nation members, the authority of elected Chiefs and Councils is limited to the powers set out under the Indian Act. The Indian Act does not provide authority for a Chief and Council to make decisions about lands beyond the boundaries of the First Nation’s reserves.

By contrast, the Hereditary Chiefs are responsible under Wet’suwet’en law and governance for making decisions relating to their ancestral lands. It is these lands that the Hereditary Chiefs are seeking to protect from the impacts of the pipeline project, not Indian Act reserve lands."

The difficulty can be on 'claims' of ancestral lands as their ways were mostly verbal, predating colonial ways outside colonial law, which they had no need for of course. There is then the issue of tribes that do not represent a nation state, as said state did not and does not exist in a legal reality, although it is argued.

Here is the past arguments and what has been set out by the UN (UNDRIP)

Sovereignty of Indigenous Peoples in Canada
In the United States, Native American (or “Indian”) tribes are seen as “domestic, dependent, sovereign nations.” They have the inherent right to govern within their reservations. They can make laws, establish courts and enjoy immunity from external lawsuits. This doctrine of domestic sovereignty has never been applied to Indigenous peoples in Canada. However, many argue that under international law the same approach should apply. (See also: Indigenous Self-Government in Canada.)

In 2007, the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues was adopted by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). Canada at first opposed the document. This was because of issues concerning land disputes. (The declaration’s clauses about the duty to consult could impact resource development.) UNDRIP took two decades of work by Indigenous peoples around the world. Canada initially supported this work. Its rejection of it caused a ripple of unrest. In 2010, Canada joined the other Anglo-settler countries of Australia, New Zealand and the United States in endorsing the UNDRIP as an “aspirational” document. After a change in federal government, Canada signed UNDRIP in May 2016. It has yet to be seen how Canada will implement this agreement.

From the link ("see also"):
Definition
Indigenous self-government is the formal structure through which Indigenous communities may control the administration of their people, land, resources and related programs and policies, through agreements with federal and provincial governments. The forms of self-government, where enacted, are diverse and self-government remains an evolving and contentious issue in Canadian law, policy and public life.
[...]
Land Claims
It has been through the land claims (or comprehensive claim settlement) process, rather than constitutional amendment, that individual communities have achieved differing levels of self-government. Numerous claims have been negotiated with discrete provisions for self-government and levels of co-management with other governments. All Canadian governments, including Indigenous ones, are subject to the Constitution and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
[...]
Conclusion
The judicial approach to Indigenous self-government is methodical and incremental. Political negotiations have established some powers of self-government for individual communities of First Nations and Inuit, but have yet to fully address the claims of Métis and those of other Indigenous peoples who do not reside in Indigenous communities. All political negotiations are under increasing scrutiny by those who either oppose any degree of self-government for Indigenous peoples or who argue that constitutional amendments are required to give effect to the self-government agreements.

Don't know how things will work out, it will be a long process with stalls, friction and different cross purposes among (to use the word) stakeholders. I'm all for settlements, some workable framework that benefits all, yet not for outsiders meddling (wanting chaos, imo), and that will continue until both sound native chiefs and a sound government, in unison, put their feet down and say enough; fix these things and lets move on and build something together. Ceding a whole country back to those with unsubstantiated claims is not going to work out well.

Resources is a big one, and corporations will need to learn to share, which some are doing so through negotiations with tribes that want to change their situations for their people rather than live on handouts.

Complicated as it is...
 

It appears that the game's not up yet. Police have arrested 10 at the Tyendinaga Mohawk blockade of the rails.

"Despite the day’s events, the lines of communication between the government and Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs remain open, federal Indigenous Services Minister Marc Miller said.

“It means now that we’re working even harder… We remain committed to a peaceful resolution,” he told reporters before Question Period Monday. “We’re not only fighting days of suspicion and mistrust but decades and centuries.”

The Mohawks are known in Canada for their response to an attempt to develop their land without their consent, which is collected under the title 'The Oka Crisis' of 1990. I don't see it being a wise move by the CDN PTB - it seems to have revitalized the nation-wide protest.

The Port in Vancouver is being blocked again, Indigenous youth have returned to the BC Legislature with numerous supporters, the Gitxsan have returned to blockading the rails in New Hazelton, the CP Rail Line in Maple Ridge (Vancouver suburb) has been blocked on Kwantlen territory, rail lines are blocked outside of Hamilton, the bridge has been blocked in Saute St. Marie, Native youth are blocking the intersection in front of Parliament in Ottawa, Highway 6 is blocked by the Caledonia First Nation, and probably more.

The CDN PTB are in a bind. They have a neoliberal mandate to open up Canada's resources to foreign investment, at the public expense, using public subsidies to do so (instead of using tax monies for social services, which have been slashed and slashed since the neoliberal era of austerity began). They are ideologically possessed by this mandate - and so they plug on with airy talk but also more arrests amidst negotiations. More arrests IMHO will only lead to the talks being less likely to come to an agreement - as the Natives and their supporters don't seem likely to stand down at this point. What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?

