Is Unity a sign, or a Section 109?

“What the Creator gave the Anishinabeg only the Creator can take away.”
Painted words declare this on a sign erected at the site of the longest standing blockade in our history with Canadians.
The fathers of this non-native confederacy we are presently engulfed within made up this next sentence on their own in Charlottetown 1867- without any of us Indians around.
“Section 109, all lands and resources belong to said provinces.”
This self-delusion is repeated twice more in the Canadian Constitution to perhaps convince each other that repeating it so might make it true….
It has apparently convinced ballot box created native leaders. They literally brushed aside Idle No More grassroots to create even more policy based on 109 with the current Prime Minister…
The second paragraph of a study entitled “ Indian government Under Indian Act Legislation, 1868 -1951” states chiefs and councils were imposed on the indigenous for the purpose of complete assimilation.
Are those highly paid relatives of ours only doing what that foreign system was designed for?
The actions of the Idle No More grassroots are perhaps adding this phrase to that sign just north of Grassy Narrows …”What the Creator gave the Anishinabeg only the Creator can take away –or trade, sell or give away”
In the interests of unity maybe all those chiefs who refused to step over Theresa Spence ought to have all gone on a hunger strike as well?
Somehow send those lost calories to the malnourished of our homeland, that a Governor General by proxy deprives them of daily. Offer those symbolically to this nation to nation relationship starving for recognition and respect…
Perhaps those chiefs beyond Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan ought to consider a traditional fast. Those can produce a clear eyed clarity for Creator given human instructions that goes far deeper than a comprehensive land claim…
A tradition guided grand chief once told me, “never lose sight of that little word unity inside the bigger word community. With it you can do lots, without it you won’t get very far.”
INM in continuing to resist and insist that this land and the societies that rely upon Creation are being even more dangerously imperilled in recent omnibus legislation, steps far past the constitutional fib that is 109…
It can however be frustrating continuing to create unity with a country that has entrusted its fate to Levi Strauss juniors.
The oligarchy in Ottawa –rule by the few- simply cannot abide brown folks, who, even amongst themselves don’t like being told what to do, to give up sacred duty.
That Tom Flanagan-inspired party has embedded deeply within it a view they have never consistently distanced themselves from. Flanagism says that Indians are only immigrants here themselves, only relying on pigment, combined with shame and guilt, to pry loose tax dollars from Treasury Boards.
They eventually wore down the instinctive mistrust of voters until now their true right wing agenda gives them opportunity to unleash it first on us indigenous…
Could the most powerful antidote to that already exist in the healing work we’ve begun at the individual and family level?
When that restoration of who we are reaches practical proportions, at the community and nation level, might we then manifest a true indigenous agenda at last?
A maxim of which includes that eighth fire unity prophesized by the Medewin- to combine the imported scientific with the already existent Turtle Island spirituality.
To end this Doctrine of Discovery-based racialized superiority that burdens us all with odious legal, economic and political systems better buried than still accepted as conscionable?
The elders of Grassy once asked MNR two questions. “Where did you get your authority and how can we work together?” They were saying the land is changing so fast now- how can we do better as human beings -united in purpose- to cease destroying it?
In the meantime how can we prevent the extinguishment of the essence of our own indigenousness by the instruments of legislative oppression we are relying on for wisdom today?
How can we prevent the loss of collective rights we carry by charging our own people rent to live on their own treaty based reserves and enacting private ownership to appease loans officers at banks and to referendum into place fee simple agreements that kill off aboriginal title entirely?
Where is that unity we so need today to prevent AFN from becoming a haunting acronym meaning all- for- nothing tomorrow?
To me, it’s actually amusing witnessing all manner of so called leaderships trying to stay in front of where Idle No More is headed.
In the 17th century Baron de Lanhotan, experienced us. According to Jack Weatherford in “Indian Givers, How the Indians of the America Transformed the World ,” he found an orderly society but one that lacked a formal government that compelled such order “
The Huron told him “ we are born free and united brothers, each as much as great a lord as the other while you are the slaves of one sole man”.
This is where the seeds of freedom were discovered by Europeans. That eventually blossomed into the fading form of democracy being Levi Struass-ed and Neo Conned away today.
INM is about freedom. INM by refusing to be enslaved by forces other nations are prepared to accept is a very creative expression of what indigenousness is, as it struggles to practically revitalize and restore itself…
That essence is also all about the blessed unity all sentient beings are heir to… which is always been more a set of signs rather than a self-deluded section 109…
Meegwetch to the cyber channel-ers of time immemorial consciousness.
Meegwetch to Idle No More participants, walking together in that beautiful way…