Update: A previous version of this story, and the version that ran in our April 1, 2015 issue, said that the $5,000 donation towards veterinary costs was non-repayable. This is incorrect, and the Camosun College Student Society expects money to be returned to them if a lawsuit that is happening as a result of the situation is successful; if it’s not, at that point the money will be classified as a donation. Our apologies for the mistake.
With all the protest on the ground regarding Bill C-51, people are still not talking about the biggest elephant in the room: colonization.
Colonization has done more harm to society than the “anti-terrorism” bill. Just think of those who are actually forced to live with real terror on a daily basis.
Coming from an institution such as Camosun College that supports indigenization and interculturalization, I’m shocked by how little dialogue there is about Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and other similar situations. Why are people so concerned about Bill C-51 when an unarmed 18-year-old boy is gunned down in broad daylight and the media circus that follows paints the police officer who shot and killed him as the victim?
Upon joining the Diversity Advisory Committee (DAC) last year, I queried as to why the college didn’t formally commemorate Black History Awareness on campus, despite the University of Victoria having annual events. To my disbelief, it was implied that we could just put students on a bus and transport them to these external events as a show of solidarity.
At the Camosun College Student Society (CCSS) level, it took two face-to-face meetings of intense debate to shore up a $250 donation to the Victoria African and Caribbean Cultural Society (VACCS)-sponsored Black History Awards Reception; yet, in a single phone-in motion with hardly any discussion, the CCSS approved a $5,000 donation toward a student’s veterinary costs.
If we can be so callous and unaware of the harm colonization visits upon racialized communities here in Canada, what is our effect abroad? At a recent Amnesty International film night we explored the lives of African slaves brought over to colonize the country of Colombia during the 1600s.
Today, that Afro-Colombian community, in spite of being classified as the country’s rural poor, built a thriving artisinal mining industry which utilizes a less invasive extractive process that doesn’t require blasting away entire mountainsides.
However, the US-backed regime that brought an end to warring drug cartels turned the paramilitary and resistance fighters into the government death squads that ultimately terrorized poor ethnic communities to make way for foreign mining corporations.
Would it surprise you to know that 75 percent of the world’s largest mining corporations are Canadian-owned and likely supporting genocide of world’s poorest indigenous populations?
Colonization and white privilege are sewn into the fabric of the North American culture. We are instilled at a young age with the principles of equality and social justice. Sadly, as adults, we eschew any notion that we ourselves could be oppressive in our nature. Therein lies the problem.
If we cannot see the plight of African-Americans as Africa’s indigenous who were forcibly enslaved through colonization, how can we claim to support indigenization? How can we as Canadians be so averse to the notion of being branded terrorists by Bill C-51, yet ignore the undulating genocide of Canadian mining corporations in its entirety?
Camosun College as a whole, to reclaim its soul as an institution of higher learning, needs to support decolonization for all marginalized groups, as well as ongoing divestment efforts within its mandate. To say otherwise would be to acknowledge our complicit nature in the terrorizing of other cultures.
“Why are people so concerned about Bill C-51 when an unarmed 18-year-old boy is gunned down in broad daylight and the media circus that follows paints the police officer who shot and killed him as the victim?”
Why is a young Canadian more concerned about an incident in a foreign country — over which he has no control — than what is going on in his own backyard? Canadian students used to be concerned about the undue influence of the U.S. on Canada, Now, students seem to have adopted virtually every trendy political cause originating in the United States and ‘Third World’.
Try researching the origins of things like the ‘social justice’ movement, or the ‘white privilege’ theory, or the ‘Agenda 21’ movement — and then ask yourself if you’re simply being a unthinking pawn for foreign interests who would transition Canada into nothing but a pawn of the international Left…
P.S. The rhetoric you employ throughout your piece is pure Communist Third World ideology. Chances are, you learned it from a textbook written by an American Leftist professor. Vladimir Lenin had an expression of contempt for people like this : “useful idiots”…