Category: We Are All Treaty People

Are All Vancouver NIMBYs now also Racists?

Something very interesting is happening in Vancouver:

Much like in the US, Canada is experiencing a severe housing affordability crisis, and the country’s indigenous communities, known as First Nations, have long suffered disproportionately from inadequate housing.

But Canada’s indigenous communities are fighting to address the issue. In Vancouver alone, several First Nations are leading a major push to build housing on indigenous-owned land, in some cases partnering with the federal government to build entirely new communities that will house tens of thousands of people, while generating wealth for generations of First Nations members to come.

Ground has already been broken on one of these projects, 11 towers with 6,000 homes being built by the Squamish Nation on a 12-acre piece of land near downtown Vancouver, Canada’s most expensive real-estate market. The Squamish people were forced off of this land in the early 20th century and finally won back their ancestral territory about 20 years ago.

The Broken Record

You could erase the dates in this article and aside from the monetary amounts there would be no way to tell whether it was written today or 5, 10, 20 or 50 years ago. No half-awake thinker need be perpetually stumped as to why an economic system premised on the Soviet model doesn’t suddenly produce great outcomes. Note to Canada’s developers of aboriginal policy: stop banging your head against the wall.

“Time after time, whether in housing, policing, safe drinking water or other critical areas, our audits of federal programs to support Canada’s Indigenous Peoples reveal a distressing and persistent pattern of failure,” Hogan said at a press conference Tuesday.

“The lack of progress clearly demonstrates that the government’s passive, siloed approach is ineffective, and, in fact, contradicts the spirit of true reconciliation.”

It’s the fourth time since 2003 that the auditor general has held the government responsible for unsafe and unsuitable First Nations housing.

Will a First Nation-owned pipeline be without protests and opposition?

Can’t imagine why oil shippers demand explanation from Trans Mountain for pipeline cost overruns, can you?

B.C. First Nation and Western LNG partner to purchase natural gas pipeline project. Can they succeed in bringing a major pipeline in on time and on budget, or will they face the same perils as Trans Mountain (above) and Coastal GasLink? Will other First Nations do all they can to halt it, like GasLink? Will they destroy equipment and raid camps?

US Bureau of Land Management accepts bids for the sale of Federal Helium System. FYI the US Govt getting out of #helium is what’s driving Saskatchewan’s burgeoning industry

The Libranos: Just Another Day In Bananada

Blacklocks (paywalled)MPs yesterday summoned Defence Minister Bill Blair for questioning on how an employee became a millionaire while moonlighting as an Indigenous contractor. Members of the Commons government operations committee gave Blair until month’s end to appear for cross-examination: “It is wrong.”

Related: Video

Kristian Firth of GC Strategies admits in committee to meeting various government officials outside of a work setting – allegations that he previously denied.

Conservative Michael Barrett: That sir, and you can check with your lawyer or with a dictionary, is a lie. It’s perjury.

“Reflecting” On A Narrative

How anyone can take these people seriously anymore is beyond me. Every time the issue of residential school graves crops up, things just get weirder and weirder as the gap between accusations and efforts to discover the truth gets wider and wider.

Spearing is leading the team that has used ground-penetrating radar and aerial and terrestrial sensors to identify 93 sites of “potential human burials” near the former residential school by Williams Lake First Nation.

At a press conference led by Chief Willie Sellars on Tuesday, Spearing said the sites show “reflections” that suggest human burials, but added the only way to confirm the findings would be through excavation. She said the investigation is still in its early stages and the findings are preliminary.

Inconvenient History

Paleolithic cultures necessarily live in perfect harmony not only with nature, but with each other, right? If there is any conflict in such cultures, it must be due to residential schools or the 60s sweep or some such. So what explains deadly conflict that occurred over a century prior to European settlement, the memories of which continued to create divisions between aboriginal communities well into the present?

They show elders relaying their tales of ambush and murder while in the midst of daily activities, cutting up a seal or cleaning fish on the beach.

One elder tells of a slaughter so extensive that the Inuit called the place where the rotting bodies were left Annarnituq – Bloated Island. It’s visible in the distance as a boy runs toward it through the wild grass.

