art, freedom, human rights and democracy

Not a bad story in The Christian Science Monitor on the subjects above. A quote from Alexandre Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Prize speech drew me to it.

“Art serves to battle lies and preserve the moral history of a society without the transitory and debasing rhetoric of bureaucrats.”

Have a safe Fourth of July, y’all.

an evening with ward churchill

 

Ward Churchill shortly after winning his wrongful dismissal court case

This will be a long post. It began Thursday afternoon, but could only be posted today because (as we all know from experience) life intervenes. I apologize in advance for any mistakes or fudging of the material for whatever reason.

 

——-

There are about 450 people, maybe more, sitting in a large lecture hall in the old Concordia building in downtown Montreal. It’s the same building that black activists and students occupied in the ’60s, back when it was Sir George Williams University. They awakened in some Canadians, if only for a while, concern over segregation, the civil rights movement, black consciousness. That keen awareness faded because it was easy for people here to see those issues as someone else’s problems.

We’re there to watch a film entitled American Outrage about Mary and Carrie, the Dann sisters of northern Nevada. They’re Western Shoshone. They’ve been locked in a battle with the United States Government for the past forty years. The film reminds us that the battles haven’t only been legal. 

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM), acting on instructions from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Attorney General’s office and the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., has engaged in threats, physical intimidation, arbitrary arrest. Officials have invaded (there’s no other word that fits) the Dann ranch and those of other Western Shoshone with helicopters in the air and heavily-armed officers on the ground to rustle their horses and cattle, or stampede the herds off grazing lands. The film makes it clear that someone, or something, wants the Shoshone people off their lands.

The U.S. Government argues that a treaty signed in the 1800s was nullified “by steady encroachment,” a non-existent legal concept the Dann’s lawyer tells us is bullshit. The Federal Government also charges the Dann with “unpaid grazing fees” on “unoccupied federal lands” to the tune of $5-million. These are fees, the Danns say, for using their own land, Western Shoshone territory. Yet, U.S courts have backed up the U.S. position to the consternation of the United Nations’ Committee for the Elimination of Racism and Discrimination. CERD has investigated and informed the U.S. that it has violated the rights of the Western Shoshone and it wants answers. 

That was two years ago. Since then, the U.S. has ignored the CERD finding. Mary Dann has died; she was in her 80s. The U.S. decided to explode a nuclear device on the lands of the Western Shoshone and render it useless to anyone. Anyone, that is, except the huge, international gold mining conglomerates that the film’s producers tell us have been behind the decades-old campaign to displace the Western Shoshone all along. A victory is won though when the government cancelled that A-bomb explosion in the face of growing opposition across the country.

The audience is primed by the time Churchill takes the stage. He’s taller than I pictured. Trademark jeans, leather jacket, and neck-length hair. I expect a high-pitched, strident voice for some reason. He delivers a low, almost mumbling rumble with occasional humour and irony. He picks up on the general theme of righteous anger against racism, colonialism and evil or corrupt governments despite arriving near the end of the film. He fumbles around at first, then picks up.

He compliments and condemns at once. He speaks of the “legitimate aspirations to liberation” of Indigenous peoples across the Americas. Not your fault, he says to the audience, because… “Most people don’t choose to be complicit in genocide. Most people don’t choose to participate in or condone genocide.” Yet they do, he implies, by inaction or sitting by and doing nothing. They allow it to happen nonetheless. Genocide has been committed and is being committed, Churchill tells the audience. That was the message in the film: colonialism is still here, in so-called post-colonial America.

Churchill says cultural assimilation has been and still is the aim of today’s forms of internal colonialism throughout the Americas.

“The aim is to confuse Indigenous peoples of their tribal identities so they lose the ability to define themselves. Eventually, they will not be defined. They lose all sense of their own tribal identity. Indigenous people will then be indistinguishable from anyone else. When that takes place, colonialism will have accomplished what it set out to do.”

He reminds the audience of the international definition of cultural genocide. “It isn’t the eradication of a single person or individual. You need to eradicate the group. What do you call it when the group’s ability to define themselves no longer exists? When the group no longer has its tribal identity? I call that cultural genocide, and that is exactly what is going on today in the Americas, and elsewhere in the world.”

