We are truly and deeply sorry
and we commit to today’s apology
and next week’s apology
and, quite frankly, all apologies.
We will continue to apologize.
There are many more apologies to come.
Right.
And indeed, I’m going to apologize again.
I’m really sorry.
We were wrong. We apologize. I am sorry. We are sorry.
Sorry about not having done that.
Whenever anyone makes an apology, as the person apologizing—
Shut the fuck up!
Umm...
Do some damage boys!
Oh hello.
Welcome to System Fail,
the show where we agree with flat-earthers about exactly one thing.
Fuck Christopher Columbus.
Christopher Columbus, the original ISIS.
Christopher my boy, the earth is as flat as this orange.
But this orange is round!
So is the earth, son.
People don’t think so, but we who know the sea are sure the earth is round.
Here’s the thing, globehugger!
Your plane can’t go upside down!
Yeah, fuck Columbus.
I am your host, DeeDos,
and as millions of North Americans
observe a religious ritual from feudal Europe,
by dressing up in silly costumes
and gorging themselves on high-fructose corn syrup
Woo! That’s really stretchy!
members of multiple Indigenous nations are engaged in an anti-colonial struggle
with many front-lines.
On October 11th, a coalition of radical Indigenous organizers
called for a Day of Rage Against Colonialism.
The appeal for autonomous, anti-colonial, anti-capitalist,
and anti-fascist actions was a clear rebuke to what organizers called
“the uninspired assimilationist politics of
Indigenous Peoples Day”,
a tame, progressive alternative to the official state holiday of Columbus Day.
Indigenous people are done with colonizers!
In several cities across the so-called United States,
people answered the call
by toppling colonial statues and monuments.
In so-called Arizona, members of the O’odham Anti-Border Collective
blocked a highway immigration checkpoint to protest the construction
of a border wall through Tohono O’odham territory.
Does our freedom offend you that much?
The protest was soon set upon by Customs and Border Protection agents,
who fired tear gas and rubber bullets and arrested twelve people.
I’m down, I’m down.
Yeah, you’re gonna stay down! Got it?!
Leave my mom alone. Y’all better not hurt my fucking mom!
Recent weeks have also seen a sharp increase in colonial tensions
in the territories ruled by the Canadian State.
I thought I was gonna make it through this....but I’m not.
On September 28th,
a 37 year old Atikamekw woman named Joyce Echaquan
died in a hospital in Joliette, so-called Quebec.
After complaining of mistreatment by racist staff,
she livestreamed the taunts of her nurses as she lay dying.
This footage soon went viral, provoking widespread outrage
and a series of vigils, rallies and demonstrations
carried out under the banner ‘Justice For Joyce’.
Anti-Indigenous racism has also been on display in Miꞌkmaꞌki,
specifically in the area known as Nova Scotia
Fuck’s sake boys!
where a dispute over fishing rights has boiled over into
ugly scenes of mob violence.
An estimated 200 commercial fishers preventing employees of a lobster
holding pound from leaving, and removing crates of lobster
caught by Indigenous harvesters.
Canada’s colonial police force, the RCMP,
has stood by and watched as non-Indigenous fishers
have barricaded Mi’kmaq boats, attacked lobster storage facilities,
sabotaged traps, torched vehicles, and otherwise sought to terrorize
members of the Sipekneꞌkatik First Nation out of exercising their inherent fishing rights.
This lobster pound in southern Nova Scotia was being used by Mi’kmaq fishers
to store their catch.
The fire so intense that it burned the building completely to the ground.
Lookie there, shootin flares at us. Good try motherfucker!
Back in 2013, the Mi’kmaq Warriors Society intervened in Rexton, so-called New Brunswick,
during a conflict between members of the Elsipogtog First Nation
and Texas-based fracking company SWN.
The warriors ended up clashing with an RCMP tactical squad,
before the community eventually pushed them out of the area,
torching a number of cruisers in the process.
Recently, calls have been growing for the warriors to regroup
Ah, c’mon! Really?!
to back up their fellow Mi'kmaq, who are facing the brunt of colonial violence.
In the meantime, support is growing, with a number of solidarity actions
taking place around the country.
We stand with them, and we stand proud.
Keep on fighting. We’re here. We got your back.
