Idle No More – All Canadians Should Join This Native Campaign To Protect Our Environment

By Doug Draper 

“Don’t let racists break you down. Don’t let bigots break you down. Be proud of who you are.”

Idle No More march in Niagara Falls, Ontario begins with these young girls at the lead. Photo by Doug Draper

It is sad to hear anyone have to say that to a group of people in Canada – especially one that has lived in this country and on this continent for many more hundreds of years, if not thousands of years, before my European descendants arrived here. Why should people with so many more roots on this continent have to be reminded – as if they needed to be reminded once again – to show dignity if they are, in one form or another, spat on or hurled racial epithets. But unfortunately, that’s what they and all of us still have to deal with from some in this country.

Nevertheless, with those words, and with a cautionary note from an organizer to keep things peaceful, more than 250 Native people began a miles-long march this Wednesday, January 16 to the great falling waters of Niagara Falls, Ontario as part of a nation-wide day of protests by the Native-inspired Idle No More movement.

 What these Native people were marching for, as much as any other reason that may be attributed to them by the mainstream media and others, is an appeal to the current Canadian government of Stephen Harper to show more respect for the quality of our environment – for our waters and air and the forests and wildlife we all need to protect to ensure a healthy, sustainable future for ourselves.

They were marching against this Harper government’s decision to systematically dismantle and destroy some of what was the leading edge environmental protection acts in this country. These were acts passed by former Liberal and Conservative governments, to protect our waters and fisheries against what might otherwise by unabated industrial development that respects no balance between exploiting resources and environmental stewardship.

Photo by Doug Draper

Unfortunately, we now have a federal government that wants to take this country back to years before the first Earth Day in 1970 in this country and world where pure exploitation of natural resources, with little or no regard for the consequences, again becomes the rule for their tar sand and other corporate friends.

Forget about the mainstream media and Harper government hoping that the Idle No More movement gets lost in the smog of Chief Theresa Spence and her hunger strike or whatever it is, and whatever she has done with tens of millions of dollars her northern Ontario community of 1,500 has received from the federal and the provincial government.

There is something more important at stake here in the environmental protection laws this movement is fighting for. They are laws that not only protect the ecology of Native communities, but those of all of us, and they are ones the Harper government has been gutting because they get in the way of its corporate friends working the tar sands.

Photo by Doug Draper

We now have federal and provincial governments in Canada, even more than Americans have them in the United States, that are more interested in rolling back environmental protection rules to pre-Earth Day standards of 1970 for short-term economic gain. Any balance around protecting natural resources for our children’s future has been thrown into a pool of tar Harper and his oil party is prepared to pipe anywhere in the world, at any cost.

So as much as I have some questions, as many Canadians do, over the way some Native chiefs are managing tax dollars they receive for the purpose of helping impoverished people in their communities, I think we should all join our Native friends in the fight for laws that place environmental protection for now and our future ahead of short-sighted exploitation of our precious resources for a few.

We should all join the Native people we share this continent with in a campaign to keep this government, which goes out of its way to brand environmentalists as terrorists and thinks climate change is a joke, from playing Russian roulette with our children’s future.

It is worthwhile noting that the Native people who made this January 16 march to the great rushing waters of Niagara Falls, did so some 335 years after the first European explorer, Father Louis Hennepin, set eyes on the Falls, and described what he saw as “the most beautiful and, at the same time, most frightful cascade in the world.”

Clearly way to frightful to let leave the natural Falls alone without smearing them over with the asphalt and concrete tacky crap up Clifton and elsewhere along what we still try to pass off as one of the world’s great natural wonders.

Haven’t we non-Natives done a wonderful job of ginning up the place.

A quick P.S. – I heard some people interviewed on CBC radio this January 16 saying they were inconvenienced in transit due to Idle No More marches in the Greater Toronto Area. Give me a break! These are people who put up with a gridlock of their own making each day due to too many cars snagging roads and highways in the GTA. And now, all of a sudden, an extra half an hour or so getting back and forth to work is a problem?

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