Over the past 15 years First Nations artists in Canada have taken to hip hop as a powerful storytelling method. First Nations hip hop is an incredible blend of traditional art forms, evocative imagery and raw and real exerpience relayed with a beat. It’s as if hip hop was built for indigenous expression – being story based, status informed, poetic and underscored with a heartbeat. I have a bunch of friends in this field including Skeena Reece, Jerrilynn Webster, Manik1derful, Rachel Oki, Wasaskwun Wuttunee and others.
Beat Nation was an exhibition of indigenous hip hop artists that closed in March 2010, but the site is still up and there is a great essay there from Tania Willard about the then current state of indigenous hip hop culture and one by Skeena Reece on hip hop in the indigenous context:
I think that a larger conversation needs to take place to really get to the root of what I am talking about here. We are now seeing on a grand scale, also due to the growing number of young Indigenous people coming of age, a massive documentation process and participation in mainstream culture. They are talking about their standards of living, their communities, their hopes and fears, and we need to listen. We need to open our eyes and really see what they are presenting and not just as a last resort to avoid any great catastrophes: we need to use it as a first resort for guidance in our roles as adults and guardians. Just as in any massive form of communication, there are going to be sentimental statements made, broad sweeping fears expressed and lots of ‘documentation’ to examine, but we should really consider ourselves lucky. Native youth, Native people, Indigenous people, hip hop people are presenting ideas, making connections, drawing conclusions and asking important questions. If we use this is as a basis of discussion, we can see that they’ve taken a lot of guesswork out of the equation and what we are left with is the essence of where they are at, exactly. As adults, educators, helpers, historians and just plain human beings we need to honour this subculture as much as we honour our own families. In doing this, we honour ourselves, our people and our humanity.
Just cool stuff.
Yes.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a blog post advocating that newspapers should close their comments sections. In the days since then I have heard from many people agreeing with me, and no one has disagreed. I have had a twitter conversation with a National Post reporter whose piece about the breaking of a copper on the steps of the Victoria Legislature was – as is typical – hijacked by racist comments. In that Twitter conversation, Tristin Hooper, the reporter stated that there is nothing he can do to influence this conversation and that “freedom can be an ugly, ugly thing sometimes.”
Well no doubt. But in pondering this situation more, I am left to conclude that newspapers are actually trafiicking in racism. Take for example this really interesting Globe and Mail piece about the spiritual side of Idle No More. This is a good discussion where people actually learned something in the conversation. And then you get comments like this:
“What a load of crap. With the chiefs, elders and anyone directly related to them on the take the two spiritual sides of ‘idle no more’ are 1) Hand over more cash,2 ) and dont even think for a second we want to work at an 8 to 4 job. Oh, and add the mantra of Accounting? Accounting? Thats a white mans distraction.
If you dig back far enough you will find the simple hunter-gatherer approach to understanding the cosmos. Toss in the guilt ridden white mentality and the stone age vision of the world becomes an all encompassing stewards of the land ‘religion’. The only way this all flies is that modern society buys into the idea and pays for it.
Settle directly with everyone covered by the Indian Act bypassing the chiefs and elders completely. Give them their home and the land it sits on fee simple, a wad of cash and that is the end of it. It would be way cheaper then continuing this on for ever!”
So.
The Globe and Mail has a polcy at the top of its comments page that reads:
Editor’s Note: Comments that appear on the site are not the opinion of The Globe and Mail, but only of the comment writer. Personal attacks, offensive language and unsubstantiated allegations are not allowed. For more information on our commenting policies, please see our Community Guidelines page, or read our full Terms and Conditions. If you see a typo or error on our site, report it to us. Please include a link to the story where you spotted the error.
The comment above contains two of these three violations and elsewhere in that same comment section Teresa Spence is referred to as “Thief Spence.” The editor’s policy may be that these are technically violations, but they are allowed to stand. To make matters worse, replies on the Globe and Mail website are collapsed in threads, making it impossible to address this information and have your objections seen. Not much of a free market of ideas. A false comment gets more visibility than the reply that aims to correct it. Want to create a set of misperceptions of First Nations? Just write all manner of comments. No one will read the replies.
So what is going on here? The Globe and Mail does not enforce its own polices, or at least does it completely arbitrarily. An interesting read on the spiritual side of Idle No More gets poisoned by racism, personal attacks and unsubstantiated allegations, and we just keep looking.
The editorial policy says that the opinions in the comments are not the opinions of the paper. But by leaving comments sections like this open to this kind of abuse the Globe and Mail is sharing an opinion with you. It is stating that “it is the opinion of this paper that comments like the ones below are not in violation of our policy and contribute to the conversation.”
