THE RESURGENCE

The grassroots struggle: Defenders of the Land and Idle No More

Arthur Manuel

Gord Hill

The federal and provincial governments have tens of millions of dollars that they use strategically to manipulate Indigenous organizations and to undermine the grassroots’ ability to move forward. One of their strategies in British Columbia is to “engage” Indigenous leadership in all kinds of negotiations that go nowhere. The modern treaty negotiations have been happening for more than 20 years and have cost well over a billion dollars. But while they are negotiating, they can at least pretend to investors that everything is under control. The Indians are at the negotiating table, and eventually they will agree to the government’s extinguishment terms.

The Indigenous leadership and their non-Indigenous advisors involved in these negotiations justify sitting down with the government because they say, “only by holding discussions with the government can we make change.” They see those of us who will not negotiate under the government’s terms as frozen in time. As not capable of moving forward. As not getting with the program. Needless to say, the governments agree with the leadership and welcome them with open arms. They know they are a soft group to deal with because they have already agreed, by sitting down at the table, that their people’s own extinguishment will be the basis of the land claims agreement they will eventually sign.

Part of the reason for this is that our mainstream organizations generally select our leadership on the basis of money. They know that government money will quickly dry up if they elect leaders who fight for decolonization, but a compliant leadership attracts government money like horse dung attracts flies. People in Indigenous leadership know this, and there is an unwritten black list of people who will be excluded from the organizations because they are too grassroots. They only work with people who are acceptable to government.

It is this underlying reality that has given rise to Idle No More and groups like the Defenders of the Land. The fact that chiefs and councils will not rock the boat because they want to protect their government funding has meant that those who cannot accept this situation have no alternative but to work outside the mainstream organizations.

But at the same time, Defenders have to recognize that part of those funds are also necessary for many of our band members – our grassroots – who, in our dismal state of dependency, cannot afford to have their programs and services cut off. If we are going to do things that will threaten their lifelines, they need to be part of the decision- making process. We must try to ensure that we do not put our people in an impossible situation. We do this by working outside of the chiefs and council band structure but always working closely with the grassroots.

In this way, the Defenders and Idle No More are the basis for building a movement in Canada. No one else will play this role except us, and we can build on the considerable discontent floating around in communi- ties. Even with Justin Trudeau’s charm offensive, people see that things are not adding up. One thing is promised but another is delivered.

We have seen again and again that the prime minister and premiers are not interested in giving up one inch of power to Indigenous peoples, and Prime Minister Justin is no exception. You are daydreaming if you think you can negotiate your way to freedom without creating tension to push our colonizers to decolonize Canada.

There is nothing special about Indigenous peoples that will entice the white man to give us our freedom out of good will. Our only advantage is that our communities are spread across Canada in over a thousand locations, and they cannot take us all down at once. But unless we forcefully demand our rights, including our fundamental right to self- determination, we will not receive them. That, as minorities everywhere and in all times know, is how the world works. And that is what our current leadership, generally for their own self-serving reasons, is refusing to acknowledge.

This is why Idle No More and Defenders of the Land were formed. They reject not only the government colonial policies, but also those in our leadership who cooperate with the government colonial policies. We are now working to re-establish grassroots organizations, strategies and actions that will get us back on track defending our sovereignty and our ownership of our lands. Our people are fighting at the grassroots level to achieve self-determination, free from the colonial state.

We see courageous Indigenous people doing this every day, and if we cannot join them in these actions, we should at least support them in every way that we can. They are the future of our struggle, and our struggle is building a new decolonized Canada where our cultures and land rights are respected.

Arthur Manuel was one of the giants of the Indigenous movement within Canada and internationally. He served as chief of his Neskonlith Indian band and chairman of the Shuswap Nation Tribal Council as well as co-chair of the North American and Global Indigenous Caucus at the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples. He was also co-author, along with Grand Chief Ronald Derrickson, of the award-winning book Unsettling Canada: A National Wake-up Call. Arthur Manuel passed away in January 2017. Lorimer Press published his second book, co-authored with Grand Chief Derrickson, in the fall of 2017.

Lessons from Wesahkecahk

Melina Laboucan-Massimo

Red Rising Magazine

Our prophecies speak of a time when the blue sky and waters turn black and green things turn brown and die; when animals and fish disappear and birds drop from the sky. This devasta- tion will come as a result of mankind’s greed and disrespect of Mother Earth. This time is upon us.

