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BC Politics - 2. page

These are Stuart’s articles on politics at the provincial level in British Columbia.

“Are you by any chance the Mentiads? Well, it’s just that you look like Mentiads to me.” Canada, the Pirate Planet and Its Burgeoning Grief Industry

In what I consider to be both the greatest Doctor Who serial ever made and the most underappreciated work of the great Douglas Adams, there is a lot for modern Canadians to relate to in The Pirate Planet (1979). The story chronicles the planet of Zanak which teleports through space, envelops other planets and extracts the minerals and energy before leaving behind a lifeless, drained husk.

Its people live under an authoritarian regime that routinely carries out extra-judicial killings of dissidents, killings that are popular with the general public and cheered-on as a sad necessity of living in a prosperous society. The inhabitants of the planet do little work and appear to have no interest in understanding the automated processes that provide them a luxurious, indolent life.

The killings, it is revealed, are not simply about preventing the rise of dissident political movements. Because of the extraordinary scale of the death from which they are benefiting, events of mass death, when trillions of lifeforms and every ecosystem on a planet are annihilated in a single day, some sort of psychic energy is released causing the more sensitive, empathetic members of the population to become “Mentiads,” a group of telepaths who can pool their energies into gestalt capable of telekinesis.

When a planet is destroyed, the new Mentiad converts begin screaming “lifeforce dying!” When the Doctor first observes this, he asks whether this happens often to the afflicted man and the man’s friend replies “only when the Captain announces a new golden age of prosperity.” Ultimately, the more planets Zanak consumes, the more of its residents experience the psychic grief caused by unwittingly presiding over so much death and the more Mentiads come into being, swelling the ranks of the resistance, who ultimately confront the despots running their planet and destroy them with psychic powers.

Douglas Adams offers us a compelling metaphor to which many young environmentalists just starting off in the world can relate; I certainly did when I first saw the show in syndication when I was thirteen. In this story, we suddenly become conscious of the scale of the omnicide; it deeply upsets us and it spurs us to action.

But Adams actually warns us of the pitfalls of this story as well. When the Doctor arrives on Zanak, he castigates them for the fact that, until his arrival, they have not taken any action. All they have been doing is living in a cave in their creepy hooded robes, avoiding the government death squads and loudly lamenting the death of each new planet Zanak consumes, focusing all their efforts on identifying community members and building their grief-based gestalt.

And this is why I believe the Pirate Planet needs to be watched today more than ever. Because more and more of the energy and money needed to address the omnicide is being redirected into something called “climate grief.”

As I have observed more than once, if there is a single fairy tale that expresses the class politics of the ruling class, it is the Princess and the Pea, the fable in which a young woman who does not know she is a princess has a single dried pea placed under her mattress. She is so sensitive that she cannot sleep and tosses and turns all night. To try and make a bed soft enough, people keep adding more pillows and mattresses but she can always still feel the pea, even through a dozen eider down mattresses and pillows. This sensitivity reveals her to be the true princess.

Although the sensitivity politics of the original Enlightenment bourgeoisie, for and about whom the Princess and the Pea was written, were different from those of the contemporary Commissar Class, they have many points in common. It is for a future essay to describe the substantial differences between their respective politics of emotion and sensitivity.

When members of that class engage in dominance competitions in meetings or other interactions, both inside and outside the workplace, they are structured by competitive claims of special identities (white-passing Indigenous, psychologically disabled and non-binary are favourites because any assertive high-status white man can make them) and demonstrations of emotional upset, ideally tears.

There is no world leader more effective at the latter than Canada’s own Justin Trudeau who has perfected the art of using his tears as a replacement for government action or public policy. And the BC legislature, the most Woke legislature in the country passed the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous people and all eighty-seven members of the chamber had a big long cry together. And then went back to their multipartisan campaign of sending heavily-armed security forces to incarcerate the Wet’suwet’en land defenders to smash a new gas pipeline through their territory.

It is not that people cry while they act on climate or Indigenous rights. It is that they cry instead of acting.

Our governments constantly cry about things they are still doing and apologize for wrongs committed by the dead. So, naturally, aspiring commissars desire opportunities to demonstrate their own sensitivity, shed their own tears so as to rise is status within their class. And consequently, there is money to be made. Climate grief seminars, courses and retreats are being rolled out by private institutes and public universities. Zoom calls comprising a dozen middle aged white women each with “she/her” pronouns next to their names, in case anyone was going to get confused, allow the Woke to engage in miniature practice competitions to become the Apex Victim. And they can come away from the call all feeling like they have done environmental activism that day, that they are, in some small way, the Mentiads.

The area of environmental action that has been most damaged by this turn is the forensic. Efforts we used to put into assessing responsibility for quasi-natural disasters, magnified by human negligence we now put into mourning floods and fires. What has sped this up is increasing government funding for “commemoration,” “mourning” and “grief.”

And this phenomenon is not just limited to climate or environmental issues. Grief money is spreading into more sectors as demonstrations of sensitivity replace action as a new frontier in the post-political.

In 2021, the Trudeau government unveiled tens of millions of dollars in new spending on murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls. Although four government commissions in the Highway of Tears area have all had the same two core recommendations since 2000, close the camps and restore daily bus service. None of this money went into buses going anywhere, never mind a government even considering doing anything other than expanding the man camp system faster. The biggest area of funding increase and the fastest money to be released was, of course, money for commemoration, mourning and grief.

I am not one to suggest that we should not experience grief about the omnicide. I cry about it myself every couple of days and, in my social time, my friends and I talk each other through the grief over a pint or nine. But we do not mistake those times for taking action against the Greenhouse Effect. There is more work to be done than ever when it comes to taking down the fossil fuel industry. And the work continues to grow more urgent every day.

Wake up people! We’re not the Mentiads. Your tearful gestalt does nothing. Because this is reality, not science fiction.

BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |

Canada Needs Land Reform (part 2): Rural Land Reform Lessons from Latin America

One of the most significant differences between Canada and the other countries of the Western Hemisphere has been not just what it has (or has not) done in response to the massive dispossession and oppression of Indigenous people during the European conquest but where that impetus has come from.

As I stated previously, most countries in the Americas have sought democratic political resolutions to land inequity through their legislatures. Candidates have run in elections on platforms of reconciliation, been elected and carried these programs out to varying degrees of success. The history of Canada has no such episode and recent Canadian history shows no real attempts.

In 1969, the Pierre Trudeau government put forward its white paper on Indigenous peoples, proposing termination, the legal doctrine the US had unsuccessfully applied 1894-1933 and which Mexico had tried 1857-1920 to similarly disastrous effect. Not only did First Nations leaders oppose this policy and rebuke the Trudeau government but so did many settler Canadian voters, not so much because they opposed abolishing Indigenous “status” and Reserve governments but because this radical rewriting of settler-Indigenous relations had not been placed before voters in the 1968 election.

Since Trudeau’s shelving of the doctrine of termination before the 1972 election, pretty much every significant advance in Indigenous rights in Canada has emanated not from parliament and the provincial legislatures but from the courts. As rehearsed in my essay last fall, this has produced a number of perverse and pernicious effects when it comes to resolving the land question.

With the exception of BC Premier Mike Harcourt’s proposed BC Treaty Commission, which failed to settle one single demand for land reform during its decade in operation, political leaders no longer go to the voters with plans for settling the Indigenous land question in the form of any discernible government program. Their essential message is that they will ape the language of the courts and follow the decisions of the courts because it is the judicial not the legislative branch of government that should decide the land question with respect to Indigenous peoples.

When it comes to the land crisis experienced by settlers, along with non-status, Métis and off-reserve Indigenous people, a completely different, unconnected, siloed conversation ensues. First of all, once treaties are off the table, the land question is thought to be a wholly provincial matter, or at least has functionally been so since (a) crown land south of 60 degrees was distributed to the provinces and not the federal government since the 1867, and (b) the federal government abandoned its guarantee of every Canadian enjoying a “right to shelter” when it defunded federal housing programs and enacted the Canada Health and Social Transfer legislation that untied provincial transfer payments from housing guarantees.

Shockingly, even though the vast majority of land in every province west of the Gaspé is state-owned “crown land,” governments have not come to the voters with land redistribution plans to alleviate unemployment or the housing affordability crisis. And in a divisive and perverse move, they have argued that because so much land is covered by flawed, corrupt and non-consensual “numbered treaty” system, treaties whose meanings are in dispute and often before the courts or, was simply seized by the state without a treaty, it would violate the rights of Indigenous people to redistribute land to settlers.

In reality, neither settlers nor any group of Indigenous people have meaningful, functional, stable access to the crown land near them, nor do they have any democratic control over its use, as it is typically under the direct control of forest, fossil fuel, bottled water or mining companies, or of provincial government departments responsible for selling water, minerals and timber.

The only programs remotely resembling what one might call “land reform” were some experimental pilot “community woodlot” programs in Western Canada in the 1990s, where some crown land was alienated to a local municipality or corporation with community ownership to be controlled for the limited purpose of producing wood for a local mill. Multi-use, non-extractive use, these forms of community land tenure are not even on the table, not even part of the debate.

Meanwhile in our cities and towns, the housing affordability crisis is being fobbed-off on the private sector in the same way the Indigenous land question is being fobbed-off on the judiciary. Provinces and cities rarely use their own land to solve housing problems; even when they decide to take public land and dedicate it to housing, the first step in that process is typically privatization, after which times, the failure of the land to provide what it was intended for is blamed on the free market.

This is a messed-up state of affairs but the good news is that it is uniquely Canadian. If we stopped seeing our land crisis as multiple, separate, siloed or competing land crises but as one, we could chart a different course. And if we saw our legislatures, not our courts or our markets as the place where our land problems are solved, we could chart a different course. Finally, if we looked to the rest of the continent at how to build majority coalitions for land reform, we could create the social movement needed to chart that course.

The Mexican Revolution was a complex, multi-phase, multi-faction process that effectively re-founded Mexico a century after its initial separation from the Spanish Empire in 1821. The basis of this re-founding was the restoration of something Mexicans call the ejido. Previously privatized lands that had been held by major landowners and foreign corporations were seized by the government and redistributed to rural cooperatives.

Eligibility for these lands was based on three main things: (1) the grassroots, inclusive and cooperative nature of the project, (2) the economic viability of the business it sought to create and (3) the material need for the land. In other words, the government redistributed land to the rural proletariat and peasants based on self-organization on the basis of class.

Of course, it went without saying that the primary beneficiaries of the ejido were Indigenous Mexicans because class and race function synergistically. Consequently, this policy proved very popular with Indigenous people. But it was also popular with the non-Indigenous rural poor because it did not walk back the reforms of 1857 that had abolished separatist race-based courts and race-based systems of land tenure. The fact the ejido equally available to settlers and Indigenous people located in the same geographical and class position.

The ejido proved the most popular and long-lasting of the many reforms of the Mexican Revolution but was ultimately destroyed as a condition of Mexico joining NAFTA in 1994. This attempt to re-privatize the ejido has led to an ongoing insurgency, the Zapatistas, in Southern Mexico for the past generation.

Between 1950 and 1953, Guatemala undertook a hugely popular land reform program very different from the Mexican one. There, the government expropriated private land the big fruit companies had left fallow for three or more consecutive years. This land was then parceled as family farm plots and distributed to families who had previously been sharecroppers on the fruit companies’ lands. The government assessed a market value and automatically qualified the landless family receiving the land for a mortgage with the government bank. Families began working the land and paying off their mortgages within months and Guatemala’s banana production actually rose; but much more importantly, kitchen gardens got a lot bigger and families were able to meet more of their food needs on their own land.

The program was so successful and popular with the peasants that the fruit companies convinced the Eisenhower Administration to remove the government in a coup and begin reversing the reform in 1954.

As in Mexico, the overwhelming majority of the beneficiaries were Indigenous but, as in Mexico, the land reform was based on people’s class, location and financial need. And the reforms were popular because they benefited a broad class-based coalition from all three of the country’s main castes (i.e. races), indio, ladino and criollo.

