If Canadians have a chance of stopping Mr. Harper’s planet-trashing plans, it will be because these legally binding rights – backed up by mass movements, court challenges, and direct action will stand in his way.
In the Globe and Mail, way back on Christmas Eve, Naomi Klein wrote on feeling the hunger of Theresa Spence for justice.
This quote from Klein’s article contains my favorite 35 words yet written on why Idle No More is so important. For me, they sum up the essence of the thing so quickly, so forcefully. One knows exactly where this must go.
mightyturk 
Stephen,
I don’t see what Naomi Klein’s Jewishness has to do with her opinions and I have myself recently participated in some pretty dignified drumming and chanting in drum circles, so I feel bad when I see it dismissed as you have in this post. There is a world of meaning behind these rituals that deserves to be respected.
Another thing I feel bad about is how I have been ignorant of so much about our native peoples for so long. The author Wade Davis made me appreciate the value of seeing Mother Earth from a worldwide indigenous perspective.
This recent Idle No More movement highlights for me these points:
1. We continue to colonize our native peoples through, among other things, ruining their unceded lands and waters hostile, barren and toxic via the unbridled extraction of minerals, oil and trees.
2. Our First Nations are experiencing huge rates of disease due to these activities. The pollution is also affecting us, though less obviously. Ninety-nine per cent of scientists and a large, growing number of lay people realize that continued economic growth that depends on pollution is unsustainable.
3. Many of us “white folk” are coming to realize that multinational corporations, many with foreign profit centres like Brazil, China and Holland, with absolutely no connection to the land, are being given the right to exploit it. While First Nations are the canary in the coal mine, we all are being quickly colonized, and, ultimately, impoverished by the world economic system.
4. The Movement is a valuable, attention-grabbing focal point whose many contentious, non-unanimous issues are unified by the unanimous belief that “Enough Is Enough.”
I checked out your blog and found some interesting stuff there, though there is much with which I also disagree. I liked your “My Pretty City” song.