Coat Checking Colonial Privilege: Surpassing Tar Sands & Industrialized Transportation

Coat Checking Colonial Privilege: Surpassing Tar Sands & Industrialized Transportation

I’m pushing urgency here, as people prepare to march on May tenth, two-thousand-and-fourteen, make your colonial privileges known and honour Indigenous and allied peoples on the front lines, and learn properly to each of their struggles living under occupation. We are attempting to reoccupying cultural spaces presently, and historically, threatened from Tar Sands extraction and all tar sands movements creates is the death of peace. I suggested strongly if you are out there reading this, that on May 10^th, 2014 to drop your colonial privileges, check them at the door, leave them at home, somewhere in the comforts of your dwelling, and honour those on the front lines, standing proudly already, stand with signs and such sure, then make an effort to create signs stating your intent: “Solidarity with Unis’tot’en” can be a prime example; since they are safe guarding their homelands from Tar Sands and pipelines, and don’t forget Treaty 8 territories, lands devout where Indigenous peoples lives near the monster of tar and metal, and to Six Nations Indigenous communities that are under threat from oil mining traveling by way of pipes and liquid fracked gas, too (among anything else that the ideals of capitalism brought along with them back in 1492).

I fell out of your dream only to weep happily

I fell off your thoughts only to be colonized

I fell out of your nightmare to only trip on hatred

I fell off your ladder and become depressed no more

Suddenly I am hearing words that I have been working tirelessly against, as I know many work tirelessly for industry to go away, for the Tar Sands to pack up and leave this solar system, I have met or shook hands with people or held a sign and screamed for the system to collapse and stood by against thousands for the tyranny in so-called Kanata…all the while knowing my familial customs continues to be forgotten. The words, you ask? Well, these are like many that are becoming normalcy yet abnormal to my writing and visual mind: pipelines, tankers and corruption. Some words I find rather unfriendly to my Indian identity of being Hul’q’ui’num are all being threatened, shaken violently, on my ancestral homelands and throughout Indian country. My utmost peak is reached, this is enough, I want to sleep and awake to my canoe, my village, my people, and my family.

I am searching for my canoe, a stolen structure that was deemed primitive so “modern fuels” can then consume us. You can see why my awareness levels of anger and frustration are aimed at corrupt, racist and biased bullshit for this built structure that was forcefully placed on Indian lands. Volts of energy surges through my body like lightning struck me. I then awoke to type my furry, rage, and confusion in an ordered fashion. Watching helplessly and words spew digitally in hopes of translating images that are prancing madly around my thoughts. Conveying a message of hopes that “I am here, Mother Earth is not alone”. I say loudly. “I do not understand”, as I am driving in my gasoline filled car these words are spoken, continually, “why do we do these things to you, Mother Earth”. I tell her, I plead to her, “You’re people have not forgotten your power, your beauty, your grace”.

I continued sadly, tears about to be ejected from the water ducts residing behind my eyes hiding years of oppression. “I am upset by colonial law”, then I pause, I must hold on I think. I continue in prayer by talking out loud to Creator, to Mother Earth. “I am begging your forgiveness to help us, please watch over my family, they need it most right now, watch over the peoples on the frontlines defending and uplifting their vows to safeguarding you, Mother Earth”. I do not and must not ever share my prayers, and I never have, though I feel with colonization taking control and consuming the planet like a disease, a plague unleashed unto the environment’s soul, this is the time to pray aloud. We have not forgotten you Mother Earth. I repeat this, like a step I have created: “We have not forgotten you Mother Earth”. I honestly pray she holds on, too.

I think personally that this is what Idle No More did for me, on a separate level, we fucking disturbed consumerism and shocked the very core of silence by drumming. Salish peoples sang deeply and danced sacredly and I too chimed in echoing the calls of the songs and sung deeply: forever connected and bonded to the lands. Praying that the entire continent gets that I am Hul’q’ui’num and I am, even in death, alive. So the world understands now, and understands always, that I am fucking pissed off at the pipelines, at Enbridge, and energy companies maiming the planet alive, tankers poisoning the ocean, the whales, the seals, the shellfish, the starfish, the shrimp, the rocks, the salmon, my poor family is being ignored because they are animals, yet they are my family, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, cousins, teachers, we have trains causing further havoc on the lands and at the same time, I am unsure if I will ever fade or pick silence as an option. I vow that I will never live up to the chants that I am only Indian and that is all I will ever be: a Heathen in the eye of white men. If I change these words around: “All I will ever be is a proud, say it loud Indian”, then yes, I am only Indian, like many though, we will not go quietly.

Finding Ancestral Home Lands: Only to Discover Colonial Treaties

Finding Ancestral Home Lands: Only to Discover Colonial Treaties

I recognize the moment I first went home, onto my ancestors home territory, after learning of the displacement so-called Kanata forced into the home of my Grandmother, removing her three sons and one daughter (my mother) from her Indigenous care, a Grandparent and Hul’qumi’num women I will never know on a personal level, remains the most difficult experience I have ever done: despite the surreal fact that I quit using crystal meth, quit smoking pot, quit drinking alcohol, quit using drugs in general and mostly, I quit smoking cigarettes. Going home remains one of the hardest things any Indian can go through. Lots of questions with little answers to the pain we each witnessed on a daily basis growing up under white occupation, growing up and overthrowing racism.