Another interesting example of land reform was that of the Peruvian dictatorship installed by the Johnson Administration at the beginning of 1969. Whereas the Mexican and Guatemalan revolutionaries were anti-capitalist (despite the Guatemalan reform being a capitalist reform designed to move the country forward historically, in the style of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in 1980s China), the Peruvian regime was installed by the US as a bulwark against communism and an example of how even something like land reform is possible under capitalism.

Unlike the Mexicans and Guatemalans, the junta running Peru was constrained by its alliance with the US from engaging in uncompensated expropriation. But years of corruption and tax fraud allowed the government to purchase land far below market value because the owner had been paying property taxes based on land values artificially depressed by fraud and collusion between tax assessors and the landlord class.

Like Mexico’s land reform, self-organized cooperatives rather than family units were the beneficiaries of the reform and the types of cooperatives were evaluated based on similar metrics to Mexico but with greater sensitivity to the wide diversity of Peruvian ecosystems, commodities and the amount of processing required before goods were sold for further processing or sent to market. Whereas Mexico and Guatemala had already gone through a process of termination, eliminating Indigenous land tenure, Peru had not. This meant that the junta converted pre-existing Indigenous collective lands into land cooperatives, not dissimilar to the Alaskan reorganization that was taking place at the same time. In this way, land reform was the means by which Peru effected termination.

Yet, termination was embraced by most Indigenous groups because the new cooperatives were more dynamic, democratic and prosperous and meaningfully more land. Complications later arose with these Indigenous lands but the complications stemmed not from objections to the loss of traditional forms of land tenure and government but the tendency of small holders to function more as neighbourhoods of independent yeoman farms with only superficial economic cooperation.

As with the other examples, there is a common theme: reform was conducted based on class; settlers and Indigenous of that class benefited equally; the overall program primarily benefited Indigenous people.

I am not proposing to copy any of these, except with respect to one thing. Canada should embark on a project of land reform that is driven not by the courts or the private sector but by our parliament and legislatures. And that project should benefit and be supported by a broad coalition of Canadians needing land, rural and urban, settler and Indigenous. In the next piece, I will look at global examples of reforming and redistributing urban land.

BC Politics Canadian Politics Landscape, Urban and Spatial Studies Race | fusangite |

Canada Needs Land Reform (part 1): We Are Not As Divided As We Think

One of the reasons the establishment has been so keen to import US-style cultural politics and the moral panics they generate into Canada is that keeping Canadians divided culturally grows more important every year as our material interests and needs become increasingly aligned. The growing disagreements in Canada about gay rights, women’s rights, free speech and coercive public health measures mask a broad convergence on the material interests of Canadians.

Today, there are virtually no ordinary, decent working people in this country who are not victims of Canada’s land inequity crisis. Most land in this country is owned by the banks or by real estate and development firms. Now, it is true that much of that land is technically held in the name of one or more individual Canadian “homeowners” but most of these individuals are functionally indistinguishable from renters. They must transfer a vast amount of money to a third party to avoid the loss of their home and subsequent eviction. In some senses, the average heavily mortgaged property owner has less housing security than the average renter because more legal protections exist against eviction that repossession.

For a while, this thing urbanites call “the affordability crisis” was largely limited to cities and resort areas but in recent years, all Canadian real estate, from un-serviced lots in Central New Brunswick to bungalows in the village of Valemount (despite the closure of its only sawmill and main employer), has massively inflated in cost and can only be purchased with the “assistance” of a bank.

Since Covid’s arrival on the scene, rents in rural industrial and agricultural communities have increased faster than those in resort and urban areas, almost catching up. That means that whether renting or owning, a home is an increasingly exorbitant cost and the largest cost in almost all household budgets.

Even among people who owe little or nothing to a bank, things are scarcely better. That is because as housing and land prices rise astronomically, property tax rates do not even need to increase for annual property tax bills to double in the space of less than half a decade. This is especially impactful because those who own their homes outright or almost entirely are typically seniors or people at the very end of their working life.

And because neither private- nor public-sector pensions have kept up with inflation, RRSPs grow more unreliable as the stock market in which they play grows ever more casino-like and our governments keep stripping away legal protections for private sector and union pension funds, not only are seniors incomes both volatile and in decline, they are caught in a double bind. They need their home to continue to appreciate in value so as to deal with rising inflation rates, declining income and declining income security by selling or borrowing against their home.

Finally, there are the Canadians who live on Indian Reserves. While these people’s housing is technically “free,” chronic shortages mean that not everyone entitled to reserve housing can obtain it or are forced into incompletely constructed, incompletely renovated or dilapidated housing. Furthermore, those who are unemployed (and on-reserve unemployment rates remain more than double off-reserve unemployment rates) typically have half or more of their provincial government income assistance withheld as it is categorized as a “shelter allowance.” And as we well know, a shocking proportion of those houses are connected to inferior or non-existent utility grids, often lacking in everything from reliable electricity to potable water to internet access.

Few reserve governments have been permitted by provincial or federal governments to levy their own taxes (the Sechelt and the Nisga’a nations being notable exceptions). Consequently, with such woefully insufficient and insensitive block grant funding from the federal government, reserve governments do not have a ready mechanism to fund infrastructure improvements, housing repairs or new housing. Urban reserves have increasingly turned to using their own meagre land holdings to conduct real estate megaprojects that they hope will produce a secure revenue stream. And rural reserves have been forced to accept “benefit agreements” from forestry and mining companies in exchange for endorsing industrial activities on their traditional territories.

In other words, young or old, rural or urban, conservative or progressive, owner or renter, Canadians are suffering under and trapped in an intensifying national land crisis. And a key part of the establishment’s trick in intensifying and profiting from this crisis has been to redescribe it as a set of unconnected, separate problems or, worse yet, a set of competing priorities canceling each other out in a perverse zero-sum.

Let me just list some of the most egregious and obvious ways Canadians are being divided on the land question:

Owners versus Non-Owners

Most Canadians who “own” their home are in one of two situations: (a) the bank owns their property and they need its value to appreciate because mortgage payments are so high, there is not room in the family budget for adequate retirement savings; they rely on constant appreciation to replace lost retirement savings and declining pensions; (b) they own their property almost entirely or outright but are now living on a fixed retirement income that is steadily declining against inflation and a finite number of RRSPs they will run out of in a few years; they too rely on constant appreciation as their sole source of new equity and income.

Non-owners are generally in two groups, lifelong renters and aspiring owners. Neither group is served in any way by the continuous rapid appreciation of housing. Rising mortgage costs due to appreciation and interest rates raise rents in the basement suites and laneway homes in which an ever-increasing proportion of our renters live, also driving up prices in purpose-built rental as basement suites typically occupy the bottom of the rental market. Obviously, constantly increasing home prices pull potential homes out of the reach of first-time buyers with the consistency of Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown every year.

As both groups’ financial desperation intensifies, so too does their polarization. Every years one group needs prices to rise even more, just as the other needs them to stop rising.

Landlords versus Tenants

A witty publication in my home town coined the term “artisanal landlording” last year. It pointed to the fact that a shockingly large proportion of people’s rental housing needs are being met in basement suites or laneway homes by landlords who are renting-out between one and three suites in order to meet crippling monthly mortgage payments. These artisanal landlords typically have full-time jobs and often children as well. In addition to being short of time, they often lack even the most basic building maintenance and repair skills and knowledge and often also lack the liquidity to engage tradespeople in a timely manner to deal with matters as urgent as blocked plumbing or malfunctioning heating systems.

Without any real control over rising mortgage payments, these landlords often lack financial wriggle room when provincial governments cap rental increases at a level lower than their costs have increased and are often one major flood or other architectural disaster away from their whole miniature real estate empire collapsing like a house of cards. For this reason, they often have an incentive to be slow and inattentive to repairs because, in most provinces, a landlord can only make major rent increases when switching tenants.

Tenants, consequently, face not just rents increasing as fast as legally permitted. They are dealing with increasingly incompetent, underresourced, overworked and harried amateur caretakers who will try to push them out of their home if met with a big bill or mortgage payment hike. Furthermore, tenants who live at closest quarters with their landlords and being set up to have the most acrimonious relationships. Worse still, these declining standards in the promptness and quality of maintenance and repair work in these isolated new units allow purpose-built rental businesses to cut back on their repair and maintenance spending.

Indigenous People versus Settlers

In both rural and urban environments, Indigenous people are usually the most underhoused, poorly housed and insecurely housed people. And most are associated with a “traditional territory” on which they have no title, sovereignty or rights of occupation, except at a theoretical, legal, unenacted level.

As I have long suggested, the “land acknowledgement” is one of the most odious woke racist humblebrags out there. Settlers stand in front of other settlers and engage competitive acts of weepy, emotional histrionics about how guilty they feel about doing whatever they want with the land they are standing on without, themselves, consulting anyone Indigenous about what they are doing.

In rural areas, land injustice is thrown into sharper relief than it can be in any urban environment. Tiny Indian Reserves sit in the middle of huge swaths of alienated public land, realms the size of European countries that have been alienated to pipeline, mining and forest companies. This technically public or “crown” land containing trap lines, spawning streams, sacred and historic sites and other sources of long-term sustenance, both financial and physical but it is under the sole dictatorial control of a single resource-extraction company that sees no value in other things the land produces. Indeed, it is in the interest of these companies to ruin things of value to other economic sectors as quickly as possible to reduce land use conflicts over precious things: destroy the biggest trees, most beautiful vistas and the richest sources of fish and game first.

But what many in Southwestern BC miss is that the settler towns are not in any significantly different position. Like many living on Reserve, many are of mixed Indigenous descent and have a variety of legal statuses with respect to their personal Indigeneity. Like many living on Reserve, they depend both on short-term jobs from the companies liquidating the natural capital on the land around them, and on that land not being liquidated so that it can provide recreation, food and a sense of place and belonging.

If one lives in the extractive belt from Timmins to Terrace, whether one is a settler, on-Reserve Indigenous person or off-, one enjoys no democratic control over the land around one’s community. Decisions are made by corporate boards or branch offices of transnational corporations in Calgary, Vancouver or Toronto, overseen by governments comprising legislators mainly elected in suburbs and cities far, far away.

The most demoralizingly extractive jobs, which often involve the physical destruction of places and activities with which one has grown up are, outside of white collar government work, pretty much the only family-supporting jobs in much of Western Canada’s rural industrial periphery. Consumers in the city demand wood, natural gas, pulp, etc. and then blame the workers who do their bidding for the environmental destruction they, themselves, have demanded they enact. Consequently, it is crucially important to prevent any multi-racial class-based alliance among the workers of Canada’s rural industrial periphery.

Dividing rural workers on a racial basis has been the strategy of the establishment in the West since the first cannery started paying a different wages to Chinese migrants, Anglo migrants, Tlingits and Tsimshians. But our current situation is best traced back to the 1980s and 90s when the combined effects of unsustainable over-cutting and mechanization thinned the ranks of Canada’s International Woodworkers of America from 40,000 to 8,000. The 1990s mining industry capital strike in BC and Saskatchewan produced similar effects in adjacent industries.

Whereas bush work had been largely racially integrated (even if the towns in which the workers lived often fell short of that mark with de facto restaurant, laundromat and other commercial business segregation), the layoffs were not. The minority who managed to keep their logging, mill and mining jobs were whiter than those who lost them.

Reserve governments are often as or more motivated to sign benefit agreements in order to guarantee jobs for unemployed residents as they are to gain a new revenue stream. Guarantees of a portion of new pipeline, mining or logging jobs, however temporary they may be are the best shot these communities have at resolving catastrophically high on-reserve joblessness. But those agreements are made in the context of a zero sum of bush work; every job gained by someone living off-reserve is a job that doesn’t go to someone who resides in a conventional municipality or regional district.

