Environment, revenues, autonomy...at stake in Idle no More Protest

Ron James said it so well in his comedy show last night on CBC. "Some irony eh? When the people we stole the land from may turn out to be the ones who save it!"
AS Ms McQuaig so eloquently summarizes below, Harper's energy (read jobs and the strong Canadian economy as his mantra) steamroller may finally be slowed, if not stopped. I think the jury is still out.
And I also think that the First Nations are also interested in 'revenue sharing' as a piece of their growing protest. So let's not paint them as angel dust being sprinkled on the evil Satan who resides in the Langevin Block. They are an oppressed people, all of them, including First Nations, Metis, Inuit and their lives are emblematic of a Canadian form of racism for which all Canadians must take responsibility.
This is one file with 33 million-plus bloody hands all over it!
Harper may be only the match that lit this most recent fire of protest, front-page headlines, 'working' and 'ceremonial' talks and who knows what kind of results. And if we are to believe some speaking on behalf of the Idle no More movement, this summer there could be extensive interruptions in the normal flow of both road and rail traffic, but also assaults on the investments by corporations where those investments touch native soil, as they see it.
There are, however, still some pressing and perplexing questions:
Why has Harper not included all political leaders in the discussions?
Why has Harper not agreed to visit Attawapiskat for himself?
Why has it taken so many generations and decades of negligence on the part of the federal governments to resolve what are obviously deep and long-standing grievances?
Why has the Canadian public been so silent, and so disengaged in the plight of First Nations people for so long? And Why has the global community not shed more light on this travesty of justice denied, even basic living conditions denied?
And, going forward, what will it take for the file to be resolved in both the spirit and the letter of the policies and the attitudes that bring about a form of reconciliation between the government and the people of Canada and the First Nations peoples?
McQuaig: Canada's energy juggernaut hits a native roadblock
By Linda McQuaig, Toronto Star, January 14, 2013
Those who believe we can freely trash the environment in our quest to make ourselves richer suffer from a serious delusion — a delusion that doesn’t appear to afflict aboriginal people.
Aboriginals tend to live in harmony with Mother Earth. Their approach has long baffled and irritated Canada’s white establishment, which regards it as a needless impediment to unbridled economic growth.
Nowhere is this irritation more palpable than inside Stephen Harper’s government, with its fierce determination to turn Canada into an “energy superpower,” regardless of the environmental consequences.
So it’s hardly surprising that the Harper government has ended up in a confrontation with Canada’s First Nations.
Certainly the prime minister has shown a ruthlessness in pursuing his goal of energy superpowerdom.
He has gutted long-standing Canadian laws protecting the environment, ramming changes through Parliament last December as part of his controversial omnibus bill. He has thumbed his nose at global efforts to tackle climate change, revoking Canada’s commitment to Kyoto.
And he’s launched a series of witch-hunt audits of environmental groups that dared to challenge the rampant development of Alberta’s oilsands — one of the world’s biggest sources of climate-changing emissions — as well as plans for pipelines through environmentally sensitive areas.
But, while there’s been some resistance from provincial governments, opposition parties, and environmentalists, Ottawa’s energy juggernaut has continued to surge ahead.
At least until now. With the First Nations, Harper may have met his Waterloo.
Among other things, Harper’s attack on Canada’s environmental laws included rewriting parts of the Indian Act, thereby removing safeguards for native land and waters that are protected in the Constitution.
Of course, even with the Constitution on the side of aboriginals, it’s hard to imagine a group consisting of some of the poorest people on the continent taking on the federal government, backed up by corporate Canada, and winning.
After all, the First Nations are divided, and the government has deftly exploited these divisions. Furthermore, many influential media commentators side with the government, helping it portray aboriginals as impractical dreamers unable to understand the dictates of the global economy.
And restless natives have been a permanent political backdrop in Canada, unable to even ensure clean drinking water for themselves, let alone shape the government’s agenda.
But what’s new and potentially game-changing is Idle No More, the youth-based native initiative that, suddenly and unpredictably, has grown into a feisty grassroots movement — one that has shown the potential to attract activists from Occupy Wall Street, the Quebec student movement and even middle-class Canadians starting to wonder if barbecuing weather in mid-January suggests we’re playing too fast and loose with the environment.
Idle No More grew directly out of the resistance to Harper’s energy juggernaut. Pam Palmater, a Mi’kmaq and spokesperson for Idle No More, notes that changes in the omnibus bill make it easier to overcome native resistance to energy projects. For instance, the changes would enable a handful of natives, without support from the band majority, to surrender reserve land to Enbridge, enabling it to build a pipeline.
The Harper government will undoubtedly mobilize resources and cunning against Idle No More.
Whatever happens, it’s hard not to be inspired by this gutsy, earthy band that has asserted itself in the tradition pioneered by native-influenced governments in Ecuador and Bolivia, both of which have passed laws giving Mother Earth legal protections.
Canadians have reason to be ashamed of our treatment of aboriginals — from residential schools to the continuing failure to provide basic necessities like water, housing and education to people whose ancestors were here long before ours arrived.
Ironically, their insistence on their constitutional rights, as Palmater notes, may be the last best hope of Canadians to reverse our own culture’s reckless disregard for the dictates of Mother Earth, who ultimately is more demanding and unforgiving even than the global economy. Rising GDP levels won’t mean much if we’re swamped by rising sea levels.
The very least we can do is to get behind this ragtag group that has, in a few short weeks, shown more wisdom than our “advanced” society has mustered in decades.