6 Matching Annotations
  1. Oct 2021
    1. What does it mean to have governments now calling for these huge tree-planting programs, without talking about Land Back, without foregrounding Indigenous land rights and Indigenous knowledge, and so thinking about what that would mean, what it would mean to look at an entirely new lens for conservation that is not about creating tree museums for carbon sequestration, but really, about returning land.
    1. When gold was discovered in the Yukon, 100,000 people desperately tried to make it to a small patch of land in one of the most remote environments on the continent. Few made it all the way. The Klondike Gold Rush was many things: a media conspiracy, a ponzi scheme, a land grab. But above all, it was a humanitarian disaster that stretched over much of the Pacific Northwest.

      “The truth is that all of the gold that was mined out of the Klondike was under Indigenous land. There was no treaty with any of the Indigenous peoples in the Yukon.”

      “That land was stolen by the Canadian state and that gold was whisked away by private interests. The Federal Government only signed land claims with Indigenous peoples in the Yukon in the 1990s, but by that point, almost all the gold had been mined out of the ground.”

      “The Klondike gold rush was a rolling disaster that captured tens of thousands of people. When the first European explorers came to the Americas, they came here looking for gold. In the 1890s, that lust for precious metals eventually led men to the farthest reaches of this continent.”

      “Today, instead of 100,000 people descending on a small patch of land, you have large corporations digging treasures out of the ground. But the legacies these mining operations leave behind are just like what happened in the Klondike: workers with broken bodies, environmental destruction, the dispossession of Indigenous land, sexual violence. The gold rushes never stopped. They just morphed into something different.”

      Canada is Fake

      “Canada is not an accident or a work in progress or a thought experiment. I mean that Canada is a scam — a pyramid scheme, a ruse, a heist. Canada is a front. And it’s a front for a massive network of resource extraction companies, oil barons, and mining magnates.”

    1. Stories about the dirty business of Canadian mining.

      Canadaland: Commons

      Introducing our new season… Mining

      Stories about the dirty business of Canadian mining.

      Mining is a dirty business, but it is what Canada does best. Three-quarters of the world’s mining companies are best right here in the Great White North.

      In our new season, Commons: Mining, we’ll be digging deep into the practices and the history of the extractive industry. From the gold rushes that shaped the country to the cover-ups and the outright frauds at home and abroad.

      Canada was built on extracting what lay under the land, no matter the damage it did or who it ended up hurting.

      The first episode of Commons: Mining comes out on October 13th.


      Canada is fake

      Canada is not an accident or a work in progress or a thought experiment. I mean that Canada is a scam — a pyramid scheme, a ruse, a heist. Canada is a front. And it’s a front for a massive network of resource extraction companies, oil barons, and mining magnates.


      Extraction Empire

      Globally, more than 75% of prospecting and mining companies on the planet are based in Canada. Seemingly impossible to conceive, the scale of these statistics naturally extends the logic of Canada’s historical legacy as state, nation, and now, as global resource empire.

      Canada’s Indian Reserve System served, officially, as a strategy of Indigenous apartheid (preceding South African apartheid) and unofficially, as a policy of Indigenous genocide (preceding the Nazi concentration camps of World War II).


      Theft on a grand scale

      It’s really been about theft on a grand scale. Look at how the United Kingdom became rich, or England and then Britain as it was, at the time. It was through bleeding India dry, we bled $45 trillion out of India. We taxed the subcontinent until there was virtually nothing left, then used a small amount of that tax money to buy its goods. So we were buying goods with their own money. And then we used the phenomenal profits — 100% profits — from that enterprise to finance the capture of other nations, and the colonization of those nations and the citizens, the railways and the other things we built in order to drain wealth out of them.

      — George Monbiot

  2. Sep 2021
    1. Khelsilem Is Young, Squamish and Reshaping the Political Landscape How the kid they called Old Man Rivers is helping to change the future of his people and the region.

      “The Squamish Nation fought for decades to get their land back. In 2003, 10.5 acres of the 80-acre government-designated reserve were returned to their original inhabitants.”