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| Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence |
2012 ends on a sombre note in India and in Canada.
India stood still in the last two weeks as the 23-year-old
girl battled for life, eventually losing it in a Singapore hospital. A nation
of billion plus is shamed like never before. Although I’ve been away from India
for four-and-a-half years, and I can’t claim to know and understand what’s
going on, I’m optimistic (perhaps unreasonably) that the tragedy will force
a change led by the urban youth – a small and basic but much-needed change in
the attitude toward women.
Canada is on the edge as Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence’s
hunger strike enters third week.
It is this development that has touched me in a significant
manner.
As a newcomer to Canada, I voted with my feet. I chose to come and
live in a country that I think is better than my former homeland. Not merely
because of the economic opportunities it offers, but because it is a more just
society – a society that celebrates differences and treats everyone with
the same respect.
Spence’s hunger strike shatters that belief. It tells me
that I’ve been naïve in making such assumptions; that, in fact, the Canadian system
is deeply unjust, even if the society is not.
As a newcomer to Canada, I’m hesitant to take sides. But Spence’s
fast for the rights of First Nations people strikes a chord and takes me back
two decades when as a journalist I covered environmentalist Medha Patkar’s
hunger strike fighting for the rights of India's aboriginals.
Chief Spence says “she won’t back down until the Canadian
government agrees to address First Nations’ struggles.” Mahatma
Gandhi's legacy lives on in the 21st century, too.
When I had first read A Fair Country Telling Truths about Canada John Ralston Saul a couple of years
ago I felt it was a wishful, romantic view of both the First Nations and
Canada.
Saul contends that Canada is a Metis nation shaped by the
First Nations’ concepts of egalitarianism and negotiations. However, in the
context of Spence’s fast, the central thesis of Saul’s argument acquires a new
resonance for me.
In the book’s chapter Learning
to Imagine Ourselves, he says:
Canadians carry both the Aboriginal and the European
tradition. We have become rich in part because of that Western Manichean drive.
And ideas of exclusivity and race were certainly introduced here with a
vengeance. Yet those tendencies have been limited by our other tradition. And
today the delight we take in our non-monolithic society suggests that our
Aboriginal foundations are rising to the surface. At the same time, the sense
of discomfort in the country over environmental and economic policy shows that
much of the tension between our two basic forces remains unconscious.
And so we work hard to fit our non-monolithic culture into a
revised version of our European liberal monolithic inheritance. But that
requires twisting ourselves into a knot in search of Western justifications for
non-western actions. Of course, there are European liberal elements in our way
of life, but our deep roots are here not there; they are far more indigenous
than liberal. The source of our non-monolithic – and for that matter our
egalitarian – sense of ourselves lies in the structures of the Aboriginal maze
the Europeans found here and into which they eased themselves over hundreds of
years. You have to work hard to avoid this argument. And you have to turn your
curiosity away from our local reality. Both parties were changed. Both gained.
Both lost. But our deep roots are indigenous, and there lie the most
interesting explanations for what we are and what we can be.”
Click here to read more about the campaign: Idle No More
Listen to CBC’s Jian Gomeshi’s essay: This is Q