The hurt and misgiving of the colonial past has reared its head, nation-wide. The more Native nations pulled into it (arrested, for instance), the harder it will be for Canada to retain its nice, polite domestic image. The neoliberal programming will most likely override the polite domestic image. I don't see this conflict has having a resolution. It would take a great deal of cunning (disguised as humility) for the PTB to back down. Then they could pat themselves on the back for appeasing public sentiment, get the populace to calm down, and return to bizness as usual. But, I won't be surprised if a sort of War Measures Act (see the FLQ history in Quebec for more details), or something similar, is put into process, and everyone is rounded up and incarcerated. all of this protest may have a societal effect of increasing the policing of public protest and criminalizing dissent.
 
Don't know how things will work out, it will be a long process with stalls, friction and different cross purposes among (to use the word) stakeholders. I'm all for settlements, some workable framework that benefits all, yet not for outsiders meddling (wanting chaos, imo), and that will continue until both sound native chiefs and a sound government, in unison, put their feet down and say enough; fix these things and lets move on and build something together. Ceding a whole country back to those with unsubstantiated claims is not going to work out well.

Resources is a big one, and corporations will need to learn to share, which some are doing so through negotiations with tribes that want to change their situations for their people rather than live on handouts.

Complicated as it is...

Yes, its a non-linear Event!

I wonder, however, about your statement 'corporations will need to learn to share'. To me, that's analagous to saying 'psychopaths will need to learn to share'. Here I am thinking of Laura's work on economics in The Wave - game theory, John Nash, etc. Have you read that? If economics is the rule of law for corporations, and game theory installs an STS mode of selfishness and greed, then corporations, as the primary 'actors' in this system are geared towards an all-consuming psychopathic behaviour. To my looking, saying that 'they need to learn to share' brushes too close to wishful thinking.
 
Have you read that?

Nash, oh yes, which is in alignment with Robert Hare's take on The Corporation meeting most, if not all, on the psychopathic checklist.

However again, most, if not all, can't escape working or being influenced by corporations; try filling up your car or operating in society without them in one form or another, and they themselves are just legal constructs, and not all operate to pathological extremes nor those within with consciousness. Then there is exchanging corporate functions for the State, which can have new problems of a pathological nature. Yet I concede to your basic point if a broad brush is used, and yet there are nuances to corporations that look to better negotiating with communities and groups affected that can be beneficial for both e.g. providing new skills and a means to better themselves if they want, along with infrastructures that they have never had. Communities can be linked by a new bridge being constructed and food delivered, while people and their families benefit with jobs in IT, engineering or what have you, too. In many ways, society and laws have helped reshape some of the checklists behaviors, though not all can or will be modified. Nothing new here.

Anyway, that was my point - "doing so through negotiations," for right or wrong. Yet the felling going forward are that there are those who want it all to fail; Canada, U.S., Europe et al., and will step in and impose a new reality that neither Indians or any other will do well in.

As Rex Murphy recently opined (on the latest Teck drop-out):

In the waning days of the SNC-Lavalin scandal, Trudeau was heard defending his interference with the rule of law by saying, “I will never apologize for standing up, fighting for Canadian jobs.” In what dream world was he inhabiting when he floated that boast? Say it out loud in Alberta today. Or Saskatchewan. Or say it to farmers or people in the forestry, construction or resource-development industries. They are all bearing the pain and carrying the cost of the government’s carbon taxes.
[...]
In all of this, however, my mind turns not to the leaders of industry or government, but to those who do not spout off on Twitter or drape ugly banners from bridges or high buildings. I think of the men and women who are fresh from trade schools and colleges, as well as older workers who have faced hardships due to the economic downturn. These people keep seeing glimpses of possible employment on the horizon and get animated by the fresh hope that work is on the way, only to see another project die, another dance of victory from the environmentalists and the anti-oil professionals. The job of these climate zealots is to make sure that no one else can get a job. And their job will never be finished, as there will always be another proposal to stop.

Rabid environmentalists put a blowtorch to the hopes and dreams of thousands of Canadian workers every time. They are gloating about their victory over Teck as we speak. It is a strange, strange world that would allow the amputation of our prospects, and leave unemployed people to worry their days away, while leaders head to Paris, or Davos, or even Senegal to chatter about “transitioning.”

It’s time to take the pot off the stove. It is boiling over with a fury.
 
Just a few points to add in this difficult subject:

Shut Canada Down is the first look aka the #ShutCanadDown eco-environmentalists crowd. What's their play?

The Post Millennial can be read for some background on groups such as CorpEthics - here is a snip:

Why is the tar sands foundation opposed to Canadian oil?
According to Krause the tar sands group formed around the time of the Iraq war and California energy crisis in 2003-2004 and strategized how to get control of the United States’ domestic energy policy.

It includes clients such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Hewlett Foundation.

The group also funds the Tides Foundation in San Francisco and the New Venture Fund in Washington, D.C. Yes, the same Tides Foundation which spent $1.5 million in foreign funds on Canadian third-party organizations during the 2015 election.

I think they have four goals, three of which are great: renewable energy, energy efficiency, energy security, that’s all good. But it’s the fourth goal — this idea of keeping Canada out of the global market
For example, while the organization aims to reduce carbon development in Canada, there is no such movement organized for Texas where fracking is common and no carbon tax exists.