Similarly, court-mandated and government-negotiated land claims settlements are reasonably understood by those living off-reserve as endangering one of the few sources of non-government employment in the region. In other words, both the benefit agreements won by pro-industry reserve governments and the land claims made by traditional, hereditary governments are understood as either transferring settler and non-status bush work jobs to Indigenous people or annihilating them altogether.

A Call For Unity

But what if we swept all this aside? What if instead of pitting people against each other, we recognized that the real problem is this: forest companies, mining companies and banks have seized control of our land, the land of all people living in this country. What if we took our land back, together? What if #LandBack was not code for transferring title and sovereignty from people of one race to people of another? What if it stood for ordinary, decent, working people coming together to take our land back from the super-rich and the transnational corporations they control and use to extract the value of our land, of our work?

What if we realize that we were all being manipulated to fight each other, as a distraction by the bastards who have stolen our land and reap astronomical profits from it? The next several articles in this blog will be about how we might overcome the obstacles to building a coalition of settlers and Indigenous people, on-reserve and off-reserve, urban and rural, renter and small owner to take our land back together and all gain more land, more financial security and true political independence.

BC Politics Canadian Politics Landscape, Urban and Spatial Studies Race | fusangite |

#LandBack, #DefundThePolice and the Hashtag Politics That Have Revealed Progressives As the True Conservatives: A Jeremiad for National Indigenous Peoples Day

This is the first of three posts that will bring together the two prior series and culminate in something I have not put forward in over two years: a positive idea about where Canadians might direct their energies to create a society with the resilience to save what we can and share the losses equitably as we face the Extinction Event. Two of these posts are dedicated to specific conversations I had in 2021 that challenged me and reshaped my thinking in productive ways. The final post in the series will be dedicated to Quaker writer Arwen Brenneman who asked me to write something in this blog that was not merely critical but aspired to a practical action or goal. This one I dedicate to Zionist geneticist Jonathan Sheps who helped to realign my understanding of what radical politics is and is not.

BDS and the Rise of Hashtag Post-Politics

I am a socialist who opposes the current practices of the Israeli state and finds the continuous acts of dispossession, disenfranchisement and punitive expeditions into the West Bank and Gaza strip unconscionable, and Israel’s participation in the wider Middle Eastern practice of using non-citizen residents as right-less labour deeply disappointing. But I have struggled to support the BDS (Boycott, Disinvestment, Sanctions) movement, not just because, as a university instructor, its demands were uncomfortably close to putting a “No Jews” sign outside my classroom. There was something more on which I could not put my finger.

And Jonathan explained it. By appending “right of return” and other demands it would be impossible to meet to its list of reasonable demands, BDS had rendered its program not radical but instead functionally impossible. There is simply no way to get to the spatial and demographic order of the Palestinian mandate in 1948 from our present location in space-time. There is no remotely humane way to reverse all of the shifts not just in who lives where but how land is used, how land is legally held, how local hydrology and physical infrastructure have radically shifted, etc. There is no way to undo three quarters of a century of intermarriage, shifting political views and shifting economic aspirations.

By staking out, not a radical solution, like the idea of a multi-confessional, multi-ethnic unitary state of Israel-Palestine that Meretz, the coalition of Arabs and Jews, greens, socialists and the original kibbutzim movement that sits in the Knesset is beginning to articulate, but an impossible one, BDS actually confers a kind of permission on the Israeli government to continue its oppression of the Palestinian people. Because it refuses to advocate something that could actually happen.

BDS, which began as a campus campaign, was one of those political movements that functioned as a vanguard for many upsetting new political developments that are often grouped under the broad category of “wokeness.” Incubating in elite liberal arts colleges in the US and then diffusing out through the larger university system, a new kind of politics emerged, a post-political politics.

Post-political movements are, in my view, fundamentally grounded in despair. They are founded in an assumption that we, as a society, have lost the ability to come together, agree on a program for improving our collective lot and using democratic power to challenge the powerful interests standing in the way of those aspirations. Having given up on the idea of actually doing politics, post-political movements have two main foci: (a) punishing malefactors (bad people and bad institutions) and (b) describing an aspirational political order that, while appealing, cannot be reached from where we are currently located in the space-time continuum.

The Neo-McCarthyism or “cancel culture” of Wokeness is how the first is manifest. Demanding that the “right of return” whereby everyone descended from an Arab lineage pushed off their land in Israel-Palestine since 1948 be permitted to return and seize the property from its present occupant and that those occupants then relocate to wherever their ancestors were in 1948 is not just the worst game of musical chairs ever imagined; it is neither possible nor desirable. It represents not so much justice as it does an additional layer of somehow compensatory injustice in the spirit of Monty Python’s Dennis Moore.

The essential conservatism of BDS’s agenda is that while it advocates causing harm to those it blames for the Israeli occupation, it defends the status quo by arguing, via the impossibility of its demands, that there is no alternative. While BDS formed the vanguard of this kind of post-politics (as distinct from genuinely radical politics, like, for instance, declaring the Jubilee), its innovations have helped to deform popular movements into a post-political form.

Take, for instance, #MeToo. First of all, it is no coincidence that the movements I will be offering as examples henceforth will begin with hashtags. Remember folks: social media platforms are the tools of billionaires who wish to promote post-political behaviour, not just because actual politics would threaten their power but because their social media platforms are where most of post-politics takes place.

#MeToo entailed thousands of women singling-out men who had been sexually violent or abusive with them and calling them out in the public square, attempting to inflict reputational punishment on them. But when Mia Kirschner attempted to intervene in this debate by talking about the structural, institutional and procedural changes that could protect women from sexual and gender-based violence in the workplace, no one took much notice.

Kirschner, by seeking practical reforms, like contractual stipulations and changes in the law to prohibit the kinds of behaviours in which monsters like Harvey Weinstein habitually engaged, placed herself and her ideas outside the discourse of #MeToo. That is because #MeToo was post-political; no one really held out hope that we could change our culture, laws and institutions to prevent a future Weinstein, Roman Polanski or Woody Allen from abusing his power. So instead, we settled for doing patriarchy’s housecleaning for it, clearing out the men who had lost the continence necessary to keep their abuses sufficiently private and replacing them with more continent men, at least for now.

When people defend the #DefundThePolice movement to me, the conversation always starts off funny. Almost inevitably, one of the first things its defenders say is “of course, we don’t really want to defund the police. It’s really irresponsible of the media to portray us as people who want to completely defund law enforcement.” I feel like I have already made my point but I will continue. Obviously, if you do not want the police defunded, you probably should not call your movement “Defund the Police.” Except the movement only sort of made that decision, it was mostly made by Twitter moderators paid to do the bidding of the investor class.

But, these valiant defenders aside, many people like Kwantlen University Criminology Professor Jeff Shantz do argue that we should simply stop paying the police and allow volunteers to take over. But does anyone really think that is possible or desirable? There are many organizations, including a number of local motorcycle clubs who would love to take over that file. In fact, there are so many groups of young men with guns that would like to take this job on as volunteers that the state’s monopoly on violence would soon be a thing of the past and groups of “volunteers” would “compete” in a free and open marketplace for control of our streets.

Surely, nobody wants that. Nobody really wants to relinquish the small amount of public control we have over the cops because they need us to write their paycheques, surely. What we want are radical reforms to law enforcement with respect to training, promotion, recruitment and command structures; we want a broader, shared, interdisciplinary, cooperative first responder approach with firefighters, child protection workers, etc. What is needed is a way to arrest and begin to reverse Anglo America’s police forces incremental transformation into fascist paramilitaries indifferent to our democratic institutions.

But because defunding the police is the most effective way to most dramatically intensify and accelerate that process, everyone can rest assured that it will not happen, that even the most fascistic among us do not want to go that far that fast. And, as a result, demands for reform, even minor reform are effectively shouted down by a demand for that which is either impossible or undesirable.

The Rise of the #LandBack Hashtag and the Racism That Lurks Behind It

Much like the Monty Python debate between the Minister for Home Affairs and A Small Patch of Brown Liquid (probably a creosote derivative used in industrial varnishing), Justin Trudeau seems bewilderingly proud of his record on Indigenous issues, having promised to provide potable water to every reserve that lacked it back in 2015. As we approach the one-year anniversary of his third election victory, seven years later, his government has fixed the toxic water systems of exactly zero reserves. Nothing has been done. Not only has nothing been done; work has not even started.

Following multiple multi-million-dollar commissions and inquiries by the federal and provincial governments across Canada into murdered and missing Indigenous women over the past twenty years, rates of murder, rape and disappearance continue to increase. And following the key recommendations of every one of these commissions, not to mention the scholarly consensus in the field i.e. cheaper, more available interurban transportation and the elimination of fly-in worker “man camps,” we have systematically cut interurban transit and increased the number of man camps across Western Canada.

We have also invested in a special unit of RCMP officers who are deployed to deal with uppity Natives who seek to protect their land from non-consensual development. These officers have shown, time and again, a willingness to run roughshod over civil liberties, to gratuitously and punitively destroy Indigenous people’s property, sabotage trap lines, illegally hold journalists without bail and treat peaceful protesters with brutality.

It is into this maelstrom of colonial racism that #LandBack has appeared as a hashtag, a kind of BDS on steroids. The idea is that we should return land ownership to the Indigenous people whose ancestors held it before the arrival of colonists. Such an idea is both impossible and undesirable.

Does anyone really believe that 2% of Canadians should own all the land inhabited by the other 98%, that the 320 members of the Semiahmoo Nation should own all the land and make all the land use decisions for the 100,000 people living in White Rock and South Surrey? Does anyone believe that, for instance, Afro-Nova Scotians should lose all their land to the Mi’kmaq people because they lack the requisite seniority to own land in Nova Scotia? What about the Doukhobors and Jews who fled persecution and pogroms of Tsarist Russia? Or Punjabi refugees who fled Indira and Rajiv Gandhi’s extralegal killings of those who desired a Sikh homeland? Or just regular working white folks who have saved, possibly across generations, to hold a single piece of land to provide some small modicum of physical and financial security against the troubles to come?

Also, let us remember that the way Indigenous people held land varied from place to place and time to time. On BC’s coast, society was highly vertical; land tenure was not equally shared within most polities; aristocrats held the land on behalf of commoners and slaves had no land rights at all. In many of these societies, there was extensive, programmatic body modification, often from birth, so that aristocrats, commoners and slaves could be recognized easily.

And because all other institutions in settler society have abdicated to the courts the entire settler burden of dealing with the land question, this has necessitated Indigenous people presenting themselves in ways that will be viewed most favourably by the court system. As a result, it has become a material necessity to maintain or, even, to reconstruct these systems of aristocratic status in order to obtain whatever limited land justice our judicial system sees fit to dispense.

It beggars belief that so many socialists choose to align themselves not with the egalitarians and levelers in Indigenous communities but instead with the neo-traditionalists and aristocrats whom our courts compel to continue putting on this show. Such alliances make sense to me as an environmentalist but the there is nothing socialistic to be found there.

But last summer we saw something lurking under the #LandBack hashtag that goes beyond the conservatism of simple post-politics and demands for the impossible. Lurking underneath is a real rage, a real hatred on the part of Wokes for Indigenous people who refuse to put on the neo-traditionalist show, people who have decided that Christianity or mathematical excellence or a love of motorized outdoor recreation, trucks and guns is part of their Indigeneity.

Because the reaction to the most recent rediscovery of the residential school graveyards was a wave of successful and attempted church arsons specifically directed at churches attended by Indigenous people today. It is here that we see the essential conservatism of Woke hashtag politics intensifying into a kind of Bizarro fascism. The message was clear to people like my friend Nathan, who spent nights last summer sleeping in the church he loves, guarding it from white settler arsonists, just as his Assiniboine ancestors had once guarded their homes in the Red River colony a century and a half before. The message is this: if you do not want to be an exhibit in our white guilt settler museum, you will be destroyed by fire.