“I’m not going to differentiate between one genocide going on in the world or another,” he continues. “I’m not going to compare genocides. You know, Auschwitz versus smallpox. I’m not going to argue about the scale of one or another; this one is bigger or worse than that one. I’m not going to argue about the scale, or the method of delivery, or whether this method was more efficient than some other method or way of measuring. I just want to make clear that it genocide is going on today, and we all know it.” 

Churchill was fired a couple of years ago from his teaching job at Colorado University. He had written an essay years earlier about the terrorist attacks that brought down the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center in New York City in September, 2001. He tied the terrorist attacks on 9/11 to U.S. foreign policy. “The chickens had come home to roost,” he told the audience in Montreal.

Churchill has recently won a wrongful dismissal lawsuit he filed against CU. The reason, according to CU, was Churchill’s less than rigorous research methods and plagiarism. Churchill won his case, and a $1 award for damages (he asked for $1-million), because he argued, and the judge agreed, that the real reason was political pressure applied on the university to get rid of Churchill for that article he wrote. This Montreal audience has obviously followed the case. They applauded when Churchill summarized his firing, the court fight, and the judgement (although no mention of the symbolic $1 damages award). 

There are several perspectives on Churchill, who has written several books mainly on U.S. Indian affairs policies, but some touching on topics such as colonialism and post-colonialism in Africa or India. For example, some Native Americans have attacked Churchill as a wannabe, a white man in buckskin. Read more here, and here, and here. <all links to Indianz.com with links to the original stories> 

I had to leave early so I didn’t hear the rest of Churchill’s presentation or the Q&As that followed. However, two things, a quote from Churchill, followed by a comment from a Mohawk who attended and left early as well:

“There are some who ask how can this (cultural genocide) be legal in the U.S., or in Canada for that matter? Well, it was made legal. They made laws to make these things legal. Laws existed to further these policies and make these actions by the state legal. Remember that Hitler’s Germany had laws too. The [NAZI] state enacted laws and acted legally when it committed its genocide. Just because it had laws making everything legal did not make it right. It wasn’t.”

“I guess it’s important for people in there (the auditorium) to hear what he has to say, but I’ve heard it all before. I know this stuff. We learned it the hard way or at home. For a lot of them, it’s important to know what their government does in their name.”

[END]

defending the despicable

A 7-year-old girl shows up in class with a nazi swastika drawn on her arm. The teacher washes it off. The next day, the mother has redrawn the swastika on her daughter’s arm and sent her back to school. Provincial child welfare authorities show up at their home, find nazi flags and other symbols of neo-nazism, and decide to take the girl and her 2-year-old brother into custody. 

“It was one of the stupidest things I’ve done in my life but it’s no reason to take my kids,” the mother told CBC News at the time.

The mother is fighting Manitoba child welfare authorities who have applied to take permanent custody of the children. She says that while she possesses neo-nazi and “white pride” symbols, she is not a white supremacist. 

“A black person has a right to say black power or black pride and yet they’re turning around on us and saying we’re racists and bigots and neo-Nazis because we say white pride. It’s hypocrisy at its finest.”  

Consider whether the state should have the right to remove children from their families because the state deems the parents’ thoughts or beliefs unsuitable, unacceptable or dangerous. Then consider what you would do as a Mohawk parent if the state decided that possession of red power literature, symbols or a Warrior flag were justification for apprehending your children? 

Is it instilling pride or conditioning racial hatred?

congress of aboriginal hypocrisy

Patrick Brazeau

Stories keep seeping out of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples (CAP) about its head, Patrick Brazeau, its senior administration, its board of directors. The stories are about sexual harrassment, pyschological harrassment, lack of political accountability, misuse or abuse of position or power, coverups, and so on.

Two women have taken their complaints public; both to Brazeau himself and the CAP board, one to the Canadian Human Rights Commission when that went nowhere. In both cases, there was supposed to be an internal review that cleared Brazeau. Not everyone believes it, knowing all too well how political organizations tend to shovel such things under heavy carpetting.

Two members of the board, one from Manitoba and another from Saskatchewan, have released letters of complaint about the “internal investigations” and their muzzling by Brazeau and other senior CAP officials. They say that when tried to lay their hands on the investigation’s report, they were refused. When they sought to raise questions about the report and the women’s allegations during CAP’s annual general assembly, that Brazeau kept them from attending. Brazeau was re-elected at that meeting.

By suspending the Manitoba delegation from that CAP assembly, and muzzling discussion about these allegations before the election, the western delegates say that Brazeau and others may have rigged the election by avoiding any accountability that might have been expressed by the voting delegates. Lack of accountability, as some may have noticed, is one of Brazeau’s constant criticisms about reserves, band council chiefs, the Assembly of First Nations and its leader, Phil Fontaine.

Brazeau has not cooperated with the Cdn Human Rights Commission, which passed the complaint of sexual harrassment along to an Ontario human rights tribunal. Considering Brazeau’s push to have the Canadian Human Rights Act imposed upon reserves and their band councils, again this seems more than a mite hypocritical.

Sadly, instead of releasing documents like the report of that internal investigation, Brazeau and the CAP executive have decided to shut ranks (predictable), condemn the victims (also predictable), and shut the blinds in hopes it will somehow fade away like the last episode of Dallas

Brazeau said the allegations were investigated and dismissed by an independent mediation firm last year.

“The conclusions of the investigation was that there was no wrongdoing, there was no sexual harassment and therefore, the allegations were false, and that’s now case closed,” Brazeau told CBC News on Wednesday.

“My integrity is not at stake here.”

Uh, huh. Oh, yes it is!

Beyond this almost daily sliming of Brazeau, however, reporters have not asked what I think are much more pertinent questions. Sure this Algonquin Indian from Maniwaki, QC, has some serious character flaws and needs to answer some questions. But so do the good folks who put him into the Senate?

Why aren’t reporters demanding answers from Chuck Strahl, the Min of Indian Affairs, to find out why he still says this about Brazeau:

“I’m sure he’ll do great work,” Strahl said. “He’s a good man. He will do the right things as he goes forward, and he’ll provide good leadership both on Quebec issues and aboriginal issues.”

Pardonez moi? Yeah, right.

What kind of vetting took place before the Prime Minister appointed Brazeau?

The Prime Minister said he wanted to get away from patronage appointments to the Senate and institute American-style hearings and an elected Senate. Bull-roar.
What criteria did he use when selecting fine people like Pamela Wallin, Mike Duffy, and the rest of this bunch of “Cash-For-Lifers.”

So why isn’t the news media asking these questions? Or are they waiting for Parliament to be recalled so they can avoid asking them and get to the real stuff about… uh, whatever.

here we go again

The CBC is hailing the Royal Assent given to Bill C-27, an Act to Amend the Human Rights Act as a good thing. I say, beware what you wish for – especially when it comes from Canada’s other national public broadcaster (APTN is another).

Why? I remember Bill C-31 which allowed some but not all “non-status Indian” people to regain their status after the Canadian government had stripped them of their rights in the first place with clearly, obviously, deliberately discriminatory legislation.

First, Bill C-31 didn’t work for everyone. Second, it continued to allow discrimination against Status Indians. It did so by continuing the very same discrimination – only this time by jumping a generation. So Bill C-31 might allow a child of a non-status Indian to regain rights, but the children of this person would lose it. Clever folks, these federal bureaucrats. Makes you wonder what they do in their spare time.

Secondly, status is one thing but most services are delivered to “band members.” Some bands came up with such narrow definitions of membership that they actually lost numbers. This, too, is another form of discrimination but the feds considered this to be OK so long as it was Indians discriminating against Indians AND in a way that they agreed with (less Indians is and always has been the ultimate objective of federal Indian policy).

Then there were the unkept promises (don’t get me started!) by the Prime Minister on down that bands would be adequately funded and able to handle the increased demand for medical and social services, housing, basic welfare, etc.

Hah! If you believed that one, I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn for you.

Here’s what the CBC put down about Bill C-27:

But bands in the region will need more money to comply with the act, said John Paul, executive director of the Atlantic Policy Congress of First Nations Chiefs.

With this legislation, he said, communities may be forced to provide services “with money they don’t have.”

Reserves were exempt from the Canadian Human Rights Act when it was passed in 1977. The exemption was supposed to be temporary to give bands time to prepare.

The House of Commons closed the loophole late last month.

