Canada's War on First Nations: Sovereignty, Self-Determination and LandBack

Four amazing Indigenous Leaders , Russell Diabo, Mohawk, Scott Clark Coast Salish, David Knox Kwakiutl, Adam Gagnon Dst'hyl Wet'suwet'en are having a discussion on The National Plan, Canada's UNDRIP PLAN , Douglas Treaty and the Prisoner of Conscious!

 

Post from Peter d’Errico

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CANADA'S WAR ON FIRST NATIONS

Russell Diabo, First Nations Policy Analyst, on First Nations Self-Determination

Peter d'Errico Oct 1

Russell Diabo (Kahnawake Mohawk) is a long-time advocate for First Nations rights and self-determination.

His website, “Truth Before Reconciliation”, provides extensive resources to support his powerful vision statement:

“My vision is to see First Nations protecting their traditional lands and waters by developing and implementing their own Self-Determination Plans for Community Development and Nationhood based on restoration of stolen lands, territories and resources, or restitution where lands and resources aren’t returned.”

On September 19, 2024, Russell released an updated summary of his analysis, CANADA'S WAR ON FIRST NATIONS, which opens with this statement:

My belief--which is based upon my policy experience and observations over the past 4 decades of First Nations-Canada relations--is that the Crown (governments & courts) is continuing to empty out (limit & restrict) the meaning (scope & content) of Aboriginal and Treaty Rights….

The full statement is available here as a PDF:

	Canada's War On First Nations Update 344KB ∙ PDF file
Download

A major conclusion of Russell’s analysis is that:

First Nation Peoples would be better served focusing on internal organizing, networking and capacity building instead of hoping a federal political party will save us.

 Getting rid of the Indian Act? That's colonialism (2024) in action... Trace

LandBack Celebration

Caldwell First Nation welcomes a new chapter

By Mark Brown August 19, 2024

 

Caldwell First Nation marked a turning point for its people with a celebration over the weekend.

A Land Back and cultural event was held on Saturday, to welcome families who have moved back to Canada's southernmost First Nation, and leave out a welcome for those who may soon be moving back.

Chief Mary Duckworth said Saturday's celebration is the start of a new chapter in the life of Caldwell First Nation.

"It took years of strong leadership and enduring obstacles on our path home," said Duckworth. "If not for our ancestors and leaders, we would not be standing here on our land now. In ceremonies, songs, and stories, and most of all through our nationhood, we are sharing our gratitude to the Creator and to all who have come before us and contributed to saving our nation and creating a new homeland."

The celebration completed the journey of ten people -- eight adults and two children -- who began returning home on July 20. By September, 58 people are expected to return to the community.

Caldwell First Nation, which has existed since 1790, finally had a place to call home when it acquired land near Point Pelee in Leamington in 2020.  Funding for development was granted in November 2021.  Since then, new net-zero homes have been built, along with new street signs.

The First Nation persevered through war, arson, racism, the residential school system, the Sixties Scoop, and other challenges.

"This small yet strong nation persevered, meeting around kitchen tables, writing letters, and testifying to the federal government," read a release from Caldwell First Nation. "We set aside small amounts of money for our dream and, with the advocacy and leadership of Chief Carl Johnson and his son Larry Johnson, we eventually, some 230 years later, won a 198-acre small piece of our original homelands back by ratifying a land claim settlement for Point Pelee with Canada in 2011 for $105-million."

Duckworth said that Saturday's ceremony brought the story of the First Nation full circle.

"We have come through a devastating experience of land loss at the hands of colonial powers and have restored our land and our homes," said Duckworth. "Land Back is a deeply meaningful and important history for everyone who lives in Windsor-Essex, Chatham-Kent, and Elgin County to understand."

SOURCE: https://cknxnewstoday.ca/chatham/news/2024/08/19/caldwell-first-nation-welcomes-a-new-chapter

 

Assimilation Vacation?

In the 1960s, Zepeda’s grandmother protected her from being taken away on an “assimilation vacation” in the San Francisco Bay Area, where children would “learn how other families live” and potentially be adopted away from their rightful families.  Zepeda and her siblings lived with a constant fear of being taken from their home, often being told by their grandmother: “You better behave because if you don’t, white people are going to take you away.”  It wasn’t until 1978 that the Indian Child Welfare Act prohibited the removal of Indigenous children from their families.

