The Mapuche have always believed that the world would end if they did not resist the colonizers, and have called on the spirits of their ancestors to aid them in battle.
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The Unconquered Mapuche (2005)
The Secwepemc people’s resistance to colonization is rooted in their spirituality, which is based on the balance brought by the Creator and his helper, Coyote.
How the Kanehsatà:ke Mohawk community stopped a police invasion and decommissioned the band council’s police force.
Connected to wâhkôhtowin are several other principles or laws, such as miyo-wîcêhtowin, which is the intentional cultivation of good relations, as opposed to the tolerance of just any way of relating to each other, however harmful.
Since the 2002 Woodwards Squat, non-houseless activists in Vancouver have consistently tried to co-opt “squatting” for their own self-promotional media stunts and organization-building purposes, rather than to meet the immediate needs of the houseless. This was criticized back then too.
“Capital has stolen our time from us (it needed it for production) and it has stolen our space (it needed it first as places of production, then as a system of control and repression, then to get general consensus). Now we are faced with the need to move toward expropriating our time and space.”
Strikes and occupations and riots, holy heck!
“Expropriation / occupation, I would argue, poses an even greater threat to capitalism than does property destruction alone, because the occupation opens the door to new forms of social relations, and moves beyond economic critique towards a politics of everyday life.”
“We want our children to be brought up as Métis and not as middle class pseudo-whites. These children belong in our Métis culture and nation.”
“White liberals are quite anxious to usurp our creations, as well as to embrace them as successes of the imperialist nation. But Aboriginal culture is not an appendage of white bourgeois culture.”
“Just as colonialism could only provide work for a privileged few, technology has made it so that capitalism, the final stage of exploitation, will not be able to provide workers with work.”
As Barnholden says, the riot doesn’t herald the revolution. But the riot can prefigure the structure of the revolution in its contrast of equality to democracy and of freedom in practice to the legal abstraction of human rights.
“The 1876-1877 smallpox epidemic demonstrates how Aboriginal dispossession and settler-colonialism were linked through the overlapping governmental apparatuses of territoriality and public health.”
“My role in the ‘Oka Crisis’ was inevitable because of my great-grandfather and my grandmother, my parents and the history of my community, but also because of the two governments’ intentional disregard of Natives’ legitimate protests and demands.”
“Although there are fundamentalists within both groups, it would be unfair to state that either Marxists or Native Peoples’ movements are ideologically static. Both are capable of responding to changing realities and each appears able to incorporate the thoughts of the other to some degree.”
“In an atmosphere charged with the idea of rent strike, almost all landlords perceived the danger of providing provocation for further strikes. Even those considering the purchase of rental property in Vancouver may have paused for a short period before buying. In this way, the strike’s atmosphere of tenant resistance slowed the rate of rent increases for the average Vancouver tenant.”
“Each community must follow its own distinct pattern. Central leadership only preserves and stabilizes the present capitalist system. Likewise, local councils should guard against the formation of any kind of hierarchy or bureaucracy or any distinction by age, sex, or education.”
“All things of the world are real, material things. The Creation is a true, material phenomenon, and the Creation manifests itself to us through reality. The spiritual universe, then, is manifest to Man as the Creation, the Creation which supports life.”
“In order for commodity production to develop, it was important that the communal family be destroyed. The social interrelationships in which surplus labour was appropriated collectively had to be terminated or ruptured.”
“On October 13, 1965, we held a ‘fish-in’ on the Nisqually River to try and bring a focus on our fishing fight with State of Washington… It ended with 6 Indians in jail and dazed Indian kids wondering ‘what happened?’”
