Why resist the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver?

"The Olympic Games are coming and you can't stop them, so what's the point of protesting now?" is a question I get asked virtually every day. Sometimes the question is posed by journalists sincerely puzzled by the fact that opposition to the Games still exists and seems to be growing just a month before the opening ceremonies. Other times, the query comes from members of the public or even from friends and family. Inevitably, the tone is akin to, "It rains a lot in Vancouver so what's the point of bitching about it?" The usual tag line to both is "If you don't like it, stay home" or "Move somewhere else."

Unlike the rain, which is beyond the power of normal mortals to control, the Olympics are not a force of nature, rather one of human construction whose impacts have been acutely harmful to a lot of people. Most of us grew up or moved to Vancouver knowing it was going to rain a lot, a fact we chose to accept as part of life. The Games, however, were not the outcome of a fair choice; rather they were foisted on the city by a small band of developers and politicians who stage-managed a plebiscite (functionally an opinion poll) involving only 12 per cent of British Columbia's population in order to get a desired result.

The rest is history: the bid organizers, later the Vancouver Olympic organizing committee, lied about virtually everything that followed as they proceeded to trash the place with their preparations. Games costs that were to be completely accounted for never were; the "greenest Games ever" wound up destroying Eagleridge Bluffs; social inclusivity and homes for those in need in the Olympic Village never materialized; the stated $175 million in total security costs, obvious even then as a lowball estimate, mushroomed to almost $1 billion. Instead of kept promises, we got catastrophic impacts on the poor and homeless, egregious environmental destruction, outrageous and still largely unaccounted for costs, and a virtual assault on civil liberties. We haven't even seen the traffic nightmares that are just days from being imposed. Nor have we yet calculated the fiscal impacts on individuals and their businesses as they discover the realities of hosting a party for the rich in the midst of a security free-for-all. Add to the above the lost opportunity costs-that is, what $6-billion-plus could have bought instead-and a more cohesive picture of the full impacts emerges.

In spite of this, some people still love the Olympics and Vancouver's role and will continue to support the Games regardless. Nothing I write here is likely to change this.

What follows, then, is really for those who are still on the fence and looking for an answer as to why some of us keep fighting back. Keep in mind in the following that this is my opinion and not necessarily representative of others who oppose the Olympics.

First, going out into the streets in February to call attention to the harm done by the Olympics is not a pointless exercise, rather the equivalent of bearing witness, basically a moral response to something many of us believe to be fundamentally damaging to our lives and communities. However, there is more to opposing the Olympics than being against the local developers' or even the International Olympic Committee's avarice and the disruption it causes. The Olympic Games in Vancouver represent in microcosm a pathologically flawed economic and social structure that has dominated the world for a long time, a one-dimensional world view that puts profit before all else. Shining a light on any part of the Olympics in Vancouver re-creates a larger global picture.

For example, focus in on the displacement of the homeless in Vancouver and the image that emerges is one of impoverishment of peoples around the world by many of the same organizations that bankroll the IOC. The war on the poor in Vancouver mirrors the war against poor farmers in Afghanistan. The destruction of Eagleridge is reflected back as yet another corporate assault on the environment, from Athabasca's tar sands to the rainforests of the Amazon, unsurprisingly with many of the same sponsors promoting and being promoted in turn by the IOC and Vanoc. The exploitation of First Nations in British Columbia for land and resources, not to mention misuse of their culture for tourist dollars, resembles the theft from indigenous peoples across Canada and around the world. The organizing slogan of the Olympic Resistance Network, "No Olympics on Stolen Native Land," thus has a local as well as a global context as part of a struggle against the conjoined twins of capitalism and colonialism that have devastated so much of the planet.

Our response to the sins of omission and commission of the Olympics, just as for the sins of the larger entities that the IOC represents, is not to become apathetic and withdraw in defeat or run away, but to stay and fight back-in other words, to resist. Resisting the Olympics seeks to reclaim the streets of our city for our common purposes, reasserts our fundamental natural and civil rights, and sends a message of strength and solidarity to those around the world who are fighting for the same goal of a just society.

Resistance is not defined as a circumscribed set of actions, but is rather a state of mind, an emergent construct that refuses to be awed by the power of the Olympics and its corporate sponsors or the levels of government that actively do their bidding. Resistance is similarly not deterred by a security apparatus that desperately hopes to keep a lid on Olympic protests to avoid embarrassing the IOC.

