A piece authored by Shantal Otchere for Feminist Shift
What began as a meme has become a rallying cry. Following a long history of Indigenous resistance against stolen land, demonstrations, protests and occupations across the country – amid international calls for racial equality – have emerged under the banner of “Land Back.”
From the CN rail blockade erected by the Mohawk Nation earlier this year to protests of the Coastal GasLink pipeline on Wet’suwet’en territory, the Land Back movement has lifted land claim disputes and First Nations rights to greater prominence. Even – in the case of local Indigenous activists – forcing movement by officials.
Nearly three months after a group of Indigenous members of the Kitchener Waterloo community began a Land Back occupation in Victoria Park, they’ve gained the attention of city and regional councillors, the Grand River Conservation authority and the public at large.
The cities of Kitchener, Waterloo and Cambridge, along with the Grand River Conservation Authority concluded a series of meetings discussing an action plan for reconciliation with Indigenous communities in August.
They plan to appoint a consultant, or group of consultants, to help address the needs of Indigenous peoples. Only, five years earlier, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) released a report detailing 94 recommendations for actions to accomplish that very thing. Among them, “repudiation of concepts used to justify European sovereignty over Indigenous lands and peoples.”
Since the TRC released its report in 2015, several legal actions denying Indigenous peoples the right to protest developments on their territories have been served to activists who stood in the way of private companies seeking to displace communities or claim ownership of properties purchased out from underneath Indigenous land owners.
“80% of injunctions filed against First Nations by corporations were granted,” found a report released by the Yellowhead Institute, which reviewed over 100 injunction cases involving First Nations communities. While, “81% of injunctions filed against corporations by First Nations were denied.”
What do you do when the laws that currently govern your community, laws that didn’t exist until long after you had established your own laws and sovereignty, prevent your rightful access to the lands your people have lived on since time immemorial?
For First Nations communities across the country, including in Kitchener-Waterloo, Caledonia and B.C., you demand to be heard.
In an effort to elevate voices from Indigenous communities, The Feminist Shift reached out to Indigenous leaders to discuss the impact of land dispossession, for their thoughts on Land Back movements and what true reconciliation looks like. These leaders include
- Amy Smoke – the co-organizer of the Kitchener Waterloo Land Back movement,
- Dr. Eva Jewell – Assistant Professor at Ryerson University and Associate Fellow at the Yellowhead Institute,
- Jean Becker – Senior Director of Indigenous Initiatives at the University of Waterloo, and
- Tammy Webster– teacher and Anishnabeg Outreach Board President.
What does “Land Back” mean to you?
Amy Smoke: It’s not just land back. It’s culture back, language back, ceremony back, water back. We have lost so much. The erasure of Indigenous knowledge, Indigenous Two-Spirit knowledge. So, Land Back is sort of reclaiming all of that and revitalizing all of that.
[On the Victoria Park, Kitchener Land Back occupation] I would love to give this all back to Six Nations. This isn’t a land claim.
Dr. Eva Jewell: Throughout the last 152 years now that Canada has been a country and even before then, since colonialism started, newcomers have landed in what we know as North America today and Turtle Island, there’s been a disagreement and a discrepancy between how land is to be shared. When treaties were being made, when agreements were made between my ancestors — Anishinaabe – and other indigenous people’s ancestors and newcomers or settlers, there were agreements that were made that did not mean the giving up of land. There’s a lot of coercion. There’s a lot of mistranslation that happened, and some downright dispossession and oppression, and that happened through colonialism.
So, land back means a reckoning with those flawed ways that the agreements were carried out and a privileging of the Indigenous worldview that were there and present at the time when those agreements were being made.
Jean Becker: I think it means different things to different people. It can mean land claims, so governance agreements, it can be a literal wanting the land back– from portions of it to the entire country. I think often when traditional people are talking about land, what they’re talking about is stewardship and the protection of the land. So, it depends on the context. It depends on what’s happening in a particular area.
Tammy Webster: When I hear that hashtag, Land Back means there’s a sense of ownership and that’s not Indigenous, that’s not First Nations. Land Back isn’t about giving land back because that implies someone has to own it. And to me, that’s counterintuitive to my upbringing of “we use the land. It was never ours to own.” What I’m trying to do, generally, isn’t necessarily land back or reclaiming it.
Before treaties, before contact, before politics, before colonies and before all those governments came in, we had our own systems, we had our own understandings. We had our own ways of doing things and interacting with one another. So, let’s reawaken that. Because that’s ‘Indigenizing.’
What should people know about Land Back movements?
AS: Most settlers think that we’re asking for it all back, that everybody needs to go home to their countries of origin. That’s not necessarily true. We are looking for sovereignty, the ability to govern ourselves, the autonomy to create our own structures, take care of the land the way that we once did.
