The power of stories to tell us who we are is well known, so to lose touch with your people’s stories can lead to a void inside one’s self — or even within a community as a whole.
I was reminded of this today on my radio show, Urban Nation LIVE, when I had the pleasure of speaking with Cree/Métis educator Dr. Kim Anderson about her efforts to gather and honour those restorative narratives in her latest book, Life Stages and Native Women: Memory, Teachings, and Story Medicine. (She’s in Winnipeg today and tomorrow as part of Thin Air 2011, aka the Winnipeg International Writers Festival.)
Sharing the teachings of 14 elders across three cultures, the book is a collection of cultural and lived understandings of the roles and responsibilities of Indigenous women and girls, from pregnancy and birth through to puberty to death.
For those of you who may have missed its original airing, the interview is below.
If you can speak any of this country’s 65 or so Aboriginal languages, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) may have a job for you. According to an ad on their website, Canada’s spy agency is seeking “Translators / Interpreters – Foreign and Aboriginal Languages” who among other things, “possess an excellent ability to work under pressure and meet deadlines without a loss of efficiency or effectiveness.”
Now I can’t say with any certainty why CSIS wants Aboriginal interpreters – and any explanation from them seems unlikely (they ARE a spy agency). But I do believe recruitment of this sort adds even more mistrust to an already nervous Indigenous peoples ‘activist’ community.
For more than fifteen years, I have been working on issues of violence in Indigenous communities in BC. I have become familiar with the state of the justice system in Canada, with its huge over-representation of Indigenous people in detention centres and an accompanying lack of concern for those of us who are victims of violent crime.
It is a norm in Canada to view Indigenous people as criminals, as inherently violent, rather than as human beings worthy of the same protection from violence afforded to other citizens. This should no longer be surprising to me, but some days, the truth seems harder to bear than others.
Angeline (Angie) Pete
Take today, for example. While wasting time on Facebook, I saw a link to an article about the start of this year’s Walk4Justice, a march from Vancouver to Ottawa to raise awareness about violence against Indigenous women. I am familiar with the facts of the high rates of violence against us and the over 700 girls and women who have gone missing from our communities, including the recent disappearance of Angeline Eileen Pete from North Vancouver.
Half way through the article, I read the word “beheaded” and burst into tears, turning my face away from the screen. Apparently, I have reached a breaking point for my ability to hold these truths, as the years and generations of loss pile up on me. I wonder how is it that these ongoing losses, constant deaths, and unrelenting assaults, continue day after day without it being deemed a crisis. And why aren’t First Nations leaders negotiating for a fundamental shift in approaches to ensure Indigenous girls’ and women’s safety, along with our economic development, resource use and treaties? Yes, National Chief Shawn A-in-chut Atleo, I am talking to you.
Where are these ongoing violations in your list of priorities? Women and girls are not just “disappearing” from our communities into some unknown non-space. They are somewhere. They are being made to disappear by individuals acting within a system that has been designed to facilitate our demise.
A few minutes later, I go back online to see if the Walk4Justice has received any media coverage from CBC, and, in the process of discovering there was no coverage, I come across an article about a hearing taking place in northern BC. Last year, some cops covered themselves in face paint and camouflage, drove out to a remote hunting ground and shot a Gitxsan man in the back who had failed to show up for a court date.
Today, the man’s family heard that the man was likely unarmed, holding a rake rather than a gun. The police might have assumed he would be holding a hunting rifle, seeing as they sought him out at place he specifically used for hunting. Did they drive out there assuming he would be armed, wanting to hunt him down as they would an animal? The ‘undertones’ of racism are hardly undertones — they are overt, systemic and endemic to the way justice is structured in this country. What will it take for the system to be acknowledged as part of the problem, serving to normalize violence against Indigenous people, while locking us up at ever-growing rates?
As I continue to harden myself in order to face the ongoing state of assault in our communities, I can only hope more and more people will start to be moved by these losses, rather than experience them as unexceptional, normal, as just another day in Canada.
Oil brings me things. Things like home heating, air conditioning, electricity. It means people aren’t burning trees so I can hike through forests. It means people aren’t burning coal so I can breathe without blackening my lungs. It means communities don’t have to be flooded so someone can jam up a river to create hydro power instead of burning oil.
That means no-one has to bribe someone else to take in the nuclear waste generated by the plant that occasionally goes off-line and leaks radiation. It means I can visit my brothers at either end of the country in under a day. I can visit my mother three-thousand miles away at the drop of a hat. It means some of my friends and some of my extended family have jobs.
Oil-drenched pelican
BUT… I don’t like oil development.
I don’t like the odour at extraction sites. I don’t like the sludge and goo that gets dredged up and left to stain the earth. I don’t like how the industry moves in and chews up the landscape and drives elk and caribou and moose and deer and bears and wolverines away.
I really don’t like seeing ducks and pelicans and cormorants struggling and failing to get the junk that ends up coating lakes and streams off their wings. I hate seeing muskrats and beavers trying to chew the stuff out of their coats.
I don’t like seeing people have to shut down water wells because the water table is contaminated. I really hate how pumping transforms landscapes into industrial moonscapes. I don’t like how when oil is burned it makes breathing a little tricky.
I don’t like the brown haze that sits over cities where a lot of oil and gas gets burned. I don’t like how it generates power that’s used to ship out tax bills so my government can put down more roads and chew up more wilderness.
I don’t like how it’s used to fire plants that generate plastics. I don’t like that it is used in the manufacture of plastics. I don’t like how it generates so much money that people lose sight of what it’s costing to make that money.
BUT… while I’m pretty sure solar is a lot more DNA friendly, I’m also aware oil is a quicker path to ultimately giving me the ability to send my words out to you on the net.
So while I watch the people protest in Washington just now about pipeline development — and the bid to keep that gaping maw that is the tar sands open, its advocates spewing out swill all the while about “environmental protection” — I’m mindful that there is a bit of hypocrisy in the complaints.
The world is right to be sensitive and cautious about the mad rush for more and more oil, and more and more ways to burn it. But though some fight the good fight, for most of us the talk doesn’t resemble the walk.
"Art. 22.2. Together w/Indigenous peoples, States shall act 2 ensure women + children fully protected…"
In an ill-advised bout of social media enthusiasm, I thought it would be cool and nifty and useful if I tweeted the UN Declaration pertaining to Indigenous Peoples rights. Had I known beforehand what it would take to distill the dang thing, I might have re-thought my initial impulse. But I persevered and glad I’m did: below you will find the fruits of my labours, re-purposed via the amazing tool Storify.
We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.
The power of stories to tell us who we are is well known, so to lose touch with your people’s stories can lead to a void inside one’s self — or even within a community as a whole.
