Idle No More 101

The engineers were Nina Wilson, Sheelah Mclean, Sylvia McAdam, and Jessica Gordon. It was a response to Canada’s Bill C-45, which overhauled the Navigable Waters Protection Act and removed protections for many waters that go through First Nations. Changing the act literally moves the emphasis of the protection—it morphs from protecting the waterways to protecting the navigation on those waterways. Now, instead of 30-some thousand lakes being protected under the old law, only 97 lakes will be protected. As MP Kirsty Duncan eloquently states, “The days when Canadians take an endless abundance of fresh water for granted are numbered.”

These mobilized Native people wanted to ensure that children two, three, and twelve generations from now would have clean water. The children that will benefit from the Native mobilization are not just Native children; it’s for all children. Lakes and rivers tend to be either clean or dirty for Native and non-Native children alike.

It’s not a Native thing or a white thing, it’s an Indigenous worldview thing. It’s a “protect the Earth” thing. For those transfixed on race, you’re missing the point. Idle No More simply wants kids of all colors and ethnicities to have clean drinking water. It’s also not a “Canada” or “United States” thing. Multinational corporations do not care about borders. Despite legislation to intended to prevent pollution, corporations pollute freely with almost complete impunity, and our children are the ones that suffer. We likewise should not care about borders—we are mobilizing on both sides because we understand that we do affects one another.

We will continue to aggressively organize and be Idle No More about the attempts to destroy our sacred lands, whether its Keystone XL Pipeline or Tar Sands Mining in Canada. We will be Idle No More on SSA Marine’s attempts to create a deep-water shipping terminal for water and air poisoning dirty coal in the Lummi waters near Pugent Sound, WA, or any disrespect to our lands.

We’re not going anywhere, we’re not going to be silent. We’re Idle No More!

It’s About: Protecting Women. Similar to the sustained, capitalistic effort to exploit and pillage the Earth, the carnivorous, capitalistic nature has also exploited and abused women since the founding of both America and Canada. As Linda E. Speth and Alison Duncan Hirsch explain in Women, Family, and Community in Colonial America: Two Perspectives, America’s first marriage and property laws, or ‘coverture,’ stipulated that married women did not have separate legal existences from their husbands.

Indeed, a married woman was a dependent and could not generally own her own property or control her own earnings: “Once she married she became a legal nonentity,” they wrote. “Her husband not only assumed her legal privileges and duties but certain rights to her property as well.”

And that was for white women living with relative privilege. Obviously, for Native women, Black women, and women of any other ethnicity that were unfortunate enough to live in the United States, it was much worse.

That pattern of condescension and indeed hatred for women has continued until the present. From the 1834 ruling in Bradley v. State of Mississippi which affirmed a man’s “right” to subject his wife to “moderate chastisement, in cases of great emergency, and to use salutary restraints in every case of misbehavior” to the Indian Health Service’s history of forced tubal ligations of Native women, the United States has shown a consistent trajectory of hatred and destruction for Native women.

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