Further alienating Indigenous people from their roots was the repression of their spiritual beliefs and practices going back to the 1850s.  Until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act passed in 1978, many people practiced secretly while participating in mainstream religion.  For example, Zepeda’s great grandfather was a tribal medicine person, but also an altar boy for a Catholic priest.

Owning land contributes to economic and societal stability as well as long term wealth. While the United States government was obliged for many generations to honor treaties and debts with native tribes, the Termination Act of 1953 sought to disband tribes, sell their lands, and relocate American Indians. For Zepeda, this meant that she was no longer Indian and was not eligible to receive services from the Indian health clinic.  The policy also had long-term and devastating economic consequences for tribal communities who lost their land.

In 1983 with Hardwick v. United States Government, Zepeda was considered Indian once again. “We have reorganized and reestablished ourselves.” Now, she lives again on the land that had been her grandma’s.

Understanding Indigenous Communities to Support Their Health Needs

READ MORE

VIDEO:  http://placemattersoregon.com/ 

For thousands of years, the Klamath Tribes have had a deep physical and spiritual connection to southern Oregon. But in 1954, the U.S. government took over their tribal lands there. The trauma of losing their land, and the racism and discrimination they confronted in the years after, are at the root of health challenges that still affect tribal members at higher rates than other ethnic and racial groups in Oregon.  Monica YellowOwl, a prevention specialist for Klamath Tribal Health and Family Services, and other tribal members are working to restore their people’s connection to the land in order to improve their physical and mental health. “We don’t always want to be seen as the traumatized Indians. We want to be seen as resilient Indians, powerful people, connected to our homeland, practicing our traditions and our cultures,” Monica says. 

Place Matters Oregon is an effort of the Oregon Health Authority to get people talking about how place affects our health—as individuals and as a community. Check out the link above to explore more connections between place and health and join the conversation. 

 

HESAPA - A LANDBACK FILM

 

Rapid City, SD – NDN Collective’s LANDBACK Campaign has officially launched pre-sales of the limited edition LANDBACK Magazine, He Sapa: The Heart of Everything That Is, which pivots on the cornerstone work of the LANDBACK Campaign to reignite and continue the ongoing struggle to return the He Sapa (Black Hills) to the Oceti Sakowin (Lakota/ Dakota/Nakota) Nation. LANDBACK organizing has a powerful lineage. Nellie Red Owl (1907-1992) is intentionally featured on the cover as an acknowledgment of that lineage, her courageous actions, and her commitment to reclaiming the He Sapa. 

The LANDBACK Magazine contains over 100 pages of content from movement elders, youth organizers, the frontlines of LGBTQ2S+ justice, climate justice, and joint-struggle movements against White Supremacy and colonialism and is intentionally Indigenous-powered project, created in partnership with Indígena, Primate, Red Media Press, and Red Planet Books and Comics.

“The LANDBACK Magazine is a culmination of stories and experiences shared across generations of front line struggles, courageous mass mobilization, and teachings to guide us into the future,” said Nadya Tannous, LANDBACK Campaign Organizer. “We’re bringing old school, punk vibes and a loud voice, connecting local LANDBACK efforts to domestic and international struggles for justice.”

“What started as just a wild idea shared with a few brilliant minds is now a work of art that represents the past, present, and future of LANDBACK as a global movement,” Krystal Two Bulls, LANDBACK Campaign Director. “We focus locally on the He Sapa: The Heart of Everything That Is. My hope is that it activates a whole new generation of organizers to step into the centuries-long mission that our Ancestors sacrificed their lives for. It has always been about our relationship to the land, and it always will be.”

“It is a true honor to be able to compile stories, poems, photos, and interviews with movement elders and young people who call He Sapa home,” said Demetrius Johnson, LANDBACK Campaign Organizer. “The care and love that went into the creation of this magazine can be felt and seen on every single page. The struggle to reclaim He Sapa is ongoing, and the hope is that this magazine supplements this long and powerful history of reclaiming that sacred site.”

The LANDBACK Magazine will hit the shelves of many Indigenous-owned and Movement bookstores in the so-called continental US, so-called Canada, and the Hawaiian Kingdom in November for Native American Heritage Month, including Goodminds, Libélula Books and Co, Birchbark Books, Red Planet Books and Comics, and Native Books Hawai’i. It will also be intentionally distributed to highschools, Tribal Colleges and Universities, University Libraries and to our incarcerated Relatives. 