On the other side of the continent, the Secwepemc have delivered
a cease and desist order to the TMX Pipeline corporation,
which is now owned by the federal government.
Shoulda known better, but I didn’t.
The order demanded an immediate halt to plans to drill under the Secwepemcetkwe,
or Thompson River, in so-called British Columbia.
If completed, the Trans Mountain Pipeline would massively ramp up the transport
of bitumen from Alberta,
allowing for an expansion of the Tar Sands,
and threatening the survival of salmon that surrounding Indigenous nations
and much of the region’s wildlife depend upon.
On Thursday October 15, five people were arrested
while blocking workers from drilling under the river.
This is unceded Secwepemc territory. Our land is not a sacrifice zone.
We are going to stand and defend this water by any means.
Things have also been heating back up on the Wet’suwet’en yintah,
as workers with the Coastal GasLink pipeline are preparing to drill
under the Wedzin Kwa, otherwise known as the Morice River.
The Coastal GasLink pipeline is a proposed 670 kilometre,
fracked gas pipeline owned by TC Energy
and private equity firm KKR.
Its construction through unceded Wet’suwet’en territories
has faced sustained and determined resistance for over a decade.
As construction continues to push on towards the Wedzin Kwa,
Coastal GasLink workers are increasingly enlisting the RCMP
as private security, harassing Wet’suwet’en and their allies,
and attempting to block them from upholding Wet’suwet’en law.
Don’t threaten me with an injunction if you don’t know that you don’t have permission
of the authority of this territory.
This past February, Wet’suwet’en supporters launched
a coordinated series of decentralized rail, port and highway blockades
under the banner #ShutDownCanada.
These blockades lasted for weeks, causing widespread logistical
and economic disruption.
Calls for a resumption of these solidarity actions have recently begun to circulate.
We all knew it was coming.
But we hoped it wasn’t.
And in so-called Ontario, members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy
from the Six Nations of the Grand River
occupied a proposed development site on their territories back in July.
The encampment, dubbed 1492 Land Back Lane,
is located near the town of Caledonia,
which lies within an area known as the Haldimand Tract.
This land, which spans six miles
on either side of the length of the Grand River,
was granted to the Haudenosaunee by treaty in 1784 as compensation
for territories that their confederacy had lost in the American Revolution.
The official reservation of the Six Nations of the Grand River currently accounts
for only 5% of the historical Haldimand Tract.
Ownership of much of the remaining lands is disputed.
European settlers on the Grand River:
helping to create a close relationship between the people of Haldimand
and their Six Nations neighbours for many years.
Back in 2006, community members from Six Nations
occupied a proposed development site, known as the Douglas Creek Estates,
leading to what became known as the Caledonia crisis,
a tense stand-off that was only resolved when the Ontario government stepped in
to buy off the developers.
This time around, the proposed McKenzie Meadows
development site, home to 1492 Land Back Lane,
is located directly across the street from the former Douglas Creeks Estate site.
Patterns of repression and resistance have taken a similar direction as well.
OK, we have some people chasing a police officer out of the way.
Get the fuck out of here!
Keep going!
A militarized raid on August 5th by the Ontario Provincial Police, or OPP,
immediately provoked widespread community mobilization,
and led to burning highway blockades.
It’s on boys!
On Thursday October 22nd, an Ontario Superior Court approved
a permanent injunction against the encampment.
Since then, resistance has only intensified.
The Ontario government has since sought to isolate the encampment,
heavily criminalizing supporters,
arresting dozens of people for breach of injunction for simply visiting the site,
and playing on colonial fears of Indigenous resistance.
Well you just can’t go in and take over people’s future homes.
It’s wrong.
And then when the police come, they get an outhouse,
toss it over from a bridge, onto a police car.
Fair play.
To find out what they’re so scared of, I recently caught up with Skyler Williams,
a Haudenosaunee resident of Six Nations and the official spokesperson
of 1492 Land Back Lane.
Hey Skyler, how’s it going?
Holding space... and y’know, preparing for what lengthy legal battles await us.
I see. Well at least the weather there looks pretty nice.
How did the 1492 Land Back Lane occupation start?
Myself, and some friends and family kinda knew about this development that was about to start.