The Alberta tar sands are scarring the earth – polluting and draining watersheds, poisoning the air and destroying the land I call home. The landscape is drastically changing from a once pristine and beautiful boreal forest to an increasingly industrial and toxic terrain. Animals and fish have become sick with tumours, and caribou are now listed as an endangered species. People are no longer safe to harvest traditional medicines, teas or berries because they have become contaminated – and even though we fear that our medicines have turned into poison, we continue to forage (and forge) the path ahead. People young and old have started to die of rare forms of cancers that we have never seen before. I come from a community where, until my generation, my family was able to live sustainably off the land.

The tar sands are not an isolated incident; neo-colonialism in the form of resource extraction is happening across Turtle Island and throughout Mother Earth. Today the earth is being contaminated and destroyed at an unparalleled rate, and people and animals alike are being sacrificed for the benefit of the greedy few.

We are not only in an ecological crisis; we are in a moral human crisis. All around the world, we see people’s homes and traditional territories being turned into industrialized landscapes. We see people’s clean drinking water being overtaken and turned into toxic dumpsites for industrial facilities. It is painful to see the devastation to the land. It reaches a deep part in your spirit – a feeling of indescribable grief.

It was over five years ago when I returned home to my community of Little Buffalo where my family lives to witness the aftermath of one of the largest oil spills in Alberta’s and Canada’s history. What I saw was a landscape forever changed by an oil spill that had consumed a vast stretch of the traditional territory where for generations my family had hunted, trapped, harvested medicines and picked berries.

Days before the federal or provincial governments were willing to acknowledge this tragedy, my family was sending reports of headaches, burning eyes, nausea and dizziness. They asked me if I could please find out more information – if it was an oil spill and how big it might be. It wasn’t until five days later, only after the Harper government was re-elected, that the information was released on the magnitude of the spill. More than 4.5 million litres of oil had soaked into the land.

Soon afterward the story was swept under the carpet, away from the eyes of the public. Cleaning the toxic spill continued for the rest of that year, and the following year we still found a contaminated site despite claims by the company that all had been remediated. We know that the damage to the land will outlive our grandchildren’s grandchildren.

This is one of the many reasons why I continue to fight for the protec- tion of Mother Earth. One of my clearest and most powerful memories as a child was of being out on the land with my kokum and mosom, travelling through the territory for the summer months by horse and wagon. Seeing the vastness of the land, I felt free. I was in awe of how beautiful, lush and expansive the land was and seeing so clearly the connection of the earth and the sky world made me feel complete.

Although, ironically, I am not sure the serenity and peace I felt then will ever return, because of the extreme resource extraction taking place on the land. It is from this place that I persevere in this struggle to dismantle the machine of colonialism that still has a stranglehold on our people and land today. Social, political and economic pressures are literally tearing our communities apart. The colonial-industrial system is predicated on systems of power and domination, so it is no wonder that we see these systems play out in our communities, in our families, in our personal relationships and in our movements. We must be aware of how the harmful aspects of this predatory society have seeped into our lives, so that we may shed our involuntary inheritance of colonial behaviours: hierarchy, dominance, profit, greed, immediate gratification, and caring more about our egos and personal gain than the well-being of others.

The values of colonialism exist in the form of capitalism. We need to work together dismantle and reorganize this system and to recentre our values and how we relate to each other and the earth.

The colonial values of domination are embedded in patriarchy, which is one of the reasons why we see the raping and pillaging of Mother Earth as well as violence against women. I am not only talking about physical violence against women. I am talking about emotional, spiritual and psychological violence that is perpetuated in our society today and sometimes even in our movements. We must question the values we prioritize in our movements and understand how to create a paradigm shift in how we treat each other, ourselves, and the earth. If we continue to work from a colonial foundation, we are not recognizing the role and value of Indigenous ways of knowing and being.

The earth is our mother. Violence against the earth begets violence against women. This is both a political and personal issue for many of us. This is a reality that many of our communities face today. It is not just a news story. It is not a coincidence that over four thousand Indige- nous women are murdered and missing in the country we call Canada. Indigenous women are five times more likely than non-Indigenous women to die from violence.

I am bringing up these statistics not only because they are staggering figures. I speak to these issues because they are personal. This is real in my life. In 2013, I lost two women in my family to violence. One was my cousin, who was murdered by her partner, and the other woman was my little sister, Bella. Bella had just graduated from college in Toronto. Her death is still unsolved and listed as suspicious. In that summer alone, I attended three funerals within my own family. The other death was a suicide. This is a reality for our communities. Not only do we have to deal with resource extraction in our own backyards, but we must also deal with consistent violence in our lives as Indigenous peoples.

