The new prime minister promised to take immediate action on climate change and also to amend the recently passed (and universally criticized) Anti-Terrorism Act, a piece of legislation that, as a leaked Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) memo would reveal, specifically targeted Indigenous and environmentalists’ resistance to development projects. In contrast to Harper, Trudeau promised a new kind of politics - “sunny ways,” as he put it.
Young, social media-savvy female Indigenous activists led a kind of Canadian version of the Arab Spring, called Idle No More. In response to Bill C-45, a massive outpouring of Indigenous opposition throughout the country took the form of protests, teach-ins and traditional Native dances in shopping malls across the country. Along with muzzling federal scientists and librarians, and putting into place new controversial anti-terror legislation, this was part of Harper’s strategy of transforming Canada into an “energy superpower” or a “ petro-state.” This materially threatened the traditional hunting and fishing practices of Indigenous peoples across Canada. In fact, in the same year, the Harper government passed one of many omnibus bills, Bill C-45, that, among other things, eliminated protections for freshwater across the country. Chief Spence wanted to discuss the abysmal conditions on her reserve, and indeed, across the country’s Indigenous communities, including substandard housing stock and lack of potable water.
In response, Spence undertook a hunger strike to secure a “nation-to-nation” meeting with the prime minister and the queen’s representative to Canada, the governor general.
In 2012, Harper refused repeated requests to meet with then-Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence. Since forming his first government in 2015, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has promised a very different kind of politics from that of his predecessor, Stephen Harper, who made clear that he had little or no interest in engaging constructively with First Nations peoples. In these latter countries, neoliberalism has given rise to proto-fascist politics as manifested in (among other things) the brutal crackdown on the Water Protectors at Standing Rock over the Dakota Access Pipeline, and violence against Indigenous peoples in the course of the accelerated development of the Amazon Basin, respectively. Now, however, in the context of a turbo-charged neoliberalism, we witness an intensification of these extractivist practices that disproportionately impact Indigenous communities and their ancestral hunting grounds and waters - not unlike what we have seen, for example, in the United States and Brazil. Like the U.S., Canada has a long, ignominious record of abusing, locking up and betraying promises to Indigenous peoples. The Canadian state has always, if only tacitly, understood this relationship between authoritarianism, resource extraction, colonialism and what Karl Marx called “primitive accumulation” - the looting and pillaging of wealth. In a sense, the writing was already on the wall when, in the immediate aftermath of the election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, an article appeared on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s website acknowledging that the former military man’s politics were profoundly authoritarian, but the extractivist (and therefore anti-Indigenous) platform on which he was elected “could mean fresh opportunities for Canadian companies looking to invest in the resource-rich country.” But to what extent is this reality rather than mere appearance? Indigenous Climate Action via FacebookĬanada seems to have bucked the global trend toward authoritarianism that we have seen from the U.S. Indigenous youth demand that Canada’s minister of energy and mining meet with Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs.
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