Native fight over mining goes beyond treaty rights TheStar.com - News -
Native fight over mining goes beyond treaty rights
June 07, 2008
Stephen Scharper
"Politicians, guided by the power of the privileged class, promise that
the dream of perpetual affluence is still possible. It is not. For
millions of human beings, impoverished and separated from their
indigenous relationship with the land, the proof is clear: Development
as defined by colonial nations of this world is merely theft and murder
and when we bring it on ourselves, it is suicide."
So wrote an imprisoned but impassioned Bob Lovelace, former chief of the
Ardoch Algonquin First Nation, who was freed last month after protesting
mining on traditional Ardoch lands.
"If you go camping often or spend time in the woods," Lovelace
continues, "you know we live in a very quiet world, a world of murmurs."
Yet many of us in North America have become "autistic" to the natural
world and have to re-attune ourselves to the whisperings of non-human
nature, notes "geologian" Thomas Berry.
"What it means to be human comes out of the environment," Lovelace
observes.
"When you look at a map of Europe," he notes in an interview, "you don't
see a square all cut up." Instead, national boundaries are often formed
around ecosystems, as was the case with pre-contact maps of North and
South America. We have to recapture a sense of our rootedness in our
lands and waters in order to be healthy as a species.
Lovelace, who teaches aboriginal studies at Queen's University, warns
that if we neglect our eco-systems, the results will be "cataclysmic."
Signs of cataclysm are already visible through increased natural
disasters such as- earthquakes, tsunamis, and typhoons.
It was this understanding of the interrelationship of humans with nature
that in part prompted Lovelace and six members of the Kitchenuhmaykoosib
Inninuwug (KI) to take a stand against uranium drilling in their
homelands by Frontenac Ventures Corporation.
Last February, Lovelace was sentenced to six months in jail for his
protest. He challenged the Ontario Mining Act of 1873, which stipulates
that anyone 18 or older can obtain a prospector's licence and stake
mineral claims throughout the province. Lovelace, declaring that the act
provided no protection for aboriginal lands, sought to reveal the
"colonialism" that accompanied access to resources on native land.
Lovelace has been buoyed by support from religious leaders across the
province. Such support dovetails nicely with what Lovelace calls
"transactional democracy," which begins with grassroots environmental
concerns and awareness, involving people "in their kitchens" and not
just in provincial or federal legislatures.
As this incident reveals, our mainstream approach to land use is still
overwhelmingly marked by exploitation for economic gain. Lovelace is
forcing us to confront the baleful legacy of a land that is proving
devastating to the planet's climate, leaving vast swaths of our
ecosystems, as well as impoverished children, as veritable road kill.
Lovelace's cause concerns not only aboriginal rights, but also changing
entrenched laws that perpetrate outdated values. They open up not only a
path to new legislation, but to new land ethics as we confront the
ecological and social challenges of the 21st century.
Stephen Scharper is co-author of The Green Bible.
stephen.scharper@utoronto.ca.