“We’ve got to ask themselves, ‘Why Alberta has been singled out, even though it’s the only jurisdiction in the world with a cap on emissions from oilsands, the only place with a carbon tax as it is, and even though the province has created a very large boreal forest reserve? Why is there is there still a campaign against Alberta?” Krause said.
https://globalnews.ca/news/4657720/...out-protecting-u-s-interests-not-environment/
https://globalnews.ca/news/4657720/...out-protecting-u-s-interests-not-environment/Despite the obvious three goals which are said to be 'great' statements on renewable energy, a look a year ago by Wendy Mesley (old anchor at the CBC) into these groups has this:
We looked through pages and pages of tax records. And it's clear that at least a dozen Canadian environmental organizations received millions from wealthy U.S. donors who are targeting Canada’s oil industry. So where exactly is all this American money coming from? #cdnpoli
https://twitter.com/hashtag/cdnpoli?src=hash




Vivian Krause @FairQuestions




WOW. Since @WendyMesleyCBC reported this, CorpEthics re-wrote its web-site, deleting that its strategy "from the very beginning" was to "land-lock" oil sands crude. Also deleted mention of influencing elections
Original: https://web.archive.org/web/20180624115636/https://corpethics.org/the-tar-sands-campaign/ …
Re-Written: https://corpethics.org/the-tar-sands-campaign/ …

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5:23 PM - Jan 25, 2019

So that's a little background of what has been festering in the background. Now what about the current situation with the Wet’suet’an in conjuction with their actions (and at odds with ShutCanadaDown et al. while being used)?

Here is how Matthew Ehret on his site penned a recent article on the situation - note: it relates to his Silk Road continuum, yet bear in mind his points:

Indigenous Communities Revolt Against Eco-Colonialists: Trudeau Crumbles Under His Own Liberalism

editor / 20 hours ago


The fight over the construction of a 670 km, $6.6 billion liquefied natural gas (LNG) pipeline stretching from Alberta to ports in British Columbia has absorbed national headlines across Canada and crippled a major component of the Canadian economy in recent weeks. However popular a headline as it may be, this story is not at all what it appears. Mainstream media has tended to twist major facts in order to hide the reality of the strategic fight which ties directly into Canada’s participation in China’sBelt and Road Initiative as well as the systemic effort to keep Canada’s native communities in squalor, poverty and dependence under a dubious Gordian Knot of eco-colonialism which began in earnest over 70 years ago.

Before untying this knot, four truthful facts of the story reported by mainstream media should be outlined:

Fact 1: The protests which began in British Columbia in solidarity with the BC Wet’suwet’en tribe on whose land the Coastal GasLink pipeline passes have spread across Canada’s central and east coast.
Fact 2: Hundreds of freight rail traffic lines, as well as federal and municipal passenger rail, bridges and roads across Canada have been shut down by protesters.
Fact 3: This crisis has risen to a level of intensity such that Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been forced to cancel his international campaign to win support from poor nations in his bid to put Canada into the UN Security Council and return home in order to deal with this.
Fact 4: Neither Trudeau, nor any opposition parties have any ability or will to actually resolve this.


This is where the truth ends and creative writing in journalism takes over.

Natives = Anti-Capitalist environmentalists: An Imperial Fallacy

The majority of press agencies reporting on this story attempt to convey the idea that native communities across Canada are battling big oil conglomerates in defense of Mother Nature. They attempt to portray Canada’s First Nations as unanimously acting in opposition to yet another rape of their lands by big money western capitalists killing the environment.
However, upon digging more deeply into the dynamics and the longer arc of history shaping Canada’s problems of underdevelopment, and drug/unemployment and suicide epidemics among natives, a very different picture has emerged.
The first crack in the popular narrative struck me as I heard Rebel Media’s Keean Bexte ask a handful of Albertan anti-pipeline protesters why they were not respecting the democratic vote of First Nation band councils who supported this project. Surely, the interviewer must be just another right winger lying to defend “big oil”!
Nope. Not lying at all. Not only did all elected chiefs representing the 20 bands upon whose territory this pipeline will be built vote massively in favor of the project, but 5 of the 6 elected Wet’suet’an nation bands also voted in favor. In addition, even the majority of hereditary chiefs voted in favor of the project! The only point of resistance which fuelled the pan-Canadian blockades arose from 5 of the 13 hereditary chiefs who voted no.
The fact that the majority of protesters interviewed by Rebel News were non-native was another anomaly that was not isolated to Alberta, but spreads thematically across Canada. In case after case, we find that a vast majority of organisers of the blockades have been university students of an eco-anarchist persuasion deployed out of Ontario and Quebec sociology departments with very little awareness of genuine native issues, nor even an awareness of what will even be eventually flowing through the pipelines (the majority of those questioned presumed the answer was “oil”- a very different beast from LNG).

So what do actual natives say about this project?

Troy Young, a Wet’suet’en youth leader has stated if the environmentalists are successful, it will be one of the biggest cultural appropriation in British Columbia’s history.”

First Nations councilor Karen Ogen Toews who also co-created the First Nations LNG Alliance stated if our people are living in poverty then the way to overcome it is through proper training, trades education and a job. My conscience is clear.”