All life is sacred. And all life forms have spirit. When we destroy the land, we destroy other beings. We destroy Mother Earth. We violate the sacred connection that we have with her.

For many of us this work is not just a job, it is a way of life. I have come to realize it is not only how we politically challenge these systems of dominance but also how we decolonize and deconstruct them in our daily lives. We need to decolonize both politically and personally.

This is why I am intent on continuing to decolonize myself. I often ask myself: What kind of movement are we building? What are the values that guide our actions each and every day? What kind of future are we fighting for? Are we living in ways that will create the future that we envision? Are we treating our families, loved ones and those in our movements with the dignity and respect they deserve? We must be prepared to answer these questions.

Growing up, my dad would talk about how we could learn from the mistakes that Wesahkecahk, the trickster, would make so that we would know how to treat the world around us and how to respect other beings like animals, birds, plants and trees. I try to include these teachings in my life and in how I interact with the world around me, including the way I carry myself and how I treat others, how I love myself, honour all living beings, and do my best to be humble and trustworthy. These values are important for me to live by and I incorporate these principles into my daily efforts of personal and political decolonization. In coming to further understand what resurgence looks like, I turn to the teachings, morals and values from our old stories as a way to decolonize.

The prophecy that I began with – when the blue sky and waters turn black and green things turn brown and die; when animals and fish disappear and birds drop from the sky – also speaks of a time when people will gather from the four sacred directions to stop this decimation, all distinctly separate but forever connected in the Sacred Hoop of Life. Those who have kept their ancient knowledge, ceremonies and stories alive shall be our teachers and our guides going forward.

People from diverse backgrounds and creeds will truly begin to work together in honesty and respect – with a deep sense of solidarity with one another. It is a time when people from the Four Directions will come together to work for justice, peace, freedom and recognition of the Great Spirit and the sacredness of our Mother Earth. This time, my friends, is upon us.

Melina Laboucan-Massimo is a member of the Lubicon Cree First Nation. She is currently a Fellow at the David Suzuki Foundation. She worked as a Climate and Energy Campaigner with Greenpeace Canada and the Indigenous Environmental Network for the past decade. Facing firsthand the impacts of the Alberta tar sands to her traditional territory, Laboucan-Massimo has been a vocal advocate for Indigenous rights for over 15 years. She has written numerous articles on the tar sands and produced short documentaries on water issues and Indigenous cultural revitalization.

Decolonization: The frontline struggle

Kanahus Manuel

Kanahus Manuel

When I was arrested I was in a truck with my three-month- old child, my sister and my mother in the hills above Bella Coola. In the web of charges they threw at me, the one that finally stuck was for “assaulting police,” a charge that had been levelled against many of us who were, in fact, assaulted by the police when we were trying to protect our land from the Sun Peaks development.  I remember this as the saddest moment of my life. Not because I was going to jail but because I realized that while I was away, I would be separated from my infant son. In fact, they separated us as soon as they led me into the booking room. I don’t remember anything except the sound of my three-month-old crying for me in the next room. I insisted again and again that they bring him to me because I had to feed him.

Finally, because the child was by then screaming from fear and hunger, they brought him to me.

I held him in my arms and nursed him in the holding cell. But my heart was overcome by the sadness of knowing that in a few minutes they would take him away again. When he was finished feeding, I found myself tickling his feet trying to keep him awake, because I knew when he fell asleep they would take him away. He fell asleep. They took him away. And they put me away for eighty days.

I saw him every weekend because my father brought him to me in jail, and I gave him a supply of my expressed breast milk to feed him. I lived for those moments with my son and I died each time the visit was over and they took him away again.

But I survived this ordeal because by then I already knew who I was and what I had to do as a Secwepemc woman to fight for my people. This was the period where my own mind was being decolonized.The process had begun a few years before. When I was growing up, I went to white man’s school in the town nearby to our Neskonlith reserve in the BC Interior. It was a bitter experience. This region of the country has a history of right-wing racists, and our school was rife with their mini-racist children. I came from a family proud of our Secwepemc heritage and would not accept shameful treatment for myself or my Secwepemc classmates. I learned to fight, to physically strike back at the outrageous behaviour towards us. I began to hate this school and I was determined to quit at the earliest opportunity. My father understood. In his own youth and throughout his life, he had also been a fighter. He gave me books like The Autobiog- raphy of Malcolm X that showed how a brilliant, angry man confronted the racist society he was born into. I finished high school away from the Interior in East Vancouver.