Pre-order Your Copy of the LANDBACK Magazine Here

Learn more about the LANDBACK Campaign Here

Margaret D. Jacobs — After One Hundred Winters - with Alaina E. Roberts

 

2021 BOOK: After One Hundred Winters confronts the harsh truth that the United States was founded on the violent dispossession of Indigenous people and asks what reconciliation might mean in light of this haunted history. In this timely and urgent book, settler historian Margaret Jacobs tells the stories of the individuals and communities who are working together to heal historical wounds--and reveals how much we have to gain by learning from our history instead of denying it. 

Purchase Book Here: https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9... 

Margaret D. Jacobs is professor of history and director of the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. 

Her books include White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940. 

Website: reconciliationrising.org.

Jacobs will be in conversation with Alaina E. Roberts, an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on the intersection of Black and Native American life from the nineteenth century to the modern day with particular attention to identity, settler colonialism, and anti-Blackness. In addition to her first book, I've Been Here All The While: Black Freedom on Native Land, and multiple academic articles, her writing has appeared in outlets like the Washington Post and TIME magazine and her work has been profiled by the likes of CNN and the Boston Globe. Find her on Twitter @allthewhile1.

A necessary reckoning with America's troubled history of injustice to Indigenous people

Jacobs traces the brutal legacy of systemic racial injustice to Indigenous people that has endured since the nation's founding. Explaining how early attempts at reconciliation succeeded only in robbing tribal nations of their land and forcing their children into abusive boarding schools, she shows that true reconciliation must emerge through Indigenous leadership and sustained relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people that are rooted in specific places and histories. 

In the absence of an official apology and a federal Truth and Reconciliation Commission, ordinary people are creating a movement for transformative reconciliation that puts Indigenous land rights, sovereignty, and values at the forefront. With historical sensitivity and an eye to the future, Jacobs urges us to face our past and learn from it, and once we have done so, to redress past abuses. Drawing on dozens of interviews, After One Hundred Winters reveals how Indigenous people and settlers in America today, despite their troubled history, are finding unexpected gifts in reconciliation.

 

This Land is Whose Land?

Through genocide, broken treaties, and a legal system created by and for the colonial interest, this land “became” American land. 

Excerpt:

June 14, 2019 | Mali Obomsawin

Foster Care and Adoption (1800s–present)

For the last three centuries, government agents across the country have been responsible for forcibly removing Native children from their homes and putting them up for adoption or in foster care. Native children enter the Child Welfare System at rates nineteen times those of non-Native children. The Indian Child Welfare Act (1978), a federal law erected to curtail this unconscionable phenomenon and protect Native children, is currently being challenged in the Supreme Court.

The Allotment Act (1887–1934) and Blood Quantum

Instead of forced assimilation or removal, the General Allotment (Dawes) Act aimed to break up Native communities by targeting their geographic autonomy. The statute parceled up previously communal Indian lands and allocated it to individual tribal members. Then it opened “surplus land” to settler homesteading. The government institutionalized a policy called “blood quantum,” in this case requiring Natives to “prove one-fourth Indian blood in a given group” in order to inherit their families’ land. This system, in turn, set Natives up to eventually breed themselves out of existence through intermarriage, which would ultimately relieve the government of upholding treaty promises. Although the Dawes Act was replaced by the Indian Reorganization Act in 1934, blood quantum continues to be widely used to determine citizenship– and how blood quantum is used varies from tribe to tribe. In many cases, blood quantum has the continued effect of shrinking enrollment, burdening and complicating Native identity and relationships, and, in the company of dogs and horses, reducing Natives to our blood measurements.

Eugenics (1900s–present)

Advocated by “public health” professionals throughout the twentieth century, eugenics practices were ubiquitous across the United States and Canada. From 1913 to 1957, the state of Vermont issued a “eugenical-sociological” survey called the Vermont Commission on Country Life to identify and exterminate the state’s “undesirables” to ensure a “superior stock” of citizens for the state’s future. The commission specifically targeted Abenaki people resisting assimilation, along with African Americans, recent immigrants, and paupers. The term “mental defectives” was broadly applied to those that commissioners wanted to target. Fast-forwarding to the 1970s, researchers brought to light ongoing projects of forced sterilization of southwestern Native women, performed by physicians and Indian Health Service workers. Eugenics has played a sustained role in American “public health” practice throughout the previous century, and cases of forced sterilization of Native women in North America continue today.

