BC’s recent adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) through Bill 41 was the subject of a major corporate conference at the Vancouver Convention Centre on January 14th, 2020, focused on the expanded business opportunities that have supposedly been unlocked in the Declaration’s wake.

Contradictions are rife in the BC Supreme Court’s granting of a legal injunction against the Wet’suwet’en people and the BC government’s recent adoption of UNDRIP.

“When movement passes were introduced at P4W [Prison for Women] in 1982 or 1983, they echoed another history. Our ancestors were required to obtain passes from the RCMP or from the Indian Agent to travel off reserve. Now we required written permission to go up a flight of stairs or to move three feet from ‘A’ Range to the hospital. Our ancestors also understood that such laws were made to be broken.”
– Fran Sugar and Lana Fox

Land Back is truly a slogan whose time has come. A modern solution to a modern problem. How to boil down Indigenous sovereignty and liberation to its basic components. Memes, graffiti and tweets benefit from brevity. But the term Land Back, like everything else, has a certain ancestry.

“The colonial world is a world cut in two. The dividing line, the frontiers are shown by barracks and police stations. In the colonies it is the policeman and the soldier who are the official, instituted go-betweens, the spokesmen of the settler and his rule of oppression.” – Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1963

Indigenous anti-mining struggles, from Tahltan territory in northern British Columbia to Maya territory in Guatemala.