You’re listening to Back in the USSR on 93.3 FM CFRU
in Guelph, I am Siegfried. That song that you just heard is called
"Monsters, Devils and Strangers", it was recorded by Irish Republican
prisoners of war in a British jail outside Belfast on March 1 1991. That day was the 10th anniversary of the
hunger strike that began on March 1 `1981 in which ten members of the Irish
resistance - Bobby Sands, Francis Hughes, Ray McCreesh, Patsy O'Hara, Joe
McDonnell, Martin Hurson, Kevin Lynch, Kieran Doherty, Tom McElwee and Michael
Devine - gave their lives for the cause of Irish liberation from British
colonialism. That song you just heard is
all about that struggle for liberation, not just in Ireland, but all over the
world, and that includes the very colonial society that is Canada.
Comrades and friends, we’ve come to the end of February, but the epic struggle that gripped this country over the course of the past month has only just begun. A revolution is growing in this country. It began with the RCMP and Coastal Gas Link’s invasion of sovereign indigenous Wet’suwet’en territory in the province that goes by the colonial name of British Columbia, backed by snipers and armored vehicles. It began with the arrest of indigenous land defenders, matriarchs and hereditary chiefs. It began with the mass arrests of indigenous land defenders and their allies, who blockaded the port of Vancouver and closed down rail lines across the country in a show of solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en people and in staunch opposition to the settler-colonial state that is invading their lands and oppressing them in the name of extractive industry and fossil fuel expansion through pipelines built on stolen indigenous land.
Comrades and friends, we’ve come to the end of February, but the epic struggle that gripped this country over the course of the past month has only just begun. A revolution is growing in this country. It began with the RCMP and Coastal Gas Link’s invasion of sovereign indigenous Wet’suwet’en territory in the province that goes by the colonial name of British Columbia, backed by snipers and armored vehicles. It began with the arrest of indigenous land defenders, matriarchs and hereditary chiefs. It began with the mass arrests of indigenous land defenders and their allies, who blockaded the port of Vancouver and closed down rail lines across the country in a show of solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en people and in staunch opposition to the settler-colonial state that is invading their lands and oppressing them in the name of extractive industry and fossil fuel expansion through pipelines built on stolen indigenous land.
And the movement continues to grow. Bridges, ports, railways, and the offices of
prominent politicians and corporations have been occupied/shutdown. Guelph is no exception, there have been some impressive
actions here in this city as well. There has also been strong international solidarity, notably from Palestinians, who are also facing genocide at the hands of a brutal settler-colonial regime. And I
want people to appreciate just how radical all this is. The Mohawk scholar Gerald Taiaiake Alfred, a
former professor of political science and indigenous governance at the
University of Victoria, responding to the unprecedented solidarity that indigenous
land defenders are receiving from wider Canadian society, said that Canada is experiencing
a genuine revolutionary moment:
“I can remember saying 15, 20 years ago, that if we
ever had a development in our movement where the power of Indigenous nationhood
and Indigenous rights could be melded and brought together with the power of
young Canadians who are committed to the environment and social justice, it
would be revolutionary,” Alfred told the Georgia Straight in a phone
interview Thursday (February 13).
“
And I think that that's what we're witnessing.”
According to Alfred, the protests are providing a
“channel among Indigenous youth Canadian youth, non-Indigenous allies, who are
just so angry and frustrated at the hypocrisy and the foot dragging and the
corruption that they see in their own government”.
“I think that this movement here is reflective of
their commitment to take action, to confront what they see in all aspects of
their life,” he said. “Not only in politics, but within the culture, within the
relationships that they have, a culture among people who have power that allows
them to act with impunity and hypocrisy.
“It's driven by the consequence, I would say, of an
intellectual understanding of the injustice in the society, of a political
commitment to do something about it and the emotional energy recognizing that
they are witnessing and living through the actual suppression and acts of
violence against primarily Indigenous women who were defending that territory
as they always have done.”
Alfred said that it has become “clear to everyone that
what's happening in the woods and territories is a microcosm of all of that”.
“And it's provoking a response on all of those levels
intellectually, politically and emotionally, and I think that's why you see
such passion.”
What we’re seeing is a developing mass movement
against the capitalist colonial state in Canada. A state whose real economic priorities now stand
revealed for what they are, exposing Justin Trudeau’s many, many, many lies
about reconciliation and a “nation-to-nation” relationship with indigenous
peoples, in addition to his two-faced positions on climate change and the
environment. And people are truly
catching wise to the role of capitalism in all this and how capitalism is the
driving force behind colonial policies that oppress indigenous people and
destroy the environment.
