Tag: Land rights

From the River to the Sea

~ The Koboi Project

The national motto of Canada, “A Mari Usque Ad Mare,” which translates to “From sea to sea,” marks the occupation of a land which the prior occupants still call Turtle Island. While this proprietary geographical imagery derives from the Biblical Psalm 72:8, “He shall have dominion from sea to sea and from the river unto the ends of the earth,” its eschatological sense of “dominion” has been repeatedly transposed into an imperial one throughout the Common Era. The territorial imagery of “A mari Usque Ad Mare,” is evoked again in ‘America the Beautiful’, a popular patriotic song often confused with the American National anthem,

America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

This proprietary boundary symbolism seems to be an identifiable feature of European settler colonial imagery and lore. Indeed, European settler colonialism can be said to have been inaugurated in 1452, when Roman Catholic Pope Nicholas V issued the bull Dum Diversas, authorizing King Afonso V of Portugal to subjugate the lands and the lives of non-Christians. While Zionism does not derive from this Christian ‘doctrine of discovery’, the founding of Israel in the violent displacement of native Palestinians by non-native European Jews, can be seen as the last significant instantiation of such an ethnopolitical ‘dominion’.

Given both the history of settlement and erasure of Palestinians from their lands and the fact that in the past month, 10,733 Palestinians have been killed (10,569 in Gaza and 164 in the West Bank, November 8, 10:50 GMT Update) with the complicity of the collective West, I wonder if it is a guilty self-projection that underpins the interpretation that the freedom slogan, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” as a call for genocide (mass killing or other form of eradication with intent)? In fact, as Israeli historian Avi Shlaim has recently explained, this is not a call for the destruction of the state of Israel, but “a call for freedom ‘from the river to the sea’ for everybody.

Image: https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/from-sea-to-shining-sea.html

https://doctrineofdiscovery.org/dum-diversas/

https://jewishstudies.washington.edu/israel-hebrew/why-israel-isnt-a-settler-colonial-state/

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/9/israel-hamas-war-in-maps-and-charts-live-tracker

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/2/from-the-river-to-the-sea-what-does-the-palestinian-slogan-really-mean

Lax Kwa’laams Ceremony

~ The Koboi Project ~ 1 Comment

lelu-island-totem

At the recent pole raising ceremony on Lelu Island, Simoyget Yaahan Don Wesley, who was the face and voice of the resistance to the PETRONAS led Pacific Northwest LNG development on the island said, “Today, the Tsimshian people and the Gitwilgyoots stand proudly to stand this pole that marks the occasion of … where our ancestors left off at Rupert harbour thousands of years ago …. to commemorate what we have done here, the past to years, of taking on a giant in the Liquified Natural Gas Industry, the Federal and Provincial governments, the Lax Kwa’laams Indian Band, the Metlakatla Indian Band that tried to take away our land, our way of life and our salmon. The people of the gitwagiats tribe got together and made a stand to show Canada that our blood is still here on this land and that we are here forever.” 

The Tsimshian people are constituted in seven First Nations, the Kitselas, Kitsumkalum, Lax Kw’Alaams, Metlakatla, Kitkatla, Gitga’at  and the Kitasoo. By the reference to ‘Lax Kwa’laams Indian Band’ and ‘Metlakatla Indian Band’ above, the speaker is indexing the elected bodies representing these bands and not the people s individuals. The Gitwilgyoots are themselves Lax Kwa’laams and, according to Shanon Lough in the Nothern View, the ceremony was attended by about 100 people including members of Lax Kw’alaams, Metlakatla bands, along with people from the Gitga’at and Gitxsan Nation, as well as non-Indigenous people, some from as far away as Montreal, Wyoming, California and New Mexico.

Image and audio: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/our-blood-is-still-on-the-land-tsimshian-raise-totem-pole-declaring-victory-over-b-c-lng-project-1.4367586

https://www.thenorthernview.com/news/video-and-story-totem-pole-raised-on-lelu-after-lng-project-falls/