Canada for five bucks!
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On Canada Day at Dundas Square, Toronto, they were selling Canada Day t-shirts and hats for $5
Cheap made stuff. Canada for five bucks!
Is that all that Canada is worth?
Yikes!
But on Canada, a small group of singers and drummers gathered at Dundas Square to bring in a little grassroots pride to the celebration from Indigenous and ally Canadians.
Dundas Square itself was not that full and held none of the awesome energy it held during Aboriginal Day (which is actually part of Aboriginal Month) on Wednesday June 26, 2013. I bought a pair of beautiful hand-made and beaded moccs and they weren’t five bucks!
On Canada Day, we waited near Yonge Street until the amazing Steve Teekins finished his performance on stage with his dancers — which could not be heard over the din of the merchants selling their wares, “$5 plush cowboy hats”… “$5 t-shirts here).
Then there was a break in the stage performances, so all you could hear was, “five bucks…five bucks!” It’s pretty much stuck in my head now: Canada is worth 5 bucks.
This is definitely where we set up our little singing circle, bolstered by the Sovereignty Summer call out by Idle No More and Defenders of the Land.
In an interview, Idle No More co-founder, Sheelah McLean, is asked by rabble.ca editor Derrick O’Keefe what some of the potential hot spots might be for our Sovereignty Summer.
She replied, “Idle No More is here to support pushing forward on the issues that people have been struggling with for a very long time, so of course some of the heavy extraction areas — in B.C., with the pipelines, in Alberta, with the tar sands, and we’ve got [Enbridge’s] Line 9 and we’ve got the issue of fracking in New Brunswick.
These aren’t new issues; these are issues that have been happening in these communities for a very long time. But what used to happen before is that communities would do something, like a non-violent direct action, but they were isolated in it — in other words other communities weren’t necessarily joining in.
They didn’t have the capacity that we have now, to use social media, and corporate media, to let people be aware of what the issues are and get people behind the action.
So I think that what we’re going to see across Canada is people taking these issues to the streets, and that’s exactly what we want.
Each community may do it in a different way, and have a different issue, but we really need Canadians to get behind these actions and to force this government to implement treaty and to see that justice is done in this country. Enough is enough,” she told Derrick O’Keefe.
Here is Toronto, we wanted to give people a different perspective of Canada, a grassroots, non-commercial view of what the nation of Canada was founded on, and what its true cost was.
I know that Canadian children are taught dreadfully incorrect info about First Nations in school. Indians are presented as Spectors of the past, with what remains either colonized or hidden away off in some fly-away reserve.
So a small group of Indigenous women and their allies decided to intervene in Toronto’s Canada Day ceremonies by holding a ceremony of our own — with drums and songs, tobacco and prayer, to make our presence known.
It’s important that First Nations communities asset the truth: “we are still here”
There is a lot going on with Idle No More, including a new websites: idlenomore.ca and idlenomore.com.
There are current struggles such as against the tar sands, resistance to fracking in the Yukon, a five day blockade at a Hamilton Line 9 pumping station, and in depth Mi’kmaq and ally resistance to fracking in New Brunswick.
Sovereignty Summer is heating up across Canada as Indigenous nations declare that: “we are still here!”
*For photos from the action, please see John Bonner’s blog. His credit is for the photo at the title of this piece, too.
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