From TheTyee.ca
Original article here

Bob Campbell clutches his granddaughter at a public thanksgiving feast near Vallican, B.C., and asks: “Do I look extinct?”

Campbell is a headman of B.C.’s allegedly exterminated Aboriginal nation, the Sinixt, known as the “Mother Tribe,” from the upper Columbia River, the region we now call the West Kootenays. The original name of both the land and people, Sinixt, means “place of the bull trout.”

“I was born in a concentration camp,” Campbell says. “Miners had hunted us down like animals, settlers destroyed our villages, loggers shoved us off our land, and dams decimated the salmon. Our ancestors were sent to an armed fort at Colville, now in the state of Washington. We were trapped south of the border, not allowed to return. In 1956, the government of Canada declared us extinct, but look: I’m not dead yet, and we’re back.”

Mother nation

Sinixt villages once lined the banks of the Kootenay, Slocan and Columbia rivers. Hunting parties camped along creeks descending from the Monashee and Selkirk mountains. The people enjoyed a bounty of caribou, sturgeon, salmon, and the once-plentiful bull trout. Each summer, Sinixt families travelled 100 kms south along the Columbia River in white pine bark canoes to their fishing camp at Ilthkoyape — Kettle Falls, Washington — where they gathered red sockeye in dip net baskets with the Skoyelpi, their southern neighbours. A designated “salmon chief” shared the catch among villages throughout the region.

“The Sinixt were the mother tribe of the Pacific Northwest Salish,” says Sharon Montgomery at the Kakusp and District Museum. Their language parallels the Okanagan, Sushwap, Skoyelpi (Colville), and Spokane dialects. “As the mother nation,” says Bob Campbell, “we often settled disputes among the bands.”

Before his death in 1934, Sinixt headman James Bernard described their abundant homeland: “We had camas, huckleberries, bitter root…. When I walked out under the stars, the air was filled with the perfume of wild flowers. In those days, the Indians were happy.”
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Those days took a dramatic turn in the spring of 1811, when surveyor David Thompson, mapping the region for the North West Company fur traders, arrived at the central Sinixt village, kp’itl’els, at the confluence of the Kootenay and Columbia rivers, north of modern Castlegar. “You white men,” Bernard says, “you came here… on a little piece of bark, with a few sticks tied together. You found us that day in plenty; you had nothing. You did not bring your wealth with you.” Settlers and prospectors swarmed up the Columbia seeking pelts and minerals.

Dispossessed

“The first disruption of our people,” says Bob Campbell, “came from disease. The early smallpox epidemics may have been accidental, but then Hudson Bay traders brought diseased blankets and our people died from typhoid and tuberculosis. Pure and simple, it was genocide. The trading companies paid a bounty for indigenous people’s scalps and genitals.”

After prospectors discovered gold in the Columbia in 1855, some 10,000 miners pushed north into British Columbia and clashed with native communities in the Fraser and Columbia basins. Miners burned villages and hunted “hostile” natives. In a typical case, miner Sam Hill shot and killed Sinixt villager Cultus Jim at Galena in 1894. A local court acquitted Hill on grounds of self-defence.

Ore smelters required wood for fuel and construction, and sawmills flourished along the rivers. The large mill at Edgewood cleared the forests on both sides of Lower Arrow Lake and then moved south to the Sinixt heartland near Castlegar, denuding the forest there. The revered white pines disappeared from the landscape.

At the turn of the century, Sinixt siblings Alex and Marianne Christian fought for a homeland in their village of kp’itl’els, but a royal commission denied their claim, and in 1911 Marianne was found naked and dead in a snow bank. Alex claimed she had been raped and murdered, but a town coroner concluded she had died from “exposure.” Alex’s grandson, Lawney Reyes, an artist in Seattle, wrote a history of his family, White Grizzly Bear’s Legacy: Learning to be Indian.

Most of the surviving Sinixt fled south to Kettle Falls, but were confined to the armed camp at Fort Colville. After a Canada/U.S. boundary survey established the 49th parallel border, the U.S. forced the Sinixt into the artificial “Colville Confederated Tribes” camp. Thereafter, they were trapped in the U.S. and not allowed to return to Canada.

In 1902, B.C. identified 20 surviving Sinixt as status Indians and allotted them a desolate rocky bluff at Oatscott at the north end of Lower Arrow Lake, far from the centre of their homeland. Since the Sinixt seasonally migrated along the river, they rarely visited the inhospitable allotment. In 1956, the last survivor on the government roll passed away. When researchers found no one at the reserve site, the government declared the Sinixt nation “extinct.”