To recap on the basic information, the Wet’suwet’en nation
is resisting the construction of the $6.6-billion Coastal Gas Link Pipeline through
their land. At 670 KM, the pipeline will
cut a massive swathe through indigenous lands in northern BC, with the goal of
transporting fracked natural gas from the northeast to a coastal terminal near
the town of Kitimat, where it would be processed for overseas exports. The pipeline itself is only one part of a $40-billion
fossil fuel infrastructure project by LNG Canada that has been described as a “carbon bomb” by Marc Lee, a senior economist with the Canadian Center for Policy
Alternatives, that would result in an increase in carbon emissions equal to all
the cars on the road in BC.
The Canadian Federal Government and the NDP premier of
BC, John Horgan, have thrown their weight behind the pipeline, but the real
answer as to why so much money and resources are being put into this
destructive and invasive project, and why court injunctions against its
opponents are being enforced so rigorously and violently by the RCMP, are to be
found in the current state of Canadian capitalism.
Canada has some of the largest oil and gas reserves in
the world, and the investments in this industry are greater than any other sector
in the Canadian economy. The export of
oil and gas to external markets, particularly the United States, has
traditionally been a crucial pillar in the Canadian state’s efforts to offset
problems of profitability in the broader economy, where stagnating wages, the gradual
elimination of well-paid manufacturing jobs, runaway debt and a massive real
estate bubble are threatening to plunge the system into crisis. However, the United States, as a result of massive
growth in the fracking industry, no longer imports nearly as much oil as it
once did and is set to become a major oil exporter itself over the course of
the next decade. This has led to a decline
in profitability for Canadian oil producers, who, since 2006, have been seeking
to offset this decline by finding overseas markets for their oil, particularly
in Asia. Both the Harper and Trudeau
governments have therefore invested considerable resources in facilitating profitable
fossil fuel exports to potential Asian markets.
And explains why Trudeau has been so politically and financially dedicated
to pipeline expansion through British Columbia to the West Coast, even when it
overrides his statements on the existential threat of climate change, the need
to cut carbon emissions, and on the rights of indigenous peoples. All of that is secondary, at best, to the
needs to the Canadian capitalist class: the businessmen and bankers who want to
export their oil overseas and on whose behalf the state issues injunctions and
sends in heavily-armed police to evict indigenous land defenders from their own
sovereign, unceeded, territories.
None of this is accidental. None of it is the result of some innocent misunderstanding. Trudeau has given the fossil fuel industry
more than $3-billion in tax subsidies, while spending $4.5-billion to buy the
Trans Mountain Pipeline for Kinder Morgan to ensure that it gets built, and
while using paramilitary violence to displace indigenous people who are “in the
way”. The sheer police presence outside
the world’s largest mining convention, which began at the Toronto Metro
Convention Center on March 1st, likewise speaks volumes, given that
more than 60% of the world’s mining corporations are headquartered in Canada.
As Todd Gordon and Geoffrey McCormack point out: “The
Canadian state has evolved to optimize the conditions for capital accumulation.
This commitment to Canadian capitalism is at its core a colonialist project –
predicated upon and reproducing it – and is utterly irreconcilable with
ecological sustainability.”
Nor should we be surprised when the Ontario Provincial
Police (OPP) move in and violently arrest Mohawk land defenders blocking the
rails in Tyendinaga near Belleville in support of Wet’suwet’en, or conduct mass arrests of people standing in solidarity with similar blockades in Vancouver,
Hamilton or the GTA. Or that the
Canadian Far Right, including the Soldiers of Odin, would call in bomb threats
against the Tyendinaga land defenders and threaten to attack the demonstrators
occupying the provincial government buildings in Victoria, BC in solidarity
with Wet’suwet’en. The Wet’suwet’en
people themselves have faced similar threats from settler vigilantes and other
people brainwashed by the ideology of white supremacy, which has functioned as
a useful tool of capitalist exploitation and resource extraction in colonial North
America from the late 17th Century.
Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer’s demand that lethal force be
used to clear the blockades and the demonization of the land defenders in the
Canadian corporate press reveals just how entrenched racist settler-colonialism
is in this country.
But I want to quote Ta’kaiya Blaney, one of the young
indigenous land defenders occupying the steps of the BC legislature and what
they said on February 29 when the Soldiers of Odin threatened them with violence:
“White supremacists feel threatened because they know
their systems are dying and we [Indigenous people] are very much alive.”
The very survival of indigenous nations in the face of
colonial genocide is a revolutionary act and now it’s clear just how empty the phrase
“reconciliation” is. How can a victim of
genocide reconcile themselves to a genocidal system? Would you ask a Jew to
reconcile with the government of Nazi Germany? Settler-colonialism cannot be reconciled
with. Like all forms of colonialism, it
has to be broken down and ultimately overthrown entirely, along with the
capitalist system that drives it and makes it possible. The fact that so many non-indigenous people
in this country understand this and are acting on that understanding is truly
revolutionary and I have confidence that their internationalist solidarity with indigenous land defenders will sound
the death knell for colonial rule in this land.
Willy Dunn - I Pity the Country
Willy Dunn - The Ballad of Crowfoot
Willy Dunn - I Pity the Country
Willy Dunn - The Ballad of Crowfoot
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