Indigenous protests sweep Canada

Native peo­ple across Cana­da have block­ad­ed roads, bridges and rail­way lines as part of the grass-roots indige­nous move­ment Idle No More.

From British Colum­bia, where dozens of pro­test­ers demon­strat­ed out­side hear­ings for a pro­posed oil pipeline, to Ontario, where bor­der cross­ings to the USA were blocked, the scale of the protests strong­ly sug­gest that the move­ment is show­ing lit­tle sign of dying down.

The Idle No More move­ment began in Novem­ber 2012, when four women from the province of Saskatchewan held a ‘teach-in’ about the like­ly effects of Bill C‑45, a large and com­plex bill pro­posed by Prime Min­is­ter Stephen Harp­er, which would seri­ous­ly weak­en many envi­ron­men­tal reg­u­la­tions.

On 4 Decem­ber, a group of chiefs from the Assem­bly of First Nations (AFN), Canada’s prin­ci­pal indige­nous orga­ni­za­tion, were pre­vent­ed from enter­ing the Par­lia­ment build­ings to lob­by MPs over the bill. News of the snub, using the Idle No More hash­tag, quick­ly spread across the coun­try.

Anoth­er impor­tant ele­ment of the protests has been a hunger strike by There­sa Spence, chief of the Attawapiskat First Nation in north­ern Ontario. This Cree com­mu­ni­ty, despite being the loca­tion of De Beers’s Vic­tor dia­mond mine, is riv­en by social prob­lems, includ­ing poor hous­ing and chron­i­cal­ly inad­e­quate edu­ca­tion pro­vi­sion.

Chief Spence declared that her hunger strike would con­tin­ue until the Prime Min­is­ter and the Gov­er­nor Gen­er­al (the Queen’s rep­re­sen­ta­tive in Cana­da), agreed to meet her to dis­cuss Abo­rig­i­nal rights.

On Jan­u­ary 11 a del­e­ga­tion of First Nations lead­ers, under the aegis of the AFN, held a meet­ing with Mr Harp­er and var­i­ous oth­er min­is­ters. The Gov­er­nor Gen­er­al, how­ev­er, did not attend. The meet­ing was incon­clu­sive, with the Abo­rig­i­nal Affairs Min­is­ter report­ing that ‘it would be fol­lowed by high-lev­el dia­logue between the Prime Min­is­ter and Shawn Atleo’, leader of the AFN.

As described by the native writer Lisa Charley­boy, the objec­tives of Idle No More are ‘to build indige­nous sov­er­eign­ty, to repair the rela­tion­ship between indige­nous peo­ples of Cana­da (First Nations, Métis, and Inu­it), the crown, and the gov­ern­ment of Cana­da from a grass­roots frame­work, and to pro­tect the envi­ron­ment for all Cana­di­ans to enjoy for gen­er­a­tions to come.’

Idle No More has called for a World Day of Action on Jan­u­ary 28th.