Crystal Smith (Chief counselor of Haisla Nation) stated First Nations have been left out of resource development for too long, but [in this project] we are involved. We have been consulted and we will ensure there are benefits for all First Nations. I’m tired of managing poverty. I’m tired of First Nations Communities dealing with issues such as suicide, low unemployment or educational opportunities. If this opportunity is lost, it doesn’t come back.”

These testimonies begin to actually approach the real issue at hand: The fight for economic independence and dignity for native communities, which has been systematically withheld since the 1876 Indian Act.

Canada’s Underdevelopment

Over a century of neo-colonialism has resulted in Canada becoming the largest nation on earth housing fewer people than the city of Tokyo, 80% of whom are concentrated among only six cities within 100 km of the American border.

Inuits were beginning to emerge into modern industrial society during and after WWII, as a 1994 Royal Commission report on the history of Canada’s relationship with the Inuit noted:
“The effect of improved health care introduced after the Second World War was that the mortality rate began to decline and the Inuit population, by the mid- to late-1950s began gradually to increase… In Inukjuak, there was a health facility, a church, a schooI, a fur trading post, a store, a port, etc …. So, slowly, the Eskimos were becoming a part of the whole society. Even if most people were still hunting, it wasn’t their main Source of food. Many were getting some kind of benefits, either as salary, family allowance, or old age security payments, like all other Canadians who benefit from the universal social safety net.”
In the mind of the British Empire, this trajectory had to stop, and an operation was begun in 1953 run out of the Privy Council office and enforced by the RCMP to convince the natives that western technology was incompatible with their natural cultural ecosystems and were increasingly encouraged to live in reservations far outside the sphere of the rest of North America’s economic life. According to this reasoning, no advanced skills or education would be needed in their “natural” hunter-gatherer life styles. Just like post WWII neo-colonial policy towards Africa, buckets of monetary and tax incentives were offered… as long as the Inuit just remained in their reserves and stopped trying to develop higher standards of living or believing they should try to integrate with western society.

The High Arctic Relocation Project

This racist policy took the form of the 1953-1958 High Arctic Relocation project overseen by the RCMP where families from Inukjuak in Quebec were transported to the uninhabited Grise Fiord in Ellesmere Island and Resolute on Cornwallis Islands. These Inuit were told that they had to be “re-rehabilitated” into their “natural nomadic ecosystems” and suffered dearly. In the referenced 1994 Royal Commission report on the project, an elderly RCMP officer was interviewed who said he didn’t “understand why the Inuit were not given quarters at the base to live in and why the ample food which was available at the base was not made available to them.” The report continued, “The servicemen were told that the Inuit were there to rehabilitate themselves . . . to learn how to survive on their own and go back to their old way of living. The project was to see if they could survive in that High Arctic environment where Inuit had lived in earlier times. . . . Temperatures of -55° were common in the winter.

In 1987, the surviving families and their children filed a lawsuit against the Federal Government stating “there is overwhelming evidence to suggest that the central, if not the sole reasons for the relocation of Inuit to the high Arctic was the desire by Canada to assert its sovereignty over the Arctic Islands and surrounding areas”.

{this seems so, which is in part why the Inuit 'Rangers' were started to patrol the DEW Line}

relocation-arctice.jpg

Playing the Inuit on the Grand Chessboard

The use and abuse of these Inuit families points us to Canada’s perverse role in the British Empire’s grand chessboard. Though not often appreciated today, the British Empire then (as now) has always aimed to sabotage the industrial growth (and thus economic independence) of sovereign nation states. After Lincoln’s “American System” allies in Russiasold Alaska to the USA in 1867 and later built the Trans Siberian railway, the British financial oligarchy became deathly afraid of the strong strategic intention by leading Russian and American patriots to connect the continents through the Bering Strait corridor making the role of Canadian natives extremely vital in obstructing this process.
During WWII, American VP Henry Wallace made his intention to build this rail/road tunnel to Russia known to Russia’s Foreign Minister Molotov who warmly supported it. Although the Cold War de-railed this initiative, American plans to develop the Arctic continued intensely through the construction of the DEW radar line and resource development strategies that had the support of leading nation builders like Canada’s C.D. Howe (Federal Minister of Everything) and W.A.C. Bennett (Premier of BC 1952-1972). Since Canada had zero population in the high Arctic, the Americans’ claims to Arctic territory was quite strong and in the minds of the Deep State run through Rhodes Scholars and Canada’s Privy Council– had to be stopped at all cost.
In this poisonous spirit, the Relocation Program was designed to create “human flagpoles” for the sake of making a case that Canada’s Arctic claims were somehow legitimate. While Canada’s Prime Minister John Diefenbaker ended this racist program in 1958, (replacing it with his optimistic Northern Vision) and gave natives the vote with his 1960 Bill of Rights, the deep state quickly undermined his vision and led a coup resulting in his 1963 ouster.
diefenbaker-montage-north.jpg

John Diefenbaker featured alongside a 1958 blueprint for his arctic cities of Nunavuk (Frobisher Bay) and the Alaska-Canada rail connection (never built)
In the post-Diefenbaker years of 1963-2020, the human flagpole policy evolved into the “eco-colonial” program designating nearly all lands of northern Canada off limits to any form of genuine economic development. The name for this policy became eco-systems management which imposed an absolute division between scientific and technological progress and the supposed “natural balance” or mathematical homeostasis of nature.
It is noteworthy that this plan was first put into action by none other than Justin Trudeau’s father in 1970 in order to block the development of hydro electric projects growing under the leadership of Premier Bennett. Such a doctrine of technological apartheid has grown ever since by the likes of Maurice Strong, The Club of Rome, The World Wildlife Fund, The Munk School of Global Affairs, and The Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation headed by Pierre Trudeau’s former assistant Thomas Axworthy up until the present day.