These are just a few of the state-sanctioned ethnic cleansing tactics that were erected to solve the “Indian Problem,” the unanticipated survival of Indigenous populations as American nation-building progressed, from which Adolf Hitler drew inspiration during the Third Reich (additional source). However difficult to face, this legacy cannot be divorced from today’s America.

The means of allyship—and dismantling culturally systemic ignorance—starts with “passing the mic” to marginalized people, who know our communities’ experiences, needs, and struggles better than anyone else. But this opportunity only arises if activists make room for Native experiences of America: our less patriotic accounts of America’s history and legal system derive from centuries of hypocrisy, broken treaties, and systematic genocidal policies. Confronting the experiential gap between Natives and Americans will take determined self-education, listening, absolute humility on behalf of settlers, and vast improvements in institutional education.

But the need for effective activism is dire. Real, organized change requires allyship and the recognition that ignorance is a privilege. It requires those who consider themselves dedicated to justice to question the accuracy of their own education, read and listen to thinkers, artists, and activists from marginalized communities, and accept every opportunity to pass the mic. Finally, it requires that Americans let go of the elements of American culture that silence and erase the marginalized, even if those elements have been treasured.

 

Article

 

Land Back in the 2020s #LandBack

There is no blueprint for how to return stolen land, but with thousands of acres returned to Indigenous care over the past two years alone, we know it can be done. 

SOURCE

Voices From Here: Richard Hill

 

People’s Relationship to the Land 

"There is no greater thing we as peoples can do for our Mother Earth and for our children of the future than to preserve our rich heritage and relationship with this land." - Robert Whiteduck, Chief of Algonquins of Pikwakanagan First Nation, 1998 

Read this : LAND ACKNOWLEDGMENT

ABOUT THE VIDEO:

In this interview, Richard Hill shares about the complexities of Haudenosaunee territory, wampum belt teachings, and his work to repatriate material culture to his community. 

Nya:weh, Rick, for the teachings you offered and for sharing your life’s work with us.

Filmed on September 5, 2019 on Six Nations of the Grand River Territory. Cinematographer – Jonathan Elliott Series Editor – Madison Thomas Colour – Martin Gaumond + Outpost MTL Sound mix – Seratone Studios Portrait - Natasha Donovan 

How Native students fought back against abuse and assimilation at US boarding schools #TakeLand #LandBack

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Portrait of Ernest Knocks Off. John N. Choate/Cumberland County Historical Society, CC BY-NC-SA

LINK

As Indigenous community members and archaeologists continue to discover unmarked graves of Indigenous children at the sites of Canadian residential schools, the United States is reckoning with its own history of off-reservation boarding schools.

In July 2021, nine Sicangu Lakota students who died at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania were disinterred and returned to their homelands at Whetstone Bay in South Dakota.

One of these young people was Ernest Knocks Off. Ernest, who came from the Sicangu Oyate or Burnt Thigh Nation, was among the first group of students to arrive at Carlisle, in 1879. He entered school at age 18 and attempted to run away soon after arriving. He ultimately went on a hunger strike and died of complications of diphtheria on Dec. 14, 1880.

My new book “Writing Their Bodies: Restoring Rhetorical Relations at the Carlisle Indian School” explores how Indigenous children resisted English-only education at Carlisle, which became the prototype for both Indian schools across the U.S. and residential schools in Canada. Ernest Knocks Off was 18 when he arrived at the Carlisle boarding school in 1879. He was one of many young Native people who fought – in his case, to the death – to retain their language and culture.

Native American students at the Carlisle Indian School, circa 1899. Library of Congress/Corbis Historical Collection/VCG via Getty Images

A tombstone of a young Oglala Lakota student buried at the old Carlisle Indian School cemetery. Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis News Collection via Getty Images

Pratt and his supervisors at the Bureau of Indian Affairs hoped that they could break up tribes by disrupting the transmission of language and culture from one generation to the next. By destroying tribal identities, they hoped to take land in communally held reservations and guaranteed by treaties.

PLEASE READ: How Native students fought back against abuse and assimilation at US boarding schools

 

Here is a record from Carlisle:

Notice: Howard Slow Bull (age 18) goes to the institution in 1886, is sent to farmers in PA in 1888 and dies in 1893 at age 25. These are the mysteries we still need to solve... so their souls can rest...   These were not schools but DEATH CAMPS and these children were hostages.... Blog Editor