Furthermore, according to the Globe’s own terms and conditions, when you upload anything to the comments boards at the Globe and Mail you give the Globe and mail a license to use the material any way they want. By leaving it on their site, they are using comments to drive traffic to their advertisers and therefore earn revenue. Comments, and especially outrage, represents real cash money. Racist speech, unsubstantiated allegations and personal attacks all drive comment threads that are hundreds of comments long. More readers = more revenue. Racism sells.
Furthermore, also from the Globe’s Terms and Conditions:
When participating in a Forum, never assume that people are who they say they are, know what they say they know, or are affiliated with whom they say they are affiliated. The Globe and/or its affiliates and licensors cannot be responsible for the content or accuracy of any information, and will not be responsible for any reliance or decisions made based on such information. When using a Forum, you may not post, transmit, link to, or otherwise distribute any information, materials or content that do not generally pertain to the designated topic or theme of the particular Forum. Use of a Forum for commercial purposes of any kind is strictly prohibited. Please note that The Globe reserves the right to refuse to post or to remove any information or materials, in whole or in part, that, in its sole discretion, are unacceptable, undesirable, or in violation of these Terms and Conditions.
This is no about restricting freedom of speech. This is not about stopping a conversation in society on First Nations issues. Quite the opposite in fact. Every single person who posts in a comments thread has the freedom to start their own blog and post anything they want. What it is about is this clever dodge that papers use to hide behind the guise of freedom while trafficking for money in hate speech and libel. And the sheer volume of it plus an insubstantial disclaimer protects them from legal action.
So is there hope for a conversation with editorial boards on the merits of comments sections? Are their editors who agree with me? Are their journalists out there who consider this worthy writing about? Or are we just too tied to the money to turn off the tap?
Public conversation, and by extension, public policy suffers for this rhetoric.
PS…bonus link…the Globe and Mail allows a personal attack to stand in an article about one man who is addressing racism on Craigslist. WTF?
PPS…The Globe and Mail has, since its inception, had this quote on its editorial page: “The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures.” Going to war against arbitrary measures was the paper’s founding principle. I wonder if people still talk about what that means around the editorial board?
Imagine you are stuck in traffic. By the side of a road is a billboard that changes it’s message every five minutes. You glance over at it and read this:
“Some claim. One race in Canada should not have to work for a living. That this race should receive millions in funding without accountability. That the elite of this race should be allowed to defraud their regular people. How can anyone support this? How can anyone slam Conservatives for not supporting this like the NDP/Liberals?”
How would you feel? Would it make you angry? Would it make you happy? Would you wonder how a message like that – containing three of five common racist assertions against First Nations peoples, got put up on a billboard for thousands to see?
The billboard is by the side of a road, and the person who has written that has done nothing to warrent the eyeballs that are staring at it. They didn’t pay for the space, they haven’t had their comment fact checked for accuracy. They haven’t even signed their name. It appears that no one even cares if it is hate speech.
And then what if a headline on the billboard declared “Join the Conversation!” and had an ad attached to it? Would you feel like there was a conversation to be had? Would you wonder who was profiting?
This is exactly what comments sections on newspaper web site are.
The above is an actual comment from an anonymous poster that has been allowed to stand in an article about how the Conservative government refuses to make legislative changes to Bill C-45, which is what the Idle No More movement has been protesting.
As a practitioner of real conversation, it drives me crazy that the Globe and Mail among other outlets invites us to “Join the Conversation.” What happens on newspaper websites is not a conversation. It is shrill hit and run racism, unsubstantiated opinion, outright lies and conjecture. It is often targeted personally (the comments against Teresa Spence and Shawn Atleo in recent weeks have been shocking) and it cheapens the idea of conversation and free speech and poisons the environment of public service for those who wish to enter it.
The fact that newspaper comments sections are moderated matters not at all. I don’t believe newspapers are doing society any favours by allowing this kind of discourse to happen.
I am not advocating for a restriction on free speech. What bothers me about this is that anonymous posters are using the reputation of newspaper to get views on their comments. These posters have done nothing to warrant thousands of people reading their vitriol. So why do newspapers cultivate market share, and then allow this stuff to stand? Money? The longer you linger on a page – and outrage is a cheap thrill – the better the bottom line. Pandering to the basest forms of rhetoric works for papers. No matter how much newspapers disclaim the opinions in their comments sections, the fact is that by providing thousands of readers per comment the are enabling hate speech and giving it a wider audience than it would get on its own.
But this stuff absolutely destroys the calibre of public discourse. Those of us that are part of Idle No More or who have been advocates for progressive solutions to First Nations issues spend all of our time addressing myths and not creating substantial proposals for change. And when we do table substantial proposals for change, we are met with contempt by mainstream society and policy makers, who often repeat the lines that are propagated in comments sections.
