More Photos 2009

Border Rave Photo Exhibit, Tucson; Earthcycles Producer Govinda interviewing guest at AIM West, San Francisco; Dr. Loco in concert at AIM West, with Leonard Peltier photo. Photos by Brenda Norrell.

No Olympics on Stolen Land: Get Your Torch Off Our Land

Press Release
Photo: Kalle Anka

Anti-Olympic Protesters bring their message of resistance across Canada; Olympic Torch shamed


Monday, December 21 2009, Vancouver Unceded Coast Salish Territories- Protesters are bringing their anti-Olympic message with chants of “No Olympics on Stolen Native Land”, “Get your torch off our land, we don’t want your Olympic scam” and “2010 Homes not 2010 Games” across Canada. In many instances, activists have successfully disrupted the Torch Relay, forcing delays and route cancellations, with at least four arrests associated with anti-Torch related actions.
Today, Six Nations community members have declared that the Olympic Torch will not pass through their territory. A Declaration by the Onkwehonwe (people) of the Grand River Territory states “This land is not conquered. We are not Canadian… We hereby affirm our peaceful opposition to the entry and progression of the 2010 Olympic torch into and through our territory.”
In the coming weeks, dissenters are also expected to converge in Kitchener, Calgary, Edmonton, Stratford, and Guelph.
In Toronto over 250 people took to the streets on December 17, blocking major intersections and forcing the cancellation of the Torch in parts of downtown Toronto. A banner dropped directly across the stage read “Gego Olympics Da-Te-Snoon Nishnaabe-Giing Ga-Gmooding” (“No Olympics on Stolen Native Land” in Anishinaabemowin). (Visit http://www.facebook.com/l/9c773;torontotorch.blogspot.com or email torchblock@gmail.com)
At least four communities in the province of Quebec have opposed the Torch Relay: Sept-Iles, Montreal, Kanahwake First Nations, and Quebec City. In Montreal, over 200 people converged and delayed the relay as well as the main ceremonies and concert. (Visit: http://www.facebook.com/l/9c773;www.amp-montreal.net). On October 30, over 400 people gathered to oppose the Torch Relay launch in Victoria. An Anti-Olympics Festival and Zombie March succeeded in disrupting the relay. Security personnel were forced to extinguish the torch, load it in a van, and reroute it.
Actions have also occurred in cities as diverse as Comox Valley, Kingston, Halifax, Ottawa, and St. John's. With the number of protesters equaling or exceeding spectators, dissatisfaction to the 2010 Winter Olympics is growing across Canada. According to a November 2009 Angus-Reid poll, over 30% of B.C. residents feel the Olympics will have a negative impact and almost 40% of residents support protesters.
Protesters note that the Olympics are not simply about the athletes; rather the corporate Games are leaving a legacy of displacement, militarization, and repression. Public funds invested by all levels of government are nearing $7 billion. According to the Olympic Resistance Network, “While Olympic corporate sponsors are getting bailed out, Indigenous lands are being stolen, people are becoming homeless, thousands are losing their jobs and access to public services, the environment is being destroyed, and civil liberties are being eroded with almost a billion dollars sunk into surveillance. The negative Olympic legacy is turning into an anti-Olympic legacy of resistance across the country.”
Social justice activists also believe that the Olympic Torch is a $25 million propaganda tool for corporate sponsors who have some of the worst social and environmental practices. The Royal Bank of Canada has been under fire for its financing of the environmentally devastating Alberta Tar Sands, while Coca Cola has been responsible for massive depletion of groundwater and toxic waste pollution in India.

Olympic Torch Detoured: No Olympics on Stolen Land

Olympic torch relay rejigged amid protest, but modified Six Nations show goes on
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/091221/national/oly_torch_relay
By Susanna Kelley, The Canadian Press
SIX NATIONS INDIAN RESERVE, Ont. - The Olympic torch's journey across Canada was forced yet again to take a detour in the face of aboriginal opposition to the Games, with an Ontario First Nation rerouting its relay amid a protest from a splinter group in the community.
While the torch still made an appearance on the Six Nations reserve near Brantford in southern Ontario, the original plan to run the flame through the reserve - supported by the elected band council - was altered at the 11th hour.
Instead, the torch was taken directly to a bingo hall on the reserve for a celebration during which some two dozen torchbearers circled the hall with the flame.

