[BCFSN] Video showing devastation of Pacific coast. Most species gone.

Wed Aug 20 12:59:25 EDT 2014

*I think this is especially relevant in light of the recent Mount Polley
breach, ALR controversy and land grabbing that is happening all over the
world. *

*Brian Bethune and McLeans magazine writes: *

*For almost the whole of his 70 years, Thomas King, the California-born
Canadian novelist, broadcaster and, more than occasionally, polemicist, has
been having, inside his own irony-prone mind, the conversation captured in *The
Inconvenient Indian*. King’s 12th book, which has brought him a RBC Taylor
Prize nomination
<http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/five-vie-for-25000-on-taylor-short-list/article16340919/>,
centres on non-Natives’ continuing incomprehension of First Nations
reality, as opposed to their mythic presence in our imagination. “What’s
really hard for many people to get their heads around,” King says, “is that
Natives control part of Canada,” including land we want to exploit for its
resources. “But if Natives don’t want a pipeline running through their
land, then they don’t have to have one.”*

*The following is an excerpt from King’s *The Inconvenient Indian*.*

What do Indians want? Great question.The problem is, it’s the wrong
question to ask. While there are certainly Indians in North America, the
Indians of this particular question don’t exist. The Indians of this
question are “the Indian” that Canada and the United States have created
for themselves. And as long as the question is asked in that way, there
will never be the possibility of an answer. Better to ask what the Lubicon
Cree of Alberta want, or the Brantford Mohawk of Ontario or the Zuni of New
Mexico or the Hupa of northern California or the Tlingit of Alaska.

But I’d just as soon forget the question entirely. There’s a better
question to ask, one that will help us understand the nature of
contemporary North American Indian history. A question that we can ask of
both the past and the present.

What do Whites want? No, it’s not a trick question. And I’m not being
sarcastic. Native history in North America as writ has never really been
about Native people. It’s been about Whites and their needs and desires.
What Native peoples wanted has never been a vital concern, has never been a
political or social priority.

The Lakota didn’t want Europeans in the Black Hills, but Whites wanted the
gold that was there. The Cherokee didn’t want to move from Georgia to
Indian Territory (Oklahoma), but Whites wanted the land. The Cree of Quebec
weren’t at all keen on vacating their homes to make way for the Great Whale
project, but there’s excellent money in hydroelectric power. The California
Indians did not ask to be enslaved by the Franciscans and forced to build
that order’s missions.

What do Whites want? The answer is quite simple, and it’s been in plain
sight all along.

Land.

Whites want land.

Sure, Whites want Indians to disappear, and they want Indians to
assimilate, and they want Indians to understand that everything that Whites
have done was for their own good because Native people, left to their own
devices, couldn’t make good decisions for themselves.

All that’s true, from a White point of view, at least. But it’s a lower
order of true. It’s a spur-of-the-moment true, and these ideas have changed
over time. Assimilation was good in the 1950s, but bad in the 1970s.
Residential schools were the answer to Indian education in the 1920s, but
by the 21st century, governments were apologizing for the abuse that Native
children had suffered at the hands of Christian doctrinaires, pedophiles
and sadists. In the 1880s, the prevailing wisdom was to destroy Native
cultures and languages so that Indians could find civilization. Today, the
non-Native lament is that Aboriginal cultures and languages may well be on
the verge of extinction. These are all important matters, but if you pay
more attention to them than they deserve, you will miss the larger issue.

The issue that came ashore with the French and the English and the Spanish,
the issue that was the *raison d’être *for each of the colonies, the issue
that has made its way from coast to coast to coast and is with us today,
the issue that has never changed, never varied, never faltered in its
resolve, is the issue of land. The issue has always been land. It will
always be land, until there isn’t a square foot of land left in North
America that is controlled by Native people.

Land. If you understand nothing else about the history of Indians in North
America, you need to understand that the question that really matters is
the question of land. Land contains the languages, the stories and the
histories of a people. It provides water, air, shelter and food. And land
is home.

Research Associate, Indigenous Community Engagement
Southwest BC Bioregional Food Systems Design and Plan
Kwantlen Polytechnic University
Office: 604.599.2569
Email: dawn.morrison at kpu.ca
Website: http://www.kpu.ca/isfs

Indigenous Food Systems Network
C/O 555 East 55th Avenue
Vancouver, B.C, V5X 1N6
Mobile: 778.879.5106
Email: dmo6842 at gmail.com
Website: www.indigenousfoodsystems.org
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