Monthly Archives: October 2009
Polish Death Probed – Attempt on Mohawk Ignored
Mohawk Nation News
http://www.mohawknationnews.com/
MNN. Oct. 29, 2009. On October 14th 2007, Polish immigrant, Robert Dziekanski, was killed by the RCMP at the customs venue in Vancouver Airport. He was tasered, knocked down and hit again. He screamed in pain on the floor. They fired again, again and again until he died.
Dziekanski had come from Poland to visit his mother, who had been waiting for him at the arrivals level for 7 hours.
A bystander video taped his death with his cell phone. The RCMP were all buffed up with body armor, hand guns, pepper spray and collapsible batons. They said they feared for their safety when he picked up the stapler and waved it at them.
The state is spending millions on an highly publicized investigation into his death.
What’s the difference between this and the attack on Kahentinetha Horn at the Akwesasne border on June 14, 2009? The CBSA Canadian Border Services Agency video taped this vicious assault which they hide for reasons of National Security. Many witnesses have signed affidavits.
Horn was pulled over by the border guards to wait for hours. CBSA and a squad of heavily equipped commandos appeared. They surrounded her car, grabbed her and used stress tactics that brought on a heart attack. The border guards tried to push her to bend forward so the blood would rush into her heart and kill her. She survived.
This attack has been kept out of mainstream news. Every request to the RCMP, OPP and Attorney General of Canada to investigate this crime has been stopped.
Canada does not want a review of their agents torturing and trying to kill a 69 year old woman who was peacefully crossing the border at Akwesasne.
Rally in Solidarity With Six Nations Land Rights! – Nov 7
Rally at 1 PM, Victoria Park, (Corner of George St. and Darling St., Brantford, ON). Potluck dinner and social to follow at 5PM at the reclaimed Kanata Village site.
Down with the Brantford Injunction! No Developments on Six Nations Land! Drop all charges against Six Nations land defenders! Meaningful negotiations now!
Speakers include:
- Aaron Detlor (Lawyer for the Haudenosaunee Development Institute)
- Bev Crawford (Haudenosaunee Hoskanigetah)
- Bill Squires (Mohawk Workers)
- Chris Harris (Black Action Defense Committee, Toronto)
- Dawn Martin-Hill (Dept. of Indigenous Studies, McMaster)
- Jan Watson (Co-founder of Community Friends in Caledonia, CAW 555)
- Janie Jamieson (Former spokesperson for the DCE Reclamation)
- Jim Windle (Brantford TRUE)
- Missy Elliott (Young Onkwehonwe United)
- Phil Monture (Six Nations Land Claim Expert)
- Ruby and Floyd Monture (Six Nations Land Defenders)
- Steve Watson (CAW Educational Department)
- Tim Reynolds (Brantford TRUE)
- Tom Keefer (CUPE 3903 First Nations Solidarity Working Group)
- Vince Gilchrist (Haudenosaunee Hoskanigetah)
Brantford, Ontario has become “ground zero” in the struggle over Indigenous rights in Ontario. Most of the city is under landclaim, but instead of halting development until the status of the disputed land can be negotiated, Brantford city council is carrying out an aggressive policy of encouraging the criminalization of Six Nations land defenders. Since 2006, when protests in nearby Caledonia erupted, over 60 people from Six Nations have faced more than 160 criminal charges as they have tried to peacefully stop illegal developments from taking place on their lands.
Defenders of the Land, Private Property Abolitionists
By Shiri Pasternak
Indigenous peoples in Canada have marked the geographical limits of capitalist expansion through more than five centuries of permanent resistance. Due to the geography of residual Aboriginal lands, they form a final frontier of capitalist penetration for natural resource extraction, agribusiness, and urban/suburban development. While much of the focus of the economic crisis has centred on foreclosures and job losses in the manufacturing and service sectors, a renewed push for resources – e.g. tar sands, timber, fisheries, mining, suburban sprawl – may tread in the old vices of colonialism, but it has also been ushered in by a new political economy of indigenous dispossession, and with it, spurred a new phase of resistance.
The Zapatista uprising made headlines around the world in 1994, but all across this land, indigenous peoples were also rising up against an “opening up” of their territories for free-market investment. For example, by 1995, the resource industries of BC entered a new phase of expansion at the same point that Aboriginal people were in the midst of establishing claims to what would amount to 110 percent of the provincial land base. Confrontation in Gustafesen Lake by the Secwepemc Nation was accompanied by waves of blockades across the province. In Toronto, native protesters occupied a Revenue Canada office for 29 days, and the occupation of Stoney Pt Provincial Park in Ontario ended tragically with the death of protester Dudley George, killed by police.
A series of policies posing as solutions to self-determination struggles were also introduced. While “self-government” policies appear to promote political autonomy, they are designed to download the “Indian problem” onto native communities by reducing federal involvement and promoting “self-sufficiency” through competitive economic development – key features of the neo-liberal agenda – forcing cash-strapped communities to enter into “fiscal partnerships” with corporations to finance their reserves.
Tierra Prometida – Journey of the Indigenous Toba
Tierra Prometida (Promised Land) chronicles the journey of a group of ethnic Toba People who were driven from their traditional territory in Argentina’s dense El Impenetrable forest.
For centuries the Toba resisted colonial encroachment and missionization, until the late 1800s, when the Argentine government began to occupy and divide El Impenetrable into concessions to exploit.
Ever since that time, the Toba have been cheated, forgotten, and forced to endure a hostile reality—all the while searching for a better life for themselves and their children.
Ruben Sarmiento, Chief of the Toba Community “19 de Abril” tells the story of his tribe and the obstacles they have had to overcome after being settled in the port area of Dock Sud, Buenos Aires, one of the most polluted areas in the world.
Situated near the Federal Capital, Dock Sud stands as the focus of discrimination, unemployment and crime, malnutrition, and diseases like tuberculosis and Chagas disease, caused by a parasitic insect.
Despite being decimated by environmental aggression, violence and social exclusion, the Toba have continued to believe in and struggle for a future of freedom.
Tierra Prometida – El Periplo de los Aborígenes Toba (Promised land – Journey of the Indigenous Toba) was produced by Noron producciones. If you’d like to learn more about the film, visit (ESP) http://www.periplotoba.com.ar/. Thanks to Jahnessa for passing on the film.
Hail Mary Pass
MNN. Oct. 25, 2009. A Hail Mary pass is when a long ball in football is thrown down the field towards the offence’s goal line. It’s a last ditch hysterical attempt [by the federal Mud Dogs] to beat the invincible Ongwehone Eagles. Time has run out for the mud dogs to stop their losses. They are desperate to win. If this pass is completed, they can go on to score the winning goal. Hey, Mud Dogs, it’s hopeless. Give it up! You ain’t goin’ nowhere with it!!
Montreal ambulance chaser, James Moon-Bat Oreilley, wanted my files. He was looking for my defense strategies on the Federal Court of Canada border case. Sometime in the ethereal future, Canada is going to try to carry out their plot to remove me from the earth. This comes on the heels of events where Mohawks and other Indigenous nations are asserting sovereignty, which MNN posts truthfully.
Last week my friend, a lawyer in Montreal, phoned me. He had been helping us in the FCC case to charge the border agents who almost killed me at Kawenoke of Akwesasne on June 14, 2008.
Former Canadian Prime Minister Suppressed Mercury Studies
A newly published book about Minamata disease has revealed, possibly for the first time to Canadians, that former Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau personally interfered with the publication of one or more studies concerning the mercury problem at Grassy Narrows.“Niigata Minimata Disease: Methyl Mercury Poisoning in Niigata, Japan” was authored by Dr. Saito Hisashi, a general practitioner who has worked with Minamata patients ever since the disease was discovered in Niigata, Japan, in 1965. The book was first published in 1996, but only now has it been translated to English.
In Niigata Minimata Disease Dr. Hisashi focuses on Japan’s second major encounter with mercury poisoning, the first one occurring 9 years earlier, in Minamata city. However, early on in the book, Dr. Hisashi quotes witness testimony by another Japanese Doctor, Shiraki Hirotsugu, delivered at the Second Minamata Disease Lawsuit on May 10, 1988.
Anti-Colonial Thanksgiving
ANTI-COLONIAL THANKSGIVING: Films, Speakers & Feast!
Thursday October 29th – 6pm
@ The Native Friendship Centre
2001 St. Laurent Blvd, Montreal. (Metro St. Laurent)
Free: Event, Food and Childcare.
