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| Idle No More |
"Word-Dreamer" blog is a supporter of the Idle No More movement in Canada. I am dedicated to the preservation of the identity of our First Nations people and, above all, to the idea of establishing an Aboriginal nation with full sovereignty rights. Assimilation means death to our Aboriginal peoples and to Canada itself. It's in my view tantamount to genocide.
I hope I live to see the day of a great Aboriginal nation not assimilated but equal to Canada and other nations, proud, sovereign, spiritually and culturally great. I feel privileged to be a non-indigenous ally.
8 comments:
And I feel privileged to know someone who would post this.
yeah, Conrad,
I with J. B-R
assimilation into
any-thing means
... extinction
read Haznoy's book ...
he posits AND shows that:
the Hebrew Scriptures are,
among many other things,
a warning, an history, a road-map
of this very thing...
what we Americans did to our
Indigenous Peoples in the name of
our brand of Religion-Nationalism
well, we bought into a Bill of Goods
that destroyed what (American Indian) Spirituality
we had...
et ceteras
hey dude. i was going to write you a note of appreciation about your work. but i saw you knocked me off your blog 'roll' . i was thinking its to do with the fact i never wrote to you about your book; i sure hope not. if that was the case then you'd be acting awfully spiteful or something. after all the praise you lavished on my 'work and stance'. but gosh you are so conservative im not surprised. i never wanted to be critical to your work as i think you are on the way. to learning to write. your work still talks about rather than shows and enacts what you are drivingor gettting at. your are a good about writer and a fledgling shower. a lot of them verses in yr book re'minded me of Hopkins like effects but without the cause behind his stuff which makes it what it is. you See Mister Dio poetry is a quantum and yr work's not hit the necessary quanta to be jumping like little bean particles. anyhow, i must say i was disappointed you knocked me off yr bloggy roll. but what the hell a man who praises my work to the roof is bound to be hurt not to disappointed i didn write back to say his work was not quite equal to the match of wit and energy poetry requires. so it goes. i also think a lot of criticism you level at others oought to stop as it does not go nowwhere anymore. you write often like a fudgy fuddyduddybore whos not happy with what you read as its not what You imagIne and Think writing oughto'r be.
all this comment moderation is also a load of pretentious selfinflated hogwash.
the code on this one is
mergetm
dig
hey Duffy
I still think you're numero uno in the Canada avant-garde and shall restore Dada Duffy to its rightful place in my blog roll. I wasn't trying to be spiteful: honestly. There's still a little deleuze left in me like textdesiremachines work best when they break down...
And why should a blog roll be any different.
Always nice to hear from you (and a bit of a privilege, too). But gosh the barbs from the fringe do sting sometimes. I appreciate you keeping it real.
Conrad:
I'm with you in spirit on the issue of native peoples.
The whole history of the world over the last six or so centuries has been about the imperialistic suppression of native culture and population. That was certainly true in America, and continues to this day.
But in a pragmatic sense, we can't go back. We can't undo the last five centuries of history, and "make it right" once more. Mayan and Toltec and Inca Civilizations are GONE. They aren't coming back. History has overtaken them--overtaken their religion, their science, their art, their gene pool. We can't stop it. And it does no good to cultivate a feeling of guilt and remorse and reparation. We are of our own time, and must behave in ways that honor our present.
Personally, I don't feel responsible for what my distant forebears may have done, say, in India or in Eastern Canada. The suppression of indigenous culture has happened. We can keep it alive, or encourage people whom it belongs to to keep it alive, but we can't recreate the conditions in which it thrived.
Should we create a Native Indian state, say, out of North and South Dakota, Montana and Wyoming? How could that be done? Obviously it's never going to happen. History follows force and dominance. Those forces may be evil, but they prevail.
I don't know what the answer is.
Curtis,
thank you for your reply. I guess I don't see (nor likely ever to see) our First Nations peoples as having been extinguished by history. And if they are visibly present so must the conditions of their own survival be safeguarded and enshrined in a country's laws. I like the idea of an Aboriginal nation because it's beautifully utopian and beautifully just. I still believe in our better natures--despite the world's march of "force and dominance" --and would like to see the rise of something as incredibly unlikely and helplessly unsustainable and unworkable as a Nation within a Nation if only to prove that the "forces of evil" (and historical forces have always been mostly evil and attributable always to the human)can be tamed: in the way, at least, that I've always been attracted to transcendence because, in Tertullian's sense, to believe it is the worst sort of absurdity imaginable. I like a belief that dares to oppose the world's absurdity with a beautiful absurdity of its own.
And perhaps the rise of an Aboriginal nation may coincide with the rise of a world committed to protecting and cherishing the environment. Perhaps the Jewish writers got it all wrong: perhaps the world's really populated by water, land and cloud spirits and European settlers killed them as handily as they've killed indigenous cultures based on them to make room for their own ogreish monotheism. And as certain Protestant sects have rightly maintained, Capitalism was god's only really begotten offspring.
And perhaps nothing really can be extinguished and left for dead and GONE as long as there's one more spirit to oppose--as beautifully absurd and unsustainable and unworkable a notion as it is-- any & every ogreish Pragmatism that shows its face.
Conrad:
Here in California, the big issue with the tribes is the rapid expansion of gambling resorts.
People with little Native American heritage, and often tiny fractions of their blood, will be set up to lobby the state for "reservation status" on some tract of land, in order to set up huge casinos, which then exploit the surrounding region. These casinos are usually backed with organized crime money, and even in some cases run by them as well.
These are not examples of independence or a revitalization of Native American culture, but brazen, shameless attempts to legalize gambling. And with the gambling, which is bad enough by itself, you get drinking and prostitution and loan sharking, etc.
This is NOT the "beautiful absurdity" you're talking about, of course. But it's the reality. There are tiny reservations around the state, but the unpleasant fact is that their inhabitants exploit their "environment" in the same way we do, through over-cutting, over-fishing, drilling and despoiling. The argument is that they can damn well do what they like with their land. Autonomy is fine if it leads to good practice; but when it's just a pretext for the old bad practices, then there's ultimately despair.
Your version of a "beautiful absurdity," of course, an enlightened model of a "green" culture, in harmony with nature and other men, isn't what is happening. That's part of what I mean by not being able to "go back" to an earlier time. When the native peoples roamed the plains, hunting buffalo, it all made some kind of sense. But living in tight little reservations in the 21st Century? Not the same thing at all.
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