Advertisement
Advertisement
Erica Violet Lee: I heard about COP21 and talked to some of my friends who work with Indigenous rights and environmental rights, we were talking about the need to get Indigenous people to Paris, to be involved in this type of negotiations. The Canadian Youth Delegation was one of the groups that was offering accreditation, passes into the negotiations. Normally I wouldn't identify as Canadian anymore since my work with Idle No More and thinking about what it actually means to consider myself Indigenous to this space in a colonial country, but I decided to come with the Canadian Youth Delegation.What were your expectations before you went?
I have no idea. When I started reading about COP21 and the United Nations climate negotiation spaces I was thinking this is the highest level of importance in talking about making legal the rights of indigenous people and it's one of the best platforms and opportunities we have to ensure that our sovereignty is respected, to ensure that the world isn't destroyed by corporations and greedy governments.To sit in these negotiations with countries from all over the world is strange and it's totally different scope than anything I've ever done before. I find it overwhelming but was also feeling pretty excited to be here just realizing what a privileged position it is for me to be able to come from inner-city Saskatoon and to try and represent people who these spaces aren't meant for. The United Nations is such an elite space and I realized there are people who have spent their whole lives negotiating in United Nations sessions. But understanding too that even the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People hasn't been fully implemented in a meaningful way even though Canada is a signatory. So, in one sense it's the peak of power in the world but in another sense it's still not enough and it does nothing for us on the ground so far.
Advertisement
Strange but exciting because I want to be able to bring all of the stories I've heard over the past few years working with Idle No More and working with different communities across Canada and the world. You hear so many stories of people who have lived off their lands for decades and centuries, who can't eat the fish anymore because they're covered in cancerous tumors. Those people who can't drink their own water out of the streams that their ancestors drank out of for centuries. So those are the kinds of stories that I wanted to bring here.Something else I found out in the United Nation spaces is that there is a real tokenization of Indigenous people. Like there is a very select few who are repeatedly held up, while a lot of voices are excluded—particularly those of us who come from poverty or smaller communities, or especially prairie communities. We are not held in esteem, we are not allowed access to many other spaces that other people might be.A lot of people from other countries have an idea of Canada as idyllic, what do they think of the stories you are bringing from the Indigenous communities you've been to?
That's a rhetoric that we've heard over and over and as the Canadian Youth Delegation. We have been trying to disrupt that because Trudeau gets on the platform and says, "Canada is back." So what does it mean when we say that Canada is back? More than anyone, the folks who work with Idle No More understand the damage that Harper and the Conservative government did to us and did to the land in the past decade and the fact that we are still not out of that. It will take decades to recover from what happened just with the destructiveness of the policy and the rhetoric that they were spewing. But also recognizing that the Liberal Government is already doing a lot of the exact same things but under the banner of "a good Liberal Canada."
Advertisement
Well, the weirdest part about the United Nations and the climate forum is that you have to fill out an application to protest. You [have to] say: this is our protest, this is the exact space it will take place in, this is the exact time it will be, this is our messaging. You are not supposed to name a country, you are not supposed to name a politician or a person, you are not supposed to name a corporation or a company. So, basically, even that protest we did, we had to fill out an application for it, and we ended up getting scolded for it after because we weren't clear enough in explaining what our message would be and the fact that we named Canada as a country was a problem.I'm thinking a lot about protest and disobedience and the ways that, even within the United Nations space and the atmosphere in Paris, disobedience and protest are turned into props as well. They say we are allowing you to dissent but you have to do it within these strict confines. I think it was still a great action but I guess a lot of it too, is that it still feels orchestrated by these massive powers.
Advertisement
It was a good response. When you do a protest in a space like that there's tons of media coverage and tons of people supporting us. But it was, like I said, it feels tokenistic and I have been struggling with finding ways with actually disrupting the power structure from within it.When you are in a place like the United Nations and you have to fill out a form to have a protest, is that really taking down the system? So many people talk about getting involved in politics or getting into the system to change it from within but so often I have seen those people become coopted and really comfortable with the system.With the Youth Delegation, did you feel like you were expected to be a prop?
