The Mohawk People Have Nothing to Negotiate! Renters Have to Pay

MNN.  June 8, 2011.   Kahnawake is a Mohawk community on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River across from Montreal.  This tract is part of the greater Rotino’shonni:onwe/Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy territory, which is the unsurrendered eastern half of Onowaregeh, Great Turtle Island.

In 1680 French King Louis XIV illegally gave 45 thousand acres of our land to the Jesuits to turn us into Catholics. They named Kahnawake, our home, the Seigneury of Sault St. Louis.  The account, not the title to our land, needs settling. Canada and Quebec’s demand to settle is an admission of our position that the land is ours and always will be.

Kahnawake Is a Kanienkehaka and Ongwehonwe issue. None of Great Turtle Island is for sale. After the French and Indian disputes, the French sued for peace and a return of their prisoners that we held. The Peace of Montreal in 1701 brought peace between the French and the Iroquois and 39 of our Indian allies who signed onto the treaty. This treaty remains active.

People’s Tribunal against the Criminalization of Protest in Ecuador

During three days in the city of Cuenca, Ecuador, hundreds of representatives from several Latin American countries gathered to share experiences and strategies during the Continental Conference in Defense of Water and Mother Earth. The event took place between June 17 and 23, and was organized as an act of resistance against development projects that threaten this vital resource, Yakumama, our mother water. A letter of intention by the organizers reads, “We hope this gathering will become a permanent process of fellowship to protect water and food sovereignty, to create a new social order in harmony with nature, with justice and equity.”

The conference began with a visit to sites where environmental conflicts have taken place, in Cochapata and San Bartolomé, more specifically, in the southern province of Azuay, both areas affected by mining companies.

On The De-POCification of the International Socialist Organization

I think most of my readers would likely agree with the statement that the International Socialist Organization is one of the worst so-called “socialist” organizations in the occupied United States. It has a revolving door membership situation, that for a long, long time has meant it relied on the student population for much of its membership (leading lots of people over the years to joke that the S in ISO should stand for student, not socialist). It doesn’t recognize, and in fact attempts to disprove, the existence of an aristocracy of labour (which goes back to British-Israeli Trotskyite Tony Cliff, who is the ISO’s primary ideological forbear). It also has a history of bad settlerist politics with regards to the national question in the United States.

It’s this last one that is the subject of this post, written near the end of August 2010 by Donna Chidi, a “Person of Colour” (aka, a colonized person – POC for short) and former member of the ISO and its Washington DC branch. She writes about how POC comrades within the ISO, first in the NYC branch, and then in the DC branch, attempted to spark discussions on dealing with the ISO’s “whiteness”. She then describes how this discussion was subsequently shut down and long time members kicked out, with even the the National Steering Committee directly intervening in the case of the DC branch, sending a personal representative to to do the kicking out.