Today the federal government revoked the sovereignty of the Attawapiskat First Nation. Attawapiskat has been in a state of emergency for the last two years, but an appeal to the media by their NDP MP caused the government to act.

Attawapiskat is one of the few bands that posts their financial statements online. I actually just finished a course in reading government financial statements, so I skimmed through them. It turns out that First Nations financial statements are a lot more complicated than, say, the financial statement for the Government of Canada. Here’s a long blog post discussing the problems with First Nations financing with references to Attawapiskat. I wrote up a post with what I thought was the smoking gun but then I realized I had misread the statements (and hid my previous post because it’s embarrassing).

The trick with First Nations funding is that the federal government gives them a bunch of payments earmarked for certain areas of expenditure. This is similar to health transfers to the provinces – I’d argue that both violate the Constitutional sovereignty of these governments. The education situation in Attawapiskat is too complicated so let’s look at the housing fund:

The obvious question is why the hell is a housing fund spending so much on wages, “program delivery” and administration, and so little on capital? Are these euphemisms for repairs or fraud?

The huge jump in spending in 2007 was the year before a new chief and council got elected, which doesn’t make that much sense. The financial statements don’t say where the transfers come from (I believe it’s another Attawapiskat fund), but a big transfer in 2009 got spent on some kind of capital. Then a huge increase in government funding for 2010 didn’t get spent on anything.

Attawapiskat’s financial statements don’t make enough sense to say whether there is mismanagement but I’m skeptical of any organization that has so much variance from year to year. Most organization’s financial statements show steady operational expenses with occasional capital purchases. Insofar as protection of the citizens of Attawapiskat outweighs their right to self-governance, I support the federal takeover of their government. But why didn’t someone at Indian Affairs see this coming a long time ago?

I was having a discussion last night with Celine and Robin about the lack of identity politics in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Well, today Olga posted a link on Facebook that brings it back, but on the other side. This letter to the Occupation asks them to acknowledge that Wall Street is native territory, discussed further in this blog post.

To paraphrase the Occupation: “We are the 99%. We are oppressed by capitalism. We need to take back political control. We need to take back our country.”

To summarize the criticism: That is not true for the 4% of Canadians (2% of Americans) who identify as aboriginal. They are oppressed by colonialism first, and capitalism as just one aspect of that. They haven’t had any political control to be suppressed by capitalism. The Occupation should be liberating the country on behalf of the aboriginal people, not simply recolonializing it.

Apparently the Lenape, who lived on Manhattan, signed a treaty with the Dutch that they understood to be for sharing the land, not giving it up. Similarly, the Douglas Treaties that cover Centennial Square in Victoria were likely understood as peace treaties, not land transfers.

The demand that the United States “honor all treaties signed with all indigenous nations” seems reasonable to me. And in British Columbia I’d add, “act immediately to negotiate treaties with all indigenous nations who do not have treaties with the Crown”.

Most Northwest Coast First Nations glass art looks like something that belongs in a corporate lobby:

But at the Burke Gallery at the University of Washington I came across the work of Preston Singletary, which is actually glass sculpture:

He is Lingít, so it wasn’t surprising I saw his work in Washington: museums in Washington and Oregon are obsessed with Lingít art. They don’t seem to like local aboriginal art (to be fair, baskets from the Oregon desert are pretty boring), and Lingít art is almost as crowd-pleasing as Haida while being from the good old U-S-of-A.

I’ve also only ever seen Yup’ik art in the US, which is quite different from both Inuit and First Nations art, and quite awesome:

Thunderbird is a giant bird of prey that nests on top of Mount Rainier. It watches over the people of Cascadia (Coast Salish and others).

In the sea there used to live a giant orca, so big that it ate whales. We’ll call it Orca.

Whale meat and oil were an important food source and trade good for the Cascadians. But Orca was eating so many whales that they were beginning to go extinct.

Thunderbird decided that Orca had to be stopped. He perched near the sea and waited. When Orca surfaced for air, Thunderbird swooped in and hauled him out of the water.

Orca displaced so much water that the water receded. You could walk from Vancouver Island and Haida Gwaii to the mainland. The Cascadian people saw all the scary things that live on the bottom.

A few wise leaders realised that the water could surge back. They told people to lash canoes into rafts and moor them to sturdy trees like the arbutus. Some people listened, some people didn’t.