Wheelchair Accessible Space
Speaker: Tracey Deer
Film: Club Native
In Club Native, Deer looks deeply into the history and present-day reality of Aboriginal identity. With moving stories from a range of characters from her Kahnawake Reserve – characters on both sides of the critical blood-quantum line – she reveals the divisive legacy of more than a hundred years of discriminatory and sexist government policy and reveals the lingering “blood quantum” ideals, snobby attitudes and outright racism that threaten to destroy the fabric of her community. Tracey Deer will present her film and be available for discussion/questions after.
Speaker: Billie Pierre NYM/OG
Film: A Quiet Struggle
Update on Indigenous organizing focussed on the resistance to tourism and development as it’s related to the Winter 2010 Olympics in BC.
Speaker: Karl, from Kersplebedeb
Brief talk about medical apartheid and the politics of the H1N1’s effect on low-income & native communities.
Speaker: From Montreal’s Missing Justice Campaign
Missing Justice is a grassroots solidarity collective based in Montreal that works to eliminate violence and discrimination against Indigenous women living in Quebec. Our goals are to raise public awareness and create a safer environment for Indigenous women by tackling issues of systemic racism, sexism, classism and negligence that are present in the media, the justice system and police forces. We recognize that the causes of racialized and sexualized violence are linked to Canada’s colonial policies of the past and present.
Southwest Indigenous Uranium Forum a Success
This past weekend Indigenous Peoples from Alaska, North America, Bolivia and Japan converged near Acoma Pueblo for the 7th Southwest Indigenous Uranium Forum in Sky City, New Mexico. Although the forum focused on the uranium developments being proposed at Mount Taylor and throughout the grants mineral belt of New Mexico, it also provided an opportunity for networking.
CONTACTS: Anna Rondon, 7th Indigenous Uranium Forum Organizer, 505-726-9392 505-726-9392
Nikke Alex, Black Mesa Water Coalition, 505-879-7461 505-879-7461
Southwest Indigenous Uranium Forum a Success
by Anna Rondon
Photo by Brenda Norrell
ALBUQUERQUE – This past weekend Indigenous Peoples from Alaska, North America, Bolivia and Japan converged near Acoma Pueblo for the 7th Southwest Indigenous Uranium Forum in Sky City, New Mexico. Although the forum focused on the uranium developments being proposed at Mount Taylor and throughout the grants mineral belt of New Mexico, it also provided an opportunity for affected communities to share knowledge, experiences, and strategies to combat the current onslaught of nuclear power throughout Indigenous territories worldwide.
Over the two and a half days, participants shared knowledge about a variety of topics related to uranium mining including ongoing resistance efforts, the health affects on uranium mining, the implications of U.S. energy and climate policy, and the emerging green economy. Suzanne Singer, a young Navajo woman new to the issues of uranium mining reflected, “I have learned a lot here. This summit has been very different than other conferences I’ve been to because it brought out so much emotion in me – anger, happiness, and most importantly, inspiration.”
Olympic Spirit
Stewart Steinhauer of The Dominion asks the question “What is genuine indigenous art?”
Gifted with a white privilege suit on his Birth Day, Steinhauer has been slipping back and forth across the invisible boundary between Turtle Island and Canada, since 1952, in his lovely birthday suit. And this is what he saw.
"Western societies appropriate indigenous cultural phenomena while almost unthinkingly crushing indigenous realities," says stone carver Stewart Steinhauer. Pictured here, Red Thunder's Gift.
KUTENAI TERRITORY, TURTLE ISLAND—The day after my first child was born, I carved my first piece of sculpture from a piece of tree root that caught my attention as I sat by a fire. I had been a devout atheist since an early teen rebellion against forced Christian indoctrination, but the finished carving was, in my heart, a spirit guardian for this incredible fresh new human being who had come so profoundly into my life.
Growing up on Cree reserves and in small Canadian towns in Cree Territory, I had never seen anyone, other than the Dene painter Alex Janvier, making what Canadians called “art.” On the prairies, unlike the west coast, there was no cultural tradition of carving. Why I suddenly pulled my pocket knife out and began carving a tree root is mysterious, though looking back thirty-six years later I can see by the timing that it obviously had something to do with the birth of my first child.
The death of my second child, in a car accident, at age three, shook my atheistic view of the universe, at least on an emotional/spiritual level. The action of carving, now stone instead of wood, 14 years on, became a space where my atheistic mind-chatter faded back into oblivion, while my body, heart and spirit worked cooperatively to give physical form to the anguish I experienced with that beloved child’s death.