There is enough residual enmity that people in the area convened in 2011 for a ceremony initiated by Cree trapper Ron Sheshamush to try to heal the rift once and for all.

 

The Libranos: ArriveScam

@RealAndyLeeShow;

It is right on his LinkedIn that ArriveCAN contractor David Yeo, President of Dalian, works for the Department of National Defence. He has worked for the DND for *37* years – since 1987.

They just figured out he’s a federal employee that also won massive contracts? For real?

To complete the trifecta of corruption, enter Chief Big Screen TV.

The Globe and Mail first reported that the company presents itself as Indigenous-owned and together with another company, Coradix, worked on the ArriveCan app. According to the Globe, the two companies are in receipt of $400 million in government contracts.

Indigenous Services Minister Patty Hajdu yesterday announced a review of how it awards contracts to Indigenous-owned businesses. The government’s policy is that five percent of the total value of government contracts go to Indigenous businesses by 2024.

Subhuman Slurs

At the rate things are going, there’s little hope for reconciliation in this country. Once a politically influential group openly embraces racial collectivism and pigeonholes others into superior and inferior race categories, it’s all over.

“The white people in Canada are subhuman because of what they’ve allowed to happen,” said former Chief Councillor of the Tla’amin First Nation KWAST-en-ayu (Maynard Harry) in a 90 minute phone interview with The New Westminster Times about the City of Powell River’s controversial name change proposal.

“White people need to acknowledge their culture is lost,” said KWAST-en-ayu bluntly. “White settler culture is a lost culture because nothing good defines white people.”

“If I insult white people, I don’t give a sh-t,” admitted KWAST-en-ayu.

Missing And Misappropriated Aboriginal Money?

If your reserve was sitting on substantial oil and gas deposits you’d have to have pretty lousy management to lose track of $120 million, but accountability is probably an outdated artifact of the colonial mindset anyway.

Public financial reports for Frog Lake First Nation show the band is short $120 million in net assets over a five-year time period between 2013 and 2018.

The records show the band-owned business called Frog Lake Energy Resources has been losing millions of dollars since 2015.

APTN reached out the current Chief Greg Desjarlais and initially agreed to an interview but later cancelled.

In a virtual meeting with community members he says that an audit is unnecessary.

Exaggeration First Nation

As anyone who has done basic research into their family tree might know, the presence of unmarked graves in rural 19th century cemeteries is extremely common. Given the high rate of infant mortality at that time, it’s also not surprising that many were children. But careful consideration of the actual evidence doesn’t make for shocking headlines, so some feel it’s best to make sinister inferences and jump to outrageous conclusions instead.

Earlier this month, the Acimowin Opaspiw Society (AOS) — announced they have confirmed that at least 212 children were buried in unmarked graves during the school’s operations.

“It can be safely stated that in our community of 12,000 people, each family has had four to five children who went missing from this institution,” he continued.

The remnants of the Saddle Lake site are so extensive that grave diggers kept uncovering child-sized remains when digging graves for recently deceased band members.

The Name Game

If you publicly disagree with the current penchant for renaming streets, towns and cities, it might just cost you your job. But then, that’s just revolutionary justice, right?

According to Vizzutti, a group of protesters in favour of the name change gathered outside Powell River City Hall for the May 4th council meeting. Vizzutti says one of the protesters, threatened to have him fired from his job.

The next day, May 5th, Vizzutti received a severe Code of Conduct violation letter from Sheree Haydu, Manager, Clinical Operations, Sunshine Coast for BCEHS, demanding he appear at a meeting to address alleged “racism.”

We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans

Judge Orders Wind Farm Dismantled In Win For Tribal Sovereignty

By ordering the scuttling of 84 turbines spread over 8,400 acres of land, along with the removal of underground lines, overhead transmission lines, and meteorological towers, U.S. Court of International Trade Judge Jennifer Choe-Groves essentially ruled that the renewable energy project, known as Osage Wind, should never have been constructed in the first place because the developers – Osage Wind LLC, Enel Kansas LLC, and Enel Green Power North America – did not have the required lease from the Osage Minerals Council.

