Shucking Oysters: Their Home and Native Land
By Alex Allen
“We were not perfect, but we had no jails, we had no taxes…no wine and no beer, no old peoples’ homes, no children’s aid society, we had no crisis centres. We had a philosophy of life based on the Creator. We had our humanity.”
– Art Solomon, “Songs for the People: Teachings on the Natural Way”
June is National Indigenous month. But instead of one day or a month, we should be recognizing and celebrating their culture every single day. I don’t think I need to share residential school atrocities or the names of missing women from the highway of tears, or how many first nations are arrested and marginalized. We all know, and if we don’t know, that is even more distressing.
Reconciliation is the buzzword. Think about it. To reconcile means to pacify, to content, to agree. Does that sound like a healthy partnership or are there shades of colonialism? And then the term: Free, Prior and Informed Consent. The UN seal of approval that allows indigenous communities to give or withhold consent to a project that may affect them or their territories. Once again, the wording is unfortunate. “It’s not rape it’s seduction, so just lie back and enjoy it,” PM Lester B. Pearson, glibly said in response to Americans buying up Canadian businesses with reckless abandon in the 1970s.
Gary Snyder wrote in The Practice of the Wild, “native people everywhere are conducting an underprivileged and underfunded fight against unimaginably wealthy corporations to resist logging or oil exploration or gold mining on their own land.” Corporations look at everything, from human beings to the natural environment, as exploitable commodities. When we start to see land as community rather commodity, maybe we just might begin to treat the Earth with love and respect.
We are visitors that have overstayed our visit. It’s their home and sacred land. Unfortunately, the struggle to resist the temptation to sell out, to take the cash and run, or stay and surrender, must be huge. But there are some who resist, as Joe Martin of the Tla-qui-aht First Nation, explained, “one of our teachings is that mother nature will provide for our need, but not our greed. And it is our greed that’s destroying many things nowadays.”
Joe, who is a lead carver, shared what a totem pole represents. In western culture, we have always looked at the totem pole as a representation of one’s status, depending on how high or low we are in relation to others. In the traditional worldview of Joe’s people, the totem pole is all about interdependence, inclusion, and integrity, where each animal crest depends on the others, all the while being valued for its own function and significance. “The top crest of the totem pole, in our tradition,” explains Joe, “always represents the sun or the moon. Those things are important, because everyone’s life is influenced by them…it teaches us self-respect and respect for other living beings.”
Ever since the BC NDP took power eight years ago, when the government needed to have “nation to nation” talks with Indigenous leaders, it met with First Nations Leadership Council (FNLC). And yet, for whatever reason, the Eby government chose not to consult with the Council on Bills 14 or 15, which will fast-track all infrastructure and renewable energy projects if passed. The executive Chiefs have called Bill 15’s proposal to bypass environmental assessments and issue automatic permits an affront to their rights and title.
“We need you to understand that there are 204 First Nations in British Columbia and, while you may find support among a select few who we wish well, your refusal to withdraw the bills will have serious impacts on the FNLC’s and many First Nations’ relationships with your government,” read an open letter to Eby released in June.
Eby’s big economic press conference was billed by New Democrats as intended to show certainty to investors that BC is a safe place to build multi-billion dollar projects. Given Eby’s disregard to First Nations, certainty seems to be the last direction the province is headed.
And federally, the same thing is going on. Fast tracking major projects that are deemed in the “national interest,”such as pipelines, with barely any environmental oversight. If the bill passes, “nothing’s off the table” when it comes to legal challenges, Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak, national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, told lawmakers last week. “You’re going to have legal wrangling right up the ying-yang if you don’t do the right thing and do this bill in a proper, respectful and good way. I think Canada can save itself years of litigation if it does that.”
Federal ministers pointed out that one of the five criteria for designating a project to be in the “national interest” is that it advances the interests of Indigenous people. I think the elders would beg to differ. In Simon Winchester’s words, “the wise ones have a message to those white trespassers who have treated them so ill: the Earth is in peril; moderate your behavior and help maintain it in the condition that we inherited it, long before you came.”
Christian Beamish, fisherman, big wave surfer, and mariner, said it best: “The ocean is absolutely a wilderness, but there are few places where the waste stream of humanity does not reach. I think we are just realizing that, as a species, we have thoroughly inundated the world. Industrialization is a bitch, culturally and environmentally. However, in the same way that indigenous cultures have taken such abuse, yet still exist, the natural world remains.”
But alas, we human beings are always far better at inventing tools rather than using them wisely. It is easier to manipulate a river by building a Site C dam than it is to predict or care about all the complex consequences this will have for the wider ecological system. You know, the birds and the bees, and the flowers and the trees. And all the other creatures without a voice, including the Indigenous.