When an Elder came to me and said he had a message from my dead child, which he had received in a sweat lodge ceremony, I placed a mental pause on my atheism and started attending indigenous ceremonies, a wandering circular journey around and back to where my long-ago ancestors had been driven off of their path.
Indigenous Sovereignty Week Builds Community-Based Resistance
By Greg MacDougall writing for Rabble.ca
Greg Macdougall is active in Ottawa with IPSMO (Indigenous Peoples Solidarity Movement Ottawa). He is also a member of Common Cause, the provincial anarchist organization and runs the EquitableEducation.ca project.
In November of last year, Indigenous activists and allies from across Canada came together in Winnipeg to form Defenders of the Land, a network of Indigenous communities and activists in land struggle across Canada.
Out of this network came a call for a pan-Canadian event, Indigenous Sovereignty Week, which is now upon us. Close to 30 cities and communities across Canada (and even a few in the United States) will be holding public events from Oct. 24 to Nov. 1.
The purpose of this week is to build local relationships between groups and individuals, disseminate ideas and generally contribute to building a cross-Canada movement for Indigenous rights, self-determination, and justice that is led by Indigenous communities but with a broad base of informed support.
Activities throughout the week include: speakers, panels, workshops, films, community tours, feasts, and performance art, music, and spoken word. A wide range of issues will be covered, but relate to four main themes: Struggles for Indigenous rights and self-determination; Indigenous knowledge, culture and identity; Indigenous peoples and the environment; history of Indigenous-Canadian relations.
Arthur Manuel is an Indigenous activist who will be part of the ISW speakers tour, visiting different communities on different days to help educate people and spread the word.
Peltier ‘Circle for Clemency’ White House Nov. 5, 2009
Telephone: (919) 475-1343
Email – clemencynow@gmail.com
NATIVE AMERICANS AND SUPPORTERS RALLY TO SEEK CLEMENCY FOR LEONARD PELTIER 11/05/09
The Circle For Clemency is a group of Leonard Peltier supporters that will be joining together in a peaceful and prayerful act of solidarity. This action is to bring attention to Mr. Peltier’s continued unjust imprisonment as a Native American political prisoner. This will be in conjunction with the planned Tribal Nations Conference to be held at the Department of the Interior building in Washington, DC. on November 5, 2009.
This past summer, imprisoned Native Activist/Nobel Peace Prize nominee Leonard Peltier was once again denied parole. The decision was extremely disheartening to Leonard, his family and his many supporters here and worldwide. Since that day, our focus has turned towards seeking Executive Clemency for Leonard Peltier.
In September of 2009, Native Activists Ben Carnes and Robert Fife fasted for seven days and offered prayers in an attempt to seek an audience with President Obama that he might consider Executive Clemency for Leonard Peltier. This simple and humble gesture took place in front of the White House and has given birth to a renewed enthusiasm from the Indigenous community and their supporters. In October of 2009, the Circle For Clemency for Leonard Peltier was founded by Indigenous Rights Activists Wanbli Tate, Larry Monterrey, Barbara Low, Ben Carnes and Robert Fife. Last week, President Obama announced a first of its kind Tribal Nations Conference to be held in Washington, on November 5th, 2009. Leaders from all 564 federally recognized Tribes have been invited.
The Circle For Clemency For Leonard Peltier and their supporters will be gathering at Lafayette Park in front of the White House for sunrise prayers conducted by Traditional Spiritual Leaders at 6:00 AM, November 5, 2009, after which they will walk to the Department of the Interior building to respectfully greet their tribal representatives, welcome them to the conference and ask that each of the them include within their individual nation’s agenda a simple request for clemency regarding Leonard Peltier. They will then spend the day in a prayer vigil at the Department of the Interior for the release of our brother, Leonard Peltier.
How Stupid are Tribal Councils?
Mohawk Nation News
http://www.mohawknationnews.com
MNN. Oct. 25, 2009. Native Pride has asked if tribal, state and federal officials are really so stupid? MNN wonders too. US Senator Charles “Chuck” Schumer (D-NY) misinforms the public about how Indians have no right to sell our products to non-Indians and estimates that the state is losing billions? in taxes. There’s also the misinterpreted 1994 US Supreme Court ruling that New York State could illegally collect taxes without our consent. [http//:letstalknativepride.blogspot.com/ edited by MNN]
Shumer says that his people can sell to us but we can’t sell to them. NYS knows they may tax purchases but can’t tax our sales. NYS says the consumer is supposed to remit the tax back to them. (Form CG-15). How likely?