Creative Olympic resistance can be active or passive. It can take the form of conventional protests or civil disobedience, including direct actions, or can be as simple as talking to tourists to help them understand that the "fun" party they came to attend has arrived at enormous cost to the rest of us. Some of these visitors might even be interested to know that a few streets away from the official "celebratory sites," a very different community not willing to celebrate the Games will be promoting an alternative vision, one that rejects corporate profit ahead of people and distances itself from the of social myopia of Gordon Campbell and Stephen Harper and those like them. Resistance might include hanging an anti-Olympic/pro-people sign in a window or just refusing to cheer the circus as it moves down the street. Each act of resistance is synergistic with all the others.

Far from futile, resistance to the Olympics may be part of the rebirth of the anti-globalization/world-social-justice movement. Indeed, if there is any positive legacy to be found after February to Vancouver's Olympic misadventure, it might just take this shape.

Comments

Submitted by DONNA_MENESS on January 18, 2010 - 11:01pm.

According to the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, the intangible cultural heritage (ICH) – or living heritage – is the mainspring of humanity's cultural diversity and its maintenance a guarantee for continuing creativity. It is defined as follows:

Intangible Cultural Heritage means the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills – as well as the instruments, objects, artefacts and cultural spaces associated therewith – that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage. This intangible cultural heritage, transmitted from generation to generation, is constantly recreated by communities and groups in response to their environment, their interaction with nature and their history, and provides them with a sense of identity and continuity, thus promoting respect for cultural diversity and human creativity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intangible_Cultural_Heritage [3]

http://web.ub.ca/okanagan/ccgs/faculty/younging.html [4]

Returning to the other issue, if indications of spinning and weaving are considered important indicators that confirm the presence of the Vikings on the east side of North America (i.e., as found on Northern Baffin Island), then by the same token evidence of spinning and weaving in the Pacific Northwest must surely be just as important, if not more so. It is now well known that Norse spindle whorls were found at Brattahlid on the west coast of Greenland and the Viking Site at L'Anse Aux Meadows in Newfoundland. What seems to be less universally known, however, is that pre-Columbian spinning and weaving also occurs in the Pacific Northwest--including the area suggested for the location of "Vinland," i.e., the Cowichan Valley, land of the Cowichan and Coast Salish peoples.

Starting with the far northwest, Tlingit territory extends down from the Yakatut area to the suggested "Helluland" location around Etolin and Wrangell Islands. "Markland" lies further south on the Queen Charlotte Islands (the home of the Haida) while directly east lies Tsimshian territory. "Vinland" is located in the southeast corner of Vancouver Island, the home of the Cowichan and Coast Salish. The territory of the Musqueam is on the mainland to the east. With these divisions in mind we turn next to the use of dog wool in Pacific Northwest weaving.

THE HAIR OF THE COAST SALISH DOG
Who taught "Salish weaving" to the Cowichan girl mentioned in the excerpt from the The Daughters of Copper Woman remains unknown. Nevertheless, the reference to the use of dog wool by Hilary Stewart clearly leads back to the Coast Salish prior to the introduction of sheep into the region, i.e., Elizabeth Lominska Johnson and Kathryn Bernick record that:

Ed Sparrow is the only Musqueam elder who remembers seeing the preparation and weaving of wool. When he was five or six years old, in about 1904, he watched Thellaiwhaltun's wife with Selisya and his grandmother, Spahquia, doing this. At that time he did not realize that they were making the blanket that would be used on the floor at his naming ceremony. The fibre they used was mountain goat wool. He remembers being told in the past they had dogs with long hair which hung down from their bellies...The loom which he remembers had two cross-bars. It did not stand upright, but instead leaned against a wall of the shed where the women worked. It was seven or eight feet tall, and so they had to stand on a box to work. Its width was about three and one-half feet, but he remembers seeing weavings on Vancouver Island which were fifteen to twenty feet wide. (Elizabeth Lominska Johnson, and Kathryn Bernick, Hands of Our Ancestors: The Revival of Salish Weaving at Musqueam, Museum Note No.16, UBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver 1988:26)

As Reg Ashwell explains, although associated with spinning and weaving in this cultural context the dogs themselves remain something of a mystery:

Little has been recorded about the Northwest Coast Indians' dogs.. According to reports of early travelers, the dogs had the appearance of coyotes. They were highly trained by their masters, who called them by their name, treated them like respected members of the family, and according to tales old Indians tell, even sang to them. The dogs were trained to enter the woods and chase the game out to the hunter. The Coast Salish used them particularly for driving mountain goats into ambush and for herding deer and elk into lakes, where they could be attacked and slain by men in canoes.
What breed were these dogs? They have mixed long since with the pets of white settlers and reliable identification is no longer possible. Perhaps students interested in dog history will one day attempt to unravel the mystery of their origins... Coast Salish women, utilizing a simple loom, wove in wool--a practice uncommon in North America since the continent was not well-supplied with wool-bearing animals until after the introduction of sheep by white men. In addition, the Puget Sound women had their own little wool-bearing animal--a tame dog, quite small, but with a thick coat of creamy wool which could be shorn at regular intervals. When the wool was hacked off with a mussel shell knife, the fleece was so thick that according to one historian you could lift it up by one corner, like a mat. The Coast Salish also utilized the wool of the mountain goat. The Salish Indians along the Fraser River sometimes hunted the goats and traded the hides to the Coast. They also searched over the hillsides in spring and summer, when the goats were shedding, and gathered the tufts of fur which rubbed off on the bushes as the animals passed by. Perhaps it was this gift of wool which inspired Salish women to begin weaving cloth. Early explorers describe the dogs as having the appearance of Pomeranians, usually white in color, but sometimes varying to a brownish black. They were usually kept on tiny islands in Puget Sound and the Straits of Juan de Fuca and were not found among the more northerly Indians of the Northwest Coast. The women would paddle out daily from the village with food and drink for the dogs and always took them along with them during prolonged absences from the village on food gathering trips and other necessary excursions. A woman's wealth was said to have been judged by the number of dogs she owned. Captain George Vancouver reported meeting a group of two hundred Indians, most of them in canoes, but a few walking along with a drove of about forty dogs, which were sheared close to the skin like sheep.
The opening of the Hudson's Bay trading posts and the subsequent appearance of the easily obtainable Hudson's Bay blankets spelled the death knell for the weaving of these beautiful Salish blankets and mantles, only a few of which survive today in museums and private collections.
With the coming of the gold rush in 1858 and the resultant drastic changes in Coast Salish life styles, the dogs were no longer a valuable commodity and soon became extinct. Today there is not an Indian living who even remembers how they looked.
The wool of the dogs was much finer than that of the goats, and the yarns produced from it were very much like those of a fine grade commercial wool. The shearing was sometimes repeated two or three times in a summer and even then it was hard to get wool enough for many blankets. Women would mix the dog wool with mountain goat wool and together with goose down or duck down and the cotton from the fireweed and other plants, in any proportions available. Clay beaten into the wool with a flat, sword-like piece of wood helped remove the grease from the wool and also whitened it, for dog wool was not so white as the wool of the mountain goat. Next the weaver combed the fibers out with her fingers or hand carders and then rolled them on her leg. The wool was then ready for spinning. The spindle used was a smooth stick three of four feet long. At is lower end was a whorl of carved wood (often beautifully decorated), to keep the strands from slipping.
The loom for weaving the yarn consisted of two horizontal rollers supported in slots cut in wooden uprights set in the ground. Although not always used, the alternate strands of the warp were often keep apart by a simple heddle of thin wood to allow the hand to pass through. The warp was run around these rollers in a series of continuous cords so that the web could frequently be pulled around to a convenient position for the weaver, who always wove from the top downward. (Reg Ashwell, Coast Salish, Their Art, Culture and Legends, Hancock House, Surrey, 1978:50-62, emphases supplied).

Although the dogs mentioned above may have become extinct or disappeared through interbreeding, one thing remains clear enough, namely that Coast Salish weaving clearly predates the arrival of post-Columbian Europeans on the West Coast. It seems necessary to emphasize this point because although priest Lempfrit had been removed from the Cowichan Valley in 1852 (see Part III: Three Steps Back), the Church nevertheless returned there after the 1862-1863 smallpox epidemic and from that time on a movement towards knitting rather than weaving per se appears to have taken place in the Valley, i.e., Prior to the 1850s, when the first European settlers arrived in the Duncan area, the Cowichan people had been in contact with settlers in Fort Victoria and Sooke... Roman Catholic and Anglican Missions began visiting in the 1850s and took up residency in the following decade. Before European contact the Coast Salish people wove blankets, leggings, and rumplines (burden straps) out of mountain goat wool, dog hair, and other fibres. The wool was spun with a spindle and whorl, and the blankets were woven on a two-bar loom. There is little information on pre-contact production and use of these weavings, although examples remain in museum collections...