The Destruction of a People

Today First Nations (Metis, Inuit and other indigenous groups) suffer from a 300% higher suicide rate than non-indigenous people on average with two times more indigenous people on reservations committing suicide than those living off reservation. Inuits dispersed across the arctic find themselves at the greatest disadvantage as their reservations are rarely connected to other reservations by roads, and a trip to a city costs thousands of dollars. Although they have access to television, and alcohol, there are few jobs in these isolated concentration camps, zero prospect for improvement or change (and thus very little incentive to stay in school). In these communities suicide rates are NINE TIMES higher than non-indigenous areas with 72.3 suicides/100 000 people (versus 8 suicides/100 000 in the south of Canada) especially concentrated among youth ages 15-24. The worst-hit group is sadly female children which features a heart wrenching suicide level 22 times higher than non-indigenous groups. On average unemployment clocks in at five times higher in native groups, and obviously, drug and alcohol use is as rampant as domestic violence against women.
These dismal statistics are not caused by any “genetic inferiority of the native people” as some racist commentators have asserted over the years, but rather are the effects of a deep cultural victimisation caused by generations living under British Colonial social engineering.
To grasp a better idea of my meaning here, a fruitful exercise can be found in comparing the relatively healthier cultural dynamics of Russian Inuit who share many similarities to their Canadian counterparts but suffer from fewer spiritual wounds, embracing technological development much more enthusiastically and with greater trust in their governments than anything seen in Canada.

The New Silk Road and Economic Independence For All

Ellis Ross, a former elected Chief of the Haisa tribe and current MP for Skeena, BC has come out eloquently attacking eco-colonialism and described the importance of LNG development in a recent interview by saying:
“One project gets built, then I have the ability to say ‘no’ to funding coming from Ottawa. I mean that is independence! And it was always a dream of mine to say to Ottawa ‘I don’t need your $5-7 million/year come to my band. I can handle my own. I can handle my own infrastructure, my own sewer water. I can handle all of it. I don’t need you.
Interviewer: “Without the strings that are attached.”
Ross: “Exactly! And the punishments! If you get a surplus in any of that funding, you get punished. If you get a deficit, you get punished.”
If Ottawa actually behaved in a manner becoming of a sovereign nation state, and offered productive credit through the publicly-owned national bank of Canada to help First Nations develop their economic resources, then Ross would not have come to the conclusions enunciated in his interview. However since Canada’s federal government has acted under the control of a Malthusian deep state since the 1963 ouster of John Diefenbaker, offering only IMF-styled loans with strict conditionalities which has kept First Nations in squalor for decades, native leaders seeking to liberate their people have been forced to take the approach outlined by Ross and the 20 bands supporting the LNG Coastal Gas Link pipeline today.
The $40 billion project to bring Canada’s liquid natural gas to four new major BC ports is tied entirely to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) which has evolved to incredible proportions with major long term, win-win infrastructure projects across 160 nations and it is growing. China’s leading partner in this vision for the coming century is Russia, which has embarked on a Polar Silk Road extension and is driven by Putin’s bold Arctic development plans which is pulling upon Canada’s undeveloped Northern frontier today in a similar manner as that of the 1940s-1950s American pro-development northern strategy.
China has stated on multiple occasions that it wants to collaborate with every country on the BRI- including Canada and the USA! It has trillions to spend, technology to offer and an ever growing market hungry for goods and resources from other western nations wishing to escape the “post-industrial” model of consumerism dominant since the 1968 paradigm shift. Will Canada be able to capture this opportunity or will nation builders ignorant to Canada’s subtle dynamics fail to achieve this vision in the same manner that the well-intentioned but politically naive John Diefenbaker had 60 years ago?

us-joins-new-silk-road-map-1-1024x672.jpg
 
Just a few points to add in this difficult subject:

Shut Canada Down is the first look aka the #ShutCanadDown eco-environmentalists crowd. What's their play?

The Post Millennial can be read for some background on groups such as CorpEthics - here is a snip:



Here is how Matthew Ehret on his site penned a recent article on the situation - note: it relates to his Silk Road continuum, yet bear in mind his points:

Thanks for the article. And also, thanks for the conversation. It's helping me to think through and make clear to myself 'certain something' that has been floating around for me as I've been reading the slew of pro-BRI articles by Ehret and others.