But it was finally the struggle to protect our land, and the people I met in that struggle, that really changed me. We began to understand the real depth of the reproach “seme7stsut” our people used to denote someone who was “acting white.” We understood and we rejected the seme7stsut values of greed and arrogance that we associated with the white world and those seme7stsut among us. During this period of questioning, it was once again my father who gently guided me. He said I should go to community meetings. He was chief at the time and he was beginning to challenge the massive ski resort, really a complete town with 24,000 hotel beds, being planned on that still-wild part of our territory we called Skwelkwek’welt, which translates roughly into “our mountain lands.” I became involved in the Skwelkwek’welt protec- tion group. I joined the camp in the forest to reoccupy our lands and to demand that the destruction of the forest be halted. It was during this period that I had my true education.

The Skwelkwek’welt Protection Centre was peopled mainly by youth and Elders, like Sarah Denault, Irene Billy and Wolverine, who was just out of jail from the Gustafsen Lake stand-off. They had grown up in the 1920s when there were still relatively few white people in the area, and their parents had grown up in a period when our lands were still ours. The Elders at the camp showed us a land rich in plant foods—roots, berries, plant stalks, mushrooms and lichens—as well as a home to deer, moose, bear, beaver, lynx, cougar and wolverine. Skwelkwek’welt was important to them because it was one of the last places in our territory where we could still hunt for food, gather medicines, and continue our Secwepemc cultural traditions. This education from the Elders, I came to understand, is an essential part of decolonization: seeking out the knowledge of your people, those who have the knowledge and can pass it on to you. Because the traditions and values of our people still beat in the hearts of our Elders and they are ready to pass them on to any who seek them out.

I also learned at the camp from other young people there who were part of the Native Youth Movement. We not only put information pickets on the road to Sun Peaks, but we also took over government offices responsible for giving the resort permission to seize our lands. The Elders taught us how incredibly rich our land was and how important to our survival it was to keep it wild, and the other young people in Native Youth showed me that we did not have to passively accept the rape of our land. We could fight back – and we did. We did not go passively when the police attacked us. We defended ourselves and we defended our land.

But more important than all of this was the fact that I was able to get in touch with the spiritual life of our people. One of the Native Youth Movement women was pregnant. She told me she was going to have a traditional birth, and at first I did not know what it was. But then I also became pregnant and I also had a traditional birth. It was a powerful, life-changing experience.

I had my child on the land surrounded by the Elder women who knew the rituals surrounding birth and the songs that were to be sung. I had my child in the forest looking up at the mountains, and bringing new life in the way my people had since time immemorial.

Three months later, my newborn and I were together in the holding cell in the Bella Coola jail. But even at that painful moment, I knew that for him, I had no choice. I had to fight and continue to fight for his right, for the right of all of my children, to be free from the racist, spirit- destroying colonial system – the genocide – that Canada still continues to serve us.

Since then, fifteen years have passed. I have not let up. I have intensified my efforts to free my people from colonialism. My generation finds itself on the front line of the decolonial struggle every day of our lives. We have to choose to fight for our rights and our future or to surrender them both and lose ourselves in a country that has shown only contempt for us.

That is the way the world is. That is our struggle. And today I am not afraid of jail and I am not afraid of the police. I urge all those who are fighting to decolonize Canada: Fall in and carry out your duties. The sides have already been chosen for you. You will not play mediators on our soil. We are the rivers, both sides of the rivers and all bridges connecting both sides. There is no middle ground. I urge all of our people: Fall in and we will struggle together for our future!

Kanahus Manuel is a Secwepemc and Ktunaxa activist, birth keeper and Warrior. She appeared in a documentary film made by Doreen Manuel called Freedom Babies. She is well known for her activism against Sun Peaks Ski Resort, Imperial Metals and the Mount Polley mine spill and with the water protectors at Standing Rock. She is currently playing a leadership role in fighting the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion through more than 500 kilometres of Secwepemc territory. As a result of her activism, she has been named in several court injunctions and has been jailed by the Canadian state.

