My call to revolution

How to prevent native uprising - Winnipeg Free Press

This article by Douglas Bland speaks to me of a militaristic view of the relationship between the First Peoples and the Rest of Us, following the theme of his book, “Uprising”. http://koningskomments.blogspot.com/2010/07/uprising-by-douglas-bland.html

As I am sure I have said elsewhere, I believe it is only because of the restraining voices of First Peoples Elders, plus the damage we have inflicted over the years on the self-confidence and self-respect of First Peoples brothers and sisters, that the young people have not become more militant during recent years.

Meanwhile, the past week’s media revelations re the Attawapiskat situation brings before us the appalling conditions faced by First Peoples youth in their homelands, so I ask how you could blame them if they begin to lash out at us. To date, their “lashing out” is lateral – they hit upon themselves with suicide and drug use, and upon one another with the violence we see reported regularly within First Nations communities. These are the actions of people who have no hope. We are the criminals for allowing those situations to continue, year after year, unabated because we think we don’t know what to do, so we simply pretend it isn’t there.

But there are things we can do. We can become aware of fellow human beings whose ancestors have lived in these lands we know as Canada since time immemorial (and please don’t come back with the old saw about “they came across the Bering Sea”. That’s a cop-out and you know it.)

Canada has a history that reaches back into the centuries, and we need to know that history. Canadian history did not start with the arrival of the Vikings, or Columbus, or Champlain. At least by the time we reach Champlain, we can see that he recognized he was in the homeland of people who were resident here before his time.

But I have been saying these things ad nauseum for many years, and I’m still having to say it – so I don’t know why I bother if no one is listening.

But I keep holding onto hope – hope that one day, enough people are going to hear about this reality that they will begin to study, ask questions and find out about the history we share with the First Peoples in whose homeland we now dwell. I have hope that enough of us will begin to sit down with First Peoples and begin to listen to them – their stories, their history, their lives, and I pray they have the guts to ask First Peoples to help us to find a way to bring our relationship back into balance, so that each of us sees the other as fully equal
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That won’t happen, however, unless we can admit that we don’t know everything, we are not superior to First Peoples, and that we really need to ask them, with respect and true regret for past mistakes, to let us be their friends. That calls for a massive change in our thinking, in our thought processes – such a huge change that it is in effect revolutionary.

We are the ones that have to engage in revolution - a revolutionary change in our thinking about our relationship with the First Peoples of Turtle Island..  I invite you to think about it.