The effects of colonization, the intergenerational trauma that comes with all of that is still very much prevalent today. Along with gendered violence. Violence on the land is violence against Indigenous women, Two-spirit women, youth, femme as well. They go hand in hand, all of the things that we’re doing to mother earth, our original mother, plays out in horrific scenarios of colonial violence against Indigenous women as well.
So, Land Back is the ability to just do what we need to do to continue to heal our communities and heal not only our elders, but our youth and then the coming youth.
EJ: There’s not really a critical understanding of just how stark the dispossession of land is. Or just how stark it is that Canada stole land. I don’t think that the legitimacy of Canada is ever questioned. When I teach, one of the first things I do with students is call into question the formation of the state, the language of the state, the definitions of what a state means versus what a people is.
Those things are never questioned. It’s just accepted that Canada is a legitimate country that has jurisdiction over all of these lands, even in places where that jurisdiction is very deeply disputed. We saw in the Tsilhqot’in case a few years ago– where the Supreme court ruled that the entire city of Vancouver is sitting on land that’s not even Canada– that even the Supreme courts are finding like, “Oh, the title to this land is actually pretty shaky.” People don’t really understand that a lot of the territories that Canada occupied were never actually given up. They just take for fact that Canada is legitimate.
JB: If people read the Yellowhead Institute’s Land Back report I think they will come to a much better understanding about land. What that report so clearly shows is the extent to which Indigenous people are still being dispossessed from their lands by corporations, by governments, by courts. We’re not just talking about the early colonial days; we’re talking about what’s still going on today.
What does that history of Indigenous land dispossession look like locally?
AS: We chose Victoria Park [Kitchener] because it was a site of historical trade, feasting, ceremony. So, we chose this space in particular, because we’re sort of taking that back.
In an urban setting like this, there’s so many Indigenous folks that need space. We need land for ceremony. We need water, we need fire. We need all of those things to be truly who we are, to be peaceful, to be balanced, to be sane, to be healthy. You don’t often just see [Indigenous] people taking up their space and burning a sacred fire.
EJ: In dense, metropolitan areas in Canada, such as Vancouver, Vancouver Island, those areas where there’s a lot of private ownership of land, it makes- for land back- a much more difficult circumstance. What that specifically means in the Southern Ontario region, for example, there was a Supreme court decision that dealt with the Chippewas of Sarnia who had said, “there was a land that was dispossessed from us. It was stolen from us. We want it back.” And Canada said “sorry, there’s setters on it already.” There are Canadian citizens living on it and we’re not going to dispossess them from the land for something that we did wrong.
It’s always interesting how it’s okay that Indigenous people endure that violence. But settlers are protected from the violence of upheaval from their lands.
JB: Everything goes back to finding out what has happened and what is happening and understanding that there are injustices and inequities happening, including in our local region.
You just have to look at the statistics too, to see how it impacts Indigenous people. When Canadians look at the statistics, I think what they see is that we’re less than, we’re insufficient. We’re not as smart. We’re not as educated or not as something. But what they don’t see is that the statistics show the impact of colonization.
What has been the impact of colonial violence and land dispossession on Indigenous non-men, in particular?
AS: The erasure of two spirit and queer people.
Since the beginning of time, since there were people, the eraseure of that with the missionizing, with the conversion of our folks, to Catholicism and Christianity, all of those things have erased us. We went in the closet and I always joke that there’s no closets in tipis or long houses. There’s nothing for us to come out of. In Kitchener in particular, I don’t have a two-spirit elder that I come to. I don’t have a song. I don’t have a big drum. Men sit around the big drum historically in most communities. That’s not always true. We were all once a part of that circle as well. Fire keeping is also a very gendered role. But men went off and hunted for six months. There’s no way that we didn’t start a fire. There’s no way I wore a skirt 24 hours a day in the bush, hunting, fishing. All of those things that are imposed upon us now are troubling.
Colonialism doesn’t like women to be leaders. In my community, in my nation, it’s matrilineal. The women do the talking, the women are the leaders. We pass on our clans.
EJ: One of the core tenants of colonialism, of course, we see is patriarchy. We have, in addition to the element of a centering of men, there’s a centering of heterosexual men and then a centering of adult as head and that is a very small part of the population that controls and has power over everybody else.
What would reconciliation look like to you?
AS: Give back all the land. A hundred percent of the land, not just symbolically, no more plaques, no more land acknowledgements without action. They’re just performative, it’s just a recitation. Allowing us to do what we need to do the way that we’ve always done it.
There isn’t a whole lot that Indigenous people have to reconcile. We know what happened, we know what went wrong. Settlers, Canadians, white Canadians, need to reconcile their past, their history, their part in what went wrong and all of the things that continue to go wrong in present day, contemporary, Indigenous communities.
EJ: I don’t want to be like “just vote” because as much as we want to vote for parties that do promise all the restitution and reconciliation with Indigenous people, when it really comes down to business and the action of it, we see that it’s still reifying the settler state. Justin Trudeau promising reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, but still forcing pipelines through territories that have never been ceded. There’s the political system.
I suppose it would be a matter of demanding yes, reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, but also, recognizing that justice isn’t going to be served until Indigenous people have access to our land.
JB: Something that I heard Marie Sinclair talk about in one of his many talks is, first the truth has to be told. It has to be told and it has to be listened to, and we’re nowhere near that happening. Until we really have a majority of Canadian people who actually have been educated and do understand what happened in this country and what happened is happening today. Until that, that ground swell of understanding happened, I don’t, I don’t know that reconciliation can happen.
TW: Reconciliation for me is very levelled, multi-tiered, woven with so many other things. Reconciliation is my son and my grandchildren being able to identify publicly as First Nations. To be viewed as potential leaders and given value and worth the same as anyone else. So, that involves a lot of healing and not even for just First Nations, it involves healing for non-First Nations people.
The fact that microaggressions still exist means that reconciliation hasn’t happened. Reconciliation for me is all that anti-oppressive, equity work that we’re trying to do because we need to be able to work respectfully in each other’s settings. And that doesn’t happen.
What can non-Indigenous people do to help achieve reconciliation?
AS: Non-Indigenous people have a side to teach and talk about, and we have ours and everybody knows about our traumas. We have to relive those traumas every day. The Indian Act, residential school settlements and the 60’s scoop settlements – we have to prove over and over again the trauma inflicted on us. We have nothing to reconcile. It’s white, settler Canadians that have a lot of work to do.
EJ: Supporting land back and, I guess, engaging in environmental responsibility. In the case where settlers are in ownership of our land being environmentally responsible with that, which is to say that, that’s just kind of like a means to the end point. I’m somebody who believes that Indigenous peoples should be in possession of our land and we should have jurisdiction over our land and our treaty territories.
JB: Find out more about the treaty relationships and the territory that they’re on. [You can do so by following this link.] If there are treaties awesome. And if there are no treaties that means that the lands have not been ceded. The lands are still not legally belonging to the settlers who are on those lands necessarily, not even in Canadian law. So, find out about the land you’re on.
TW: Coming together as community, building together. We had a couple of mayors here with us [at Anishnabeg Outreach]. We had some regional counselors, the Chief of Police. We had some Indigenous staff, non-Indigenous staff. We had some families come, community members come, and we all came together to do something for the greater good. That’s what reconciliation is about.
Community leaders in the non-Indigenous world, they’re getting hit hard, too. And whether it’s deserved or not, it’s not up to me to decide, but I see them hurting. I see our leaders struggling because of social media and the attacks and whether they’re founded or not, they’re hurting. So how do you do this work when people are hurting? You don’t, you continue to hurt each other. So, it’s like, no, let’s stop. We’re going to come together. Again, it’s that idea of building a relationship.
What can the people reading this do to help support Land Back movements?
AS: Allow Indigenous folks the land, access to land, start paying tribute to Six Nations. That would be nice. Love to see the money owed, love to see the jobs. All of the things that the government is doing that they say will bring all this economic prosperity – they’re not for us. We don’t get those jobs. Stop pipelines. All of the things that Indigenous knowledge comes with, in ways of being and doing on land, should be honored and recognized.
It’s not about “Indigenizing”, maybe more about Decolonizing, but really about Disrupting. None of these systems/structures currently in so-called Canada are ours. Dismantle them so we can rebuild ours again.
EJ: Inform yourself and understand that it’s an active everyday thing. And it’s holding your own government accountable too.
Decolonization is not a metaphor. So, this idea that we can decolonize Canada, well, Canada would just cease to exist because you can’t decolonize something that’s inherently colonial. You can’t decolonize, politics or decolonize your vote or anything like that. So, for there to be true restitution land has to come back to Indigenous people.
JB: In my view, Canadians generally are ill-informed and have been poorly educated in Canadian history. So, what I think they could do is educate themselves in order to better understand what is actually happening in these instances. To me, Land Back is a confrontation with our history of dispossession and colonization. It’s about healing. It’s actually about the human relationship to the earth.
People need to help themselves as opposed to thinking that Indigenous people need their help. They need to understand what some of the issues are and they need to educate others around them. People can have a profound impact on their families, on their friends by talking about these things.
These interviews were edited and condensed for clarity.