Brakes

I heard Phil Fontaine, the National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, calling for a day of protest against the continuing casual annihilation and extermination of aboriginal culture in Canada. I thought that he was learning from recent events but was disappointed to hear that he was calling for First Nations people to gather in major cities to express their outrage at their treatment by the federal government (and by association all Canadians, like myself, who choose to mostly look the other way).

Big deal. Go out and march the streets, make some noise, climb some lampposts. That's what they want you to do. State sanctioned marches (did you apply for your permit Phil?) do nothing to really endanger this treacherous Canadian state. So you get nothing and the forests continue to fall and the species continue to go extinct and your people continue to suffer and die.

Now here's a good idea. How fast will this get elites' attentions? How fast will they run to either capitulate or send in the army? Even if the army is Harper's first option, that will at least make the violence against First Nations overt instead of something that happens when "drunken Indians" are dumped in the snow outside of town to die; small genocides that you can never quite add up to anything.

So block some rails which go through your land. Good idea. As much as our "goods" move by road these days, there are still many "natural resources" that travel by rail. And our "economy" is now focused on primary resources for the Americans; think about it, we have oil (poisoned groundwater), softwood (clear cuts), minerals (more poison) and more.

So rail is a weak point in the genocidal industrial economy. These weak points are really everywhere once you learn to start seeing them.

We have a lot to learn from the original inhabitants of this land. Even today.