[News] Olympics Can't Mask Canada's Human Rights Record on Indigenous Peoples

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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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