Idle No More will never die [editorial]

There are some people who have been suckling at the teat of Corporate Canada for so long that they have forgotten who their real mother is; the milk so intoxicatingly potent that it blinds. We are seeing a lot of these Corporate guzzlers these days, so out of touch with Indigenous reality, so willing to dismiss the efforts and experience of their brothers and sisters for the taste of what their surrogates provide—money, prestige, the illusion of power, of belonging among Canada’s elite.

Perhaps a long walk—perhaps 1,600 or so kilometres of a long walk—might clear their heads. Trade out the Italian leather loafers for some good old rawhide snowshoes and perhaps they too will come home to their real families, touch back to them, feel their energy again, re-acquaint themselves with their relatives, their dreams and their desires. It’s there they will find their authentic selves, not swaddled in the arms of strangers.

It’s this estrangement, perhaps, that has skewed their perspective. They’ve forgotten that life has a rhythm, an ebb and a flow. It’s perhaps why the founder of the National Aboriginal Achievement Foundation, John Kim Bell, was so quick to ring the death knell for the Idle No More movement.

Idle No More is dead, he told a crowd gathered for the I Do Business National Summit at the beginning of March. He said he had based this opinion on those highest of authorities on Indigenous peoples, Jeffrey Simpson and John Ibbitson, writers with the Globe and Mail. Polls, Bell asserted, have shown that Canadians have turned against the movement because it provided no real answers. 

Idle No More is its own answer. Bell just doesn’t hear the right question because he’s listening to the wrong people.

We say the lot of them, Bell included, have entirely missed the point.

Idle No More is not dead. It lives as a genetic legacy in all who have taken part. It’s in our nerve endings. It’s coursing through our veins. It’s in the memory of our muscles. It lives as a gift to the generations yet unborn, because it has changed us, our perspective, our pride and our confidence. And it will re-emerge in a thousand different ways, some subtle, some overt, because it’s in us now.

If trauma suffered in one generation can be passed down to the next, and the next, like we have seen with the trauma of the residential school system, then Idle No More has been the antidote. Parents will teach their children that there is power within our languages, our culture, our traditions, within ourselves. They’ll demonstrate that power as they go about their daily lives. They’ll show it in small ways and large.

That could never be more effectively illustrated than through the remarkable accomplishment of the seven teenagers and their guide who trekked from James Bay in Northern Quebec to Parliament Hill, inspired by Idle No More and Chief Theresa Spence’s hunger strike. We all saw the pictures of the Journey of the Nishiyuu on their Facebook page. The fact that they began such a journey is a marvel. That they finished speaks to such great resolve. We have all learned from that and we are changed.

Bell insists that Canada turned off Idle No More because there was no plan going forward. There doesn’t need to be a “plan” laid out before Canada.

Idle No More is the plan. Idle No More is not about Canada. It’s about us.

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Editor's Note:
Last month in our editorial we commented on the arrest of a young woman in Edmonton who had been sexually assaulted and taken into custody for not completing her community service. At the time, claims were made by the woman’s lawyer, her social worker, and in at least two interviews with the woman that she had been mistreated by the Edmonton police service. Her lawyer and social worker have since apologized to the service because the allegations that she reported the sexual assault to the police at the time of the arrest have not been substantiated. “I acknowledge that as a result Edmonton Police Service was caused embarrassment,” wrote the social worker in his blog. We needed our readers to know this, because we made quite a stink about this issue ourselves and we think the EPS deserves to have this misinformation cleared up in our community of readers.