Pam Palmater's Reconciliation Book Club

I'm looking forward to seeing how Pam manages YouTube on Saturday. Just finished the book - challenging, compelling, accessbile. 

I have read both Unsettling Canada and The Reconciliation Manifesto by Manuel so I should check this discussion out. IMO It is all about the land. There can be no reconciliation without a land base.  When the treaty process started in BC in the mid-nineties I served on the Lower Mainland RAC, which was a settler Regional Advisory Committees designed to help instruct the governments negotiators. Being the Lower Mainland group we got all the reps from the provincial right wing organizations like the BC Chamber of Commerce etc. I eventually just quit in disgust because it was clear that all the business community and their lawyers and consultants wanted was extinquishment of land titles in unceded territories. Of course it was not phrased that way instead the constant refrain was getting "certainty" over land title. None of the proposals included the idea of indigenous sovereign control over unceded territories.

NDPP wrote:

Arthur Manuel Memorial

https://twitter.com/KanahusFreedom/status/1159628575202582529

"We are having my Dad's Memorial on Friday, August 23 at Neskonlith (50 km east of Kamloops). Camping is available. Live music in the evening. Symposium: Recovering the Land, Rebuilding the Economy next day August 24, Adams Lake Conference Center..."

Thanks for posting that. I think it means a road trip in ten days.

NDPP wrote:

Glad to hear it. Beautiful country and good stand-up people. Enjoy...

Yes indeed my wife and I stopped in Blue River for a couple of hours last summer and had a great chat with Kanahus and others in the camp across from Trans Mountain's yards, on unceded territory.

I grew up in the fifties when the anti-Indian racism was overt in Northern Ontario. I went to Catholic elementary school and the only thing we were taught was that the Huron and Jesuits got massacred by the heathen Iroquois. We even got a road trip to Midland to show us what good Indians were like, to bad the good ones were all dead, seemed to the take away.

 Wounded Knee was my awakening as I followed the events closely on the news. In the '80's I went to a theater presentation the Nishga traveled BC with to explain their land claims. In law school in the '90's I did an upper level course in aboriginal law and wrote a 40 page paper on the BC Court of Appeal decision in Delgamuukw, arguing it was wrongly decided, before the SCC overturned it.

I have come to the conclusion that reconciliation in BC, without a significant land base, is just a continuation of the slow genocidal process. I am also certain that our white settler governments will never grant the indigenous peoples, with unceded rights, the ability to actually enforce and rely on those rights. I had hopes for the BC NDP but after their disrespect of indigenous rights by their actions over Site C and fracked gas pipelines I don't even think I can vote for them next time. Buffy says it all and our Canadian governments have the same cozy relationship with the energy companies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJnwUbJoheo

kropotkin1951 wrote:

I grew up in the fifties when the anti-Indian racism was overt in Northern Ontario. I went to Catholic elementary school and the only thing we were taught was that the Huron and Jesuits got massacred by the heathen Iroquois. We even got a road trip to Midland to show us what good Indians were like, to bad the good ones were all dead, seemed to the take away.

 Wounded Knee was my awakening as I followed the events closely on the news.

In 1974 I had just read Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, when I set out to drive a motorcycle from Ottawa to Vancouver. In Thunder Bay I met two Americans heading for Alaska so we travelled together for a week. 

When we reached Kenora we camped outside of town and went to a bar in the centre of Kenora at night. As soon as we entered it was obvious that there was an unofficial line splitting the bar into the white and native sides. We sat near the border between the two groups. With our motorcyle leathers on, it was obvious from the strong glares we were getting that we were considered "biker's" by the redneck whites. Perhaps because of that, one of the First Nations came over and started talking to us. Over time, quite a few others joined us. 

They told us that some of the young First Nations had occupied Anicinabe Park on the outskirts of town and that they had help from the American Indian Movement (AIM). Their were demands were better living conditions, education and access to land. They told us that the park land had been stolen from them 25 years before without the town even bothering to go through a legal process. They also warned us that the RCMP had road blocks up to prevent other First Nations from joining them. Sure enough, when we headed back to our camp we were stopped by the RCMP. They asked if we were gun-running "to the Indians".  Perhaps they thought that was the only reasons would be talking to First Nations in a bar under these circumstances. 

The next day we crossed the border from northern Ontario into Manitoba. We stopped at a gas station and asked if they minded if we could change the oil in our bikes at the side of the station. "No problem and we'll even give you a pan to change your oil."