The parasites who cheered those arsonists on with their #LandBack rhetoric have no real material interest in living together with Indigenous people or co-governing our country with them. Because they trade on a false otherness they assign to Indigenous people. Their tirades against “cultural appropriation” are actually insulation against themselves and others using their imaginative empathy to place themselves in the shoes of our Indigenous brothers and sisters.

They are leeches who need to keep open and bleeding the wounds of Indigenous Canada so that they can suck the blood of Indigenous people into their diversity and inclusion businesses, their endless government commissions, their “land acknowledgements” performed by white people for white people, all the while demonstrating their whiteness, the true basis of their entitlement to authority. Because to attain truly Anglo Canadian whiteness, you must wash your skin clean with those performative settler tears. And those tears will come less readily if we stop giving the children of Grassy Narrows mercury poisoning.

BC Politics Canadian Politics Race | fusangite |

What the Left Should Learn from the overturning of Roe v. Wade

It finally happened. Roe vs. Wade, one of the greatest pieces of liberal judicial activism of the twentieth century was struck down. For me, my comrades and millions of American women of childbearing age this is a tragic moment, another huge piece of the Cold War social democratic welfare state’s social contract sheared-off.

But this defeat was especially searing because, unlike P3s, a US-led global order, free trade, austerity and privatization, this was not a wind-assisted victory of an elite consensus. Because that is how people of the political left see those other losses: the establishment endorsed these things; they heavily bankrolled or Astro-turfed smaller or non-existent social movement groups to echo that consensus; they got pretty much all mainstream political parties, major corporations and the liberal media to present these things as not just beneficial but inevitable. “There is no alternative,” Margaret Thatcher said.

This win is different because the establishment was on our side and was, for the most part, against the movement that just won. While anti-abortion activists enjoy the support of some major corporations in America, they are not the majority; and while they enjoy the support of one of America’s major political parties, that support is not unanimous across jurisdictions. America’s extreme Northeast and Northwest still have pro-choice Republican parties. And it was not until the early 1990s that there was even one major mainstream anti-abortion media outfit, FoxNews. And it was not until the early 2000s that TV and movie dramas touching abortion, even on Fox, ultimately came down on the side of choice.

Finally, we must remember that, even in the religious sphere, most churches were not anti-abortion when Roe v. Wade was handed-down. The Roman Catholic Church officially and vehemently opposed abortion and so, partly to distinguish themselves from the largest single denomination (Catholics), most Protestants, including most Evangelicals used abortion as a means of distinguishing themselves from Catholics. Indeed, nothing short of a complete remaking of the American religious marketplace over the next four decades was necessary to create the near-consensus among regular churchgoers in the US that the state must regulate abortion. “Mainline” Protestant churches went from being the second-largest group of American churchgoers to a tiny portion comprising no more than a tenth; evangelicals pulled away from mainline denominations and joined with the rapidly-growing fundamentalist and Pentecostal movements; historically black churches soured on abortion; and churchgoing became a rural, rather than universal American pastime.

A grassroots movement, and one that does not enjoy the support of a majority of Americans, even today, conducted a half-century struggle and beat us.

Any person of any level of political seriousness must study this victory if they have any interest in beating the establishment at anything. Whether one agrees with the anti-abortion movement or vehemently opposes it, any person truly interested in a grassroots struggle against money and power should be studying this victory with a fine-toothed comb for years to come.

So, I thought I would offer a little bit of what I have learned, as an outsider, from my experiences of organizing with anti-abortion activists and the insights I gleaned, that other social movements would do well to follow.

In 1996, mathematician and political organizer Julian West and I decided to create a coalition of political parties and civil society organizations that would champion a provincial referendum on proportional representation. Early adopters who pulled in their organizations, and built our group, the Electoral Change Coalition (ECCO), so-named by Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation’s Troy Lanigan from the ground up. They included Troy, the BC Reform Party’s David Secord, the BC Marxist-Leninist Party’s Charles Boylan and the BC Family Coalition Party’s Kathleen Toth, among many others. As the organization evolved and took its various twists and turns, I worked with a number of anti-abortion folks on voting reform work, like Kathleen’s husband Mark, FCP candidate John O’Flynn, Christian Heritage Party leader Heather Stillwell, along with BC Reform Party pro-life insurgents Bev Welsh, backer of Wilf Hanni’s successful takeover of the party by the Christian Right, Wilf, himself and, finally, Chris Delany, the Bill Vander Zalm surrogate who merged Reform into the BC Unity Party.

In fact, my last speech as leader of the BC Green Party was as part of a panel on electoral reform the month after my defeat as party leader. It ended with a hug of appreciation for my work on the file from the Zalm himself.

ECCO’s sister, and later, successor organization was Fair Voting BC, founded by Nick Loenen, the Zalm’s seat-mate representing Richmond in the legislature 1986-91. Nick’s book on PR, the original bible of BC’s voting reform movement, A Case for Proportional Representation, was explicit in arguing that PR could be a vital tool whereby the anti-abortion advocates could wield real political power in the BC legislature and was crucial in piquing so much interest in PR on the Christian Right in the 1990s.
           

Most participants in our coalition were eager to try being in such a broad, disparate and diverse group but lacked cultural experience of this kind of work. And so it fell to those most experienced with this sort of thing to take the lead, and so our organization in many ways was imprinted with the style of coalition politics practiced by the anti-abortion movement.

Learning how to formulate complex communications, strategies and tactics with allies who disagree with most of one’s political views and find a significant portion of said views not just wrong but offensive is quite tricky. But this was a movement of Catholics who had persuaded members of evangelical churches that believed the Pope was the literal Antichrist to lock themselves to abortion clinic doors together.

A fundamental tenet of our meetings was that we needed to agree on as few things as possible; the more things we added to our list of points of agreement, the more likely the coalition was to fray, to collapse into arguments. Nearly every annual general meeting featured Canadians for Direct Democracy, a junior member of our coalition, attempting to get us to expand our mandate to include support for easier-to-use initiative legislation, binding referenda and other democratic reforms. Every time, CDD was voted down.

Because we learned from our Christian comrades that the strength of a coalition comes from its size and breadth and that every additional demand a coalition makes is one that makes is narrower, smaller and weaker, no matter how apparently small or intuitive.

We also learned how to have political conversations in which we could share stories about highly charged, highly polarizing political experiences by changing the kind of story they were. Stories of logging road and abortion clinic blockades ceased being stories about old growth forests and the human soul; they became stories about being the kind of person who does this sort of thing, the run-ins one has had with the courts and police. Kathleen and I shared stories about what it was like to be a beleaguered party leader in a small organization full of eccentrics and fanatics.

In this way, what we agreed on stayed small but what we could talk about was as much as any group of people thrown together possibly could. I especially savour the memory of one night when we went for drinks after staging our annual general meeting. Every year, we would re-elect Troy president and, as he was a member of the Taxpayer movement, we always counter-balanced this by having Charles, the Marxist-Leninist, give his nominating speech. That year we had got into quite a personal tussle with CDD, whose representatives had shouted “the president is a dictator! The president is a dictator!”

Troy was commiserating with us afterwards and said, “It’s like they think I’m some kind of Stalinist,” to which Charles replied, “I’m a big fan of yours Troy. I’ve got your back. But I consider Joseph Stalin to be just about the greatest human being who ever lived and I’ll be damned if you’re going to say another word against him.” We all laughed very hard after that, led by the CHP’s Heather Stillwell, if memory serves.

Another big thing I learned from the anti-abortion movement is that you can turn a media blackout into a kind of internal publicity and morale boost. A generation before one could share crowd photos and selfies on social media and be seen by thousands of eyes, North America’s anti-abortion movement trudged through a worse media blackout than any I have ever faced—and I sure have faced a couple.

In Canada, the mainstream media would cover nomination contests in the Liberals and Tories where anti-abortion candidates for office would fight it out at nomination meetings or, as the 90s wore on, suddenly find their nomination bids vetoed by the party leader. But this did not extend to other demonstrations of the sheer size of the mobilized anti-abortion movement. When abortion clinics were blockaded, mainstream media would assiduously ignore the confrontation, no matter the turnout, even when those blockades led to multiple arrests.

But the most extreme moment of the blackout would occur annually on “Life Chain” day in which anti-abortion protesters would link hands and form into incredible multi-block chains of as many as five thousand human beings at a single location. I even asked Kevin Evans, then-anchor of CBC British Columbia’s six o’clock news about this and he confirmed that not covering the Life Chain was a matter of shared policy among all major broadcasters.

Imagine Extinction Rebellion going years or even decades without a single word of their bridge and road blockages hitting the mainstream media!

But what I found was that the week after the Life Chain was the week anti-abortion activists were most serene. Rather than feeling cheated by the lack of coverage, there was a sense of purity, of power that came from being so intentionally and obviously ignored. The Life Chain imbued a sense of confidence, the sense that their adversaries had run out of ideas for stopping them but the chain was lengthening anyway, that the power they wielded was growing and nobody co-owned it; it was all theirs.

And the very absence of coverage, the media’s implicit denial of the movement’s momentum served as proof of the real momentum it genuinely possessed.

A third important feature that merits rehearsal is perhaps the most surprising to outsiders: standing behind female leaders and listening to women. Kathleen had risen to prominence as the last president of the Social Credit Ladies’ Auxiliary, succeeding its long-time head, Hope Wotherspoon, who had ascended to the presidency of the whole party. Social Credit was the last of BC’s political parties to hold separate (sometimes concurrent) women’s conventions. And as any man who has tried to interrupt an assertive Mormon woman knows, the best place to build strong leadership skills for women is in single-sex spaces.

Not only did the churches from which anti-abortionists hailed contain and defend single-sex spaces and single-sex leadership positions, the province’s natural governing party had refused to abandon the separate spheres model until the late 1980s. This meant that there were female leaders trained, tested and promoted in female-only spaces who could meet any room she entered authoritatively and command that space. Phyllis Schaffly was not an outlier; she was a type within the Christian Right, a woman who had learned to control a room, unmediated by male power.

Given that the first and most powerful interfaith organizations in Anglo America, all the way back to the WCTU, were female-led, there was an additional expectation that conditioned this organizing. It was expected that single-faith gatherings were clergy-led and therefore male led; but by the same token, it was expected that interfaith groups and other coalitions would be more appropriately led by women. And women seemed logically qualified because if there is one gender cliché of which progressives and conservatives equally partake it is the idea of the woman as social bridge-builder, peacemaker and fence-mender.

The last observation I will make is that anti-abortion activists shared something that used to be more universal among climate activists like me: a never-ending sense of urgency, the sense that lives were being lost, people were dying every day they did not win.

That kind of profound urgency actually keeps activists from working themselves to the point of burnout, because of the knowledge that one needs to be able to keep struggling every day, that one cannot give up until victory has been achieved.

But that sense of desperation also breeds a cold political calculation, one that is willing, on the large scale, to ride on the backs of the corrupt and godless Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell, if that’s the only way to get to the Supreme Court. That desperation was enacted on the small scale every day, at the grassroots level.

Kathleen Toth and I didn’t just find a way to be joyful comrades because we were friendly people who love the other humans; we did so because we were desperate, so desperate as to not let some ethos of personal purity get in the way of making the deals we had to, to save the lives we understood ourselves to be trying to save.

If we really care about the issues that animate us, it behooves us to ask: (1) is our coalition broad enough, permissive enough? (2) can we build our power and momentum without needing others to recognize it? (3) do we have a pipeline that is producing powerful female leaders? and (4) if we are as desperate as we say, are we really doing all we can?

BC Politics Religion and Eschatology in Politics US Politics | fusangite |

Origins and Legacy of Anglo America’s Racial System, Part III of Questions Raised by the Trucker Convoy

In 1985, Stephen Rogers, British Columbia’s Minister of Forests committed a major gaffe that made headlines in BC’s paper of record, the Vancouver Sun. Rogers, the new minister, had just returned from a fact-finding trip to Mississippi. The Mississippi forest industry was presenting a greater and greater competitive challenge to BC forest products as BC;’s industry increasingly focused on chewing-up the boreal forest into particleboard or making similarly low-grade shakes and shingles, as the more impressive old growth began to run out and industrial reprocessing became more important.