In that same year, 1956, Canada began an engineering study to establish sites for hydroelectric dams on the Columbia.

Monument to prosperity

As the mining communities and smelters on both sides of the border depleted local timber, they required a new power source: electricity. “James Dawson surveyed the Sinixt homeland in 1884 for the government of Canada,” says Marilyn James, a Sinixt Aboriginal advisor at Selkirk College. “Not for treaty purposes, but because they saw something valuable, the Columbia River, a hydrological resource they wanted to possess.”

Likewise, the U.S. surveyed the lower Columbia, and in 1936, the Bonneville Dam east of Portland inundated 35 Aboriginal fishing sites. The dam installed a fish ladder that was “successful enough,” according to Oral Bullard in Crisis on the Columbia, “to lull the public into a sense of security.”

Further up the river, the massive Grand Coulee Dam, completed in 1941, made no such concession to appearances. The dam flooded 250 kms of the Columbia, destroyed the Kettle Falls fishing site, inundated 20,000 hectares of forest and Aboriginal homeland, permanently blocked salmon migration, and eliminated 2,000 kms of spawning grounds. Thereafter, salmon disappeared in the upper Columbia basin.

The massive dam powered aluminum smelters and a plutonium production reactor at Hanford, Washington, critical to the nuclear bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the war, in 1947, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation called the Grand Coulee Dam “a monument to prosperity” created from “a barren wasteland.”

In B.C., 15 dams were built in the Sinixt homeland. In 1954, Kaiser Aluminum proposed a dam on Arrow Lake. The Keenlayside dam flooded 140 Sinixt archaeological sites. The Cominco smelter at Trail built a dam on the Kootenay River near the ancient Sinixt village of kp’itl’els. The zinc and lead smelter has since dumped over 13 million tonnes of toxic slag, including mercury, into the Columbia River.

In 1968, B.C. Hydro commissioned a totem pole in Edgewood, beside the flooded Arrow Lake, to commemorate the “extinct race,” the Sinixt. “Two problems with that,” explains headman Bob Campbell. “One, the Sinixt never made totem poles, and two, we’re not extinct.”

Baby Agnice

In 1987, highway construction at Vallican in the Slocan Valley uncovered artifacts, graves and Sinixt pit houses. The government made no attempt to contact Sinixt descendants, but sent the skeletal remains to museums.

In 1989, elder Eva Adolph Orr — one of the last surviving Sinixt born in freedom but trapped in the U.S. — asked her son Bob Campbell and others to return and protect their sacred burial sites. Eva Orr slipped back into Canada and supervised the repatriation and reburial of 61 skeletal remains near Vallican on the Slocan River. The Sinixt employ a unique burial ritual, with the deceased sitting upright, facing the rising sun, that distinguishes their gravesites and confirms their claim on the land.

“It is our responsibility,” says Marilyn James, “because we are the descendants of those people. It is our responsibility to bring our ancestors home, rebury them, and protect their resting places. The Sinixt are the only nation in B.C. declared extinct, even though in 1995, Minister of Indian Affairs Ron Irwin admitted this was only a designation ‘for the purpose of the Indian Act. It does not mean that the Sinixt ceased to exist.’ Well, if we did not cease to exist, we’re not extinct.”

Orr and the grandmothers selected Robert Watt as caretaker of the ancient Vallican village, but Canada deemed Watt a “foreign national” and deported him. In 1991, he launched a legal claim for the right to enter and remain in Canada, based on his Aboriginal right to live in his territory as described in Section 35 of the Canadian Constitution. His lawyer David Aaron explains that Watt, Campbell and other Sinixt “are not considered Status Indians under the Canadian Indian Act, since they are not descendents of the 20 people recorded by the government on the [1902 Oatscott] reserve. But even so, they possess Aboriginal rights, including cross-border rights.”

A British Columbia court upheld the immigration decision, but a federal appeal court reversed the decision. However, the court claimed it did not have enough information to make a decision regarding his rights, and remitted the case back to Canada Immigration, who rescinded the previous order and then relaunched the process by deporting Watts again. Watts has appealed his second deportation and charged the Crown with bad faith conduct for putting him through the circular loop. Aaron believes Watt can win his case and “this will open the door for the Sinixt to reclaim their Aboriginal land rights.”

Meanwhile, the Sinixt are making an Aboriginal title claim to occupy their homeland and be consulted prior any environmental disturbance. In 2000, white protestors and other bands joined the Sinixt as they blocked a Slocan Forest Products road and clear-cutting operation along Trozzo Creek.

