[News] Olympics Can't Mask Canada's Human Rights Record on Indigenous Peoples
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Wed Feb 17 12:36:36 EST 2010
http://www.counterpunch.org/luckas02172010.html
February 17, 2010
Olympics Can't Mask Country's Human Rights Record on Indigenous Peoples
Canada's Aboriginal Show and Tell
By MARTIN LUKACS
The opening ceremonies at the Vancouver Winter
Olympiad were flush with aboriginal motifs:
hundreds of costumed Indigenous dancers, giant
illuminated totem poles, and the broad smiles of
representatives from the "Four Host First
Nations." It was a perfectly choreographed
display of Canada's multicultural grace for an
international audience. Ever-sensitive about
their reputation as a land of the fair-minded,
Canada's Olympic planners have gone to lengths to
showcase the nation's respect for aboriginals.
They made an Inuit design the official logo. They
ran the torch-relay through scores of
reservations. And they bought the support and
participation of local First Nations with a few
million in bonds, business ventures and gleaming
buildings. An absolute bargain, if this
aboriginal gilding can blind Canadians and the
world to the country's secret shame: the true state of its Indigenous peoples.
The evidence is hard to dispute. Roads into most
Indigenous reservations, some close to the
celebrated Olympic slopes, are dirt. Nearly a
hundred communities are on boil alerts, their
tap-water undrinkable this in the country with
the world's most fresh water. There is no
government strategy to deal with the toxic mold
that creeps up walls of cheaply constructed
houses; even by the government's own estimates,
half require renovation. Aboriginals comprise 4
per cent of the Canadian population, and almost
20 per cent of the inmates of the country's
prisons. One of the acknowledged suicide capitals
of the world? A small reservation in northern
Ontario, where a group of girls once signed a
collective suicide pact. And as I write, I am
recovering from a debilitating case of the mumps,
a viral souvenir from a recent visit to a Quebec
community seized by an outbreak. The mumps have
been practically eradicated in developed
countries. Not so in the third-world pockets that exist throughout Canada.
Canada's Minister of Indian Affairs Chuck Strahl
regularly trumpets the amounts supposedly
lavished on aboriginals. The myth that native
peoples leech off the state serves to disguise
the real scandal: that most money pays for a vast
government bureaucracy which only perpetuates
native's dependency and poverty. Billions have
indeed been spent not on paving roads and
developing infrastructure and health-care in
dilapidated and diseased communities, but on a
legal war opposing aboriginal rights. In one case
alone that ended in 2009, federal departments
poured upwards of $100 million into a court
battle against the Samson and Ermineskin Cree,
who were struggling to recover oil and gas
royalties mismanaged by the government.
I have it from an Indigenous friend that Canadian
officials chuckle about their public relations
campaigns in the halls of international
diplomacy. In British Columbia, where most
territory is legally unsurrendered, the
government forces First Nations to sign away
ninety-five percent of their lands as a
precondition for discussions. Such agreements
were once called land rights "extinguishment."
Officials now coyly advertise it as
"non-assertion." But aboriginals promising to not
claim or "assert" land rights amounts to their
being stripped of them. It was to defend such
dismal policies that Canada joined Australia, the
U.S., and New Zealand in opposing the 2007 United
Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous
Peoples. Australia has since reversed its vote,
and the U.S. and New Zealand are reconsidering.
Only Canada stands stubbornly by its position.
The government has reigned in any Indigenous
communities that have dared act on the basis of
the UN Declaration. Since 2008 the leaders of
three communities Big Trout Lake, Ardoch, and
Barriere Lake have been imprisoned for several
months. Their crimes? Peacefully protesting
clear-cut logging and mining that would have
ravaged their lands. The government's sermonizing
about such wild criminality is a cover for an
undeclared agenda: one land grab after another,
to satisfy Canadian companies and multinationals
pining for the riches on Indigenous lands.
"The Olympic embrace of aboriginals is a cruel
deception," says Indigenous activist Arthur
Manuel, who marched the last few days in
Vancouver under the "No Olympics on Stolen Native
land" banner. "Canada wants us impoverished to
justify seizing our lands. They can hint, how
could Indigenous peoples possibly control their
territories, when they are so uneducated and poor?"
The government feigns ignorance about the steps
to eliminate such bleak conditions, but there
have been no lack of commissions and inquests and
scholarly reports. The exhaustive 5-volume Royal
Commission on Aboriginal Peoples in 1996
advocated major land restitution, aboriginal
self-government on the level of the provinces and
federal state, and swift compensation for many
unfulfilled treaties. It has gathered dust on a
bureaucrat's shelf. Instead the government
promotes Indigenous voices who tell them what
they'd prefer to hear. At industry conferences
and in the media their message is applauded: that
natives need only pull themselves up by their
bootstraps, like their entrepreneurial peers
hawking traditional wares at the 21st Winter Olympiad.
The Olympic games may bring Canada the world's
uncritical attention and adulation. It will last
barely three weeks. The plight of Indigenous
peoples will persist for those who care to look,
as a blemish on Canada's enlightened and proud
self-conception. Real self-respect will come when
Canadians acknowledge Indigenous peoples'
contributions to the country, recognize their
land rights and give them a fair share of the
resources of this abundant land. Not some
business deals and a supporting role as cultural
props during a short-lived sports party in the
British Columbia mountains. But genuine justice.
Only then will this society deserve the respect it seeks by other means.
Martin Lukacs is a writer and activist in
Montreal, Canada, involved with
<http://www.defendersoftheland.org>defendersoftheland.org.
He can be reached at: <mailto:martonlukacs at gmail.com>martonlukacs at gmail.com
Notes
1. Water situation:
<http://www.polarisinstitute.org/boiling_point_0>http://www.polarisinstitute.org/boiling_point_0
2. Housing and mold problems, 2003 Report of the
Auditor General of Canada:
<http://www.oag-bvg.gc.ca/internet/English/parl_oag_200304_06_e_12912.html>http://www.oag-bvg.gc.ca/internet/English/parl_oag_200304_06_e_12912.html
3: Aboriginal imprisonment rates:
<http://www.vcn.bc.ca/august10/politics/facts_stats.html>http://www.vcn.bc.ca/august10/politics/facts_stats.html
4. Crown expenses on Samson Cree court case:
Terry Munro, Munro & Associates, personal communication, February 11, 2010.
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