Also someone remarked about this issue:

"Furthermore, it's appauling to hear that "one third of royalties from its aboriginal product line will go to an Aboriginal Youth Legacy Fund to support education, sport and culture". This is insulting. At least I find this offensive. It's almost racist and most definitely discriminatory. Imagine this scenario (in which I have been a witness of). A customer who's causing a disturbance at a coffee shop interacts with an employee. The employee happens to be of african decent. She says this to her in anger "I can't believe you are refusing me. I have donated to Africa. I have paid for schools, water, and medicine for your people!"

Submitted by DONNA_MENESS on January 18, 2010 - 11:04pm.

Furthermore

Cowichan knitters spin wool three different ways: with a Salish spindle and whorl, with a converted sewing machine, and with a homemade spinning machine. The spindle and whorl are rarely used today: There are five known types of Salish spindles (Marr 1979:67). The version used exclusively by the Cowichan people was very large and was used for spinning two ply mountain goat wool and dog hair for weaving. The spindle was a tapered shaft approximately four feet long. The whorl, which rested one-half to two-thirds of the way down the shaft, was about eight inches in diameter. Coast Salish spindle whorls were often highly decorated, and many fine examples can be found in museum collections... Neither the large mountain goat wool spindle nor the smaller sheep's wool spindle are much-used today; the majority of spinners prefer to use machines. After missionary teachers instructed their pupils in the use of a European spinning wheel, it was adapted to produce the large quantities of thicker yarn needed for knitting and for much of the Salish weaving. (Margaret Meikle, Cowichan Indian Knitting, Museum Note No. 21, UBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, 1986:1-11;emphases supplied).

Leaving the south-west in early Indian days, you might have travelled for thousands of miles in any direction, except south, without seeing any weaving. Weaving was a northwestern speciality, for weaving was very unusual in America north of Mexico. You would not find a real loom anywhere until you got to the Puget Sound country. Students of Indian history find that one of their most interesting problems is this one of loom weaving among a few northwestern groups. They are all Salish and they are gathered on two sides of the present Canadian border. They wove in wool. Ruth Underhill, Ph.D. in her "Indians of the Pacific NorthWest, 1945" refers to the Salish blanket - "only a few of which are left anywhere in the country. There was not much use of colour until the Whites brought yarn in trade. Then a few women in Canada began making colour ed designs and our Klallam and Cowlitz tried it also. A few really beautiful blankets were made in fine yarn and magnificent colour. However, there was no one to encourage them to make these for sale, as Indians are encouraged in the south west. They found that they could get Hudson Bay blankets with far less trouble and so they gave up the art some seventy-five years ago. If that had not happened, Salish blankets might have been as famous as those of the Navaho."(Oliver N. Wells, SALISH WEAVING: PRIMITIVE AND MODERN, As Practiced by the Salish Indians of Southwest British Columbia, Frank T. Coan, Sardis, 1969:3). The Loom - Two basic types of loom were used by the early Salish Weavers and are still in use. The two-roller loom - as illustrated by Paul Kane in the well-known picture, and the single bar loom, commonly referred to as a three piece loom. Each of the types have had variations noted in their construction, both in the past and as used today. The two-bar loom was developed by the Pueblo Indians between 1100 and 1300 (P. 47. Pueblo Crafts). Whether the Salish tribes were using the loom at that time is not known. Some believe the single bar loom was in use prior to the two bar loom, which developed from it. It is known, however, that both types were in use among the Salish and other North West tribes when the Europeans first came to the NorthWest. (Oliver N. Wells, SALISH WEAVING: PRIMITIVE AND MODERN, 1969:12;emphases supplied). Certainly Salish blankets are nowhere near as well known as those of the Navaho, nor indeed are they even as well known as the Hudson Bay blankets that largely replaced them. But was this and the near replacement of Salish weaving by monochomatic knitting purely incidental?

www.spirasolaris.ca/sbb4g1dv.html

Submitted by DONNA_MENESS on January 18, 2010 - 11:41pm.

