Call me anything but ‘colonized’

By Maurice Switzer

When it comes to Indigenous peoples, it’s pretty well open season for name-callers.

And we’re not talking here about locker-room slang like “wagon-burners”, which an employee of mine once used in my presence before he was aware of my ancestry.  (Boy, did he blush after I told him!)

It’s still acceptable in 2013 to call football teams Redskins, and police departments routinely tell the public they’re looking for “aboriginal” suspects. Normally respectable citizens sprinkle their everyday speech with terms like “Indian-givers”, and it’s not really that long ago that prime ministers were calling us “uncivilized” in House of Commons debates.

I once told an interviewer in a regional anti-racism project that people with some degree of public profile – like newspaper columnists – usually don’t hear as many racial insults as most of our relatives. There’s an old saying that you don’t want to tick someone off whose business buys ink by the pound!

There are a lot of names I wouldn’t like being called, but “colonized” is right up there with the worst of them. To tell an Anishinaabe that he’s colonized means he’s bought into the program, that he’s accepted decades of veiled or open suggestions that he’s not as good as other people.

Colonizing has been a favourite European pastime. It has most typically been practised by Kings of countries like Portugal, England, France or Spain who dispatched shiploads of sailors, soldiers and priests to distant lands in search of silk, spices or furs required to make beaver hats. The crews jumped off their boats, stuck their flags into the shoreline, and claimed this land now belonged to the king who paid for their trip. Assorted activities such as slavery, torture, rape, and pillaging usually ensued.

Colonizers may have differed in their approaches. Spanish conquistadors slaughtered Incas and Aztecs by the thousands in their quest for gold. British adventurers in Africa decided that selling the locals as slaves produced a  profitable return on their exploration investment.  The soil of every continent is soaked in the blood spilled by Indigenous peoples in the name of European progress.

In North America – Turtle Island – the English who became Americans had no qualms about shooting Indians who got in the way of their settlements. Their more genteel cousins in Upper Canada took a gradual and less volatile approach to solving “the Indian problem”, using treaties and residential schools as weapons to subdue and subjugate the original inhabitants of the land.

There was one common element to all of these European adventures, which today would fall under the classification of “crimes against humanity”: they were all undertaken on the assumption that the people in these distant lands were inferior to those who encountered them. There was even a Papal doctrine that decreed the theory of Terra Nullius – that lands not occupied by Christians were to be regarded as empty and available for the taking.

It would be one thing if this was all a matter of ancient history. But the process of colonization has never stopped. Armies in Central and South America still wage war against Mayan peasants to suppress their attempts to protect their territories from exploitation by multi-national  mining companies.  Revolutions against their oppressors by Indigenous peoples in Rhodesia, South Africa, Indonesia, Haiti, Cuba, Brazil, and India – to name a few – have all taken place within the past century.

And in Canada, every citizen of 633 First Nations feels the impacts of the Indian Act on their lives every day. From the second they are born their status is literally determined by a faceless bureaucrat in Ottawa, and if they die on a reserve, the Minister of Indian Affairs has the authority to approve or nullify their last will and testament.

The Constitution and Supreme Court of Canada have clearly stated that First Nations peoples have an inherent right to self-government, yet the Indian Act requires band councils to get permission from Ottawa to spray noxious weeds.

There are still over 80,000 First Nations people living today who survived Residential Schools, designed to “kill the Indian in the child”, as the experiment in cultural genocide was described by Canada’s senior Indian agent.

Day after day, thousands of these children were told they were stupid and worthless, that their language and beliefs were pagan, and that their appearance and dress were shameful. Their hair was shorn like sheep in the same way prison inmates are humiliated and degraded. Many were beaten and abused in horrible ways. Thousands never returned home – they disappeared in the same way that over 600 Native women in Canada are today considered missing or murdered without any great concern by various levels of government in this country.

A monument to the many Anishinabek who endured these attacks stands in front of the Union of Ontario offices on Nipissing First Nation.  It is a testament to the bravery and resilience of the many who refused to be colonized, who still defiantly speak their language, dance and sing their traditional songs, and hunt, fish and trap by the Creator’s laws, not those being imposed by foreign governments.

At their 39th annual assembly in June, the 134 Chiefs in Ontario debated a proposed strategic plan for unity and action in the face of Harper government actions that scoff at First Nations’ constitutional and legal rights to sovereignty in managing their own affairs.

One of the strategies was simply labelled “Decolonize ourselves”, and included technical-sounding topics like assertion of jurisdiction, restructuring of Provincial Territorial Organizations, and returning to traditional forms of government.

Another was “May need to change the mindset of some communities”.

And even simpler – “Stop asking for permission – JUST DO IT!”  Or, as one Elder of my acquaintance is fond of saying – “Act Indian, not Indian Act!”

First Nations leaders are at the crossroads. Their people – many of them joining the ranks of grassroots groups like Idle No More – are standing up and speaking out about their rights.

It is time for postcolonialism to begin.

Maurice Switzer is a citizen of the Mississaugas of Alderville First Nation. He serves as director of communications for the Union of Ontario Indians and editor of the Anishinabek News.