Birth and renewal

Every autumn now for 20 years, the Sinixt have hosted a public feast on their territory. During the 2005 thanksgiving banquet, Bob Campbell’s daughter Lola gave birth to Agnice Sophia Campbell — Eva Orr’s great-granddaughter — on Sinixt land.

“This is the first Sinixt baby to be born in our territory in almost 100 years,” Campbell explains. “This is big. Agnice has a Canadian birth certificate. After all the destruction, the land still survives. The Sinixt people still survive. Even the devastated bull trout survives in its last stronghold on the Slocan River.”

“Indian status,” says Campbell, “is a statutory scheme of the Indian Act, which has been repeatedly found unconstitutional. These discriminatory laws are not what determine Aboriginal rights. We — our lives, our history, our people, our children — we determine our Aboriginal rights. I wasn’t an Elder when the decision was made to bring our people out of co-called ‘extinction,’ but now I am the Elder. When I’m gone my daughters will continue on and when they are gone their children will continue on. The Sinixt are back.”

Rex Weyler is the author of Blood of the Land, Greenpeace: The Inside Story and recently, The Jesus Sayings: The Quest for His Authentic Message.

From TheTyee.ca

This article was recently posted on Shmohawk, a new favourite read:

what is taking so long?
Posted on June 27, 2008 by shmohawk

When the National Indian Brotherhood, or NIB, began using the word “aboriginal” in some of its documents more than 30 years ago, my Mom and Dad railed at those those they called “idiots” and worse. The NIB is the fore-runner of today’s Assembly of First Nation, and the national organization representing band council chiefs in Canada. My parents could not fathom why the NIB seemed insistent upon using generic, one-size-fits-all umbrella terms to refer to themselves.

Why, they wondered, didn’t they go back to referring to themselves as they had for centuries and in their own languages. To my parents, use of those other generic terms showed just how successful decades upon decades of brainwashing had been in erasing their own national identities. So instead of calling themselves “chopped liver,” they should call themselves “onkhwehhonhweh,” “Kanienkeha:ka” or “Anishnabek” instead.

My parents were also quite upset when band council chiefs at the AFN decided to call each of their reserves “first nations.” They felt that was just as divisive as a generic term since it gave each reserve, an artifice of the Indian Act, the pretense of existing as a separate and distinct “nation” but (still) under the Indian Act and without any central, sovereign national identity.

In northern Saskatchewan for instance, you can have a whole bunch of Cree territories separating themselves from each other as “first nations,” refusing to group themslves under their own national identity - as part of the Cree Nation.

To my parents, it was all about “divide and conquer;” it was a simple question of cultural, political and national survival. Our own Indigenous nations would either hang together or, to quote Benjamin Franklin, we would surely hang separately.

It seems someone is now thinking along similar lines. The Union of Ontario Indians (UOI) represents mostly Ojibway and Algonquin bands in eastern and northeastern Ontario. they passed a resolution instructing:

“… government agencies, NGOs, educators and media organizations that they should discontinue using inappropriate terminology when they are referring to the Anishinabek. We respect the cultures and traditions of our Metis and Inuit brothers and sisters, but their issues are different from ours.”

The resolution notes that “there are no aboriginal bands, aboriginal reserves, or aboriginal chiefs” and that the reference to “aboriginal rights” referred to in Section 35 of the Constitution Act of Canada “was never meant to assimilate First Nations, Metis and Inuit into a homogeneous group.”

Now if these Anishnabek can only get away from that clumsy “first nation” bit, and convince the others at the AFN as well, they might get somewhere. They might even get there quicker.

So… listen up. I am not a “first nation person.” I am Kanienkeha:ka (aka Mohawk). Get it?

If Canadian reporters can understand the difference between Shona and Kikuyu in Africa, or Croat from Serb in the Balkans, then why can’t they learn the differences and proper names for the distinct Indigenous nationalities within Canada as well? So can politicians.

Just saying.

Our culture is one of productivity, of utmost rationality. We are made faithful not to community, but to concepts of efficiency and material wealth. We are victims of a disconnect between among individuals and between individuals and environments. When we can identify this disconnect in everyday life, we may be able to negate their influence on us, to reject depersonalization and foster real connection between each other and the land with which we depend. A ride on mass transit provides a first hand look at real manifestations of some symptoms endemic to a “civilized” and disconnected way of life, depersonalized human relations, and the objectification and resulting destruction of a life giving environment.
Recognizing the distorted and impersonal notions of community in our culture is an easy exercise while riding the bus. Passengers board, and typically proceed to ignore each other by building walls of pretension, boredom, or preoccupation. Most wear headphones, gaze cast blankly downward or out a window, avoiding eye contact. The atmosphere is primarily one of avoidance, and a space full of potentially dynamic people is rendered sterile and boring.

