Never Idle--Surviving

On the DividedNoMore blogsite, in a piece called “Fish Broth & Fasting,” Leanne Simpson has redefined and explained what the press has been calling Chief Theresa Spence’s “hunger strike.” She calls it a ceremonial and symbolic fast, while renaming and redefining “Chief” Spence as a holy woman, “Ogichidaakwe Spence”:

Fish broth. It carries cultural meaning for Anishinaabeg. It symbolizes hardship and sacrifice.  It symbolizes the strength of our Ancestors.  It means survival.  Fish broth sustained us through the hardest of circumstances, with the parallel understanding that it can’t sustain one forever. We exist today because of fish broth. It connects us to the water and to the fish who gave up its life so we could sustain ourselves. Chief Spence is eating fish broth because metaphorically, colonialism has kept Indigenous Peoples on a fish broth diet for generations upon generations. This is utterly lost on mainstream Canada, as media continues to call Ogichidaakwe Spence’s fast a “liquid diet” while the right winged media refers to it as much worse.

Not Chief Spence, but Ogichidaakwe Spence – a holy woman, a woman that would do anything for her family and community, the one that goes over and makes things happen, a warrior, a leader because Ogichidaakwe Spence isn’t just on a hunger strike.  She is fasting and this also has cultural meaning for Anishinaabeg.  She is in ceremony.

One commentator, generally sympathetic, points out that “Chief” and “hunger strike” are apparently Spence’s words, too. Partly what is at work here seems to be bad translation not of language but of concept. Or maybe Theresa Spence is trying to talk a language the media can understand or that they expect, or that she has been trained to use because that’s what she keeps hearing and reading. Or she is talking a language she has learned through colonization, a language that is misrepresenting the full scope of what she is attempting.

In the end, Idle No More, regardless of its many objectives and spokespeople, is about survival on the scale the narrator “Angel” speaks of in Linda Hogan’s novel Solar Storms:

The devastation and ruin that had fallen over the land fell over the people, too. Most were too broken to fight the building of the dams, the moving of waters, and perhaps that had been the intention all along. But I could see Dora-Rouge thinking, wondering: how do conquered people get back their lives? She and others knew the protest against the dams and river diversions was their only hope. Those who protested were the ones who could still believe they might survive as a people. (226)

That kind of survival, not just as "a people," but with a sense of one's own fundamental humanity intact, can be achieved only through constant action in resistance, in a world in which creation is not a finished product for us to mine out for the fun and profit of the few, but an everyday activity, a process of constant reinvention for the preservation of us all.  After all, as Roger Epp puts it so eloquently and obviously in the title of his collection of prairie essays, “We Are All Treaty People.” Both the First Nations and Canada, on behalf of non-Native Canadians, signed those treaties. Undermine the treaties for one party, undermine them for all.


It is survival in the face of the three key elements of colonial thinking that result not only in dispossession of resources but of a claim to full humanity. J.M. Blaut terms these elements the “myth of emptiness”:

(i) A non-European region is empty or nearly empty of people (hence settlement by Europeans does not displace any native peoples). (ii) The region is empty of of settled population: the inhabitants are mobile, nomadic, wanderers (hence European settlement violates no political sovereignty, since wanderers make no claim to territory). (iii) The cultures of this region do not possess an understanding of private property--that is, the region is empty of property rights and claims (hence colonial occupiers can freely give the land to settlers since no one owns it). (The Colonizer’s Model of the World 15)

These elements are behind centuries of dispossessing and dehumanizing legislation, as Thomas King has explained: “...legislation, in relation to Native people, has had two basic goals. One, to relieve us of our land, and two, to legalize us out of existence” (The Truth About Stories 130). This is “termination legislation” writ large, and the root cause of many actions similar to Idle No More over the years, not to mention the current sense not just among the Native populations that the country will indeed become "empty" once all its resources have been sold off to corporate interests, most of them abroad  (what is euphemistically called "offshore"), with no real "investment" in the future of anything called "Canada."

I recall one such earlier action in the late 1970s or early 1980s, as a group walked across the country in support of Native concerns. I was working at the Saskatoon StarPhoenix at the time, and we had reported the action as a “protest march.” A few days later I was riding with Peter Wilson, our head photographer, to a pow wow near Lumsden, and we met the marchers along the way. Their leader took me to task (though I was not the reporter or editor who had used the term “protest march.” I wasn’t actually a news reporter at all, but the librarian, using up some booked time off to go for a bit of a joy ride on a really nice summer afternoon). The leader glared at me and said “This is not a protest march. It is a cultural and spiritual walk for survival.” I repeated that later for the reporter and editor. They shrugged. Then and now, the press uses its own shorthand.

Maybe we should stop calling Spence and the Idle No More and similar demonstrators "protesters," anyway, and call them what they are: “activists for survival.”  “Activism for Survival” is maybe not as full a term as we need, either, but it does express the idea of "Not Idle," not that there have not been Not Idle Native people all along, of course. Some in groups. Some as individuals speaking out when the situation has made it necessary. People like a former student I recall (but cannot name here, as I do  not have permission to invade her privacy to that degree) from my days teaching introductory academic skills courses for the U. of A. Faculty of Native Studies.

A most dynamic Cree woman from Hobbema, she told me a story that illustrates her experiences across a lifetime, experiences I accept as fairly typical. It was of an exchange she had had one day with her high school literature teacher. She had been going to school in Wetaskiwin, the city nearest her reserve, in order to get better preparation for post secondary education than she could get at her reserve school. One day, after class, she had asked the teacher if maybe they could read some stories by Native writers. There were several Native students in the class, after all. The teacher retorted with something along the lines of “If you want to read Indian stories, go to an Indian school.” That could turn the gentlest soul into an activist, I would think, if her grasp on her own fundamental humanity were to have a chance at survival.