This is the vast and enduring violence that is scarcely spoken of: a history of dispossession and resource theft under the guise of the "law." What Harper and every premier now offers indigenous peoples are promises they will have "every opportunity to benefit." They won't. In Elsipogtog, unemployment tips 80 percent and they want jobs, but fracking is too great a risk. As many as twenty people crowd into one house, in a community that needs 500 new homes. Their share of a multi-billion dollar resource rush will be destitution and despair on its outskirts.
But in the protest movement against shale gas, many young Indigenous people have discovered a new reason for hope. Like one young man, 17 years old, who has camped at the site for the last weeks. "I'm worried about the water and the future of my children," he says. He is among the terrifying warriors that shale gas-drunk politicians unleashed an armed police force on last week. Anxious that this might come, Levi-Peters sent a message this summer to the Premier. "You're going to make criminals out of us, because there is no way we can allow the fracking," she wrote him. His office never bothered to reply. She now has his response: Harper's pioneers aim to march on.
Unless, of course, Canadians are prepared to break with the past. Many are. Tens of thousands have signed petitions, and many others marched alongside indigenous peoples in dozens of cities and towns since Thursday. It is a sign that the the actions of the New Brunswick and the Canadian government may backfire. What the government and corporate media crave now is more mayhem, to sell to the public the repression they have sought all along. What they fear most is a movement armed only with drums and eagle feathers and a sacred relationship to the land, touching the hearts of ever more Canadians.
Photo Damian Kelly
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