But what landed Rogers in hot water was not anything he said about wood quality, technology or labour. What got him in trouble was his characterization of the workers in the Mississippi industry, whom he dismissed as “poor white trash.” It may surprise readers to note that those who called for his resignation or demotion attacked him for racism.

While the term “white trash” came, for a time, to define a much larger class-based group during the 1990s, back in the 1980s it still retained its original meaning from the 1600s. And, to understand where Rogers was coming from and the racism he invoked, it is necessary to say a bit about the ethnogenesis of America’s “white trash.”

From its inception, Britain’s colonial project in the Americas was sharply divided along North-South lines. Its northern colonies were populated by two main groups of colonists: religiously-motivated settlers who saw New England as a region where they could build a Calvinist society and free young men in high-risk occupations like logging, whaling and fur-trading. It was a society based around yeoman farming of subsistence crops by free people on small parcels of land. Boston was a vibrant emerging city populated by free people.

The southern colonies were a very different place. Their elite planter class controlled vast swaths of rich valley bottom land, which they turned into vast monocrop plantations to ship out indigo, rice, tobacco, sugar and the other highly prized commodities of the Age of Sail. The labour force on these plantations was, like the loggers and whalers of New England, largely comprised of poor, young men of the working class. But whereas most of the labour in the North was free, the labour in the South was compelled, unfree. The majority of the young men were indentured servants who had been sentenced to seven-year terms of slavery, sold to the planters and shipped across the Atlantic against their will.

When these seven-year terms of indenture ended, the young men were dismissed from work, penniless, sometimes offered the chance to continue their work at poverty wages but just as often simply discharged with nothing more than the clothes on their backs.

With the valley-bottom land now monopolized by enormous, well-armed plantations, the young men who stayed often looked to the upland regions, regions to which local Indigenous people had also retrenched. These Indigenous communities were often the targets of vigilantism by the now-free but largely penniless young men who had worked in the plantations. These young men did not simply seek to seize the well-cultivated and fenced Indigenous farms; they sought out Indigenous women who faced a blizzard of abduction and sexual violence from these invaders.

Sometimes Indigenous people responded with organized punitive expeditions that counter-raided, burned crops and threatened to destabilize the uneasy treaty peace the planters had bought with Indigenous nations. The local legislature, the Virginia House of Burgesses, which had steep property requirements, shared the view of the governor and imperial government back in London: the problem was the young men; they had been debtors, vagrants and thieves back in England and their criminality was irrepressible. And so, at least on paper, government sided against the young violent men and with Indigenous people.

The problem was that, at the level of enforcement, there was little interest in enacting the imperial grand design. Most of the men engaged in law enforcement in the colonies had more in common with the young, violent men—in fact, they were often young men of the same class, press-ganged into military service or otherwise forced.

A potential solution to the problem of these unruly young men was presented by the Dutch in 1620: African slaves, captured according to the doctrine of “just war” in the Congo Basin and West Africa. But this actually served to intensify the problem of the young men for the first half-century of slave-purchasing. That is because it was not clear whether it was appropriate to keep black slaves for more than seven years, whether they had a different status or different legal rights than the indentured servants. Consequently, the number of both enslaved and free Africans in the South grew steadily through the seventeenth century. And a degree of class solidarity began to develop between African and European workers, especially on the plantations that used a mixture of European and African, free and unfree labour.

In the upland regions, African and European men served together in the irregular and unofficial militias that prosecuted a slow-motion war against the region’s Indigenous inhabitants, gradually driving out the land’s original inhabitants… mostly. The fact was that, unlike the Puritan Fathers of New England, the planter elite of the South was neither particularly interested in or capable of luring young women across the Atlantic. This meant that, whether by rape, abduction or, sometimes, mutual consent, it was largely Indigenous women who bore the children of the first generation of uplanders.

So it was that, within a generation, the idea that the blood of the uplanders was impure, tainted with the blood of Indigenous people, something that only intensified as small amounts of African blood began entering this mix in the second and third generations of this system.

Then in 1676, the original system broke. Nathaniel Bacon, a planter aligned with the uplanders proposed to the Virginia House of Burgesses a large, state-supported punitive expedition against the Indigenous people to clear more land for European and African occupation. The proposal was defeated and Bacon rallied his own army from the irregular militias, which grew as European servants and African slaves left the valley-bottom plantations to join this popular army.

And the army’s ambitions grew as it became more diverse, more radical. Its members seized the prime land the planters were monopolizing and marched on the capital of Jamestown, driving out the governor and holding the legislators at gunpoint.

Over the next four years, the British Empire regrouped, easily retook Virginia from Bacon’s rebels and rolled out the new racial system that would come to define the American South and British Caribbean for centuries to come. White servitude in the mainland colonies was abolished and the full rights of Englishmen were bestowed on the uplanders. African slavery was, on the other hand, made not just lifelong but indefinitely heritable.

It is this system that used terms like “hillbilly” and “white trash” to refer to the descendants of the indentured servants. These terms were not simply geographic and class signifiers. They implied that these people’s work as tenant farmers, farmhands, overseers of slaves or owners of low-value, high-elevation, low-productivity land arose, at least in part, from their blood being tainted with that of non-white, especially Indigenous people.

Essentially, Rogers had used the American equivalent of the Canadian term “half-breed,” the pejorative not used for all mixed-race Canadians at that time but specifically for the Métis. Earlier that year, in fact, an engaged liberal at our family dinner table had proclaimed, “I’ve just seen the most wonderful documentary on Louis Riel. I will never utter the word ‘half-breed’ again; it’s such a bohunk word.” (“Bohunk” was the rough Canadian equivalent of Polack, our nation’s generic anti-Slavic pejorative.) Canadians were growing more sensitive to anti-Métis racism in the mid-80s and so Rogers’ remarks were especially ill-timed and ill-received.

But, as I have written elsewhere, the persistence of race arises from the dynamism and flexibility of racial systems; the colour line is powerful precisely because it is in constant motion. The changes to our racial systems in the following ten years were substantial and affected me personally.

In 1985, blackness in Anglo America was still governed by the “one drop rule”—individuals of African descent with skin and hair as light as mine were understood to be black people who were either intentionally or unintentionally “passing” for white. In 1985, the bullies at school understood me to be a black person who could and did “pass.” For most of the twentieth century, most Anglo Americans understood that white-looking people were not necessarily white and efforts were made to discern the “true” race of people who looked like me.

At that point in history, “white trash” referred to people who were not really white but were granted a limited degree of whiteness as long as they functioned as supporters and enforcers of white supremacy for the planter class and Southern elite, a role into which they had been pushed in the aftermath of Bacon’s Rebellion and in which many continued up until the late twentieth century as foot soldiers of the Klan and White Citizens’ Leagues. Naturally, those who did not participate in these enactments of white supremacy were often hit with insults like “not white enough to be white trash” but nevertheless retained membership in the group.

For reasons that will be explored in the next part of this series, the racial categories into which these people and people like me were placed dramatically shifted in the decade following. But, more importantly for my purpose here, I believe that we have been returning to the original definition over the past decade and a half. “White trash” and its polite euphemism, “the white working class” have been inexorably tacking back to meaning not the American white proletariat as a whole but specifically the passing Métis of Anglo America’s internal periphery.  

BC Politics Race US Politics | fusangite |

Denormalization: From Failed Public Health Strategy to a Path to a Liberal Majority

It is coming up on two years since Covid arrived in Canada on a large scale. And with the exception of the Atlantic provinces, we quickly adopted what has become the approach to Covid in most of the Global North: lots of hygiene theatre governed by the imperatives of neoliberalism.

In a way, Canada west of the Gaspé has been a leader in developing not just the policy but the discourse around Covid that has spread through the G7 nations and around Oceania and the European Union. The basic policy is this: if an activity accelerates the spread of Covid but its participants are making money for someone richer than themselves by participating, it should proceed. Only if hospitals and other crucially necessary systems are overwhelmed because of these activities shall they be temporarily halted or scaled-back. But if an activity does not make money for someone richer than the participants, it should probably be stopped or radically circumscribed.

These policies leave people feeling angry and emotionally wrung-out. They are supposed to work harder and work longer hours to compensate for all the lost labour and efficiency due to Covid. But they can’t see very many of their friends or relatives for support and community, unless they do so somewhere other people can make money. I have lost track of the number of times my provincial health officer has declared, without any evidentiary basis, that a gathering that would be unsafe around a kitchen or dining room table will be safe at a local restaurant or bar. Similarly, children, Bonnie Henry has repeatedly claimed, can only give each other Covid in each other’s homes; it cannot transmit in schools. Henry, there, is a bit of an outlier; only Donald Trump held out longer in making baseless unscientific claims of childhood immunity.

Of increasing importance in our governments’ performances of theatrical, half-assed vigilance has been the introduction of vaccine passports. The premise on which the passports were introduced seemed a reasonable one: vaccines would prevent or radically reduce Covid transmission, thereby making gatherings of pass holders. While the passports made the civil libertarian in me pretty squeamish, I decided that this temporary abridgement of human liberty might be a necessary price to pay for a Covid-free nation.

But, as we all know, this initial premise for the passports was false. The common variants of Covid in this country are variants whose mortality and morbidity are significantly reduced by the vaccines but on whose transmission rates vaccination has had a much smaller than anticipated effect and one that has continued to decline over time as the variant mix has changed. For a while, public health officials and government leaders tried to maintain their defense of the passports as a measure to halt or radically slow transmission but they have slowly given up selling us that substantial exaggeration and have changed their message.

The new idea is that the purpose of vaccine passports is that they are a means by which we can force unvaccinated people to get their shots. The idea, our governments and respected opinion leaders are now explaining, is that these passports can be used to compel people to be vaccinated against their will by threatening their access to their friends, their relatives, meeting spaces in their communities and, most importantly, by threatening their ability to be employed.

Before continuing, let me make clear that I think everyone without a medical condition making it ill-advised or potentially lethal, should choose to receive as many shots as they can sign up for. I just got my third on Monday and I don’t expect it will be my last one. I want this to happen because I don’t want to see my neighbours dead, hospitalized or suffering lifelong “long Covid” symptoms. All of those things are not just bad outcomes for unvaccinated individual but for society as a whole.

But I disagree with the government’s increasingly coercive vaccine mandates for two reasons:

First, I wish we lived in a society like Eisenhower’s America, in which all sectors of society trusted the government and the vaccine they got the pharmaceutical industry to produce. But we do not. Significant groups of people in our society have so little trust in their governments that they balk in terror at accepting any new state invasion of their personal space of decision-making. Rather than engaging in the process of re-earning that trust, government spokespeople are, instead, belittling, demonizing and marginalizing anyone who says they do not trust the state with their health. Those who oppose the passports and even those who simply question them are automatically tarred as “white nationalists,” Klansmen, Nazis, conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers. They are increasingly depicted by progressive politicians like Justin Trudeau as enemies of the people, people “who hold unacceptable views.”

This kind of language, in turn, helps to whip up hysteria against vaccine opponents. Thanks to the Identitarian orthodoxy and the neo-McCarthyism (sometimes called ‘cancel culture’) that is used to enforce it, progressives are already not just permissive of but enthusiastic about using summary firing and professional blacklisting as ways of dealing with the enemies of the people. A long-time comrade of mine, who is immune-suppressed due to having leukemia and requiring regular chemotherapy and other body-punishing treatments, was advised by her doctor not to be vaccinated and possesses an exemption. Nevertheless, efforts were made to see her writing contracts were not renewed and she braved daily threats against her life on social media, some by former comrades and friends.

Second, and relatedly, I do not believe that the establishment wants the people it has now branded as the enemies of the people to become vaccinated. While it is clear that the introduction of the vaccine passports caused a lot of people to become vaccinated, it is my belief that the passports are now producing the opposite effect, and public health officials know that.

I say this because any reputable public health professional today knows about what is called “denormalization theory.” Smoking and other kinds of addiction have been extensively studied in BC because we, as legendary addictions theorist Bruce Alexander puts it, we have a “uniquely addictogenic culture.” A little over a decade ago, former COPE city councilor Fred Bass and polymath health scientist Amy Salmon made a significant contribution to the study of denormalization and the perverse effects it can produce.

Most anti-vice public awareness campaigns, such as those against tobacco smoking and drinking during pregnancy, are attempts to “denormalize” vice activities in the public’s mind. The message of the campaigns is that successful, normal, contributing members of society do not engage in these disreputable activities. Such activities are not respectable and engaging in them marks oneself as someone not deserving of respect. When examining the whole population, evidence shows these campaigns to be successful; smoking rates fall, drinking during pregnancy declines.

What Salmon and Bass discovered, however, is that one’s reaction to denormalization is directly contingent on the social position in which an individual is located and what their expectations are regarding their future social position. Social stigma only works as a threat, it turns out, if you are not already awash in stigma anyway. Consequently, they found that the smoking denormalization campaigns they studied functioned like cigarette ads for working class Indigenous adolescent girls and other groups that are not only marginalized but nurture little hope of changing their social position over time. When bombarded with an anti-smoking denormalization campaign based on the norms of English Canada, more poor Indigenous girls buy more cigarettes younger.

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Fortunately, Indigenous Canadians, especially those living on-reserve, entered the Covid era with a strong cultural memory and proud, pre-colonial traditions of quarantining and other public health measures that allowed them to survive the deluge of European disease that reshaped the demography of a continent. Indeed, BC’s government has put more energy into undermining on-reserve public health measures than into supporting them (the BC government has smashed Tsimshian, Haida and Heltsiuk quarantines by cabinet order).

Consequently, the most vaccine-hesitant have tended to be members of the working class and underclass with cultural memories destined to cast a pharmaceutical industry-government alliance in a less flattering light, like the ongoing opioid epidemic. These vaccine-hesitant folks, are often the lowest-wage workers, the most likely to practice an organized religion, those most likely to work with their hands and/or industrial tools owned by their employer or through a loan with a local bank.

You can already picture the vaccine-hesitant person in your mind’s eye. He’s rural; he drives a pickup truck; he voted Tory or People’s Party in the 2021 election; he lives in a manufactured home; he goes to church or at least his romantic partner does; he is white or Métis; he probably even smokes. That is the effect of a denormalization campaign interacting our pre-existing sectional and class resentments.

A sane public health policy would, once having achieved near complete vaccination of respectable folks, change its messaging and begin targeting groups that have become more vaccine-hesitant because of the denormalization campaign. They would work with evangelical and Catholic clergy and opinion leaders to promote vaccination; they would work with oil industry officials who are trusted by rig workers; they would try to persuade holdouts to get vaccinated by changing their message and approach.

Instead, the very opposite is happening. Rather than ending denormalization, they are heaping stigma upon stigma, smear upon smear. First, government spokespeople disingenuously conflate opposition to passports with vaccine non-compliance, erasing the thousands of Canadians like me who are triple-vaccinated but still oppose mandates. Once redescribing us as an unvaccinated drain on the public health system, they then reason that because white nationalists are also overrepresented in the manufactured homes and work camps of Northern Canada, it must then follow that opposing vaccine passports and white nationalism are two tenets of a single political community. In this gross and inappropriate abuse of the intellectual concept of the political dog whistle, it is argued that opposing vaccine passports is both a declaration that one is unvaccinated and a statement of support for the creation of a white nationalist Petro state in Western Canada.

A handful of people argue that this is simply the next logical step in a strategy to force full compliance. If people do not just lose their jobs and larger careers but are tarred in the public square as racists, Klansmen, neo-Confederates, even Nazis, surely more will capitulate and knuckle-under, and beg for that jab in the arm, begging for mercy from the stern consequences of the technocratic state. The thing is: the kind of people who respond to escalating intimidation and threats are the kind of people who are already vaccinated.

So I do not think that is the purpose of this in the minds of our nation’s establishment. They are, I believe, playing with a kind of purity politics that would make Narendra Modi blush. The idea is to declare a growing portion of people to be outside society, itself, like the Dalits of Indian history, the ultimate scapegoats whose very touch renders whatever it contacts impure, beyond the bounds of society itself.

The idea is to create a class of permanent exiles, like the Roma of Europe, people we can push out of our workplaces, our restaurants, our pubs, even our family gatherings, a living example of the fate of those who step outside the bounds set for our ever-narrowing discourse. Already we are blaming them for individual and public health outcomes they could not possibly have changed by being vaccinated. No doubt, with the over-representation of coal-rollers and rig workers among them, we will increasingly look to blame them and not companies like Royal Dutch Shell or agencies like our armed forces for climate change.

Our government’s vaccination policies and their responses to anti-passport protesters are clearly not designed to make holdouts less vaccine hesitant. It is almost as though they have been designed to provoke key elements of the working class into becoming more entrenched in their vaccine refusal, making them increasingly financially and socially precarious, more desperate and more willing to consider extreme political positions and movements.

And it is this that will win Justin Trudeau his sought-after second majority.

Now that the Canadian establishment, progressives and centrists are increasingly comfortable in conflating opposition to vaccine passports, vaccine non-compliance and white nationalism into single phenomenon, the Trudeau government can make the argument that our society is actually full of Nazis, that not just the People’s Party but the Conservatives are rife with them. And that these vaccine non-compliant folks are responsible for the Covid epidemic not being over.

This will not just lure the Conservative Party into wave after wave of purges of candidates and members as it continues its desperate quest to recapture the mainstream; it will stampede NDP and Green voters into casting Liberal votes to protect Canada from this massive outbreak of pestilent white nationalists.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We need governments that put down the hammer and stop the smears, governments that care more about getting their political opponents’ health protected than manipulating them into a dangerous and unnecessary political confrontation.

Because the end-game is clear: the denormalization of political dissent.

Authoritarianism BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |

Truth and Reconciliation – Part III: Canada’s Parochial Play of Indigeneity

So, if “truth and reconciliation” is not the way forward when it comes to the land question, what is? And how do we engage in a productive discussion among Indigenous people and settlers about what it might be? Unfortunately, before we can begin to join the rich, vibrant global discussion around land justice for Indigenous people and examine policies that have produced actual redistribution of wealth and power, we need to recognize the forces that have walled Canada off from the rich global conversation that regimes like Bolivia’s are part of.

While there are many definitions of “Indigenous,” it is generally recognized that Indigenous people exist in many parts of the world, the Sami of northern Scandinavia, the San of Central Botswana, the Araucanians of Chile, the Yakuts of Siberia, the Moskitos of Nicaragua, for instance. This group has been called, collectively, “the Fourth World,” a term originating in Canada from a correspondence between the Tanzanian ambassador and George Manuel, head of what would soon become the Assembly of First Nations, back in the early 1970s.

One of the things I find most perplexing about Canadians of all backgrounds who are interested in justice for Indigenous peoples is their disinterest in how this debate is conducted in the rest of the world, how the land question works, how constitutional and legal rights work, how indigenous cultures interact with national cultures, etc. There is such a deep parochialism, a deep provincialism to Canadian discourse about Indigenous politics and the land question.

And as with other highly provincial discourse, lack of knowledge forecloses any possibility for comparison, the primary handle we have on evaluating anything. If Canadians cannot compare Indigenous experiences and policies across geography, our only option for comparison is time; all we can do is compare what we are doing now with our past—a convenient turn of events given our post-1982 folk belief that our ancestors were all black-hatted genocidal malefactors, to a man, whereas we are the first generation of good people ever to exist.

The Indigenous communities on top of which Canada is being built have long sought to chart their own political course and achieve degrees of independence, self-reliance and autonomy within the chaos of the Canadian project.

One of the first strategies was to create a pan-Indigenous identity that sought to create new areas of cultural, political and linguistic common ground among Indigenous people, often with new religious movements paired with military confederations. This began in the 1780s with the prophet Neolin and Pontiac, the general and continued with Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh during the War of 1812 and then Wovoka and those who followed the Ghost Dance. While impressive, these movements were crushed, one after another, the strategy delegitimated in the present day.

Since Confederation, many Indigenous people have attempted to make use of the elected leadership structures of the Indian Act. Both radicals and moderates have sought office as chiefs and band councillors in an effort to use their elected office and limited spending power to exert greater control.

Of course, these governments are set up to fail. They have no taxation power and are funded using a block grant system over which they exert no political control. The only way to find money for new activities to cut the funding of something else. Consequently, most who seek to effect change through official reserve governments become the public face of the chronic underfunding and mismanagement of reserves and are pushed into alliances and financial dealings that only further deligitimate them as corrupt.

Attempts to use the colonial electoral system have been similarly disappointing. Canada did not choose either to create reserved Indigenous parliamentary seats the way New Zealand did in the nineteenth century; nor has it enacted proportional representation, like New Zealand, so as to permit Indigenous people to concentrate their votes behind their own political party, as the Maori Party does. The only route open to Indigenous people through colonial electoral politics is entryism into major political parties. But despite extraordinary leaders like Jody Wilson Raybould, Elijah Harper and Romeo Saganash sitting on the front benches of major parties in Canada’s parliament, they have little to show, materially, for their work.

Civil disobedience, similarly, has a checkered record. While civil disobedience campaigns have delivered some results for Indigenous people with the creation of the park-reserve designation (a land use category Canada imported from Botswana that recognizes Indigenous people as a kind of self-governing wildlife, co-running the park they inhabit with the feds), the most important results they have produced have been because they coincided with a larger legal strategy to assert Indigenous rights and self-determination.

We have to recognize that Canada’s settler society is one of the more unresponsive in the world. The Sami might be far more hated according to polls of Norwegians and Swedes but they have considerably greater self-government and territorial rights. The Maori might suffer from widespread alcoholism and elevated suicide rates too but there is a Maori party in parliament that sometimes holds the balance of power. Consequently, the land and language rights of the Maori are ahead of those enjoyed by Indigenous Canadians.

The only exception to this failure of responsiveness on the part of Canadian settler institutions has been the courts. Since the landmark Gosnell case in 1972, Indigenous people have mainly lost but sometimes won major cases before the courts and regained some portion of the self-determination and land they possessed prior to colonization. Some of these cases have begun in civil disobedience actions like blocking logging roads or exercising traditional fishing or trapping rights and it has been the courts’ judgements about the protesters’ actions and not those physical actions themselves that have produced every significant political gain for Indigenous people since I was born.

The past half-century of occasional victories and some genuine gains (compared to the centuries preceding) has been pretty much exclusively because of an increasingly friendly court system. But unlike the major gains for the rights of women and racial minorities, these are not the result of more favourable interpretations of a large number of laws; instead, these Indigenous victories rest upon a single legal theory:

Canada’s (i.e. British North America’s) founding (and foundational) piece of constitutional law is the Royal Proclamation of 1763, one of the “intolerable acts” that gave rise to the American Revolution. The Proclamation stipulates that all Indigenous lands beyond the Appalachian Mountains that had not already been conquered by the British could only be ceded by a mutually-agreed treaty between Indigenous governments and official representatives of the British Crown delegated the power to conclude treaties.

The effort to secure the continued alliance with Iroquois, Mi’kmaq and other British allies by protecting them from illegal colonization by land-hungry settlers was an important foreign policy by the British Empire that was generally supported by wealthier, landed, conservative settlers and opposed by poorer, landless settlers more interested in the new liberal ideas that were washing across the Atlantic.