I understand the BRI to be an initiative that could form the infrastructural basis for an alternative to the American system of global dominance which aims to (1) control the oil (2) keep its standing army of terrorists fueled and ready and (3) use these two to buttress the US dollar, which buys more military stuff and people to maintain world control. A simplified version but that's the bare bones as far as I see it. This American unilateralism was succinctly compiled in all its bloody glory by Michael Hudson:


It seems this unilateralism is dying on many accounts. The BRI is one of example of many. I've noticed a tendency for Russophilia. Of course, after so many years of the global murderer going relatively unchallenged, it is a refreshing change to see Syria, for instance, not turned into another Iraq, thanks to Russia's intervention. So, a nod to Putin is appropriate. But it seems a mistake to look at any process or actor that is going to undermine the American ability to rape and murder globally with rosy glasses. Our very best faculties of objective Reason must be brought to bear in all cases. Nuance is key.

What are the necessary conditions for judgment? For me, it is a question of 'STS or STO'. It is difficult in our current STS world to even be capable of seeing what is truly STO, yes. But I find it to be a very fruitful lens through which to see and attempt tp know the world.

So the BRI seems to be trucking along. A while ago, I was studying the effects of, for instance, Russia's development of their gas fields in the Khanty-Mansisk Autonomous Okrug. It doesn't really matter where you look - it is very similar all over the world when it comes to Native peoples who live on resource-rich lands. We must be clear about the pattern: the inconvenient Natives who wish to continue to live their way of life need to pipe down, and get out of the way, in order to ensure Progress marches onwards. But they have nowhere to go. It amounts to the spiritual extinction of a landed people to have the land developed. So, their way of life needs to be exterminated. Is that STS or STO? And Im not asking rhetorically. Gas fields are opened up, new jobs are created, and the economy flourishes, other citizens gain something, perhaps the American war machine wavers just that much more - but at the expense of a 'primitive' minority, and also, generally, their now-despoiled or irreparably-altered landbase. Im not sure how to tally it out in some sort of 'grant balance sheet'. It grates against my conscience.

According to the Fourth Way Work, and also Earth Changes: The Human Cosmic Connection, human life seems to exist in order to receive, transform, and transmit energies. We have a whorl on our heads and a whorl on the bottoms of our feet. We have a hormonal uplink to higher realms. We are (or can be) a rely in the flow of information between the cosmos and the earth, from Creator to the atoms. As above, so below. I see this as one of our duties, and perhaps our primary duty - to ground a FRV here that is capable of being 'on behalf of Life itself'. This is a walk of richness, mystery, and beauty. Much of the forum is dedicated to 'cleaning our machine' in order to be able to undertake this mission - and much of it has to do with a sort of 'throwback to our ancestors'. I've read of stark dietary changes (keto, paleo), drinking structured water, and limiting artificial light, just to name a few of the things that I see correspond to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Why this correspondence? Because we have what could be called an 'original human blueprint' that functions according to natural laws. There is a way that our DNA functions properly, and a way that it will be damaged by our activities - or those imposed upon us. The advent of agriculture and all the neolithic diseases that spread from it, the hierarchy of kings, and then of states, and then of corporations, and the related to the advent of monotheism and its capturing of the human imagination is a linear, eschatological timeframe - all these forces are still eating away at today's Native tribes in the name of Progress. And it is these very same forces (or the inertia of them in our own ancestries) that many members of the forum are attempting to mitigate, reverse, or dispel in order to find their own shamanic link to their 'selves in the future.'

I'm not positing a solution to colonialism here. That sure would be a feat! I do not have answers. I have come to know that to be here in a good way is not to clamour for equality - for the absence of suffering would only totally destroy the ability of humans to 'de-bug' or 'transcend' or 'rise to our birthright'. Thus, your point about the climate change mob is a good one. But it does seem imperative to be aware of the depredations of psychopaths, and thus, to be, at the very least, clear about the plight of their victims. It seems that in this 3D world, we must abandon the idea that there will be 'winners'. And on the Wetsuweten issue, it seems neither side can move without Free Will being abridged...
 
I'm not positing a solution to colonialism here. That sure would be a feat! I do not have answers. I have come to know that to be here in a good way is not to clamour for equality - for the absence of suffering would only totally destroy the ability of humans to 'de-bug' or 'transcend' or 'rise to our birthright'. Thus, your point about the climate change mob is a good one. But it does seem imperative to be aware of the depredations of psychopaths, and thus, to be, at the very least, clear about the plight of their victims. It seems that in this 3D world, we must abandon the idea that there will be 'winners'. And on the Wetsuweten issue, it seems neither side can move without Free Will being abridged...

While it seems that there may be 'no winner', it all depends on our ability to see beyond the 3D options. Food for thought from Laura:


"Our physical bodies are subject to natural 3rd density causality because we are part of the 3rd density world and subject to its laws. Our actions, based on 3rd density interpretations alone, are then subject to the same empirical 3rd density causality, and because causal series are continuous in time (each event has a prior cause which is an effect of another prior cause), we have no freedom at this level of phenomena. The totality of the 4th density field of possibilities is veiled from us and leaves us with no more freedom than the causally simple stimulus-response theories of the behaviorists. Our actions are a result of causal processes, controlled and devised at the 4th density or Noumenal level of reality, and freedom at this 3rd density level is impossible unless we access the 4th density causal level by SEEING via the clues apparent in 3rd density. If we can SEE the true field of options, we can choose our ALIGNMENT. THAT'S IT! But, alignment choices seem to have far-reaching effects in terms of 3rd density empirical experience."
 