We have really been pushing back against that. We are the only Canadian Youth Delegation here. Trudeau wouldn't meet with us, wouldn't even acknowledge us. Meanwhile he is tweeting about the youth and taking pictures with people.So 'tongue-gate' and Brad Wall. How was it in that room and what made you decide to take that picture?
We were at this celebration for Canadian delegates which was at the Canadian Embassy on a really fancy street in Paris. It's this big beautiful building.Even just walking through Paris as an Indigenous person from Canada and recognizing all of this, the reason that Europe is so wealthy is because it stole land, it stole people, it stole objects. So it's just being in this space as an Indigenous person, and one of the few Indigenous people there, and seeing all of this power in one room.
Advertisement
Advertisement
So often in Canada and all over the world, too—I've experienced this in Paris at COP—people are fine with images of Native women standing around in regalia, or powwow dancing, but they don't actually want to hear our voices. They don't want to hear us being political and calling out the colonial violence that we face… They just care about us as props, as a way to uphold this vision of Canada as a multicultural country that they want to believe exists, that for us still doesn't exist.You speak about the colonial violence that Indigenous women face, so were you shocked by the violence you faced on social media?
I don't think I'm shocked anymore just because of how common it is. I got called a cheap whore—that was kind of interesting. It's always interesting when it's sexualized, and so often the critiques and the attacks we get as Indigenous women are to call us a whore, to call us a slut, all gendered and sexualized insults. So much of that goes back to the way Indigenous women are viewed as conquerable. The key part of the narrative of Canada and conquest, is that Canada wants to view us as property, as something that can be taken, as something that can be controlled. By resisting and fighting back and not being silent, we disrupt that and it really unsettles people.One of my friends in the Canadian Youth Delegation used the hashtag #upsettlers meaning when settlers get really upset because Indigenous people aren't being silent.
Advertisement
Well we are looking at the text at one of the agreements and seeing countries, the EU, remove the rights of Indigenous peoples from the document text, which is a huge problem. They actually took out the rights of indigenous peoples form the climate change document they produced here so people are trying to get it back in right now.So I guess it's recognizing that what if our rights as Indigenous people aren't protected anymore in the climate change protocols that come out of Paris? What does that mean? I think that's a big step back. I think, more than anything, this has reaffirmed my belief that the most important and revolutionary organizing around indigenous people's rights, migrants, racialized people, women, all takes place in our communities and doesn't come from the top.But I also found that there is a lot of power in being an Indigenous young person and mostly that power comes from a recognition that I don't have anything invested in this system so I don't care if it falls. Frantz Fanon, an Algerian French philosopher, talked about that saying those of us who have the least invested in these systems, who constantly face violence from colonial countries, we have the most to gain from toppling these structures of power.What is the strangest moment you have had so far?
Just the the banality of sitting in negotiations as men in suits—it's overwhelmingly men in suits—look at screens of texts and casually say, "I think we should take rights of Indigenous people out because whatever…" Just realizing what a disconnect there is from sitting in a room and going over a text and striking out the rights of millions of people in the planet… Realizing that disconnect from the grassroots struggles and trying to get get people to recognize our humanity, when they are going to strike it out with a pen in a minute.It's just the weirdness of going from the climate negotiation space where they just took my rights as a human being out of a document, now I'm going to go eat a chocolate crepe because it's going to make me feel better. International policy negotiations are kind of like living in sci-fi world but it's reality.I guess my biggest thing I've been thinking about in all of my activism, all of my years of working in communities, is that we need to stop being obedient to people who don't care about us. We need to recognize the seriousness of this struggle. This isn't a game. That's what I've learned talking to some of these big, important people is that they think it's politics and they can walk away from it when they leave the conference room, but that's not the case.This interview has been edited for style and length.Follow Geraldine Malone on Twitter.