Dechinta Bush University: Land-based education & Indigenous resurgence

Glen Coulthard

Dechinta Bush University

At the heart of colonialism is the violent separation of our peoples from our social relation to the land. Any education aimed at decolonization must confront that violence – and one of the best ways to do this is to reintroduce and re-place Indigenous peoples on their lands with the knowledge-holders who are experts in living it. That is the thinking behind Dechinta Bush University, an institution that works in collaboration with my Yellowknives Dene First Nation, other Indigenous people in the North and the University of British Columbia (UBC) to offer a post-secondary program of Indigenous land-based education.

The first thing you discover at Dechinta is that everyone has something to learn and everyone has something to teach. The curriculum includes colonization and decolonization, Indigenous law and languages, and building sustainable communities. This means not only reading Indigenous political theory, but also learning how to tan moose hides, hunt, trap and collect medicines. You learn in a fire circle with Elders and leaders. Students and faculty bring their children for an outdoor immersive culture/language camp so that families learn collectively, with our children and Elders informing our discussions and actions and our semester communities resembling real communities, with children as young as eighteen months and Elders as old as 94.

The objective is to provide a model of education that promotes true self-determination and decolonization for Indigenous peoples in the North. As a professor at the UBC campus in Vancouver in First Nations Studies and the Department of Political Science, and someone who for the last six years has been an instructor at Dechinta, I have come to understand the need for institutions like this on a fundamental level.

At UBC, we try to make the reconnections to our culture and our tradi- tional territories in order to formulate a critical analysis of our colonial present and its effects in the North. We come to understand that what is wrong with the forms of colonial economic and political development is that they obliterate those relationships of reciprocity that underlie a relationship with the land.

But you can only get so far teaching in a primarily cognitive sort of way through “traditional” sources and literatures that you use in university. As an instructor at Dechinta, I realized that I didn’t really understand the critique offered by the Dene of capitalism in the 1970s until I started that experiential kind of relationship with the land through these land-based practices. I had learned as much as I could in the archive, talking to people, and reading about the history of the period, but it was only when I started to commit myself to relearning those practices and re-embedding myself in those social relationships with the land and place that I understood in a more concrete and embodied way what was wrong with the forms of economic development that have come to be dominant in the North and elsewhere. The experience Dechinta provides is not an add-on to a southern education; it is the necessary completion of it.

The effects of teaching and learning at Dechinta can be radical, but we are far from being renegades who are dropped into territories and determine the most radical and transformative educational experiences we think would be relevant for them. We work in a spirit of reciprocity, with community engagement and input. Elders are professors, even more so I would argue than the university professors and instructors who come from the South, myself included.

For me, at a personal level, working up North with the community on a program like this is crucial because it allows me to go home and bring my children with me. I live thousands of kilometres away, so it’s important to me to include my children as often as I can. The collective nature of parenting and childcare at Dechinta is important because it is a contemporary expression of what we’ve always done.

When other Indigenous people see the success of the program they often ask if it is transferable – can it work on their territory? The acquisition or re-acquisition of land might be more difficult or impossible in certain parts of the country, and I think that we can concede that it might be more difficult by virtue of the structures that exist, the population densities and how thoroughly colonial discourse and the structure of dispossession have erased us from these spaces. But we should never concede that it is impossible. That is how it is often portrayed, that is how the enemy posits Indigenous claims: because Indigenous peoples have been so damaged by colonialism, because colonialism has been so thorough, it becomes such an absurd idea to think that we could correct this. It’s a sort of self-perpetuating prophecy – colonialism has damaged us so much and it’s been so thorough that we no longer have a legitimate claim to justice against it. We have to concede, we have to compromise, all these sorts of things, all of which are just other ways of telling us that we should not even dare to dream of a better life.

The other distinction that tends to get made in discussion of land-based education is the one between urban and rural experiences in relation to decolonization and colonization. I think that needs to be broken down, not only because Indigenous lands are also cities but because the experience of colonization has been, if you look at it in a larger historical view, very similar. Indigenous peoples were dispossessed from their territories. This was fundamental in the construction of cities and urbanization. Once you are removed from the land, and once you are removed from your reserve land base, you have to migrate elsewhere – and that’s often to urban centres that were built on your or someone else’s stolen land. This was a constitutive feature of what Marx termed primitive accumulation, dispossession, proletarianization, market creation – but also the geographical, spatial reorganization of popu- lations through subsequent urbanization. And now that very colonial process (in Marx’s own terms) is again devouring Indigenous spaces within cities through gentrification of neighbourhoods we inhabit. So this constant cycle of dispossession and violence and dispossession and displacement has happened to Indigenous peoples as much in cities as it has in land-based contexts. And, indeed, they’re structurally related.