We are born sovereign. It’s an individual birthright. We didn’t win it in an election. It can’t be granted by foreign federal or state governments. Every business on our land is a Nation business. Every Native retailer is sovereign.
New York State Governor David Paterson allows everyone to buy up to 2 cartons of untaxed and unstamped native made cigarettes, which, we presume, can only be smoked in NYS. He allows anybody to buy 2 cartons from anywhere but but not from the Indians.
In Department of Taxation & Finance of New York et al. v. Milhelm Attea & Bros., non-native wholesaler, Attea, lost his challenge. He got his license to do business with Indians from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He argued that it supersedes NYS law. Weak rulings in other states were used against Attea to imply somehow they beat us, but in fact they didn’t.
Review of “Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry”
By Gerald Taiaiake Alfred, reposted from his personal website.
Redressing Racist Academics, Or, Put Your Clothes Back On, Please! A Review of Widdowson and Howard’s, Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry (McGill Queen’s University Press, 2008).
Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation
From the excited, glowing reviews of Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry I had seen in The National Post, and as a critic of parasitic white lawyers and consultants, sell-out aboriginals, and collaborationist Aboriginal politicians, I was prepared for a hard-hitting critique and useful deconstruction of the complex of injustice that has been built up around Indigenous-state relations in Canada. Instead, I found a collection of distortions, omissions, and exaggerations, that provides a reading experience like that of slogging through an undergraduate essay by, say, a kid from Alberta ruminating on Québecois nationalism, or an Alabama schoolgirl writing on the root causes of black-on-black violence. What a disappointment.
Evidently, Widdowson and Howard get up in the morning and eat a dog’s breakfast of outmoded communist ideology and rotten anthropological theories washed down with strong racial prejudices inherited from their own unexamined colonial upbringings, all of which would turn anyone else’s stomach. Their ideas are, amazingly and unapologetically, the sort of “socialism from above” characteristic of 1930s vintage Stalinism listing upon a ragtag collection of theoretical frames which taken together form a methodological approach remarkable mostly for its inability, like the authors who employ it, to comprehend indigeneity outside of being the object of colonization and empire. To wit: elements of Darwinian evolutionary stages theory, bits of Hegelian historical determinism, and a reliably unsophisticated view of capitalism is a necessary destructive-progressive force leading to the realization of a communist utopia wherein exists a scientifically planned and state organized global society made up of human beings who are worthwhile only to the extent they are “productive”. Thus it is understandable how the authors can, or must, advocate for the destruction of the natural environment by industrial development, and why they must hate and seek to destroy the people most closely connected to and committed to the preservation of nature in the face of capitalist exploitation of the land: Indigenous people.
Widdowson and Howard attempt an awkward and ineffective mental sleight-of-hand trick to deflect anticipated criticism of their attacks on Indigenous people as being racist – as if Widdowson’s simply mentioning a potential charge is a Teflon dress protecting her against it sticking. Rather than speaking about Indigenous people, they speak about Indigenous “culture”. Instead of attacking Indigenous people, they attack the “Aboriginal industry”. But their cover is blown the instant you realize, and it’s pretty obvious from the first page of the book, that their notion of culture is equated to ethnicity and that their “Aboriginal industry” includes and embodies just about every Indigenous writer and representative in the country. There is nothing novel or insightful in their conceptualization of an “aboriginal industry.” In fact, the idea is lifted from the Métis scholar Howard Adams’ seminal work in Prison of Grass (Fifth House) and my own work on the subject, Peace, Power, Righteousness (Oxford University Press), both of which have a sustained focus on the cooptation of First Nations leaders and “comprador” Aboriginal leadership and the problem of parasitic white professionals. But both Adams’ and my book are over a decade old; isn’t it an obvious point by now that white professionals profit off the misery and have a stake in perpetuating the colonial injustice? As a critique of this problem, the book is boring drivel that anyone working in this field has heard and read many times over by now. And if this was the point of the book, I could stop my review right here. But their point is not to illuminate, it is to denigrate, and the book is voluminous in this objective.