And following the American Revolution and the mass migration of conservatives from all over Anglo America to Upper Canada and the Maritimes, the Proclamation became the primary legal and political distinction between the loyalist colonies, which would coalesce into Canada, and the revolutionary colonies that had become the United States. Because it lays the foundation of settler self-government within British North America and creates the original legal and political distinctions between Canada and the US, the Proclamation retains a significance and legal force commensurate with supreme (i.e. constitutional) law and a status comparable to the British North America Act (1867), Statute of Westminster (1931) and Constitution Act (1982).

When Indigenous people began to chalk up significant court victories in the last quarter of the twentieth century, the Royal Proclamation, and the recognition of the pre-existing Indigenous rights it recognized in the Constitution Act, were front and centre in landmark judgements. And there were a number of surprising turns accompanying this:

  • Previously, BC Indigenous people had been the worst off when it came to asserting their rights because so few were able to secure any treaties at all when their land was seized; now, the absence of a treaty was more advantageous than a treaty with which Canada was partly but not fully compliant
  • Previously, the primary representatives of most Indigenous nations were elected band councils created by the Indian Act to represent Indigenous peoples; now, the remnant and reconstituted hereditary governments were recognized as the outward-facing representatives of Indigenous polities
  • Previously, the main place where the rights of Indigenous peoples were debated and decided was the House of Commons; now, it was the higher provincial courts and the Canadian Supreme Court
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And even when it looked like that might change during Brian Mulroney’s period of constitutional brinksmanship and the crescendo of twentieth-century Indigenous resistance through civil disobedience and armed struggle, all that came to naught. The Oka Crisis, the Meech Lake Accord, the Charlottetown Accord, despite massive mobilization, failed to move the big debates and big decisions either to the streets or first ministers’ conferences. When the dust settled, the courts remained the only game in town that wasn’t completely rigged.

Before these developments, the political strategy of Canada’s Indigenous leadership involved building major federations like the Assembly of First Nations, building international links with potential allies internationally, from Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania to PW Botha’s South Africa and in making policies that were mutually beneficial to settlers and Indigenous people more popular and electorally successful with Canadian voters.

But while success in the courts meant real gains in land and power and the ability to compel elected governments to make beneficial deals, it has exacted a huge cost, one of which we are generally unaware because that is part of the cost.

As any scholar of rhetoric and communication will tell you, before you design a communication, you must answer these questions: (1) Who is the intended audience? (2) Who is the public author/speaker? (3) What does the author need to convince the audience of?

In our present environment, and for rational reasons, when Indigenous people and their allies communicate about the land question the primary audience is not the general public; it is not the voting population; it is not parliamentarians. It is the upper levels of the judiciary because the beliefs of the upper judiciary are pretty much the only settler beliefs that exert a positive effect in resolving the land question favourably for Indigenous people?

Once this is established, we then can examine the already-stated beliefs of the courts to determine who the ideal speaker (not the author) should be and the courts have made this clear: those who are authorized representatives of pre-colonial hereditary governments, in other words, individuals who most resemble pre-modern feudal lords and ladies in the minds of the courts.

How does one demonstrate this entitlement? Traditional costumes are helpful as is speech in traditional languages or, at least, English speech inflected with an accent implying fluency in an Indigenous language. Practice of a pre-colonial religion is also helpful and, if not a pre-colonial religion then, at least a neo-traditional revitalization religion like the Handsome Lake Church or Sundance Movement. Possession of an inherited, Indigenous surname is ideal but more important is the surname’s association with a lineage tied to a special responsibility to control or steward a delimited piece of territory. Finally, continued residence in or near the delimited territory is key in legitimating the speaker.

            This places a heavy burden on a particular minority constituency within Indigenous communities, given that Indigenous people are the second-most Christian, churchgoing racialized group in Canada and a majority live in cities and even those who do not often residing in rural locales far from their traditional territory. Also, as it true of all peoples, most Indigenous people are not descended from pre-modern aristocrats. While clan membership systems can sometimes mitigate this last factor, they place their own limitations and requirements for membership.

            This means that there are strong incentives to project a particular face to the world, to amplify unrepresentative voices in Indigenous communities for the communities’ collective good.

            The question then becomes what these voices should say: generally, the job of these voices is to reinforce the legal bases in which courts grant Indigenous people greater control of the lands in their traditional territory:

  1. The unbroken nature and heritability of land title: The courts are not interested in granting land to people because they need it. Their job is to return land stolen from its prior owners. That means that not only must Indigenous people show that their aristocrats and members of their clans once controlled that land but that they would still control it in the present, barring an intervening exogenous act (i.e. colonization). That means showing that Indigenous cultures are even more conservative in preserving the heritability of aristocratic privilege, that there is less churn in land ownership than in the lands and titles of European nobles.
  2. The immutability of oral tradition: One of the most important developments in the landmark Delgamuukw case was the recognition that Gitksan oral tradition had correctly dated the region’s last major earthquake right down to the year. And in the intervening generation, there have been other breathtaking instances. But, as a member of a lineage of former slaves, I know, as does anyone who has participated in a strongly orally inflected culture that this is only half the story of the power of oral tradition. The other half of its power is the very opposite; while it is capable of great accuracy and fidelity over centuries, it is also more capable of re-narrating the past and changing its details to meet the needs of the present than any written culture can. But it is necessary not only to de-emphasize but to deny this feature in order to project an image the courts need to see.
  3. The continuity of pre-colonial economic interests and activities: When it came to treaty-governed, rather than unceded territory, it was the Donald Marshall case that offered the greatest hope for Indigenous people gaining justice through the courts. Marshall was a Mi’kmaq fisherman who argued that the Nova Scotia and Canadian governments were violating the treaty between the Micmac and British by limiting his fishing rights. The greater the extent that Indigenous people can make an economic claim based on a “traditional” activity, the greater the likelihood that the courts will side with them. It is for this reason that the Wet’suwet’en have focused their public discourse concerning the pipeline the Horgan government is ramming through their territory for Royal Dutch Shell on the damage it is doing to their trap lines. Its disruption to their university-affiliated healing centre and the education and psychological treatment they are conducting there is far greater but having a psychology PhD assisting Indigenous youth with trauma and educating Masters students is not a “traditional activity.”
  4. The idealization of the pre-colonial past: In tort law, what is important to the court is the demonstration of loss. Therefore the better the pre-colonial past was, the greater the compensation for its loss. Furthermore, because it is also necessary to emphasize the continuity of aristocratic authority and heritability, it becomes necessary to show past Indigenous societies to be benevolent, paternalistic organizations with history’s kindest lords presiding over the history’s most compliant subjects. The verticality of pre-colonial Northwest Coast societies and their practice of slavery must be programmatically effaced.

Taken together, the rhetorical strategy most effective for seeking justice for Indigenous people is to present themselves as a kind of museum exhibit, as the most hidebound conservatives on earth, people with a special, nigh-magical ability to be untouched by the passage of time. In this way, Indigenous people are conscripted by financial exigency to fill that role in the consciousness of the West that Herodotus described 2500 years ago as “the blameless Ethiopians who still dine with the gods.”

With the current structure of our discourse laid-out, I will move on in the next post to talk about how and why the conversation is different everywhere else and better in most of those places.

BC Politics Canadian Politics Race | fusangite |

Fighting Back

In recent weeks, I have faced a great deal of adversity. My relationship of nearly four years with my partner ended. The separation that followed did not just entail the loss of my beloved from my daily life but of my home and all of the members of the household that she and I built during our time together. Our shared life was undermined by many things, many my fault. But not all. There is no doubt that our current political climate made a significant contribution.

This was followed by the destruction of my campaign for a seat on the Prince George School Board. My campaign launch was attended and endorsed by my comrade Chris Elston, a courageous man who has made it his mission to challenge the rise of Identitarianism in our schools and, in particular, the provincial education policy known as SOGI. SOGI, among its many flaws, requires that teachers in our school system actively mislead parents about their children’s gender identity and has, in the past, resulted in the use of experimental “puberty blockers” and cross-sex hormones on students without their parents’ knowledge or consent. These “blockers” have never been tested on children for the purpose for which they are prescribed and, when combined with hormones and “gender-affirming” surgery frequently result in permanent and irreversible sterility and the loss of sexual function.

SOGI’s confidentiality provisions and full-throated endorsement of novel and disturbing aspects of Identitarianism deserve full public debate. Unfortunately, that is not possible in our current political environment. Indeed, questioning any aspect of the Identitarian orthodoxy has been re-described in our laws and our major institutions as “hate speech” that will allegedly result in the murder and/or suicide of significant numbers of transgender people if anyone hears these questions or entertains doubts about the policy. As a result, saying to a trans-identified person “nobody is born in the wrong body. Your body is beautiful just the way it is,” can now result in a prison sentence for the person saying those words.

It was, therefore, no surprise that my opponent staged a loud protest of my campaign launch because I had invited Chris to speak about the issue. When Chris tried to converse with protesters, they, typical of Identitarians, shouted him down. For some, this decision was a mere political convenience. But, true believers, I am sure, honestly believed that if people could hear Chris’s words, trans-identified children would die in unknown numbers.

But what followed was wholly unexpected.

Some readers of this blog know that I have run afoul of Prince George Citizen editor Neil Godbout on two occasions. The first time was when he endorsed an extralegal pogrom of homeless people in Prince George and joined a small group of conservative business owners in endorsing their mass expulsion from the city. In language heavily inflected with anti-Indigenous racism, Godbout and his friends suggested that “human rights have gone too far” and proposed the indefinite illegal detention of homeless people at some location outside the city. I am proud to have mobilized opposition to this absurd and repugnant plan.

I next ran afoul of Neil when I criticized his decision to run and prominently feature a letter to the editor of the Citizen entitled “I am a racist,’ in which a local reader explained that he was tired of the lack of resolution of settler-indigenous conflict and was now proud to call himself an anti-Indigenous racist. I criticized Neil for platforming these views and, as a result, he used his influence to cancel my radio show on CFIS, the community station of which the Citizen is an advertiser and sponsor.

Following the campaign launch, Neil was approached by the politically active husband of a former student of mine from UNBC who presented him with heavily, choppily and obviously agenda-driven edited footage of a class I had taught while suffering a personal crisis and psychological breakdown fourteen months ago.

You can hear my statement contextualizing the footage here. In the footage in question, I spent time inveighing against the prevalence of the sexual molestation of children and our society’s failure to protect them. As I was in no fit state to teach at the time, the footage contained considerable profanity, which I regret. But what was truly shocking was that, whoever the editor was, a tiny excerpt was taken to attempt to remove my statements of vehement opposition to child molestation and simply include my statements that our society rarely treats the abuse of children as a crime, unless the abuser is a stranger. Neil then chose to affix a grossly misleading title to the article and grossly misleading text claiming that I was confessing to being a serial child molester and exhorting others to molest children.

As a person who suffered from sexual abuse as a child and a person who has spoken out against sexual violence against women and children on this blog for the past seven years, I was absolutely gobsmacked by this development.

Since that time, I have received more than a dozen threats of murder and assault from Prince George residents.

While still reeling from this disgusting turn of events which I can only interpret as revenge, Jennifer Whiteside, the Minister of Education entered the fray. As the person in government responsible for the school board byelection in which I was running, she chose to demand that I leave the race on the grounds that I constitute a danger to the safety of every child in the district.

I have retained legal counsel and am suing the Prince George Citizen and the Minister of Education. And I have fled Prince George, given the continuing efforts of the BC government, the Prince George Citizen and a Twitter mob of Identitarians, including individuals well-placed in BC’s major political parties, the government and organized labour to convince Prince George residents that I am a dangerous, serial sex offender against children and incite violence against me.

In essence, I am the subject of what, in the Muslim world, is known as a fatwa.

With the exception of a few feminist activists and my father and stepmother, no one is offering any public defense of me of which I am aware. That is not because I lack for sympathizers. It is because people are terrified.

