Indigenous Solidarity An (Un)Settler's Place

Gord Hill: Indigenous Anti-Colonialism

Read the Full article here on the Upping the Anti website

For those not familiar with the AFN, could you provide more detail about your analysis and critique of the organization?

The AFN is comprised of all the Indian Act band council chiefs across the country, so it’s a national organization representing those chiefs. The Indian Act was imposed by the federal government in 1876 as a way of controlling indigenous people in Canada. It has three main components: the reserve system, where natives are to be concentrated; Indian status, which determines who is or is not “native”; and the band council system, which provides a local governing structure to implement the Act. It is through these three structures that Canada has historically imposed control over indigenous people, and it is how they have maintained control to this day. The band council system works as an arm of the federal government, which funds it. Its mandate is to implement the policies of the federal government at the local reserve community level. This is why we oppose the AFN: it’s working in the interests of the government and big business.

Are the Native Friendship Centres co-opted like the AFN?

The Politics of Solidarity: Six Nations, Leadership, and the Settler Left
By Tom Keefer
http://uppingtheanti.org/node/2728

This article will address some issues which have arisen in the context of non-native activists doing solidarity work with the Haudenosaunee (Six Nations) people of the Grand River Territory who recently reclaimed land near Caledonia, Ontario.1 I will begin by discussing the problems with how many non-native activists have used the concept of “taking leadership” to guide their activism around this struggle, and I then will look at the spaces and places where I think non-native activists should focus their efforts in support of indigenous sovereignty. In order to do so, I will draw on the work of black power activists Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton as their work provides a relevant model for non-native activists looking to build solidarity with Six Nations. I will conclude by addressing the importance of the work being done by trade union activists supporting the people of Six Nations.2

http://uppingtheanti.org/node/1333

Ward Churchill is one of the most outspoken activists and scholars in North America and a leading commentator on indigenous issues. Churchill's many books include Marxism and Native Americans, Fantasies of the Master Race, Struggle for the Land, The COINTELPRO Papers, Genocide, Ecocide, and Colonization, Pacifism as Pathology, and A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas. In his lectures and published works, Churchill explores the themes of genocide in the Americas, racism, historical and legal (re)interpretation of conquest and colonization, environmental destruction of Indian lands, government repression of political movements, literary and cinematic criticism, and indigenist alternatives to the status quo.

http://auto_sol.tao.ca/node/2633

This roundtable was conducted in September 2006 with AJ Withers, Josh Zucker and Stefanie Gude of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty

What led you to get involved in supporting indigenous struggles in general, and the Six Nations struggle in particular?

AJ: The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) is a social justice organization and, as such, we support indigenous struggles. I hadn’t heard of what was going on outside of Caledonia until some friends of mine in Tyendinaga told us about it and suggested we go. We went to check it out and see if there was anything we could do to support it. We didn’t know anyone and were quite shy so we sat silently by the fire a lot and hoped people would speak to us. Finally, we learned about things we could supply, and asked if there were things in Toronto we could do to show our support.

Josh: I got involved with indigenous struggles through working with OCAP. When I joined OCAP in 2001 there were 5 paid organizers, one of whom was Shawn Brant, a Mohawk from Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory which is near Belleville on the Bay of Quinte in southern Ontario. Most members of OCAP, I would say, started learning more about native issues and sovereignty through the links Shawn brought to OCAP, which went back to before 2001.