indigenous – Page 2

Ironic noise complaint over Sto:lo drumming during Chilliwack music video shoot

Who will protect the land from reckless development?

Who will protect the land from reckless development? A thoughtful proposal for a moderate (to me) vision of decolonizing. I like the careful way the writer points out the nearness of military action against oil protestors in Australia and Canada. I like the way he names the denial and lies in the colonial “narrative” of Canada. I like that he centers indigenous people as leaders, decision-makers, and stewards of the land. I am very cautious about his proposal to forgive colonialism and move on to shared prosperity. We settlers are pretty hungry to be forgiven; it’s important to be careful there, not to jump ahead or assume we deserve that.

So in Canada, what if, instead, we decide not to ransack every last corner of our vast country in search of commodities that we can sell abroad or to ourselves, but we experiment in developing an economy that honours local culture and history, celebrates place, protects the environment, increases the resilience of local people, and provides them with the means to invest in a future of their own design? Why not attempt, while we still have the option, to pursue a natural model of development, to pursue what the late Jane Jacobs once so aptly called “reliable prosperity?”

In that regard, Indigenous people arguably offer not more despair, but hope. If we are to prepare ourselves for the inevitable shocks that the 21st Century still has in store, it might behoove us to seek lessons in resilience from people who have survived every imaginable assault, and are just now coming back into a position of prominence and eminence in a country that might yet come to see aboriginal people as powerful and visionary citizens with a capacity for forgiveness and an appetite for regeneration and renewal, whose unwillingness to assimilate may turn out to be their best defence against the boom that the rest of us seem powerless or unwilling to resist.

Talking Maps: Arctic atlas reads out Inuit names

Talking Maps: Arctic atlas reads out Inuit names. Who was telling me about this? Lynne (Leah?) the puppeteer?

Fraser Taylor’s atlas of Canada’s high Arctic reads out the names of the towns to you. The real names.

Cape Strathcona is Arvaaqtuuq. Peter Richards Island is Qikiqtatannak

It is, the eminent Carleton University geographer explains, a decolonization of the Nunavut map and a repatriation of the Inuit names.

Redress settlements are necessary, but not enough. As the Idle No More movement so well illustrates, the problems associated with a century or more of white supremacy are hardly over. The murder and disappearance of hundreds of indigenous women is tragic testimony to that fact. Without mainstream society taking responsibility for the past, do we have a future?

For its part, the provincial government has done even less than the federal government. In our classes, students are often stunned and at times end up in tears when they learn the truth about the province’s past. They deserve better.

Hunters/gatherers to trappers/harvesters. Does it matter what they call us? | âpihtawikosisân

When the terms used are English ones, defined in English and seen through the colonial lens, much is lost. If some of our hunting activities are being defined as ‘trapping’ and this definition results in the erosion of our indigenous rights, which has indeed been the case, then it is important for us to challenge these terms.

Klahowya – Your language? There’s an app for that!

How Do You Say Idle No More in Anishinaabemowin?

Perhaps what has hit me the hardest as the Idle No More movement develops, is the reminder that I still can’t answer that question with confidence. Nin-gagwe-nitaa- anishinaabem. I’m trying to learn Ojibwe. I was raised in Ottawa, and my mother was adopted during the Sixties Scoop and raised in a non-Anishinaabe household. My kookum attended Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School in Kenora, and she passed on years before anyone in my family could find her. All of her children were taken from her. Nobody in my immediate family speaks the language fluently. Bangii eta ni-nisidotam. I can understand only a little. I hope that my relations living on and near Obishikokaang hold onto the language. Reconnecting with our extended family is an ongoing, long-term process, and there are many relatives I have yet to meet. Many other Indigenous people can share similar stories on how the Canadian state has implemented strategies to rip apart their families and impede the transmission of language between generations. Residential schooling, adoption, hospitalization. Enfranchisement, marrying out. You hear these words and terms over and over again. These are all strategies of colonization, and they have been very, very effective.

Read to the end– they collect multiple translations.

Decolonization is not a metaphor

Decolonization is not a metaphor, Eve Tuck, K. Wayne Yang in Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society.

Decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools. The easy adoption of decolonizing discourse by educational advocacy and scholarship, evidenced by the increasing number of calls to “decolonize our schools,” or use “decolonizing methods,” or, “decolonize student thinking”, turns decolonization into a metaphor. As important as their goals may be, social justice, critical methodologies, or approaches that decenter settler perspectives have objectives that may be incommensurable with decolonization. Because settler colonialism is built upon an entangled triad structure of settler-native-slave, the decolonial desires of white, nonwhite, immigrant, postcolonial, and oppressed people, can similarly be entangled in resettlement, reoccupation, and reinhabitation that actually further settler colonialism. The metaphorization of decolonization makes possible a set of evasions, or “settler moves to innocence”, that problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity. In this article, we analyze multiple settler moves towards innocence in order to forward “an ethic of incommensurability” that recognizes what is distinct and what is sovereign for project(s) of decolonization in relation to human and civil rights based social justice projects. We also point to unsettling themes within transnational/Third World decolonizations, abolition, and critical space-place pedagogies, which challenge the coalescence of social justice endeavors, making room for more meaningful potential alliances.

Tag: indigenous