Live! from Occupied Northern Turtle Island a.k.a. KKKanada!

(image via Ben & Jerrys)

“British officials considered Treaty 13 a “confirmatory” purchase for lands that now comprise, in part, the City of Toronto and surrounding area. In 1787, John Johnson, the Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, held a council at the Bay of Quinte with the Anishinaabeg. There, he distributed gifts in recognition of their loyalty during the American Revolution and proposed the sale of lands near the Carrying Place at the mouth of the Humber River. While the Anishinaabeg accepted these presents to confirm their ongoing alliance, the Crown interpreted them as proof of payment for the land.

But in the 1790s, colonial officials realized that the 1787 “surrender” did not meet their own legal requirements for a treaty. The “Deed of Sale” was blank (a common occurrence), with neither specific boundaries nor a price. The signatures of Anishinaabeg were on an entirely separate sheet of paper, and one of these signatories, Wabakayne (Waabikwanaye), had recently been murdered by a British soldier in Toronto. Doubts about the validity of the first agreement and the region’s growing importance led colonial officials to push for subsequent negotiations.

In an effort to confirm the agreement, the Anishinaabe were offered fishing rights and reserve lands, and the Crown expanded the tract to 250,000 acres, expecting the community to accept $1 in return. Of course, the Mississauga did not and challenged the 1805 “purchase” over the next two centuries, resulting in a land claim settled in 2010. Several additional claims are outstanding, including for the Toronto Islands.

While the Mississaugas continues to assert rights and some jurisdiction in Toronto, the city has also become home to the largest, most diverse Indigenous population in Canada, with some estimates suggesting that over 70,000 Indigenous people live and work in the city.” (Yellowhead Institute)

What is a land acknowledgements unless they recognize KKKlanada and its settlers active role in Indigenous land left, displacement, cultural erasure, structural violence, forced labor, increased police violence and targeting, residential schools aka death camps, the building of pipelines and dams, extraction of resources, poisoning of rivers and lakes, destruction of sacred lands, the theft and murder of Indigenous women and two spirit people, mass violence and killing of Indigenous children and the resulting unmarked mass graves, the foster care system designed as a tool for the further theft and erasure of Indigenous children and life , forced sterilizations, withholding of access to adequate and healthy food, water, air, medical care, and not to mention how this terrorist settler colonial government has broken every single treaty they have signed with Indigenous peoples over the centuries? Nothing good is built on genocide and land theft, KKKlanda like the rest of the settler colonies is that nothing good. Right now as we speak the klanadian governing class is further militarizing the arctic region in “fear” of russia and china but mostly to secure their claws deeper into the minerals becoming more accessible due to the melting of the ice and the war over resources in the north and the larger world. Settler colonialism and imperialism has not died yet!

As the zionist entity continues to commit genocide against the Palestinian people in order to further steal Indigenous Palestinian land, a genocide that the KKKlanadian government fully supports, arms, and commits in collaboration with the Israeli state, they also continue their reign of terror and occupation against Indigenous people on their lands here in Turtle Island. In occupied Palestine, the Israeli Occupation Forces are the real terrorists committing brutal acts of genocide and here it is the Royal Mounted Canadian Police, Toronto Police Services and every other government service acting as occupational forces, who are the real terrorists. Indigenous resistance to settler colonialism and racist capitalism is not terrorism, it is resistance, resistance to continued erasure, oppression and repression under occupation. In order for us to properly acknowledge Indigenous peoples and their lands we must deeply inspect our roles as settlers on this land and how very similarly to the Israeli settlers in occupied Palestine, we too occupy these lands, we too are enabling settler colonial expansion and all the benefits we receive here come at the cost of Indigenous blood, dignity and rightful sovereignty here as the first nations of these lands. Many of us here, especially racialized folks may not have come here by choice, whether the reason be due to our own displacement and enslavement from our Indigenous lands, or war, famine, disaster and many other forms of warfare of Western induced interference and violence, or the false promise of a better life and economic stability and surety, but nonetheless we are here, and because we are here I believe we have a responsibility to Indigenous peoples of these lands we occupy, to assist them in their over 500 year continued resistance to occupation by imperial forces, the same imperial forces occupying many of our own homelands.

Now more than ever we must understand our place and role in this struggle. No land acknowledgement can atone for the crimes that have been committed by this government and its settlers. So instead i offer a call to resist, a call to be in true solidarity with Indigenous peoples and their resistance because until this land is free and every other piece of land is free there will never be peace, nevermind peace, in the words of ancestor Kwame Ture, peace is the white man’s word, liberation is ours. All across the globe Indigenous peoples are fighting against colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, and every other form of physical, mental, emotional and spiritual occupation and warfare. From the water, land and air defenders across Turtle Island in Wet’suwet’en, Grassy Narrows, and Standing Rock, to the Axis of Resistance in Western Asia in Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, to the resistance in Kanaky and the Philippines, to the resistance in the Sahel and the Alliance of Sahel States, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, to Kenya, and Nigeria, to Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Cuba, and to Martinique and Ayiti where Haitian people are currently under KKKlanadian occupation amongst other imperial occupiers and to everywhere else occupation exists. We must support all resistance to occupation wherever they are and struggle to bring a better world into being. Across Turtle Island there are Native, water and land protectors, blocking pipelines, dams, railways, and every other instrument of colonial occupation and extraction, we must assist them in their fight whether that be by physically putting our bodies on the line, by providing financial, emotional, or spiritual support, and/or by educating ourselves about the histories and realities of this occupation and all occupations and putting that education into action by educating others and resisting against all forms of occupations through boycotts, divestments and sanctions of any state, company, organization or individual who is dependent on the theft of Indigenous life.

(image via Ben & Jerrys)

LAND BACK NOW

SHUT DOWN KKKLANADA

!ALIGN!

!MOBILIZE!

!ORGANIZE!

!EDUCATE!

!AID!