“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?’”
“It seemed that all we were ever going to accomplish was organizing more bureaucratic offices. Then something happened about a year ago — Wounded Knee — and things started happening all over the country.”
The RCMP may serve as Canada’s federal police force, but in relation to Indigenous peoples it is not so much a domestic policing agency as an occupying foreign army.
A collection of videos from the current wave of Indigenous resistance
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
