August 15: Reflections from The Valley [Surviving Canada]

August 15: Reflections from The Valley

There are many places like this one, overlooking the village of Tulita & the Deh Cho (here in the Sahtu region) leading north downstream. The view encompasses such an expanse; The river goes off until it almost disappears into a dark outline of a mountain range. That range puts a dark dividing line, another outline of the peaks along the middle of a yet further range, one that appears from behind the first. This second range is much lighter to the eye from here, indicating that I am looking several hundred if not more miles in this direction.

The following article was written with pen and paper while I sat at the edge of the Deh Cho (Mackenzie) at Tulita (Fort Norman), where the Great Bear River flows down from the Great Bear Lake, and from the village of Deliné (Franklin). This article is not based on any research, other than the influence of previous research on my thoughts and feelings. It is rather then, a set of thoughts and feelings I was somewhat overwhelmed with that, after minor editing on screen, I have decided to share-- even if it is a personal rant about my primarily emotional reactions to Denendeh and the beautiful Valley. If you choose to reproduce it, I ask this disclaimer be included.

August 15: Reflections from The Valley
(penned August 15, Tulita, Sahtu Region, Denendeh.)

I walk to the edge of the Big River and look instead up river south-- where the water glistens a thin bright yellow line to the edge of the visible earth, the whole body of water holds together with a ribbon of green lush plant life on both shores. I look across to the west and see plants that grow from the opposite shore into mountains. And behind this, a village that (from a different vantage point entirely) gives way to rolling green earth out towards the east.

Of course, the immensity of it all, not to mention its total beauty, is awe inspiring. But what tears me just a little (to be honest) and shocks me deeply is another thought that, in every imaginable way, applies here as it does truly nowhere else. Everything I see here is truly Indian Country.

Before I continue with that thought, let me only clarify that the struggles of every single nation for the rights of the earth to be seen as human rights (because they are and inseparably so at that) are not only just, but immediate and no less urgent than any national struggle in the world today-- indeed, for all life on the earth, indigenous self-determination cannot wait anywhere despite common “wisdom” from progressives in the heart of the settler-state.

For myself, Denendeh here, as I feel it, has something I have never experienced before. You cannot look in any direction-- even when you can see as far as I can at this moment into every crevasse of the Valley, it seems-- and know there is a giant settler metropolis. Everywhere is a land that has never been under any majority stewardship but Dené (It is many hundred miles north to Inuvialuit territory).

Surely that, if nothing else, should end the discussion. Human beings have supposedly evolved, we have learned that the process of removing a people from their homeland is wrong. Yet, rather than being by far the richest per capita nation on the planet, in many ways Denendeh remains one of the most suffering.

While south in Wrigley, one man decided to explain it to myself and two men (one Englander, the other from Japan) passing through paddling the Big River.
“Our resources have been stolen while we remain stuck the poorest you can see. Now they want to build this pipeline, which will bring people, drugs and alcohol, and they will steal more of our resources while leaving us with a destroyed earth…” He went into some detail, smiled and then walked away.

The pipeline will not only be an environmental nightmare, it will also create the infamous “facts on the ground” that once and for all reduce the Dené to a minority in their own homeland-- just as Canada, The United States, small pox, The “Indian Wars” & the mis-named Riel Rebellion, and last but not least-- residential schools and their twin coping mechanism of firewater alcohol have done to every other nation on Turtle Island.

Time does not exist for me on this river bank (and it has no bearing on the sun anyhow), but it feels as if time could be running out here in Denendeh. Soon, without massive clarion calls to the contrary north and south, “camps” (really, medium sized-towns) of up to 1300 transient and “temporary” workers will pop up along the valley, right as the 1300 km “right of way” rips through the largest almost untouched areas in the territory called Canada. In some areas, villages of a few hundred will be dwarfed almost overnight. These are lands that have not been “seismic cut to death”; no area in Alberta, BC or even Yukon of this magnitude has truly avoided this kind of “progress”. Despite the promises of Imperial Oil and Canada to the contrary, these workers aren’t going anywhere. What is going instead is the animal population, the north as it exists, and a place where industrialism and capitalism do not rule but instead the life cycle dominates. The pipeline only sets the ball in motion; the destruction will not stop or slow down once it begins. Communities throughout the Valley (and all of Denendeh) are broken badly. They are socially maimed and recovering from the pain of a colonialism process mere decades young. However, they are not dying; they need to be killed to die.

Though many people are alcoholics, many others fight with all they have for their communities. While some can’t say much good about life, many others can speak beautifully of life in their traditional language and expect to be understood. It is something to see nations who need to have simultaneous translation at every public meeting, where it is often the main language of conversation over a barbecue held outside in the very hot summer sun, or where one could just as easily shop in the same language (if the store decides to be open).

Canada still speaks the language of extinction by policy and fiat: the need for all nations to “extinguish” themselves remains the strategy of the Crown. What the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Northwest Company could only start, Imperial Oil and Shell may well complete.

“The reality is, money talks and all of these changes are inevitable,” so I was told by a white man who gave me a ride while hitching here in Denendeh. It is jarring, when one thinks about it, that his words are the same rationalisation we were all fed about why we should not bother opposing the war on Iraq. Given all the attention I have just paid to speaking, what this man spoke to me will be correct-- so long as we in the south remain silent.

The question so often put forward about how solidarity works on these questions revolves around the “Aboriginal Pipeline Group” consortium that some of the leaders who signed their regions of Denendeh into extinguishment have created for a 1/3rd share in any pipeline through the Valley. To me answers are few, but have a simple start. 30 years ago, those who led the change in consciousness within the Dené Nation did so in the belief that Canadian progressives who professed their belief in the rights of the Vietnamese people to self-determination would do the exact same in regards to the Dené people. That, sadly, has not proved the case for the settler consciousness. Some, though not all, of yesterday’s young Dené upstarts are today’s would-be pipeline elites-- clamouring for a share and working with yesterday’s southern white lefties who are often today’s northern white administrators. It is common to see those who yesterday came to “help” today working for the Canadian government (getting paid handsomely) and blocking Dené moves to self-determination at every chance. Having been those who first cared because of he apprearance of colonialism have now used that consciousness to teach the colonizer how to make themselves look more reasonable and human, all the while pursuing the same policies in regards to the land and resources themselves as Canada always has.

If Southern Canadians had stood for the rights of Dené and Inuvialuit not to “extinguish their land claims first” before stealing and destroying their land, but instead for all nations to actually control their land and instead, in effect, called for the extinguishment of Canada’s claim to these lands, would not the argument for today helping Imperial Oil and their junior partners destroy the earth seem, well, oddly placed? Are not those who would invoke guilt over standing against the pipeline the very ones who should stand guilty of collaborating in a continued genocide of a people through different means?

The survival of this region and a chance for all of not to be ignorant of the actions of Ottawa in permanently snuffing out, or “extinguishing” a people will be determined in the next couple of years. There are more people across Denendeh questioning their “leaders” of all ages, some youth some elders; some organized and others still on their own. It’s time, perhaps, that we in the south questioned our leaders when it comes to colonialism, the supremacy of oil and the right to a healthy planet. The results, either way, are entirely predictable.