So, when we can start seeing that as Indigenous peoples, we can start building a more effective movement that recognizes those similarities, that what we are fighting against is essentially the same thing. We should stop fighting against each other because we see our experiences as being so different when, if we just step back a bit, they aren’t. The issue that returns again and again in formulating institutions like Dechinta is the question of financial sustainability. That is a very pragmatic and real question that needs to be addressed. But at the same time, any Indigenous learning centre, by its very nature, has to be localized and decentralized. Place-based education isn’t readily universalizable. It takes a lot of hard work and it has to be specific. You can’t just disseminate it out, in a homogenous programming model, and Dechinta recognizes that.

There are also some who question Dechinta’s Indigenous authenticity because of its connection to a large southern university. This is obviously a tricky question because it usually plays out that in order to be recognized, you have to make yourself like the power structure that is recognizing you. Recognition, as it always does, has a kind of assimilative pull to it.

But so far Dechinta has been successful in maintaining its autonomy and integrity in programming by remaining grounded in Indigenous traditions of thought and practice. Any sort of educational program- ming in the North tends to funnel students into the non-renewable resource economy, which is exploitative and is an antithesis to the types of social relations that we learn when we engage in these land-based practices and this form of education. So, as with all recognition politics, recognition is in a real tension with the decolonizing objectives of programming like this.

Although there can be no cookie-cutter approaches and programs like Dechinta must always defend their own integrity from the institutions they are associated with, the fact remains that one of the most common statements from the non-Yellowknives Dene students who take the program is, “I wish there was something like there where I’m from.” Or, “How do we go about establishing something like this on our territory?”

This speaks to the real need and the strong desire for a truly resurgent, decolonizing, land-based education. Dechinta cannot be a turnkey model, but it can be an inspiration. We welcome Indigenous people to come to learn from us and take from us what is useful and, in the spirit of the place, we will also be happy to learn what you can teach us.

Glen Coulthard (PhD – University of Victoria) is a member of the Yellowknives Dene First Nation and an Associate Professor in the First Nations and Indigenous Studies Program and the Department of Political Science. He has written and published numerous articles and chapters in the areas of Indigenous thought and politics, contemporary political theory, and radical social and political thought. His book, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (University of Minnesota Press), was released in August 2014 to critical acclaim.

Going international to decolonize

Nicole Schabus

Nicole Schabus

I came to the Indigenous territories of North America from Europe, from Austria, a country with a terrible history of racism even worse, during the Second World War, the Holocaust happened in that land. I can assure you that this history affects future generations; it makes you doubt your own ability and that of your people to love. It made me question from early on whether I would have just been one of the followers or whether I would have stood up against our society totally dehumanizing another people and, in the process, ourselves.

No one has taught me more about resistance to oppression than Indigenous peoples, including some of my Aborigine friends I studied with in Australia and Indigenous peoples I worked with in Latin America.

I had the privilege of working and living alongside Secwepemc leader Arthur Manuel, a leading advocate for Indigenous land rights. If we are serious about decolonization, the starting point has to be that this land is Indigenous land. This is also recognized at the international level, where international human right bodies understand Canada’s colonial past and present and call for the recognition of Indigenous land rights. I have attended international lobbying efforts where Indigenous peoples get treated as owners of their land, including by representatives of other nation states. It is only inside of Canada that the government makes Indigenous peoples feel like they are landless in their own territories.

This is one reason why it is so important to go international. Only by asserting their position internationally and interacting with other nations can Indigenous Peoples assert their nationhood. Arthur Manuel said: “You have to quit crying on the shoulder of the guy that stole your land!” He would tell his people that there is no point going to Ottawa. Instead he took the message to Washington, DC, in the context of the softwood lumber dispute, the UN in New York City and Geneva, and many other international fora. I worked with him at all of those fora and heard him make his impassioned pleas, but nowhere did I see him speak with more love and caring than at Neskonlith Band hall, in his community, where his children and grandchildren live. He would always go home and report back to his family, his Elders, his people. They understood the importance of the work at the international level.

