Hey! Snark!

Here's a snippet from one of my readings for today, that talks a bit about what we were commenting on re. the whole "why keep constantly being reminded of blood guilt", and what about moving forward:


... contemporary jurisprudence not only borrows from colonial justifications developed and maintained during Canada's overtly colonial period, but actually sanctions, affirms and strengthens this colonial conceptual framework. Given this result, one cannot say that the colonial narrative survives as a matter of jurisprudential inertia, as if, for example, the Court were struggling to deal with limits imposed by such common law notions as stare decisis. In employing -- and strengthening -- the same justificatory framework developed in Canada's dark colonial history, the Court has to consciously decide to speak from a colonial perspective as it goes about writing new chapters in what is essentially an ongoing -- and deepening -- colonial narrative. The Court has had to think about the principles that served to justify the takings and injustices of the past, and they have to consciously accept that these principles will continue to drive the law in a certain direction today. The Court has to consciously act as a modern day agent of colonization.

- A Colonial Reading Of Recent Jurisprudence: R. v. Sparrow (1990), Delgamuukw v. British Columbia (1997) and Haida Nation v. British Columbia (Minister of Forests) (2004), by Gordon Christie.



...mind you, I've got load of much better quotes and sources than this, but this one was in e-format already; much easier to cut & post ;)

I've been told it makes sense the fourth time you read it...

The desire for conquest (or rather the necessity of conquest) is at all times present in antidialogical action. To this end the oppressors atttempt to destroy in the oppressed their quality as "considerers" of the world. Since the oppressors cannot totally achieve this destruction, they must mythicize the world. In order to present for the consideration of the oppressed and subjugated a world of deceit designed to increase their alienation and passivity, the oppressors develop a series of methods precluding any presentation of the world as a problem and showing it rather as a fixed entity, as something given - something to which people, as mere spectators, must adapt.
-Pedagogy of the Oppressed

I have to read 58 pages of this by tomorrow. I... want to go lie down.

Why yes, I do have 126 pages of articles and 155 pages of judgments to read by tomorrow...

... does it show?

So I was thinking about Aboriginal rights & what's the purpose of learning about our wretched history with Aboriginals & where do we go from here etc etc. I started to answer a comment from snarkhunter and got all enthused - and then lj blew a big razzberry at me when I tried to post my reply as a comment.

I'm posting it here instead :)

***
Well, obviously I don't know the answer or I'd be a lot richer and more famous, but it seems like what we need to do is see what our current legal principles are, and compare them to what they should be. Then we should change the statute/common law to accord with what we say we believe to be fair.

As far as I can tell, the law as it stands in Canada right now says that:

1. All Canadian land ultimately belongs to the Crown (FedGov), because the Royal Proclamation said so in 1763.
   
   Doesn't matter whether the Natives living on it at the time were beaten by guns, germs or steel, or signed treaties that said explicitly that they would give up all control of the land, or signed treaties that said that they were willing to share the land and let colonists farm on parts of it if they in turn promised to leave the Natives alone in the rest of it and not take any of the plants & animals "as long as the sun may shine", or said nothing about the proclamation because they'd never heard of the Crown, because the only white men who had ever been in their corner of Canada were map-makers and the Natives had no idea that off in England somebody had decided they were now standing on British land.
   
   Whatever, it doesn't matter; all land belongs to the Crown.
   
   
2. Some land has "Aboriginal Title" attached to it.
   
   This means that the Crown has a duty to take care of the Natives on it. If they never signed any treaties (this applies to most of the North & West) they can claim Title if (a) they were living on the land in 1763 (good luck proving that one, though they can now bring oral history in as evidence) (b) remained there till the present day (good luck proving that one when you're talking about nomadic groups – and people who wisely fled from settlers with shotguns) and (c) had exclusive possession of it during all this time (good luck proving that one when you're talking about tribes whose natural use of the land included sharing the land with other tribes, because they weren't all anal about mineMineMINE like the Europeans were).
   
