'Idle No More' protests sparked by chief's 'diet.' It's not a hunger strike
By Lorne Gunter ,QMI Agency
First posted: Wednesday, January 02, 2013 07:37 PM MST | Updated: Thursday, January 03, 2013 10:39 AM MST
During one of his famous hunger strikes for farm workers’ rights in the 1960s and 1970s, activist Cesar Chavez had to fight off a supporter who tried to force feed him orange juice. Despite his weakened condition, Chavez was able to knock the juice glass out of his supporter’s hand and angrily insist that even the consumption of juice would violate the spirit of his fast.
Contrast that with Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence. The Northern Ontario chief is claiming to be on a hunger strike until Prime Minister Stephen Harper agrees to meet with her to discuss Ottawa’s treaty obligations. But Spence is consuming broth “several times a day,” according to reports, plus several cups of tea and water.
That’s not a hunger strike, it’s a diet. Good for you, Chief Spence. You’ve joined the millions of Canadians who’ve pledged to drop a few pounds this New Year’s. A noble goal, to be sure, but hardly a great spiritual or political achievement.
If Spence’s claim to be on a hunger strike weren’t ridiculous enough, it was revealed Wednesday that she doesn’t want just any meeting with Prime Minister Harper. “This meeting has to be not just one day, it has to be at least a week or two weeks,” she insisted.
That’s delusional.
Aboriginal Affairs Minister John Duncan has offered to meet with Spence. She has refused, insisting instead that she will only meet with the PM. And she won’t just take any meeting. She wants a fortnight.
You can bet Spence herself wouldn’t agree to meet for as long a week or two with any disgruntled resident of the northern reserve she so badly mismanages. If one of her own residents began fasting to back up his demands for a new house, for instance, you can bet Spence would refuse to see him for more than an hour or two. And she is the leader of a community of 1,800 or fewer.
Yet Spence sees nothing totally preposterous with her own demand that the PM meet with her for a week or two.
Remember, too, this is the same Theresa Spence whose remote community made national news last year when it was revealed that some residents were facing a winter in decrepit housing — including uninsulated tents.
Spence (and many of the same publicity-seeking opposition politicians who have rushed to her side this time) insisted the fault was Ottawa’s, even though the federal government had given her tiny community more than $90 million in the previous five years.
Spence herself had a comfortable office and home with a big-screen satellite television and high-speed internet. Her reserve had also received millions more from the Ontario government, from nearby mines and from casinos, and still was nearly $12 million in debt.
But the delusion goes well beyond Chief Spence to the greater Idle No More aboriginal movement that has so closely aligned itself with her protest.
Idle No More, which has been blockading train lines and organizing protests across the country, has convinced itself the federal government is surreptitiously changing federal law to make it easy for aboriginal governments to sell off land from their reserves.
That simply is not happening.
At the behest of elected reserve governments, Ottawa is changing the law to streamline the leasing of reserve land for casinos and other businesses.
At present, the Indian Act gives the federal government a very patronizing role in approving new leases. The new law would give greater control to elected on-reserve leaders.
But the rules making it difficult to sell reserve land permanently are not changing.
Like Spence, though, Idle No More supporters have deluded themselves into seeing Ottawa as out to get them.
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