While it seems that there may be 'no winner', it all depends on our ability to see beyond the 3D options.

3D is certainly limiting while fear and anger rules the day.

You had laid out some weighty comments prior, comments tied to many aspects that I can't know, and some probably deserves almost their own thread, because in all honesty this threads subject is so loaded with variegated aspects tied to different people, history - and a dark history, that it's difficult to find a good bearing that takes it all in and places it on a better path; currently there does not seem to be a hopeful path other than wishful thinking.

Anyway, had written a response to your previous post, mostly with observations and on questions, and a look back at their old life prior to the generation during the modern phases of post colonialism, which goes back eighteen and more generations to the British genesis of colonialism. What was it like before that in terms of being in the West? It's pretty established for the West coast that they had had thriving communities, unlike other interior areas where they were small and nomadic in terms of summer ranges. However very bad things happened, and here I'm refereeing to when George Vancouver arrived with his Tall Ship only to find mass death due to disease that George did not bring: 'Everyone was dead: When Europeans first came to B.C., they stepped into the aftermath of a holocaust'

Have enclosed this in full to try and get a sense of what was there (just looking at BC in this case) and what came after - it's shocking, yet one realizes that there was a created massive gap from the old life, whatever that looked like, with only a scattering of small and severly damaged groups left of those who survived. Where were the Wet’suwet’en in all this? This is less than 250 years ago in BC. Of those remaining some accounts are given, yet those were in 1936 many generations later from those who survived around areas of the west coast. The interior was like a ghost.

If you have never read this, have a read as it may have bearing on hereditary matters and of them being severed from truly knowing their complete past history.

Everywhere they looked, there were corpses. Abandoned, overgrown villages were littered with skulls; whole sections of coastline strewn with bleached, decayed bodies.

“The skull, limbs, ribs and backbones, or some other vestiges of the human body, were found in many places, promiscuously scattered about the beach in great numbers,” wrote explorer George Vancouver in what is now Port Discovery, Wash.

It was May 1792. The lush environs of the Georgia Strait had once been among the most densely populated corners of the land that is now Canada, with humming villages, harbours swarming with canoes and valleys so packed with cookfires that they had smog.

They kept seeing rotting houses and massive clearings cut out of the Pacific forest — evidence that whoever lived here had been able to muster armies of labourers.

And yet the only locals the sailors encountered were small groups of desperately poor people, many of them horribly scarred and missing an eye.

“There are reasons to believe that (this land) has been infinitely more populous,” wrote Vancouver in an account of the voyage published after his death.

But the 40-year-old Englishman seemed to have gone to his grave never grasping the full gravity of what he witnessed in British Columbia: The “docile” and “cordial” people he met were the shattered survivors of an apocalypse.

“News reached them from the east that a great sickness was travelling over the land, a sickness that no medicine could cure, and no person escape,” said a man identified as Old Pierre, a member of what is now the Katzie First Nation in Pitt Meadows, B.C.

After an emergency meeting, the doomed forebears of the Katzie decided to face the coming catastrophe with as much grace as they could muster: Every adult returned to the home of their parents to wait for the end.

“Then the wind carried the smallpox sickness among them. Some crawled away into the woods to die; many died in their homes,” Old Pierre told the anthropologist Diamond Jenness in 1936.

The tragedy played out very near to what is now the site of Golden Ears Provincial Park. And it all happened so quickly that when Old Pierre’s great-grandfather returned to the village from the bush, he found nothing but houses stacked with corpses.

“Only in one house did there survive a baby boy, who was vainly sucking at its dead mother’s breast,” he told Jenness.

The people of the Pacific Northwest had just been hit with the tail end of one of the most devastating plagues in human history.

Just as the American Revolutionary War broke out in 1775, smallpox began sweeping through Patriot strongholds and encampments.

An American attempt to invade Quebec broke apart largely because the colonist soldiers were too ridden with smallpox to continue the attack.

The epidemic soon broke out of the war-torn coastal areas and began penetrating inland, surging across indigenous trading networks and passing between warring enemies.

Before the Revolutionary War was over, its epidemiological offshoot had surged as far as Mexico and was scything its way through the Canadian Prairies.

“Boy and Girl arrived from the Swampy River, having left one man behind, these is all that is alive out (of) 10 tents,” reads the journals of Hudson’s Bay Company traders in what is now Cumberland House, Sask.

For months, the largely Scottish-born traders were visited by wave after wave of doomed refugees bearing reports of whole villages wiped off the map.

The natives “chiefly Die within the third or fourth Night, and those that survive after that time are left to be devoured by the wild beasts,” they wrote.

In 1782, smallpox finally surged into the region surrounding what is now Vancouver Island.

When the explorer David Thompson travelled overland to the West Coast in the early 19th century, he traversed whole regions ravaged by the 1782 epidemic. He met locals who had seen their villages die around them, and now lived in whatever post-apocalyptic societal structure survivors had been able to cobble together.

Is it true that the white men … have brought with them the Small Pox to destroy us?” Thompson was asked near the modern site of Spokane, Wash.

