Editorial
Aboriginal
Day of Action – A Struggle for Basic Human Rights
On
June 29 Aboriginal peoples and their supporters held demonstrations across
Canada to demand that federal and provincial governments recognize their basic
human rights, including the right to decent housing, education, health care and
jobs. These rights belong to every human being and are recognized in the United
Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. However, the Canadian government
has never enacted legislation to ensure that any citizens of this country are
guaranteed such rights. In the case of the Aboriginal peoples, the federal and
provincial governments not only refuse to recognize these basic human rights,
but have adopted a whole range of policies based on racist and colonial
premises which violate these rights on a daily basis. The demand that all
levels of government should eliminate such policies and treat Aboriginal
peoples with the dignity and respect owing to all human beings is a just demand
which enjoys the support of the vast majority of the Canadian people.
In
the days leading up to the June 29 Day of Action a lot of confusion was
generated about both the form and content of the struggle of Aboriginal peoples
for their rights. On the one hand were those who sought to limit this struggle
to a matter of some demands for economic reforms, while others belittled these
demands and proclaimed that the real struggle is for sovereignty, Aboriginal
rights, hereditary rights, and so forth.
The
first position seeks to block Aboriginal peoples from taking political action
to solve their problems, equating political action with violence and terrorism.
The second position seeks to deprive the struggle for rights of its human
content by reducing the concept of rights to an abstraction and then suggesting
that the struggle for this abstraction is a higher form of struggle than the
struggle for economic reforms.
The
essence of the struggle of Aboriginal peoples is precisely a struggle for good
education, quality health care and decent-paying jobs. This is also the essence
of the struggle of the Canadian working class. As such this common struggle
constitutes a basis of unity between the working class and Aboriginal peoples.
To belittle this reality and suggest that it must be subordinated to some
“higher” form of struggle for sovereignty, Aboriginal rights or some other
right is to divide form from content and obscure what all oppressed peoples are
really fighting for.
The
issue is not that one form of struggle is higher than another form of struggle,
but that the struggle of the Aboriginal peoples is being waged simultaneously
on a variety of fronts – economic, political and cultural. The goal of this
struggle is to put an end to the second or third-class citizenship status of
Aboriginal peoples and to provide themselves with the tools needed to control
their own destinies – a land base, economic development and political autonomy.
These constitute the main content of sovereignty and of Aboriginal and
hereditary rights.
One
of the problems that came to the fore during the preparations for the
Aboriginal Day of Action is that the federal government and various elites
within the Aboriginal community are escalating negotiations between themselves
to impose settlements on various fronts which not only fail to satisfy the
aspirations of the Aboriginal peoples but also seek to block and frustrate
those aspirations. Current proposals for Aboriginal self-government maintain
the worst aspects of the Indian Act while allowing certain Aboriginal elites to
share in the spoils of the colonial status of Aboriginal peoples. Land claims
settlements are being used to extinguish any other claims Aboriginal peoples
may have, to open up vast territories for capitalist development and to put in
place mechanisms whereby the land can be expropriated through other means. For
example, the federal government has been trying for over a decade to implement
a system of private land ownership on First Nations reserves. Without strong
and viable economic development on reserves, private ownership of land is a
virtual guarantee that, within a short period of time, the land will belong to
the finance capitalists. In other words,
in the name of eliminating the colonial status of Aboriginal peoples, the
federal government and Aboriginal elites are planning to profit from the
increased exploitation and oppression of Aboriginal peoples.
At
every turn the Aboriginal peoples come up against the reality that governments
at every level and the monopoly capitalists they serve are not interested in
solving the economic, political, social and cultural problems facing Aboriginal
peoples. If they were, then some progress would have been made over the past
several decades in eliminating the terrible living conditions, the sub-standard
education and health care, and the resulting plague of social problems that
beset the vast majority of Aboriginal peoples. This reality is shared, in one
way or another, by all but the wealthiest sections of Canadian society. The
struggle to end this reality and build a new one in which all forms of
exploitation and oppression are a thing of the past is a struggle which unites all sections of the Canadian people.
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