November 5, 2003

Opinions ¢ the other press ©

 

 
   

Macdonald Stainsby
OP Columnist

If you go to the website of the Lil’wat First Nation,
you will be greeted immediately by the following quo-
tation:

We claim that we are the rightful owners of our tribal
territory, and everything pertaining thereto. We have
always lived in our country—at no time have we ever
deserted it, or left it to others. We have retained it
from the invasion of other tribes at the cost of our
blood. Our ancestors were in possession of our coun-
try centuries before the whites came. It is the same as
yesterday when the latter came, and like the day
before when the first fur trader came.

—Stl’atl’imx Nation Chiefs, 1911 (Declaration of the
Lillooet Tribe)

The Lil’wat Nation has recently dealt with another
invasion. In this invasion they retained their land, not
with their blood, but with their life jackets, boats, and
possessions. The Lil’wat peoples live in the area that
was apportioned to them by the Department of
Indian Affairs just North of Pemberton on the Sea-to-
Sky Highway. The area is called Mount Currie. It is
one of the many reservations in Canada, and like the
overwhelming majority,
it exists as a continua-
tion of the same old
policies of the colonizer
state that is now called
Canada. In what would
actually become the
real life blueprint for
both the Apartheid
South African national-
ists and Adolf Hitler’s
German National
Socialist Workers Party,
the reservation system
was set up to deal with
the “Indian problem.”
The British were not
interested in sharing
the land they were
working so hard to steal
from the indigenous
inhabitants, nor were
they willing to allow
their peoples to mix
with “inferior races,” as
the Spanish and
Portuguese did while
colonizing the Southern half of the Americas. As a
measure to deal with this, First Nations were forced
onto small parcels of land that remain in place up
until today. Smartly playing one nation off of the
other as they have done in many places—such as the
subcontinent of India, the British Crown did not deal
with the Nations on a one-to-one level, but instead
dealt with one nation at a time. One of those nations
was the Lil’wat.

All nations were not to get anything resembling
what had been their historical territory, but would be

In what would actually
become the real life
blueprint for both the

Apartheid South African
nationalists and Adolf
Hitler's German National
Socialist Workers Party,
the reservation system
was set up to deal with
the “Indian problem.”

driven en masse to places as little as one hundredth of
their original land. Without rights to settle anywhere
else, and with little access to the resources that had
historically sustained them. First Nations (or the Inuit
peoples of the Arctic regions) have lived primarily off
of different resource-based societies. I carefully avoid
the word “economy” because it wasn’t one you would
recognize—the idea of “owning” the land, for exam-
ple, was absolutely absurd. You can no more own the
earth than you can the water or the air. This will hit
home with you much more clearly in the next few
years when the neo-liberal economic policies of the
world start to privatize the water everywhere, as they
have already begun to do so. But just because you can-
not own the air, so goes the analogy, doesn’t mean you
wouldn't be extremely upset if someone tried to make
you buy a licence to breathe.

Some nations lived off whaling, others hunting and
gathering, and in the case of the Lil’wat, the mainstay
was the always plentiful Salmon runs of the areas from
North of today’s Lillooet down to South of Whistler.
The area around Pemberton, North of Mount Currie,
is among the least inhabitable. When rains fall in the
proportions of the massive floods that happened last
week, the ironically
named “Paradise
Valley” floods, as the
entire reservation is
built on a flood plain.
If you are a non-native
and unfortunate
enough to live on a
flood plain, you are
unable to garner insur-
ance for your property.
Such is the fate of the
people of Hatzic Lake,
just outside of Mission,
BC. But if you are a
person from the Lil’wat
nation, your family has
been confined for the
last few centuries to the
ever-shrinking land of
Mount Currie, with
but a few areas around
it. In order to maintain
continuity with your
culture, you probably
have not moved away.
However, just like any-
one in Hatzic, you aren't allowed to take out insurance
for your property.

So in this situation, you have a choice. You can
abandon what little is left of your culture, forget your
roots, and leave the reservation for elsewhere. Or, like
many of the nation, unwilling to be assimilated in the
colonizers’ society, they try to make a life in Mount
Currie. Every so often, massive flooding happens, and
all belongings including photographs, furniture, and
even the very foundation of the house, will be deci-
mated. But for many, staying is still preferred to being

http://www.otherpress.ca ec

\@r logajof Tears: Mount Currie and the Rainstorms

 

eliminated entirely as a people. So, every few years,
nature makes it so that many Lil’wat peoples must
start over entirely from scratch, without compensa-
tion, or even a small cheque—as if that could even
begin to undo centuries of attempts to wipe them out
as a people.

A few short years ago, some Mount Currie residents
blockaded the highway to try to expand both their
rights toward resources, (timber, fishing, etc.) and gar-
ner something closer to real sovereignty over the land.
When this happens, I inevitably hear all sorts of com-
ments from whites saying that they are asking for too
much. Yet every time the rain falls and the waters start
to raise, anything that had been scraped together since
the last flood hangs in the balance. Any attempt to
move up in “our world” while still maintaining who
they are, is almost impossible.

In the UN convention on genocide in 1948, of

which the state of Canada is a signatory member, arti-
cle two reads:
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the
following acts committed with intent to destroy, in
whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or reli-
gious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the — group

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to

members of the group

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions

of life calculated to bring about its physical

destruction in whole or in part

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births

within the group

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to

another group

Residential Schools only closed in the 80s, some of
which were more than merely the transference of chil-
dren (e). First Nations from one side of the country to
the other have all had cases of forced sterilizations
imposed upon them (d). It’s also rather obvious that,
historically speaking, many Native peoples were killed
in the creation of Canada (a). And to those who say
“past is past,” I refer you to points (b) and (c). These
points, in particular, “inflicting [on the group] condi-
tions of life calculated to bring about physical destruc-
tion,” are very much in play here. So, if you have a
choice of living miserably with your family, or forsak-
ing who you are, which would you choose?

It’s time to consider taking the leaders of the country
to the newly founded international criminal court.
Unlike so many lesser crimes, there are no statutes of
limitations on genocide. Furthermore, even if there
were, the ongoing apartheid structures of the reserva-
tion system, such as in Mount Currie, constitute con-
tinuing, accelerating modern day genocide in Canada.
It is not “some other country” that perpetrates these
crimes. It is here, it is now, and it is as Canadian as a
beaver on a five-cent coin.

Macdonald Stainsby is a freelance writer, social justice
activist, and can be reached at: mstainsby@tao.ca

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