If Widdowson and Howard were serious Marxists concerned with the oppression of Indigenous peoples, even as a class of society, they would no doubt have focused on the economic and political relations that are at the root of the problems besetting Indigenous peoples and Canadian society as a whole. So, where is the analysis of Canada as a colonial regime and the broad consideration of Indigenous-state relations and the history of imperialism that forms the backdrop to any serious discussion of Canadian history and of Indigenous issues?
Prisoners of a White God
A documentary film about a mountain ethnic group in South East Asia, Prisoners of a White God investigates the activities of christian missionaries and international development among the Akha peoples in Thailand and Laos.
Prisoners of a White God was produced by Czech anthropologist Tomas Ryska. Through undercover work, Ryska discovers “the enactment of a hell on Earth”— the sickening truth of Evangelical missionaries, arriving with their gospel and the promise of aid, kidnapping Akha children from their villages to work in tea plantations and to sell them into the sex trade. Many of the children are also sexually abused by the missionaries.
“It is a picture of hell on earth despite the coming of so-called Good News, and it is enactment and creation of hell on earth for these tribal people”, comments the Akha Heritage Foundation. “Kidnapped from their villages, children become’ orphans’ though they have families. They become the employees on the Christian Missionary tea plantations. ‘There are no employees,’ says one man,’we have children.’ In one place, 60 children take the role of laborer on the boarding school grounds.”
“Ryska does an excellent job presenting the contrast of hypocricy and wealth of the missionary, aid, food and clothing, the underworld of child trafficking versus the appearance of cleanliness and holiness, worship done the ‘right’ way, versus the ‘pagan way…’ He uncovers the fear of eternal punishment versus the joys of heaven, fear of death threats for those who dare expose evil that dwells in the fundamentalist Christian missionary centers, corruption versus holiness, forced relocation, illness, depression, malaria, and prison camps in the lowlands for the unfortunate mountain people. It is colonization all over again.”
Ryska himself was eventually forced to leave Thailand, barely escaping “capture and murder at the hands of angry missionaries he deceived.”
Prisoners of a White God received the Grand Prixes at RAFF Film Festival, at Ecofilm Festival, at Festival of the Mountain Films, at “It’s Up To You” Film Festival and the Main Prize at Ekotopfilm in 2008.
The film is Copyright www.uwip.org c/o fPcN interCultural under a Creative Commons – Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Canada Accidentally Recognizes Mohawk Sovereignty
From Kahentinetha MNN Mohawk Nation News, www.mohawknationnews.com kahentinetha2@yahoo.com
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The colony of Canada has officially recognized our sovereignty on Great Turtle Island and has taken steps to abide by the Two Row Wampum agreement. Canada admits they have no jurisdiction over Indigenous people and territory.
On June 14, 2008, two women were peacefully crossing the illegal checkpoint in the middle of Kawenoke Island of Akwesasne. The Canada Border Services Agency CBSA called in 12 burly well-armed colonial goons to viciously attack the two women. One elder almost died of a trauma induced heart attack and the other was severely beaten and held incommunicado.
The two women live in the Mohawk communities of Akwesasne and Kahnawake. They filed formal complaints with the RCMP, OPP, Mohawk Akwesasne Police and the CBSA to investigate. All refused. The women were treated like enemy combatants with no rights. We are being falsely labeled as insurgents, terrorists and global risks. This violates the Geneva Conventions 1949 which set the standards in international law for humanitarian treatment of civilians and the victims of conflict. [See notes at end]
The women are not Canadian citizens as the Mohawk Nation never relinquished our territorial independence. The two women took it to the Federal Court of Canada, FCA T-1309-08, to address the human rights abuses. Canada is supposed to live up to its commitments under international law to respect human rights of all.
The Crown issued orders respecting our sovereignty. On October 23, 2008, Prothonotary Mireille Tabib ordered the two women to pay for Canada’s costs by depositing $19,460.00 with the court plus all subsequent costs. The reason! They live in Akwesasne and Kahnawake and are not residents of Canada. An appeal was filed. On January 29, 2009 Judge Francois Lemieux issued the same order. On Feb. 26, 2009 another case was filed by one of the women, T-288-09. On April 7, 2009, the same order was made because she lives in Kahnawake, making her a non-resident of Canada.
The Two Row Wampum agreement separates the colonists from the true original Indigenous jurisdiction. The Crown must fulfill our request to investigate our complaints against their agents. The CBSA acted outside its territorial jurisdiction when it assaulted the two women and cannot demand security for their costs.