In the 1890s, Vancouver woman Ellen Webber found a massive midden in what is now Maple Ridge.

She asked an elder from what is now the Kwantlen First Nation what it was. Identified only as “an old Indian,” the woman told Webber of a thriving, well-fortified village of fishermen, tanners, potters, canoe-makers, tailors and toy-makers.

That is, until a dragon “awoke and breathed upon the children.”

“Where his breath touched them sores broke out and they burned with heat and they died to feed this monster,” she said. “And so the village was deserted and never again would the Indians live on that spot.”

When George Vancouver saw beaches strewn with bones, he was looking at a pattern of mass-death similar to what had struck thousands of European villages during the Black Death of the Middle Ages.

As the epidemic begins, communities hastily rush through back-to-back funerals. As the bodies pile up, communities start improvising mass graves. Finally, as society completely breaks down, the dead are left where they lie.

For generations afterwards, sites of mass death became taboo places for Indigenous people. As Old Pierre said in 1936, digging into the ground of any abandoned village would turn up the “countless” bones of past smallpox victims.

His great-grandfather, after saving the sole infant survivor of the epidemic, burned the whole village down and never looked back.

How is it that the smallpox epidemic of 1782 is not part of the lore of modern British Columbia?” wrote the geographer Cole Harris in Voices of Disaster, a 1994 history of the disaster from which most of the information in this article is sourced.

The epidemic that burned itself out in the forests of British Columbia was the most significant event in North American history. Just as a settlement-minded people set up shop on the East Coast, a biological terror was depopulating far-away lands they could not even imagine.

From the Grand Canyon to the forests of northern Canada, thousands upon thousands died in the delirious throes of a European disease without ever having seen a European.

It’s arguably why the continent is dominated by two giant, English-speaking countries whose western halves are divided by a horizontal line.

Europeans had colonized Asia and Africa, but only here and in the islands of Oceania did they have such ease in demographically supplanting the indigenous inhabitants.

It’s possible that smallpox killed as many as 95 per cent of the population of the Georgia Strait. Given that estimate, as many as 100,000 people may have lived in the area at a time when the entire state of New York counted barely 200,000.

In British Columbia, as with depopulated regions across the continent, Europeans were literally stepping over the bones of the dead to find vast landscapes populated by small bands of traumatized survivors.

Here was an almost empty land, so it seemed, for the taking,” wrote Cole Harris.

As George Vancouver steered HMS Discovery north from the the Strait of Georgia in the spring of 1792, his eyes glimmered with what could be done with the seemingly empty forests surrounding him.

“The innumerable pleasing landscapes … require only to be enriched by the industry of man with villages, mansions, cottages and other buildings, to render it the most lovely country that can be imagined,” he wrote.

And indeed, that’s exactly what happened.

The peoples of the West Coast were well-versed in war: Accustomed to raiding and invasion, they maintained Viking-like fleets of war canoes, lived in fortified cities and went to battle in terrifying suits of armour complemented with trade metals from Russian Alaska.

Against a well-prepared and well-coordinated native population, any invaders could have expected epic battles followed by years of guerrilla warfare. Before smallpox, West Coast oral history contained accounts of rivers being made “black” by the canoes of invaders.

Instead, as wave after wave of epidemic hit the area, the emptied landscape became one of the easiest conquests in British history.

In 1862, just as the colony of British Columbia was getting its footing, the indigenous descendants of the 1782 survivors were hit again. Another smallpox epidemic once again killed more than half of B.C.’s native population and peppered the landscape with mass graves and abandoned settlements.

George Vancouver’s name got appended to a metropolis, an island larger than Wales, and his life-sized, gold-plated likeness was bolted to the top of a Westminster-style parliament in Victoria. “Mansions, cottages and other buildings” were not only built, but they are now counted among the most valuable in the world.

Rather than “Most Lovely Country That Can Be Imagined,” however, the carriers of Vancouver’s vision ultimately went with the slogan “Best Place on Earth.”
 
I'm not positing a solution to colonialism here. That sure would be a feat! I do not have answers. I have come to know that to be here in a good way is not to clamour for equality - for the absence of suffering would only totally destroy the ability of humans to 'de-bug' or 'transcend' or 'rise to our birthright'. Thus, your point about the climate change mob is a good one. But it does seem imperative to be aware of the depredations of psychopaths, and thus, to be, at the very least, clear about the plight of their victims. It seems that in this 3D world, we must abandon the idea that there will be 'winners'. And on the Wetsuweten issue, it seems neither side can move without Free Will being abridged...

It seems to me that the only answer to such questions that avoids getting too directly involved in the 'struggle' and missing the bigger picture, is to assume that everything (including injustice) serves the purpose of provoking thought, reflection, learning and lessons.

There are so many examples of injustice (from a subjective perspective of course) in modern history that it's very difficult to avoid the conclusion that injustice is more or less a fact of life, and not an aberration that should be somehow corrected.

That's not to say that injustice should not be fought against, and it invariably is, but it seems we must draw the line at stating categorically that injustice is somehow wrong. After all, from a philosophical perspective, injustice was/is not only necessary, but 'good' because of the opportunity to learn that it has offered, and will continue to offer to many.
 
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