First, a little item from CBC:
Marc Garneau says “the system is working”, but anyone who’s living alongside a railway where the trains are stalled on the rails (and there are two of those trains out behind my own house right now) can tell you otherwise. The system is NOT working, and hasn’t been for some time. The indigenous peoples of BC are angry at it for constantly failing them, particularly the Wet’suwet’en (whose land has become a flashpoint recently), and why becomes obvious when you look at the situation through THEIR eyes, as this short documentary does:
The issues are many, but they boil down to sovereignty over home land, and the importance of uncontaminated air, land and water, as well as the safety of indigenous women (who have historically been the most abused whenever and wherever industrial “man camps” rear their ugly heads). There is also the salient matter that the government of British Columbia has never recognized the indigenous people’s land rights in any meaningful fashion, and seems, on the contrary, to have been nothing more than a security arm for the capitalist exploiters.
The provincial and federal governments, so far, haven’t budged in their ignorant and cruel stances, even though the resistance (and even outright defiance) have been strong. That’s the bad news.
The good news is, there are plenty of non-indigenous Canadians who are on side with the protests, and they’re turning out in solidarity at the pickets of the BC Legislature buildings:
And then, there’s also this bit of glaring irony:
Jeez. You’d almost think that capitalists were just creatures of pure poisonous spite, wouldn’t you?