And then at the very beginning of us wanting to go in there to occupy, or reclaim our lands – it was
right at the start of all the COVID stuff. Barricades went up around the reserve, and
there was lots of concern about whether us as a community could
withstand the outbreak that was coming. And so people were really worried about that.
After a couple of months of letting that kind of settle and get to where it is now, we had seen
that hadn’t stopped any of the development that was going on there. They cleared the land of every
blade of grass. Every tree. Every shrub. Every hill. So now it’s just some barren clay there.
So we moved in there on July 19th. And it was a Sunday evening. We were very deliberate about
going there Sunday evening, because y’know, we wanted it to remain a peaceful occupation
of our land. And so going in there during the day during the week meant that we were
going to have lots of, y’know, workers there, and there was gonna be confrontation and that
kind of thing. So we went in on a Sunday to try and mitigate any of that risk of having
a big stand off with the developers, and the workers of those developers.
We went and we were there for about an hour. We set a fire and erected a couple of flags.
After about an hour the police pulled in and they asked how long we were gonna be there. And
we said that day that our people had been here for the last 10,000 years, and
our people are gonna be here for the next 10,000. And so we kind of all laughed.
And the police officer said “so I take it you’re gonna be here for a while, then.” And they left.
And so two weeks of just holding space began. Community support started to happen.
Y’know, we started getting hot meals delivered every day, and
people started coming out to stay with us to help hold that space. And so we started
everybody kind of chipping in and helping out. And more and more tents started getting erected.
What has the response been from the Canadian government?
On August 5th there was an injunction that was granted to the developer. “Without notice”, it's called.
And the police moved in. In the morning. They said they had to come and read the injunction.
And when they did, they blocked off both accesses to the camp to prevent anybody from coming in.
They came, they read the injunction, and then this massive line of vans— it was like
15 passenger vans —just started rolling down the highway toward us. And the police barricade line
moved back and all of the cops rolled in. 100 OPP tactical unit folks got out of those cars
with big guns. And they came out and said that they’re gonna start making arrests.
And so the group of us there, we backed up onto the site, and asked anybody that wasn’t
planning on staying through any of that, they were told that they had the option to leave
if they want. And myself and a few others said “no, we’re not going anywhere.” And we stayed.
In the process of those arrests that were being made, nine of them that day,
there was one young man that was tasered in the neck and head. One young woman, who happened to
be standing there videotaping, got in the way of the line of cops that was coming. And she
was picked up and slammed into the mud. We all got rubber bullets fired at us. It was a hectic day.
I was released about five hours later. And when I got out, this woman came up to me and asked
me if I knew what was going on. On the land and on the roads down there. And I said no.
And she showed me some video of stuff that was going online right now. And at that moment
there was highway blockades, rail blockades, and roads were blocked.
And I got back down to Caledonia, just off the reserve. And folks asked myself and some of the
other people that were, y’know, at Land Back — at 1492 Land Back Lane. And they asked us what
we wanted to do. And I think we all, almost at the same time, said we wanted land back.
We wanted to go back to our camp. And so, just like we did on day one, there was about a dozen cars,
and about 30 people jumped in those cars and drove right back in the front door.
How does this dispute fit within the broader context of Haudenosaunee land claims?
Those blockades that went up was like – was that reaction to, y’know,
an ongoing criminalization of land defence. Canada and Ontario settling land claims through
court action. Through arrests. Through putting these heavy weighty bail conditions, and release
conditions on people that they can’t defend the land. To drag people from their families,
from their homes. From arrests that are being made in front of kids. It doesn’t matter for us.
Our obligation to the land is far greater than anything they could do to us.
And to take that kind of inherent right away from my grandchildren, great grandchildren... this is
their land. Who would I be to deny them that by me not making the stand that I’m making today?
Is there anything else that you want to add?
When we stand together as communities, whether that’s Indigenous folks across the country,
or with our allies in all the big cities across the country, we’re able to make our voices heard.
There’s no limits to the accomplishments.
Thanks Skyler.
We’ve now reached the end of this episode of System Fail.
If you’d like to support any of the Indigenous-led struggles we’ve discussed in this episode,
check the show description for links on how to do so.
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Godspeed, humans.