The demands placed upon us to work, to be economically productive are made to override all else, forcing us out of what could be close knit communities and into impersonal, production/ consumption oriented environment. As a result, the disparate tasks we perform become our identity and prime motivator, leaving little room for anything more than superficial communal activity.

Further, we are disconnected not only from each other, but from the earth that we must all ultimately depend on. Riding the skytrain, I was struck by the barren landscape flying beneath. Vancouver is, of course, a place of endless “development”, and beneath me was a grey and lifeless expanse. I thought of this expanse repeated in hundreds of cities worldwide. In contrast, natural environments foster thousands, even millions of life forms that have evolved in concert with the land: they are literally full of life.

Civilization strips the environment of much of this life giving capacity, and are designed to support only one form of life. Again, we see the symptoms of a disconnect. Surely if we identified with the land and the non-human creatures on it, we would not kill the creatures and render their former environment sterile. However, instead of seeing the importance of a healthy landbase, we see a healthy economy as being of primary importance, and we shape the environment accordingly.

“The environment” is seen as something separate, a museum we go visit on the weekends to “get away from it all”, or worse still, a “nowhere” that we see through a car window while going “somewhere”. We see caged trees on city streets and caged animals in homes, symptoms not of love, but a disconnected objectification of life. We see the land only as an object to be manipulated and shaped to suit our desires. If we destroy the economy, the human species will survive, if we destroy the earth, it will not.

The pace of modern civilization clouds our collective vision. In the race to keep up, we are blind to the destruction we cause. Is that any wonder that we build vehicles and homes designed to isolate ourselves as much as possible from the outside world, that when among people we build walls to isolate ourselves?

From Mostlywater

Anti-Poverty Committee Responds to Anti-Olympic Activist Scare
Contributed by blackandred on Wed, 2008-05-07 15:35.
In sections: British Columbia Canada Turtle Island Olympics Resistance Security apparatus Press Release

Anti-Poverty Committee Response to Anti-Olympic Activist Scare:

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2008/05/04/b…

For once police ‘intelligence’ has gotten it right when they predicted that protests against the 2010 games will become more ‘intense’.

Still confused though, the RCMP has warned that such actions will increase in violence; of course it’s not violent when they taser someone to death. The APC scoffs at the allegations of violence and repeats, ‘the disruption targeting the preparations for the Olympic Games will definitely intensify’.

The newest in a wave of paranoid security rants was written by Tom Quiggan, a former security consultant with the RCMP. Tommy says there’s reason to shake in your boots and we couldn’t be happier.

The report attempts to investigate the links between several anti-colonial/capitalist organizations from across occupied ‘Canada’ to insurgent Chiapas Mexico. The report fesses up [to] the fact that a growing number of people are participating in a growing number of property attacks that target Olympic sponsors. Fortunately all acts promise an increase in sabotage; and not close to one arrest has been made!

Having run VANOC underground it is rare that an Olympic official pops his head out of his ass publicly long enough to shut the event down. Because of this we have had to direct our class rage at Olympic sponsors who are making a killing from the games.

The APC is thankful for all the inspiration. Our anti-Olympic teammates are really going for the gold and with a little more teamwork the planned convergence for February 2010 will be a successful run-up for that year
following G-8 and SPP mega-riots.

———————————————–

The Anti-Poverty Committee is an organization of poor and working people, who fight for poor people, their rights and an end to poverty by any means necessary. For more information on the Anti-Poverty Committee’s on-going campaigns, visit http://apc.resist.ca Contact us by e-mailing apc@resist.ca or phoning 604-682-3276.

UNITED WE WILL WIN!

This zine was put together by the author(s?) of anarchia, a blog with its roots in the Aotearoa (new zealand) anarchist scene.  The zine is made up mostly of personal anecdotes by activists dealing with the mental illnesses all to often caused by the pathological insanity of living in/with industrial civilization.

I just came across a blog, set as this one is, in the “Sunny Okanagan”. Said blog was ridiculously typical, and sadly representative of a large slice of the population in the Okanagan. Two sentences on the “about” page:

“About what the hell is good or bad in this massive under developed Okanagan Valley.”
“Written by a local that has seen much of the world and doesn’t want to ever move”

That’s right, “under developed”. Wow. A place that cannot provide housing for anyone making less than $20,000 a year and does not think twice about destroying valuable agricultural and/or wild land to develop high income housing (see The Rise, Outback in Vernon,and others) is UNDER developed.

