Seven Oaks Magazine.

Were I still young, innocent or academic enough to believe in things like “paradigms,” I’d say mine shifted this past weekend. For thirty rainy hours outside unceded Kamloops in unceded British Columbia’s unceded interior, the fight for Native sovereignty leapt out from the realm of white guilt, rhetorical device or empty analogy, and became a movement that I witnessed; a reality that humbled me; a project in which I was offered a small part to play. On Sunday, August 29, a group of nearly two hundred Native and non-Native demonstrators led by grassroots Secwepemc activists took to the sprawling and malignant Sun Peaks ski resort to protest the expansion of the mini-Whistler and its centerpieces – the Delta hotel and an incipient golf course. Jesus, some things never change. Seems like nothing brings anti-Indian racism to the fore like golf -- except maybe whales and fish. The Israelis pretend that they’re fighting over tombs, walls, and archaeological excavations; we pretend that all we’re after is a wicked back nine and for Luna the Orca to be back with his pod. And in both cases, massive land grabs and dispossession get wrapped in layers of indecipherable religious, legal and political horseshit to conceal the simple fact that the brown-skinned people who were there first are obstacles to the Grand Design -- Messianic colonialism or the 2010 Olympics; take your pick.

Over the course of years spent in anti-occupation politics – starting in the 1990s with East Timor and moving with Ottawa and Washington into places like Yugoslavia, Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq and Haiti – I’ve learned that, in the vast majority of cases, the “Your Backyard First” admonishment (the argument that, before dealing with these far-flung occupations, palefaces like me ought to first address our own settler status) is a cloaked, conservative quietism, as passive and stoic as it is righteous. Rarely has it been from the left, as an inducement to engage in a real campaign for indigenous sovereignty here at home. Rather, it tends to come from the right, from those trying to dissuade (or justify their abstention from) a politics of solidarity with Palestinians in particular. I think it’s clear that we’ve moved into an age of complex and interpenetrating international atrocities that renders obsolete such a simplistic view of our particular responsibilities; the government that decimated the Apaches now provides the “Apaches” from which the victims of Israel are decimated. The cyclical, cynical systems of statecraft and empire-building make of Haiti and Afghanistan new Canadian “backyards,” in which atrocities committed are indeed “our” responsibility.

But the Backyard argument wouldn’t sting so hard were it not also partially true. The facts of the case are as follows: In 1996, when I was sixteen years old and cutting my teeth in the movement agitating for an end to the Indonesian occupation of East Timor and Canada’s complicity therein, the elder Wolverine and the Ts’Peten Defenders were on trial in the wake of the police riot at Gustafsen Lake. They were right next door, being tried and sentenced in Surrey, in proceedings for which I only gave up one afternoon to observe. Whether it was obliviousness, immaturity, racism, or just the fear of facing the truly existential dilemmas raised by the realization that Home was built on the bones of others, it was easier for me to wrap my head around South East Asia than the bike trails at Whistler or the campsites at Strawberry Point.

Since that time, there have always been excuses why Native sovereignty was not a campaign that I could sink my teeth into: the eyes of the world are elsewhere; the movement isn’t visible here in the city; the educational groundwork hasn’t been laid. While I moaned and rationalized, Native and non-Native activists across the province have been engaging this provincial government and its benefactors, laying the groundwork that wasn’t there, and setting what seems to be a workable framework for putting sovereignty politics into a practical, meaningful context. This weekend’s demonstration was a feat of organization whose authors ought to be proud; meals, busses and accommodations for well over a hundred protestors came off without a hitch. Each of us there was tested in different ways: Devout anarchists (who, in the city, have raised hell for demo marshals and traffic cops alike) followed the rules and instructions handed down by the Secwepemc to a tee; everyone spent a weekend sober, in line with the mandates laid down by a Native community that has already seen enough police harassment; environmentalists cheered as the Secwepemc cut down trees to build their protest structure on the golf course. They all cooperated because that’s what they were there to do – We were there in defense of Native sovereignty, and what is sovereignty if not the right to let us know what the rules of the house are?

During the trial of the Sundancers who held off the military arm of the state at Gustafsen, I missed one chance to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Wolverine. But I was with him this weekend, and he’s not going anywhere. I’ve got no more excuses. The environmental devastation, social catastrophes and denigration of Aboriginal title that are inevitably accompanying the onset of the Olympic games here in 2010 have presented us in this province with a Chinese “crisis of opportunity.” In the six years coming, we have a chance to frame our economic and political struggles within a context that has at its base a respect for the sanctity and, more importantly, the legality of Native claims to the territory being sold off. The Olympics has given us the chance to integrate sovereignty issues clearly and meaningfully in all our work.

Last year, when the IOC were in town to see if Vancouver deserved to host the games, we met the delegation in protest, screaming “This is stolen land!” as delegates left downtown’s Queen Elizabeth Theatre. Some of us waved placards reading “Palestine 2010.” In that instant, we were trying to capture the unity of struggle that runs from B.C. to the West Bank: peoples fighting for the recognition of their mutual nationhood. Palestine, as a country, ought to have a right to host the Olympic games. And the indigenous peoples of British Columbia, as nations, ought to have the right not to.