The Radical Politics of Indigenous Resistance and Survival

[para. 1]: "The most radical thing that a person can do in Canada is to be born Indigenous. Being born into any of the Mi’kmaw, Wolastoqiyik, Anishinabek or other Indigenous Nations means that  we  are  born  into  Nations  struggling  to  heal  from  the  devastating  intergenerational  effects of Canada’s long history of genocidal policies against Indigenous peoples. Multiple generations  suffered  through  scalping  laws,  forced  sterilisations,  confinement  to  reserves,  starvation  and  the  rapes,  tortures  and  murders  of  children  which  occurred  in  residential  schools.  Being  born  Indigenous  means  that  we  are  born  into  an  ongoing  battle  to  both  resist the state’s ongoing assimilatory drive and survive its institutionalised racism. Modern colonisation, like historical colonisation, includes the ongoing state and corporate theft and destruction of Indigenous lands, waters and resources, as well as the violent intervention of state police and military, on behalf of powerful corporate interests, to quell both Indigenous resistance and ultimately Indigenous survival (Palmater 2017a). One of the primary ways that the Canadian state has used to control the resistance of Indigenous peoples was to criminalise every aspect of our identity, culture and subsistence, locking us into generations of abject poverty. By criminalising our efforts to survive, Canada has educated its settler populations to see Indigenous peoples as domestic terrorists. In so doing, it has created a portrait of our quest for justice and peace as one of radical politics carried out by ‘rogue’ Indians that are inherent ‘threats to national security’ (Barrera 2014a)."