Idle No More: Indigenous Uprising Sweeps North America
Idle No More has organized the largest mass mobilizations of indigenous people in recent history. What sparked it off and what’s coming next?
It took weeks of protests, flash mobs, letters, rallies, and thousands of righteous tweets, but Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper finally caved. He agreed to a meeting with the woman who had been petitioning him for twenty-four days, subsisting on fish broth, camped in a tepee in the frozen midwinter, the hunger striker and Chief of the Attawapiskat Theresa Spence.
No, this is not normal parliamentary process. The hunger strike was a final, desperate attempt to get the attention of a government whose relationship with indigenous people has been ambivalent at best and genocidal at worst, and force it to address their rising concerns. The meeting, set for this Friday, January 11, is unlikely to result in any major changes to Canada’s aboriginal policy. Yet the mobilization around Chief Spence’s hunger strike has already grown to encompass broader ideas of colonialism and our collective relationship to the land. The movement has coalesced under one name, one resolution: Idle No More.
Closed-Door Negotiations Spark a Movement
Phi Beta Iota: Open Source Everything (OSE) and M4IS2 will be resisted by governments but are inevitable. The corrupt and the high and mighty are the last to realize their positions are untenable. Would it not be interesting if someone wrapped C-4 around the nose wheels of every corporate jet at Westchester Airport and its Connecticutt counterparts? If snipers began taking corporate jets down with armor shots into the engines before the airplanes started rolling? Neither the government nor the corporations that are selling the public out for short-term game have a clue what asymmetric warfare and an armed militia mean. We pray that non-violence will prevail, but most forget that Gandhi and Martin Luther King both believes that as much as non-violence is preferable to violence, violent resistance is preferable to persistent oppression. The powers that be can listen and attend to these weak signals, and cut their losses, or they can hold out, and lose it all.
NOTE: Robert Steele is available to serve the President as a mediator and omsbudsman without portfolio. President Obama desperately needs someone close to him that actually understands all this stuff, is an absolute patriot, and can tell him the truth and nothing but the truth at all times. “The truth at any cost lowers all other costs.” The USA is unraveling at speed, and President Obama does not seem to realize that nothing he is doing is going to stop that unraveling, only accelerate it. Steele will not waste his time in a teepee outside the White House — the President has to want to get it right.
See Also:
Graphic: Preconditions of Revolution in the USA Today
2008 ELECTION 2008: Lipstick on the Pig [each chapter free online]
2010 INTELLIGENCE FOR EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainability
