In our final First Nations Friday, we discuss the ongoing protests at Trump's U.S./Mexico border wall, where Indigenous communities call for an end to colonial borders. We also have a special announcement about a new show coming to The Real News Network!
The post Indigenous communities fight the border regime Trump is imposing on their lands appeared first on The Real News Network.
For thousands of years, Whey-Ah-Whichen has been a site of importance to the Tsleil-Waututh people. This hospitable flat peninsula in the Pacific Northwest was home to one of their major villages, standing in the shadow of surrounding hills and mountains covered in towering Douglas-fir and other ancient trees. Today, Whey-Ah-Whichen is the site of Cates Park, so-named by the descendants of English colonists in what is now British Columbia. It overlooks Burrard Inlet, a finger-like extension of the Salish Sea separating the cities of Vancouver and North Vancouver.
Last September, the people of the Potlotek First Nation, located in Canada’s Nova Scotia, began to protest the quality of their water. The community’s water supply has been an issue for over a decade when reports of black, thick, foul-smelling tap water first became commonplace.
Amidst an orgy of martial patriotism that is finally over, there was a sad irony.
The tribal nations are opposed to the pipelines based on potential threats to the environment.
Calls have come from all over the world to boycott Nestlé after the company bought a drought-stricken Canadian community’s water supply, and more than 150,000 Facebook users have taken to the social media site to voice their outrage. [1]
A sample of pipeline projects affecting Indigenous communities across North America. Graphic courtesy of the Treaty Alliance Against Tar Sands Expansion (source; click to enlarge)by Gaius PubliusI consider this momentous.
On 8 December 2015, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau told gathered First Nations leaders: “It is time for a renewed, nation-to-nation relationship with First Nations peoples, one that understands that the constitutionally guaranteed rights of First Nations in Canada are not an inconvenience but rather a sacred obligation.”1
Jun 6, 2015, Dissident Voice
-by Kevin Annett
“Whenever the winners of a war write its official history and pronounce absolution on themselves, the results are both tragic, and comic. Canada demonstrated that in spades this past week when the government-run Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) released its “official” report on the homegrown church-and-state slaughter of thousands of native children in the so-called “Indian residential school” system.
On June 16, Prime Minister Stephen Harper officially approved Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline project to the Pacific coast to export tar sands oil, just days before Canada’s Supreme Court wrapped up its deliberations on the Tsilhqot’in Nation land claim. Coincidence? Or attempted arm twisting?