Not quite accurate, even for the CBC. It was not ONLY status Indian bands that needed more time. The federal and provincial governments wanted time as well, so they could get their programs, policies, laws and regulations in line with any changes that might be required to accommodate the COLLECTIVE rights of Aboriginal peoples. Or maybe to find new ways to weed out even more Indians or otherwise restrict their rights.

Whatever. These rights were entrenched in the Charter of Rights and the Constitution Act. The federal and provincial governments were also supposed to make sure that any changes they made did not undermine or violate these rights.

You see, it isn’t just one party that has been discriminating both for and against Aboriginal peoples. Sometimes the Indigenous peoples do it to themselves. But most often, it’s the folks with the power and authority that discriminate against Indigenous folks with near impunity – and get away it time after time.

So, let’s start keeping track of who is complaining about what in the next few months. Let’s just see if the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, and the legions of knuckleheads out there who think status Indians spend their lives sipping mai-tais by the backyard pool, begin to file all kinds of grievances “so we can all be equal under the law.”

To me, equal treatment would mean that the federal and provincial government begins to treat them the way they have been treating Indians. Let’s see how they like that!

when journalism fails

While away from Canada, I wondered what had happened with a human rights complaint lodged against a particular right-wing writer named Mark Steyn – someone who IMHO lends a distinct, unpleasant odour to journalism. With a name like that, I thought, he must have roots in South Africa. Perhaps his family hails from proud Boere stock, but according to Wikipedia he was born in Canada.

The complaint was lodged by a national Muslim organization for an excerpt published by Maclean’s Magazine, a so-called national newsmagazine that has seen better days; years actually. That Muslim organization objected to Steyn’s snide, denigrating portrayal of Muslims, their religious beliefs, and the perceived threat by paranoics like himself who see Islamic threats and onslaughts everywhere.

Alerted by StageLeft to Dr. Dawg’s Blog, and his attempt to cut through the b.s. by other loons like Ottawa Citizen columnist, David Warren, I read through the step-by-step deconstruction of a ludicrous exercise in propaganda that really should become the subject of academic study in public relations; how to bullshit the public while simultaneously picking their pockets.

Briefly, the only conclusion to draw from this odiferous collation of inaccuracies, half-truths and outright falsehoods from the Steyn camp is that the truth doesn’t matter. When human rights institutions are the quarry, anything goes. No need to check facts. No need to check sources. No need to render anything like an accurate account. Say whatever you want, no matter how blatantly wrong it is. Smear people. Make stuff up. Some of the mud might stick.

So bravo, David and Ezra, for making so clear the standards that guide journalism on the Right. At this point, I’d be checking outside for myself if you told me the sky was blue.

That excerpt refers, of course, to David Warren and that dahling of the western loonatic fringe, Ezra Levant.

Back to Wikipedia, here’s what it has to say about Steyn’s writing style (if you can call it “style”):

Steyn has been noted for using words to offend political correctness. In 2001, he wrote “it’s one thing to let the Japs build your car and the Chinks supply your cuddly toys”.[5] In another article widely published in 2002, Steyn referred to people of India as wogs[6] and while guest hosting The Rush Limbaugh Show, he spoke about “the gooks in Vietnam.”[7]

Susan Catto in Time noted his interest in controvery, “Instead of shying away from the appearance of conflict, Steyn positively revels in it.”[8] Canadian journalist Steve Burgess wrote in The Tyee “Steyn wields his rhetorical rapier with genuine skill” and that national disasters tended to cause Steyn “…to display his inner wingnut.”[9] Lionel Shriver wrote, “. . . I love Mark Steyn”, adding, “. . . however you may deplore his opinions, Steyn is funny.” [10]

James Wolcott of Vanity Fair says that he asks himself, “how can one man be so wrong” when he reads “the latest dimestore prophesy from neocon jester Mark Steyn, whose occult powers of clairvoyance never fail to fail him.”[11] Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic wrote that Steyn was, “…long on colorful rhetoric but short on dry facts.”[12] British journalist Johann Hari wrote in the New Statesman: “Steyn’s prose has a jangling musicality; like Ann Coulter, he writes in a demonic demotic that makes you chuckle even as you retch.”[13]

I have read Steyn. I don’t find him funny. Life is easy; humour is hard. He fails on both levels and is just plain pitiable, IMHO. I wish he would just stop pretending, and publishers would stop enabling, someone who lacks both talent and insight.