The Solidarity Struggle: How People of Color Succeed and Fail At Showing Up For Each Other In the Fight For Freedom by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BGD Press, Inc.
Published: 2016-07-26T16:00:00+00:00

Raven Davis is an Indigenous, mixed race, 2-Spirit multidisciplinary artist and activist from the Anishnawbek (Ojibwa) Nation. A parent of 3 sons, Raven’s work includes performance, painting, design, poetry and short film. Raven blends narratives of colonization, race and gender justice, 2-Spirit identity and the Anishinaabemowin language and culture into traditional and contemporary art forms.

IMMIGRANTS IN SOLIDARITY WITH INDIGENOUS PEOPLE

Dedicated, with love, to Raven

by Elisha Lim

Learning about Native Canadian history has put me on the defensive. I’m in love with you, so I wanted to learn about your people. But I now feel as though I don’t know who my own people are anymore. Are we greedy immigrants grasping at our piece of the colonial pie? It makes me upset, angry and resentful. You made a video called “It’s Not Your Fault,” about missing and murdered Aboriginal women and Two-Spirit people. It went viral immediately. It focused on public reactions to the announcement that, after one hundred years of ignoring the epidemic of violence against Aboriginal women, there was going to be an inquest on the subject. The video featured you praying in a thoughtful, understated way. I told that to everyone except you. I don’t think you heard me say a single nice thing about it. I was similarly reluctant to look up what you said about slavery.

“You know, there were more Native slaves than Black slaves in Canada.

“Jesus, that’s bleak.”

But the numbers were shocking. In 1759, out of the approximately 3,500 slaves in Canadian New France, 2,472 were Indigenous. More than two-thirds, because Indigenous people were sold for half the cost of other enslaved people.

I’ve been better able to express my sympathy in my university elective course, Contemporary Indigenous Canadian Art. I was instantly grieved when the first Indigenous professor I’ve ever had taught us that the reason we have no sense of Indigenous history is that Indigenous people weren’t allowed to go to university until recently. Under Section 112 of the Indian Act, anyone who wanted to pursue higher education had to renounce their treaty and statutory rights as Native people and give up their right to return home to their reserve. This section of the act was removed in 1961, but for another decade, even Native students who were offered university admission would need the permission of a generally uncooperative Indian Agent, who was a European bureaucrat tasked with managing Indian affairs in their respective district. Professor Devine sighed, “these Indian Agents were typically European farmers and trappers who lived and worked in competition with the same Native people they were managing, eh?”

Professor Devine would later weep as she told the story of Alex Janvier, a Dene Suline painter who inspired Canada’s con- temporary Indigenous art movements. In the 1950s, Janvier was the first Indigenous artist to gain acceptance into my university.

His Indian Agent forbade him from enrolling and sent him to a technical school instead.

Even worse, she went on to explain, in 1885 the Indian Act actively criminalized the artistic traditions of Native people. The

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