One of the two attendants stuck around as we changed our oil talking to us in a friendly manner until he brought " local the Native problem". He said the gas station had a small convenience store attached to it and some First Nations people came to the store to buy vanilla extract for the alcohol in it when they couldn't get it any other way. So two weeks before they had decided to stop selling it to them. His co-worker came over to back up the story. So we asked what happened. They said they were waiting with a rifle sticking out the door and pistol sticking out the window whenever a car or truck full of "Indians" drove up. We left as quickly as possible. 

On my trip back from Vancouver to Ottawa a couple of months later, I stopped in Kenora again where I met a man who was half Native and half Black, according to him the only one in Kenora. When we tried to go to a bar together, the bartenders in several bars said although I could come in, he was repeatedly not allowed to enter without being offered any explanation, so I left with him. 

The local newspaper in Kenora played quite a role in fanning the flames of racial hatred during the six week occupation of Anicinabe Park. 

Abstract

When the Ojibway Warrior Society seized control of municipally run Anicinabe Park in Kenora, Ontario, during the summer of 1974, leading to a six-week standoff, nearly all racial hell broke loose, according to local press reports. On the one hand, armed aboriginals did take control of the ten-acre park, a piece of property the group immediately laid claim to, arguing that the land had been effectively stolen from them decades earlier.

On the other hand, the local Kenora daily Miner & News represented the story as one of a classic struggle between civilization and barbarism, a colonial encounter with white town folk cast in the blameless role of aggrieved victims while natives were portrayed in three basic, hackneyed, frequently cross-pollinating image streams. The stereotyping made little distinction between or among local aboriginal people, members of the Warrior Society, or hundreds of other discrete Canadian native groups.

The borders of each of these constructions, which we will explore in this paper employing discourse analysis, remained porous, frequently overlapping throughout 1974. However, local press representations of aboriginals during 1974 in the months leading up to the park's seizure were decidedly more moderate in tone than during the standoff, which began in mid-July and lasted till late August. Then, in the weeks following the peaceful resolution to the event (though not necessarily the various issues raised by it), local news coverage generally resumed its paternalistically colonial pre-seizure character. 

In the first instance, the newspaper cast all natives—including First Nations, Métis, Inuit—qua barbarians, essentialized savages, and as morally insensate, as if they had stepped straight out of an old-fashioned Hollywood Western, exemplifying untrustworthy behavior (at best) or swimming in a sea of violence and mayhem (at worst). Second, the newspaper depicted aboriginals as hapless, ungovernable drunkards. According to this portrayal, they could no more govern their base instincts than they could effectively manage their day-to-day affairs living in the later twentieth century. A third casting portrayed natives as exotic wraiths, frequently stoic, a child-like people in need of correction and direction at the same time as they were on the verge of dying off.

Common to this stream was the notion that pitched Canada's natives as a defeated, defanged race that did not have enough sense to know that its own culture—and you will note here the insistence on conflating all indigenous cultures into one moribund monolith—was as good as dead. These press framings open a window onto how residents of this small town in central Canada imagined natives as well as how Canadian colonialism has been aided and abetted via press complicity. That is not to say that the local paper accurately or representatively reflected all white opinions in the town or that Kenora stands in for all of Canada. Yet we will argue that such press treatment was quintessentially, colonially Canadian.

A generation of empirical research demonstrates that the news media has the power not simply to establish and patrol the perimeters of public discourse or shape opinions about a topic but actually has the power to engender public opinion directly. Newspapers then play a critical role both in teaching about race yet, at the same time, also cater to and even reflect audience's views. While this relationship is complex and not fully understood, the literature on the topic indicates clearly that the press not only provides frames of explication for readers but also may actually tell an audience what to think.

Moreover, given Kenora's well-established history of discrimination against natives, one might also fairly query whether the local press was simply responding to market demands, in effect giving consumers what they wanted. While this topic has received almost no published study in Canada, a rich and growing body of scholarship, from the path-breaking work of Edward Said through Stuart Hall and others, has identified the press as a central agent in the promulgation of the larger cultural project of colonialism. By exploring the ways in which Kenora's daily newspaper spoke to the deep-seated, endemic, systemic anti-native racism woven into the fabric of Canadian society since its inception as...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236754725_The_Bended_Elbow_News...