I have heard “we must make Canada a better place” or even “British Columbians must protect our water, our ocean, our lands” and these resources have become quickly colonized without many realizing what expansionism really is, these places cannot be possessed so wrongfully from a privileged “I was here first” attitude. Furthermore, announcing that so-called Kanata to be somehow much worse in the year of 2014 than it was say 500 years ago, to the Indian faced against a white privilege face to date is widely misjudged. For this is exactly why the so-called forefather’s created so-called Kanata: in the eyes of expansionism; to expand the British Empire in the glory, in the name, and for the purest of the evilest intentions to a known terrorist named “free enterprise” also known as “capitalism”.

The idea of consumerism is to obtain things and money from the Mother, Earth movers like mountain top removal, tar sands mining, mineral mining, creek/river water company’s and colonial band politics for many corrupt officials’ holding their peoples hostage. Indeed, greed is horrible, the polar opposite of the consumer mind is all about learning the concepts of greed-greed is built to take and abuse Indian land and to maim and alter Indian law all in the name of the Queen, all in the name of progress, I mean after all, “It’s just good business”.

Industry, corporate, governments, all concepts of corruption that throws money at the problems from oil spills, liquid fracked gas “accidents”, outdated green, yellow and red light operations for said energy companies, systems of protection are being abused and yet everything is magically fixed by passing or erasing a bill…meanwhile homes, lives, and property are at its greatest loss when up against the war waged running freely from law in the oil businesses junkie veins hooked on injecting bitumen, crude, tar, oil through pipelines on our Mother Earth: they have quietly made her addicted to this wayward concept of energy as we all blindly drove to buy gas, get to the store just to obtain GMO foods and devour farmed salmon like we do religion…we are fracked! Such “high valued” energy companies remain armed to the teeth with capital soaked deep in their drug addled veins and pockets lined with lawyers like lint running freely.

Money is essentially law; crack, cocaine, and meth have become crude, oil, fuels like gasoline and diesel, plastics, man-made clothing materials, drug addiction is now about the countries of the so-called United States of Amerikkka and so-called kkKanata stand idly by as the planet dies from the blood thirsty ill-natured methods to slaughter the lands to get at the gritty tar sands and inject this sand into a different type of needle: pipelines. The papers we read within constitutions protecting human rights, federal and provincial and international laws are merely created thusly so governments can then force the Indians, and grass rooted peoples, in to the courtrooms and even those are kangaroo court schemes in the first fucking place; each hand of law built so Indian and grass rooted peoples become financially ruined…unless hope prevails and such corrupted systems are pushed so far, they each become bankrupt and we can pray, awake to fight another day.

I move on to a concept of treaties with a country or countries rather that are both birthed from a fallacy of Judeo-Christianity and its view of indoctrination. Wrongful land acquisition that Indian peoples are Heathens, Godless and primitive; since Native societies did not and still do not acquire land over profit, hatred slowly consumed the lands. Native peoples carry an idea to work with people, work with the lands, against is only an idea for corruption, greed, lust for more, Native peoples acquire what is needed to survive and nothing more than what is needed.

The act of disbanding hereditary leaders, displacing Native peoples from their homelands and allocating corrupt officials in the band offices suddenly utilizing treaty negations with so-called Kanata to “prove” these lands are ours is war against Native villages. Natures Law is a principle that stayed with the ancestors for millions of years; throughout the lands of Turtle Island, a call to return is voiced and many do not wish to go searching for home. I realize a silent war has always been upon us since 1492; when madness flowed into the rivers of our minds and corrupted the foundations of a holy practice to be and keep human qualities close to us. Somewhere hidden in the forests of our souls, awaited in the echo of self-actualization within each of us is our strength to return home.

Reuniting with lands we were all separated wrongfully from, looking to stay with our spiritual concepts to salvage Mother Earth from her captures of white governance: A system of capitalistic ideologies that consumes a Natural Law that kept lands clean and holy. Treaties of nobility like the Six Nations are an understanding I have yet to research fully. In my head I hear “colonial treaties” and think: we are doomed if we allow colonial treaties to dictate “what is mine and what is not” in terms of a people from nowhere
that dominated and wiped clean their own violent histories of Indian genocide, ecocide, residential schools, Indian hospitals, 1960s scoops and racially based judgement from white privilege. I say to the corrupt officials and elected band leaders on the reservations that we watch our lands dwindle into nothing and our culture is slaughtered so men can get rich and fat of off the death of our Mother.

 

I end this with a poem:

 POEM 1

“If anything, I go to learn”

 

I go and learn how

Colonization is, well

It’s slow and quiet

Brutal and colourless

 

He slithers

He creeps

Soils seeps

She weeps

 

Her decree

Her command

Creators Design

Not Mine

 

Blood of tar runs deeply

Soon corrupting cheaply

Tumble and fumble

Indian villages soon crumble

 

Lurch the church

Upset the status quo

Most say hell no

In toe is a system that must go

 

The dawn of autonomy

Is upon us

The era of autocracy

Is to be burned

 

The world sees a surprise

Indian Nations shall simply rise

Mumble and stumble

Immortalized jumble

 

The lands are about profit

Nothing more than profit

Margins soon breached

Many preached and preached

 

Boundaries wrongfully placed

Ancestors doomed and disgraced

Former glories go unseen

History is scattered and tattered

 

Cultures mixed and sewn together

I find an eagle feather

Create space to pray

What else is there to say?

 

Voices in the wind voice

Protect Mother Earth

Her first duty to entrust

I must, I must…I must