North Shore of Lake Superior
My drive along the north shore of Lake Superior was stunning. It was a cloudy day. Not good for scenic vistas, but great for the fantastic colours of autumn foliage. I was in heaven. At least so it felt. I made many stops to photograph what I saw. And it was never enough. The land was beautiful. As John Denver said, “It’s almost heaven.”
In the film Colonization Road, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, a writer and academic says we are not having the right conversations in Canada because even when we talk about reconciliation we don’t talk about land. According to indigenous people and the European settlers and their political representatives, the treaties were about land. Land was the foundation of it all. How would the land be shared? That was the nub and too many people have forgotten this. As she said,
“We are talking about reconciliation, but we are not talking about land. We are talking about murdered and missing indigenous women and girls but we are not talking about the land. Where the root cause of every issue that indigenous people are facing right now in Canada right now comes from dispossession and erasure and it comes from the system of settler colonialism that keeps us in an occupied state.”
As Hayden King said in the film,
” Y’know the land is the basis of the Canadian economy. Indigenous peoples have been kicked off the land, dispossessed of it, to make way for the Canadian economy…The objective is to get rid of the Indian. And traditionally the method has been very overt. ‘We’re going to eradicate your culture, we’re going to eradicate your language, we’re going to get you off the land. We’re going to separate you from your family and your communities. We have today a different form of trying to kill the Indian. Canada has been very sneaky with the institutional and legal tools it’s used to kind of push the native people out of the way.”
Teika Newton made a very another important point. She said,
“The creation of Canada is something that has been very violent. It’s been violent consistently towards indigenous women and it’s been very violent consistently towards the land. They didn’t see the poetry in our language. They didn’t see our children and our old people as being valuable. They saw resources. They saw money.”
As the Eagles said in that magnificent song, aptly titled ‘The Last Resort,”
Some rich men came and raped the land
Nobody caught ’em
Put up a bunch of ugly boxes
And Jesus people bought ’em
They called it paradise
The place to be.
They watched the hazy sun
Sinking in the sea.
Many indigenous people, like Chief Al Hunter, believe the Canadian extractive economy has mined the natural resources with few long-term benefits, particularly to indigenous people. It is a boom and bust economy. As he said, reversing an old cliché, “It’s short-term gain for long term pain.”