Thunderbird could barely hold Orca, especially as he was thrashing around. While Thunderbird was flying Orca back to his nest, he dropped him. Orca smashed into the ground, causing the whole world to violently shake. The drop killed Orca. All the villages in Cascadia were destroyed and many people died.

Thunderbird needed more energy to get Orca’s body back to his nest. He tried eating a piece of Orca but it turned out that Orca tasted horrible, not like a normal orca. So instead of flying home, Thunderbird flew Orca over the ocean and dropped him.

The splash caused water to rush back onto the land, covering even the mountain tops. Any Cascadians who weren’t in a canoe drowned. Any canoes that weren’t tied down were washed far inland, forcing the passangers to resettle there.

This really happened, on January 26, 1700.

I’d like a Cowichan Sweater. But the ones available in thrift and tourist stores have, for historical or practical reasons, very unflattering cuts.

There’s a Richmond (Coast Salish land) company called Granted that is producing what they call “Cowichan-inspired” sweaters with local (read: Asian immigrant) knitters. Both CBC 3 and The Straight have featured them without questioning their bona fides.

Four Horsemen menswear store in Victoria contracted Granted to produce custom sweaters which are being sold as “Cowichans”. The owner of Four Horsemen said something about Granted being a subsidiary of a traditional Cowichan company, but I can’t find any information about that online.

The question is whether Granted sweaters count as cultural appropriation? If not, buying one of those sweaters is stealing the Cowichan people’s intellectual property and depriving them of one of their few economic niches (see also: HBC’s Olympic sweaters).

This is a follow-up to Guns, Germs and Steel that could be called Just Germs: it’s not that the natives lost to the colonialists in armed combat, it’s that there were no natives left to fight by the time colonializing started in earnest. The colonialists waltzed into what was effectively a ghost continent. This created the myth of the Noble Savage, living in harmony with nature; the truth is that native civilizations were decimated to the point where they could no long manipulate nature.

Charles Mann is a journalist (Jared Diamond is a professor of physiology and birds) but the book’s research feels thorough and up-to-date: I haven’t found any major academic criticism online. The book itself is over 9000 pages long due to huge amounts of historical background. The background is quite interesting, but I think a lot of it could be cut without weakening the argument.

The first theme is why the Algonquians didn’t drive the Pilgrims into the sea. The unnecessary background is about Tisquantum, the Pilgrim’s Uncle Tom. As Mann tells it, his story is much more interesting and epic than Pocahontas and John Smith. (1491 should be optioned!)

The second theme is the pre-European colonializations of America by humans. The key question addressed here is whether the Indians are “responsible” for the extinction of most potential livestock and beasts-of-burden in America. There’s lots of interesting information in this chapter, but Mann doesn’t manage to give a definitive answer to the question.

The third theme is the fall of the Inca Empire. The Aztecs and Mayans get significantly less space, probably because they’re better covered in Guns, Germs and Steel and the Incas should have been better positioned to resist the Spanish: the Inca Empire is one of the largest continuous empires by latitude that has ever existed. The only two things that ever made it over the Andes are corn and disease and Mann is unfortunately unable to offer an explanation for why disease hit the Incas before the Spanish arrived.

The book is focused on the civilizations that one would reasonably expect to resist conquest. I was expecting the book to be about the state of America before colonialization. For example, James Douglas chose the location for Fort Victoria because he admired the natural rolling fields, which were in fact being slashed & burned for camas by the Songhees.

The Times Colonist recently ran a series of articles on the poor state of reserve housing in BC. In my reading, they primarily blamed the development process: that chose lowest-bid developers and then didn’t include any quality inspection or performance measures to ensure the developers completed the contract. They also spoke frequently of the physical wear created by overcrowding, although always implying insufficient housing stock, not an attempt to implement extended-family culture in European-style homes.

One issue handled carefully by the journalists was poor maintenance standards: they did not want to suggest that those people were bad tenants. But most recommendations for improvement included, in the small print, training for tenants in housing maintenance. The argument was made that many of the conditions, including poor maintenance, are widespread in ghettos all over the world (no matter what ethnic group is ghettoized). And I would add that making home ownership illegal probably doesn’t help.

I’m not sure why it’s taboo to say that most natives don’t know how to maintain a Western home? Why would they? Reservation schools were successful at dismantling past cultural practices without being successful at assimilation, which would include house-culture. Even if traditional native culture were intact, what relevance would it have to Western homes?

They traditionally haven’t had the experience of building upkeep, and they didn’t need to. If the building returned to the forest, that was what it was supposed to do.