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Chris Elston is routinely assaulted by Identitarian thugs in his travels around the country. Police, even when present, do not intervene and are content to watch thugs beat him in the street. His family has been harrassed. And this is not atypical. Those who question this bizarre orthodoxy are routinely assaulted with impunity. People watch as those who stand up lose jobs, homes, relationships, church memberships and volunteer positions. Careers are destroyed as Identitarian thugs go after people at their workplace. Homes are destroyed as they go after people’s children and spouses. People are terrorized by doxxing on Twitter, with which the platform seems fine with. Even celebrities like Margaret Atwood and JK Rowling are doxxed with impunity, in addition to the hundreds of public rape and murder threats they have received.

And we must situate these developments in a larger Canadian context. With the rise of candidate vetting processes, members of political parties are only permitted to seek public office if they pass muster with secret committees of party staffers whose names are not published and which never have to explain why candidates are disqualified. A few dozen people in this country control who is permitted to seek the nomination to run for a political party and are subject to no oversight or regulation whatsoever.

Under the guise of Covid prevention the vaccination pass system has been introduced. Even though vaccines exert no significant effect on the transmission of the Covid strains and variants that constitute the vast majority of cases (they do significantly affect things like symptoms and mortality, hence me being double-vaxxed myself and seeking a booster as soon as it is available), a measure has been enacted to exert unprecedented control and surveillance over the movements of citizens despite lacking any public health justification. And there are mass firings of the unvaccinated in the public and private sectors.

At the same time, our government is proceeding, under the guise of stamping out inaccurate Covid information, with a massive increase in the regulatory scope of the state to control what people are allowed to say on social media.

And this is matched by the neo-McCarthyism of Identitarians or, as some call them, “the Woke.” All that is required to direct the attention of the mob to someone’s spouse, children, employer, landlord, church or non-profit is an individual’s refusal to denounce someone the mob has already destroyed. That is how I got into this fix sixteen months ago: I said that feminist elders Judy Graves and her associates were not guilty of the hate speech of which they had been falsely accused.

All this takes place in the context of the militarization of the unceded territory of the Wet’suwet’en people and an occupying force using escalating violence and intimidation against peaceful protesters to force through a pipeline to carry fracked gas for Royal Dutch Shell, the folks who mobilized even more deadly force against the Ogoni people in Nigeria and, of course, the African majority in Apartheid-era South Africa. This also has taken place at the behest of the BC government, which has not only jailed Indigenous and settler land defenders in unprecedented numbers but has also jailed journalists attempting to cover this obscene overreach.

In recent weeks, associates of mine have been threatened with a range of consequences from losing their rights and membership within their political party to losing their jobs, careers, livelihoods if they do not either denounce me or end their association with me. And Identitarian activists show up on my Facebook page to place “laugh” emojis next the to news of the next setback I have faced. They want me to know that they delight in my suffering and in the threats of assault and murder that appear on my public page every few hours.

Oddly, some people seem to think that the systematic destruction and confiscation of nearly everything of worth in my life over the past eighteen months and the fatwa that now has me in hiding should teach me a lesson, that it is time to stop speaking out.

If anything, I am convinced of the opposite. The question of what people will do in an authoritarian society is no longer hypothetical. The authoritarians have arrived; they have captured our major institutions, including our political parties. Free speech and political choice are being dismantled before our eyes.

The main lesson I have taken from the Christian Bible is that if you live a morally upright and altruistic life as a public figure, it should take the government about three years to hunt you down and kill you. I have been on the loose criticizing our social and economic order for thirty-four. A pretty good run, really.

Closer to the present, my grandfather Harry Jerome Sr. was fired by the railway companies and forced to relocate multiple times for his multi-decade fight for equal rights for black rail workers. My late friend and twentieth century folks music legend Leon Bibb spent many hours with me explaining to me what he called “the assassination of Paul Robeson,” the campaign during the last episode of McCarthyism which cut Robeson, the godfather of Leon’s children, off from work, from travel and from any venue where he might spread his message by speech or song.

Someone has to stand up. And, at this point it costs me less than it would most people because so many things that I treasure have already been taken, right down to my good name and physical safety. More importantly, I see so many people like Chris and my friends at Rape Relief Women’s Shelter who sacrifice more, are in more danger and have more to lose.

But I think I will leave off with the well-rehearsed Martin Niemoller quotation about a place and time not that different from our own:

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

Speak while you can, folks. The consequences for not speaking will only increase. This suppression of free speech and democratic rights will not end with Indigenous people, land defenders or feminists and others who question the Identitarian orthodoxy. It is coming for your community; it is coming for you. Fight back.

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Truth and Reconciliation – Part II: The Truth About Canada’s TRC

If the South African Truth and Reconciliation process was a consequence of a particular kind of transfer of power in the context of a particular political era (i.e. a transition to black majority rule during the brief Pax Americana period and rise of neoliberalism), what was the context that produced Canada’s TRC?

First of all, let us be clear on what it was not:

  • It was not part of a transfer of power or regime change. Even in Indigenous-majority areas, no changes to the political system took place preceding or as part of the TRC.
  • It was not created as a process for all Indigenous victims of settler colonialism to air their grievances and seek redress. It was created to address one harmful aspect of the colonization of Indigenous people, and others only insofar as they pertained to this one aspect i.e. the Indigenous residential school system.
  • It was not initiated by the government, nor was it a process that was negotiated bilaterally between Indigenous people and the state. Its primary impetus came from two important sets of actors who had played a major role in shaping the TRC and its parameters, i.e. Canada’s mainline churches (Anglican, United, Presbyterian, Roman Catholic) who had run the system on behalf of the state and the churches’ insurance companies.
  • The government was not under any substantial legal or financial pressure from external or internal forces to conclude an agreement that was not advantageous to it.
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While this made it considerably different from the South African TRC, it shared some important features with South Africa’s TRC:

  • Corporate malefactors were immunized from prosecution based on TRC findings because the agreement that created the TRC was an agreement between the churches, the state, their insurance companies and representatives of Indigenous people to admit limited liability and pay predetermined compensation to surviving victims.
  • There was an implied immunization of individual malefactors in the agreement determining the damages and setting up the TRC using some of these funds.

It is important, when thinking of the Canadian TRC, to understand that it came into being not to solve a problem of political legitimacy, like South Africa’s, but instead to solve a financial problem. Canada’s four mainline churches and its federal government were being sued by approximately half of the residential school survivors for pain and suffering and other forms of civil court damages for the abuse and neglect they experienced in residential schools. The insurance companies representing the churches and the state had a strong financial interest in reducing the size of their payouts in compensation and in preventing the courts from imposing a settlement that might be more costly than the one they could negotiate.

Under the neoliberal administrations of Prime Ministers Jean Chretien, Paul Martin and Stephen Harper, Canada’s government had thoroughly internalized the key principle of post-1860 capitalism: use the power of the state to reduce private sector costs. Because the TRC was understood to be part of the compensation to victims, costs the government took on in staging the commission could then be used to defray the cost of state, church and, most importantly, insurance industry liability.

The settlement mandating compensation of survivors (wrongful death compensation for families had been negotiated-away in 1998) included the creation of the TRC and was signed by Martin’s government in 2005 but implementation was left to the Harper government when it took power in 2006.

So, let us be crystal clear: Canada’s TRC was part of a larger strategy for limiting the direct costs of insurance industry and church liability for crimes committed by joint employees of the government and the country’s four mainline churches. It would not have been created had the government not been a party to a protracted negotiation among survivors, churches and major insurance companies. Canada did not wake up and politically decide it needed a TRC to address its past; the TRC was part of a massive court settlement designed to limit financial exposure for state, church and the insurance industry.

Obviously, First Nations leadership also agreed to this and, within that group, there were those who had long been calling for a TRC, based on the romanticization of South Africa’s decolonization and switch to democratic majority rule. But it must be understood that this was not the state capitulating to political demands for political reasons. The state staged the process in exchange for reductions in its liability and that of its partners.

It should therefore surprise no one that almost no recommendations by the TRC have become law or regulations. Following the recommendations of the commission was never part of the agreement, merely its staging.

Of course, most non-Indigenous Canadians have not noticed this unfortunate aspect of the TRC. We tend to see it as a net positive, a favour we did Indigenous people that serves as a foundation for some nebulous nonsense we call “reconciliation.”

But, in reality, we are the primary beneficiaries of that favour because of the distinctive character of Anglo Canadian affect i.e. emotion politics.

Because of the nature of the protracted process from 1965-82, when we re-founded Canada as an inherently progressive, liberal state, Anglo Canadian settler nationalism has a unique politics of emotion, distinct from the nationalism of other white settler states like Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, the US, Australia and New Zealand.

As I have said in numerous other blog posts, white Anglo Canadians tend to bifurcate our history into two parts: (a) our past as a violent, racist white settler state run by evil, stupid racists and (b) the present and very recent past, which is completely disjunctive with the rest of the past. In this formulation, all good things come from us and all bad things come from our ancestors, who are wholly culpable for genocide, racism and a host of other crimes.

In this narration of our history, our ancestors did evil things because they had evil intentions. And we have borrowed Christian fundamentalist proof-texting practices to reinforce this belief. We take a handful of statements, often out of context, made by Victorian-era politicians and use them to somehow “prove” the non-existence of all the do-gooders who ran the system thinking they were acting to “save” Indigenous people from extinction, or to end child labour, or to make literacy universal, or to improve public health. Because John A MacDonald and members of his cabinet were clearly motivated by racial animus and did not care if Indigenous people died, every single one of our ancestors therefore also held the identical views and every single residential school employee was an evil, murderous racist who hated every one of their charges.

Because we are members of the first-ever generation of Canadians who have good intentions, it follows, the TRC and things like it exemplify this new Canada, run by the first empathetic, sensitive generation of white people in the history of the human race. That is why we don’t need to check on whether we have fixed the water systems on reserves or implemented the TRC recommendations. We know we have because good people do good things and bad people do bad things.

But what is our evidence that we are good, besides the new flag (1965), official adoption of multiculturalism (1971), new national anthem (1980), new Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982) and, to cap it all, the TRC (2015)? The answer: our tears.

While the TRC provided no tangible benefit to survivors of the residential school system, and, in fact, drained money out of compensation settlements, it provided a key intangible benefit for Anglo white settlers: catharsis. By crying with those brutalized by our system, we engaged in yet another episode of tearful ancestor-blaming. Crying with, as evinced in the BC legislature’s adoption of UNDRIP, has been a key strategy whereby settlers appropriate the grief of survivors at our systems of abuse and violence, as something we co-own. Rhetorically, instead of taking ownership of our ancestors’ mistakes, arising from both good and bad intentions, we appropriate the role of victim, making ourselves the secondary victims of our ancestors’ actions and institutions, rather than heirs to their vast windfall of stolen land.

These days, Canada’s ongoing colonialism is powered, first and foremost, by settler tears. That is why we have chosen an actor with a villainous ancestor to be our Prime Minister. He cries for us. And his tears wash the blood off our hands.

Settlers love the TRC because, in our minds, reconciliation has begun because we and our victims have all had a good cry together, just the way a family does when the wife and kids return from the battered women’s shelter to hear the abusive husband’s empty promises and professions of love for the umpteenth time.

In the land of lame holidays, in which our Thanksgiving was proclaimed as a national holiday in 1879 to celebrate the future Edward VII’s recovery from a childhood illness, while his mother was Queen of England and Empress of India, I guess Truth and Reconciliation Day shouldn’t surprise me.

But it does.

We have proclaimed a national holiday to celebrate being pressured by the insurance industry to stage a national catharsis and then ignore all recommendations arising from said catharsis. We are celebrating a tort limitation strategy used to defray the costs of settling a lawsuit by people we raped, assaulted and tortured (but not murdered—we excluded wrongful death awards), whose substantive calls for reform and justice we choose to ignore every time we convene the House of Commons.

Of course, we should celebrate. We got ourselves out of a financial jam and had a big cathartic cry. So why not dedicate a whole new holiday to our own crocodile tears and to the ingenuity of Canada’s insurance industry?

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