The main reason Arthur Manuel went international was to keep his people, especially the land and water defenders, safe. When we came back from one of our first international campaigns, the Secwepemc women and Elders had set up a camp at Skwelkwek’welt against the expansion of Sun Peaks ski resort. As a real leader, he stood behind his people, especially the women, and backed them up. We brought in international human rights monitors and took the land issue international.

Nobody understood better than Arthur Manuel that Indigenous rights have an economic, social, cultural, and environmental dimension. We lobbied the World Trade Organization and NAFTA and had submis- sions accepted by both arguing that the non-recognition of Aboriginal title is a trade subsidy, because due to government laws and policies, corporations do not have to pay the Indigenous owners of the resource. He made it clear to the non-Indigenous people he spoke to that Indig- enous rights are ancestral rights, deeply rooted in their territories, and that this deep connection, the underlying or radical title of Indigenous peoples to their land, has to be recognized. He also made it clear to them that this is a much more solid foundation to base Canada on than the colonial doctrines of discovery and the claim that Crown title is the underlying title in Canada. The latter is pure colonialism, and yet those are the doctrines and laws that the Government of Canada and the courts have upheld.

The international remedy against colonialism is the right to self-de- termination. And there can no longer be any debate that Indigenous peoples have the right to self-determination. For decades Canada tried to deny that Indigenous peoples have that right, that they are not “peoples” with their right to self-determination protected under the International Covenants on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), jointly known as the decolonization treaties. They wrote into international law the decolonization process that had been embarked on in Africa and Asia. Canada is a signatory to these international human rights treaties and bound by its obligations. Yet as a settler colonial state, Canada wanted to deny that Indigenous peoples have standing as peoples in international law.

This is why it is so important to always refer to Indigenous peoples with an s, unless you are just referring to a specific nation or person.

The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) became the longest negotiated international human rights instrument in history, in part due to the strong opposition of settler colonial states, first and foremost Canada, the US, Australia and New Zealand, especially in regard to the Indigenous right to self-determination.

This is now enshrined in Article 3 of UNDRIP, which replicates Article 1(1) of ICCPR and ICESCR and makes it clear that this right applies to Indigenous peoples. Since even those four colonial musketeers have now changed their position on UNDRIP, there is international consensus that this right applies to Indigenous peoples and it can no longer be denied. Rather I would argue that it now constitutes a binding principle of international law, and on top of it, Canada is bound by international treaties like ICCPR and ICESCR that enshrine the right. The right to self-determination is the overarching umbrella right; much of its essence is then spelled out further in UNDRIP, in regard to land rights, governance and Indigenous prior informed consent (PIC). The latter principle is also increasingly enshrined in multilateral environmental agreements that recognize Indigenous PIC and therefore Indigenous decision-making power regarding access to their lands and resources; and if such access is to be granted, it has to be subject to remuneration or benefit-sharing.

It is clear that including Indigenous peoples as decision-makers and respecting their knowledge, which is the most long-term knowledge regarding the respective territories, will ensure more economically, culturally and environmentally sustainable development. It means the transition from the 0.2% of Canada’s land base that currently make up Indian reserves enshrining economic marginalization and poverty, to decision-making over the remaining 99.8% or really Indigenous territorial authority over their lands and resources.

Arthur always circled back to the human rights dimension of Indigenous rights because he wanted settler Canadians to understand that this process of decolonization is also deeply connected to their rights. He said to settlers: “If you recognize our collective right to our lands and territories and decision-making over it, we will recognize your human right to stay here in our territories.”

He would joke, in his endearing manner that breaks down barriers, that he knows that “they do not want you back where you came from. You have been here too long. You have a right to stay here as long as you recognize that it is our land and that we have a say over it.”

The message that resonated from his last talks was that by non-Indigenous people working together with Indigenous peoples, it will mean a better future for future generations, because it is the best way to relate and connect to the land that we are all living on and to save the land that we all depend on from further destruction and alienation.

Nicole Schabus is an assistant law professor at Thompson Rivers University. She has worked for Indigenous peoples in Latin America and across Canada, especially in the Interior of British Columbia. Nicole has been practising law in British Columbia in the fields of constitutional, criminal, Aboriginal and environmental law. She also reports on and analyzes international environmental negotiations, mainly under the Convention on Biological Diversity. She has assisted with the preparation of submissions to numerous UN human rights bodies for organizations with consultative status before the United Nations. She drafted amicus curiae submissions for Indigenous peoples that were accepted by with World Trade Organization and NAFTA international trade tribunals.