Censored News Snapshots 2009

Censored News snapshots 2009: Photo 1: Keith Secola at the Havasupai Gathering to Halt Uranium Mining in the Grand Canyon (Photo 2) Louise Benally and Earthcycles producer Govinda (Photo 3) Preparing fry bread for O'odham Solidarity Event in Tucson (Photo 4) Acoma Pueblo Poet and Author Simon Ortiz at the Indigenous Peoples Uranium Summit at Acoma Pueblo, N.M. Photos by Brenda Norrell.

Censored article from Tucson reporter Gabriel Schivone on the O'odham Solidarity Event

Famed Writer Speaks on 'Stolen Land' of the Americas

By Gabriel Schivone

Censored News

http://www.bsnorrell.blogspot.com/

TUCSON -- Prolific American Indian writer, scholar and activist Ward Churchill visited Tucson on Friday night, bringing with him a new meaning to the word “occupation.”
Delivering a talk entitled “Apartheid in America: Surviving Occupation in O'odham Lands,”
Professor Churchill Spoke to a full hall at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Tucson about the U.S. government's history of conquest, genocide and occupation of traditional Indian territory.
As a sort of ominous beginning to his talk, Mr. Churchill opened his remarks by saying, “It's an honor to be here; it's always an honor to be anywhere in North America, on Native land.”
Churchill discussed the legitimacy of the “claimed territory” of the United States as “the difference between a 'claim' and a 'reality',” which, he said, are not the same thing. “The United States 'claims' many things,” Churchill said. “Those things have to be interrogated because a 'claim' is not the same as the reality. The United States claims indigenous land as its own, over which it asserts jurisdiction, enforces its own rules -- on everyone.”
Professor Churchill recalled watching on TV a public address in 1990 by former U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush. “(Bush) actually gave a very accurate assessment of international legal obligation, Churchill said. “'Illegally occupied territory,' (Bush) said, 'must be restored to its rightful owners; legitimate governments,' (Bush) said, 'must be re-established in place (of) those that had been usurped; and those who engage in lawless aggression in the occupation of other people's property and assert their authority over them by armed force had to be put back in line with law using any means necessary.'”
Churchill said he jumped up and started cheering at Bush's remarks, which struck him as an ironic rationale laid out by a modern American head of state for why the U.S. must give back the lands it took by force; the lands, Churchill said, which it continues to occupy illegally.
Throughout much of his talk Mr. Churchill made connections between the South African Apartheid regime (1948-1994), the Israeli Occupation of Palestinian lands (1948-present), and Nazi Germany's conquest of Western Europe before and during World War Two. He relentlessly tied back all of them as each following the U.S. example of its own conquest of the Americas and extermination of the indigenous populations over the past several hundred years.
A representative of the traditional O'odham ceremony leaders and the founder of the O'odham VOICE Against the Wall, Ofelia Rivas shared the stage with Professor Churchill, speaking about, in her view, one of the main problems with settler relations with indigenous people in America: “Since the very beginning of the intrusion of our people we haven't had any dialogue. “We weren't at that table when (the U.S.) made that international border. We were not considered to be human. I have to go back to that point because that's the point where we begin as O'odham people. When we begin to remember those things, then maybe we can begin to understand what it means to O'odham people.”
“When you start to feel that kind of compassion for human beings – not because they are different and because they have the same mindset as you and because they support the same ideas as you – then maybe we can change things.”

Ward Churchill has written over twenty books on Native human rights, American foreign policy, and the repression of political dissent in America. According to the website of the University of Colorado at Boulder's department of Ethnic Studies, of which Churchill is a former Chair, Churchill served as a delegate to the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations (as a Justice/Rapporteur for the 1993 International People's Tribunal on the Rights of Indigenous, an advocate/prosecutor of the First Nations International Tribunal for the Chiefs of Ontario, and is the recipient of various writing awards. It also states he is a member of the Colorado chapter Governing Council of the American Indian Movement (AIM).


Churchill's and Rivas's talk was sponsored by Dry River Radical Resource Center and the Earth First! Journal.