“The developers failed to acquire a mining lease during or after construction, as well as after issuance of the 10th Court of Appeals’ decision hold that a mining lease was required,” Choe-Groves ruled, according to Tulsa World (Dec. 22).

“On the record before the Court, it is clear that Defendants are actively avoiding the leasing requirement,” Choe-Groves said. “Permitting such behavior would create the prospect for further interference with the Osage Mineral Council’s authority by Defendants or others wishing to develop the minerals lease. […]

The reference to minerals is key to understanding the case. Wind turbines not only soar into the air from the surface of the land. Their construction also requires the subsurface smashing of rocks and other excavation necessary to ground the turbines. The Osage Nation and its Minerals Council have claimed for years that this subsurface excavation activity constitutes mining and is covered by the tribe’s mineral rights. And for that the developers needed a lease from the Osage Mining Council which they never sought. The developers began leasing the surface rights in 2013 but never bothered to acquire the subsurface mineral rights. In the end, that was their undoing.

Interesting angle.

Paleolithic Dispute Settlement Mechanisms

We’re all used to hearing how indigenous tribes got along so well with each other until the Europeans showed up, right? Apparently, the inhabitants of a village near present-day Crow Creek, South Dakota in 1325 didn’t get that memo.

The attack was brutal, thorough and devastating. No one would live on the site again. Eventually some of the villagers return to bury the nearly 500 victims in a mass grave – the worst atrocity in the history of what will one day be the state of South Dakota.

“And when we excavated down on that we found this pile of bones.”

It was a pile of bones about three feet thick in an area of about 20 feet by 20 feet.

Of all the skulls found, 90 percent had cuts on the forehead, the telltale sign of scalping. A quarter of the skeletons showed knife wounds on the first vertebrae of the neck, which is consistent with a slit throat or decapitation. Of the complete skulls, 40 percent showed depression fractures left from blunt force trauma.

Grave Error

At the Western Standard;

Having lived at two residential schools when he was a university student in the mid-sixties, Clifton is Canada’s senior statesman about indigenous affairs.

He and Professor Rouillard take us from ground-zero at KIRS two and a half years ago, when the suggestion of burials had some mandarins, journalists and pundits convinced that it was a mass grave containing pupils from the school.

This revelation initiated a spiral of false claims which shook the world and caused moral panic among Canadians the likes of which has not been seen since the last world war.

And yet there is no evidence to substantiate the allegations that otherwise benign people, priests, nuns, teachers and staff at residential schools across Canada had a hand in malfeasance.

In fact, in every chapter, Grave Error puts the boots to false allegations. The handful of exhumations that have taken place — mind you, not at KIRS — have given up not so much as a missing shoelace.

Narrative Massacre

Looking for a Christmas gift that eviscerates a common historical narrative for yourself or a like-minded family member? If you’re undecided, here’s a review that goes over the main points of Flynn-Paul’s work.

Alleged massacres resulted in the deaths of less than 1% of the Indian population and numbers in the thousands, not millions–a record long obscured thanks to Stannard’s embellishment of native population estimates. Colonialism is not an outgrowth of capitalism because the church and nobility were fervently opposed to such economic systems. The “logic of tribal anarchy” meant no land was in possession of one tribe for more than a few generations and natives were invariably locked in intratribal disputes. No evidence exists that settlers engaged in biological warfare by giving natives smallpox-laced blankets. In fact, Thomas Jefferson established an immunization program for Indians, going so far as to task Lewis and Clark with disseminating the smallpox vaccine on their famed expedition.

The “Appeal to the Noble Savage” Fallacy

The “Appeal to Authority” fallacy holds that experts are infallible: if a credible source believes something, well then, that thing must be true!2 The fallacy is not only that even truly knowledgeable people can be wrong, but also that many so-called authorities are not, in the end, all that knowledgeable.

If that’s the “Appeal to Authority” fallacy, let’s call this new thing the “Appeal to the Noble Savage” fallacy. It holds indigenous people to be the most worthy among all peoples, and incapable of engaging in human acts of cruelty. It holds them on a pedestal. The Appeal to the Noble Savage fallacy imagines indigenous people to be, well, not exactly human.

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