   
3. If a group has a treaty or can prove Aboriginal Title, the Crown has a duty to consider them before using their land.
   
   And it has to have a good reason before interfering with Aboriginal use of the land. Say, for example, military or natural emergency. Or preservation of public safety. Or conservation of endangered species. Or building infrastructure for the larger community. Or economic development. Or... anything, really, as long as the Crown really really really wants it.
   
   If the Crown has a good reason, they have to consult the Aboriginals about the planned use. They don't have to listen to them, but they do have to consult. And if they take the land away or render it unusable for Aboriginal use (say, by damming a river used for fishing, and flooding the adjacent plains or forests) they have to give Aboriginals fair compensation, ie cash.

So. People who have lived on land since before recorded history are told they can only stay on said land if it's OK with the real owners of the land, who never conquered them, signed treaties with them, or even informed them they had been dispossessed until a century or so after the fact. And if, say, the Crown decides that it wants to encourage economic development by giving logging companies permits to clearcut old growth forests and thus pretty much destroy the way of life of the folks living there, they can do so, as long as they give the Natives a big enough check to make it up to them.


Seems a little... appalling, to me. And yet that's exactly what we're doing, right now, and most Canadians see nothing wrong with it. If we were actually living up to our principles of respecting Natives, or living up to the terms of the treaties we signed, or thinking of Native land as 'Native' in any meaningful way, we wouldn't even consider handing out permits to log on it. Any more than we consider giving an Ontario company a permit to log in Vermont because we've decided it's ours and we need to develop economically and we'll be sure to give those Vermont folks a big check so they can move somewhere else once we've destroyed their ecosystem and forest-tourism economy.

IMHO what needs to happen is we need to ask ourselves if what we really want as a country is an approach whose objective is to obliterate Native peoples one clear-cut and pipeline and golf course at a time. Because what we say is that we're committed to allowing them to live their lives and maintain their culture and independence. As we promised we would, in all those nifty treaties we signed and still refer to from time to time.


Personally, after the last couple weeks, I think we should just treat them as sovereign nations and forget any of our ideas about them being an extra-special part of Canada's Multicultural Mosaic^TM. I am willing to admit that this (a) is waaaaay more granola than even I am usually willing to go, (b) would be a political and logistical nightmare (and not a welcome change to many Natives) and (c) is probably brought about by being part of a January course that, by the nature of January courses, is a little bit like brainwashing in that you get immersed in one topic 24/7 as you wade through mountains of old-growth forests' worth of papers and articles and cases in your particular subject matter.

Failing the sovereign nation approach, though, I'd say that at least acknowledging that Natives should have better-protected land rights might be a start :)

Thenceforward-just like the dominant elites-they try to conquer the people: they become messianic; t

ohGOD how I resent Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

It's important. I know it is. And when I read the same paragraph five times, I do get it. But GAH I loathe the slogging it takes to finally get there... especially since, when I finally understand, what I understand the most is that the understanding really wasn't worth the five repetitious of dreary self-important prose.

And it's 58 pages long. And then once I'm done that, I've got another 68 pages of articles to read. As well as 155 pages of cases - which, no, I'm not going to do, other than the 17-page case I just finished reading.

And the best part? This is the "pared-down" reading list, since we've got a paper outline and bibliography to hand in for tomorrow as well and our prof wanted to give us a break, so she dropped the 61-page Frantz Fanon article. Thank god, because Fanon and Freire together would cause my frontal cortex to short out my occular nerves in a desperate bid to protect itself from the superabundance of tiresome intellectuals dancing on the head of a pin.

Remind me again, please, why I filled in a positively gushing feedback form for this course.

Oh, that's right. Because it's incredibly informative and interesting and thought-provoking, and the prof is one of the best I've had in more years of post-secondary education than I can count.

Right.

::deep breath::

::plunging back in::