The history of the Olympic Games almost without exception brands it as a lie.
To greater or lesser degrees, the Olympics bring gentrification, graft and police violence wherever they nest.

It's also difficult for B.C residents to see how this will help their pocketbooks, given that the prov. gov't pledged to the International Olympic Committee that any cost overruns would be covered by taxpayers.

"The "Olympic Ideal" is part of one of the world’s most successful marketing campaigns, built around concepts that almost everyone can agree upon: world-class amateur sport and peaceful competition.

But a rising chorus of critical voices say that the Olympics are deeply implicated in the expropriation of land, money and resources. From movements demanding "No Olympics on Stolen Native Land" to angry business owners, resistance to the Olympics economic and social agenda is growing.

The Olympics budget includes a billion dollars for security. A billion dollars each will be spent on a new convention centre, a larger highway to Whistler, and SNC Lavalin's rail link from the Vancouver airport to downtown.

In the political and economic maneuvres leading up to the 2010 Olympics, a different "ideal" has been revealed – one of exclusive contracts, sponsorship deals, displacement, social cleansing, and corruption. At times, sport seems like an afterthought.

Many of the real stories behind the Olympics remain to be told."

see: http://www.dominionpaper.ca/topics/2010_olympics

Human Rights and the Olympic Movement (Lecture 5 of 5)The Contribution of the Olympics to the Promotion of Human Rights; Alwyn Morris (LA,1984). Part of the “Mohawk nation” living in Canada ...

www.slideshare.net/.../human-rights-and-the-olympic-movement [7] -

&&&

In relation to comments about politics intruding on the Olympics

1) Both the USA & Canada boycotted the 1980 Olympics because Russia invaded Afghanistan &

2) the Lubicon Cree called for the 1984 boycott because of SUNCOR O&G exhibition " The Spirit Sings" to highlight the hypocisy of "celebrating" Indigenous cultural while systemically destoying their community since within 5 yrs. the Lubicon Crees' territory had over 500 O&G wells & within 2 yrs. 95% of the Crees were on welfare after their traplines were bulldozed & businesses told NOT to purchase furs from the Crees. Food source dropped from 200 moose /per year to 20- but the O&G employees had great fun shooting off their guns!!lol

Nevermind that both levels of Alberta courts were stacked with O&G lawyers & that Canada's Supreme Court had judges that ended up on the board of directors of said O&G companies. SSHHH! -that's on the QT..lol

***

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2009/10/15/bc-1936-olymp... [8]

"These games represent the first point of contact between Canada and Nazi Germany," exhibit curator Frieda Miller told CBC News Thursday."

Duh, NOT!!!...the first point of contact was the medical experiments performed on Indigenous children at residential schools - covertly or disavowed....

but maybe if the sentence was:' These games "offically" represent the first point of contact...

The schools & religious orders made money from medical experiments, children disappeared -but who cares & who knows - payment from DIAND as long as their names were still on the books.

http://www.hiddenfromhistory.org/historyfiles/audio/HFH-Sept23-02.mp3 [9]

( DIAND archives: 13 children re: Sechelt Residential school/1939 2 shots given by German doctors...listen especially for about death of Maisie Shaw & the various official answers by DIAND/United Church/RCMP)

over 1200 Nazi scientist brought over by the Americans, most worked on space program but about 200 worked on medical experimentation. RCMP aka given Canadian name: "Bob Armstrong" -SS tattoo/ id # 091374SS

CANADIANS - learn your history- all of it, not just the "nice parts"...LOL

FYI:The Truth Commission into Genocide in Canada
email: hiddenfromhistory@yahoo.ca [10] OR kevin_annett@hotmail.com [11]
website: www.hiddenfromhistory.org [12]

Submitted by EricD on February 9, 2010 - 12:35am.

Shaw has listed some great reasons to protest. And there are more:

Scrub the greenwash off the Freeway Olympics By Cathy Wilander and Eric Doherty

Many people are asking: Why protest the Olympics when the money is already spent and most of the damage is done?

The reason we will be out on the streets on Friday (February 12) to welcome the Olympic torch and opening ceremony is to highlight the real story and the real costs of the Games and related projects. An informed public is our best hope of stopping such multi-billion-dollar boondoggles in the future.

Full text at:

http://www.straight.com/article-286495/vancouver/cathy-wilander-and-eric... [14]