A bit more reading shows us the real priorities here:
“The good news is that the economy is rolling much faster than people can afford and this at least means that the new residents of Penticton will be rich, smart and civilized people. They may be driving Hummer’s, but at least they have no intention of kidnapping kids or stabbing people. “
Alright, so correct me if I’m wrong, but the correlation is:
Poor people=kidnappers, murderers and so on.
Hummer drivers (materially wealthy people,presumably) = innocent, all the time (”no intention of” doing the above crimes).

Oddly enough, the next line is a bit contradictory:
“And maybe they’ll donate to the golf course, or build something for the homeless.”
Of course wealthy people are good for donating to already wealthy businesses, but I have no idea why they would “build something” for those poor people (the homeless) who do nothing but kidnap, stab and otherwise victimize wealthy residents of the Okanagan.

And finally, in a beautifully written entry on learning, our enlightened author talks of the dumbing down of society:
“I think its starts with extremely under qualified individuals who teach their objective one-sided bullshit.” YES, I hate it when people try to teach objectively! I’m so glad someone finally mentioned it! I know he likely misunderstood the meaning of objective, and he likely meant subjective, but in an essay on how stupid people are it’s an ironic (and really funny) mistake.  It also obscures what could be a good point, but is not developed further.

Of course, like all good Okanagan residents, our man is a devout and uncompromising capitalist:

“Suppose you’re a local company that sells T-shirts custom ordered for companies, events or just personal use. You have invested in this nice piece of technology that can print out basically whatever you want on a T-shirt, hoody, sweatpants, or even a man ginch.

Now get creative, find a website that sells blank cotton t-shirts in China for 40Cents each and buy a box of assorted colors. Trust me, this place does exsist. Then go on ebay and search for the most popular things people are bidding on regarding to funny slogans on t-shirts or even things that are patented like brand name logo’s. Make a site or get one made or sell on ebay, and supplement your income. And if you don’t want to do it, give me 30 points and I’ll make a killing myself”

Maybe I’m an idiot in that it seems a bit immoral to take advantage of oppressed Chinese labour to make a few bucks on Ebay.

Now you may be reading and wondering “why target this guy?”. The author of this blog represents everything vile about the Okanagan (and maybe the world in general): Development above all else, hatred of the poor and homeless, deification of the wealthy, lack of affordable housing, and a scary drive to profit at the expense of anything. He’d rather see Hummers than poor people in his neighborhood because poor people are apparently criminals. That sums it up very well. Funny that, a day after decrying not being able to find anything to blog about, I find this.

I’m not going to link to the blog because I don’t want to give it any more hits than it has, I don’t want to be associated with it, and I don’t want to contribute to his Google Adsense revenue.  I am so glad I’m moving soon.

I have no idea what to do with this blog.  My photoblog has been getting plenty of attention from me, but this my original wordpress blog, has been largely aimless.  My willingness to transcribe rants has subsided somewhat, and my blog frequency has been maybe a post a month.  Life, however, is an adventure, and there are things to write about.  I’m just not sure of their importance to the internet world.

Moreover, I’m not sure if I want my politics out for everyone to see.  I’ve considered attempting to transform The Asidistra Files into a source for independant, Okanagan oriented news: half news aggregator, half first hand reportage.  Even this is a level of commitment I can ill afford, being as I am doing University and working, and will be moving to the lower mainland come Autumn.

I started blogging to have a vent, a way to relieve my pissed offedness at living in a socially backward community and having to deal with Starbucks customers day in and day out.  It worked well.  Then I blogged about travelling, Mexico, Thailand, New Zealand.  Then more about Starbucks.  Now I’m done with Starbucks, and my life on Hornby Island was recorded largely with pictures on the aformentioned photoblog.

Now my blog is without purpose.  My motivation to write here is overmatched by my motivation to shoot photographs.  Writing for university affords me less time to pontificate possible blog topics.  I still have things to be pissed off about, to yell about, but this forum seems inconsequential to my aims.

So who knows, maybe I will blog with more fervour, maybe I will just post the same photos I do to the other blog.  Maybe I’ll do both.  I’m about to start a job in a local, indenpendant coffeehouse, El Portillo.  Perhaps, having blogged about my experience with corporate coffee hegemony, blogging about an indie scene will provide an interesting, motivating contrast.  Perhaps since many of my good friends are moving, this blog will provide a way to keep them abreast of my life.

I like to think this is a sign of the current open endedness of my life.  I feel like I am once more in a position where anything is possible, a way I have not felt for some time.  I feel like I have the focus and desire to make positive changes in my life and the lives of those I love.  It’s a bit pithy I know, but a good conclusion nonetheless.