So here’s what needs to happen. Let free speech thrive in it’s own free market of ideas. Newspapers should close down their comments sections and invite people to join the conversation by creating their own blogs where they can publish their opinions as much as they like. If the opinions have merit, they will get a following. People can invite comments on their own posts. If newspapers want to actually foster conversation, they should convene large World Cafes where human beings can meet each other face to face and share their opinions without hiding behind anonymous pseudonyms.
in the absence of that, newspapers surely must see that they are complicit in the falling standards of civic discourse. Has it come to this, that the only stream of revenue for newspapers is link baiting and outrage? Responsible journalists write the articles and anonymous Canadians provide the juicy violation of media laws that bring in the page views and therefore the revenue. I wonder if anyone has the steel to change this.
I have a confession. I advise people never to read the comments on newspaper websites. But I do read them. I can’t take my eyes off them. They are a train wreck of logic and hate and contemptuous entitlement.
Lately however, especially the comments on stories about First Nations, they seem entirely predictable. In fact they seem almost too predictable. Every article on the Globe and Mail website for example contains hundreds of comments, a huge majority of which repeat some basic themes:
- Nothing should change until First Nations are accountable for their money
- First Nations get a free ride
- The chiefs are corrupt and bad fiscal managers.
- Treaty rights are a joke: there should be one law for all
- The sooner Aboriginals merge with the rest of us the better.
So let me address these in brief, one by one.
First Nations are accountable. In fact the Auditor-General of Canada said that First Nations are TOO accountable. Too much is spent reporting on funds and not enough time is spent actually using them. But just because you can’t be bothered to look up the financial statements from publicly funded governments does not mean they are not accountable.
First Nations do not get a free ride. All governments receive tax dollars for services. First Nations are no different. And on top of that, First Nations are eligible for special programs and services because of the nature of the treaty relationship and the entrenchment of Aboriginal and treaty rights in the Constitution. But this is not a free ride. This is the result of agreements that asked First Nations to trade away rights to land FOREVER in exchange for some farm tools a few dollars, some new clothes, a reserve owned by the Queen and a school. That isn’t exactly a free ride. If someone invited you to a similar deal, would you take it?
Chiefs are not any more corrupt that anyone else. People are people . When people commit crimes they go to jail and do the time for it. Many, many, federal, provincial and municipal politicians are criminally corrupt as well. There is no greater number of Aboriginal politicians in jail for corruption. Also, there is no federal or provincial government that is not in debt. Having said that, in December 2011, only 12 out of 633 First Nations were in the equivalent of bankruptcy protection. This means that, according to the federal government’s own policies, and based on overly onerous reporting requirements, 98.2% of First Nations are run fine.
In Canada there is one law for all. That law is the Constitution. It protects treaty rights and Aboriginal rights. It also protects free speech, privacy, freedom of assembly and so on. It also allows for laws to be made that are different for different groups of people in order to ameliorate conditions that lead groups of people to have social disadvantages. Anyone who argues that First Nations are not currently disadvantaged in Canadian society has simply not done the research.
Aboriginal people have merged with Canada. And the mechanism for doing so was treaties. And where treaties don’t exist, outstanding issues of Aboriginal rights and title still exist and Canadians and First Nations are compelled to figure this question out. The problem for assimilationists is that they don’t like the terms of this merger. Well it’s too late for that. When the ancestors of settlers arrived in this country they inherited the treaty benefits accorded to all Canadians, which allowed them to own land, start businesses, reap the resources, poison the waters, and profit profit profit. Obviously settlers aren’t giving their benefits back, and clearly First Nations aren’t getting exclusive title over the land back. We are merged. And this is Canada. And it benefits settlers enormously.
The comments I am seeing online have a strange hollow ring to them. They parrot these objections ad infinitum and you see these lines everywhere. No one is really thinking about what they are saying, just reacting. Perhaps in some cases there are coordinated communications strategies to keep repeating these lines over and over until they seem true. But they aren’t true. You might have opinions, you might have a view of the world and how you want it to work, you might have an agenda, but it’s probably not what is really going on.
Straw man arguing has risen to the level of hollow social contempt. It seems funny now. But where it seems real, try a few of these alternate views on and see if you can have an actual conversation.
Five years ago I wrote about a speech from former Governor General Adrienne Clarkson who pointed out that all Canadians are treaty people.
Now more than ever I want to underscore that fact. Idle No More is drawing attention to the fact that Canada has been founded on a relationship, a relationship that has been set out many times in treaties. Treaty rights are so foundational to the existence of this country that they are enshrined and protected in the Constitution of Canada.
A lot of recent rhetoric from settler Canadians in the last few months has focused on the benefits that flow to First Nations as a result of treaties. But we haven’t had the conversation about the benefits that flow the other way.
Under Canadian law, Aboriginal title exists in places where there are no treaties. This is the case for most of British Columbia, although no First Nation has yet made the case under Canadian Law that they hold title. But the concept is simple and it is clear. Without the consent to enter into a different kind of relationship between First Nations and Canada, Aboriginal title exists. Where Aboriginal title is proven to exist, it has massive implications for Crown land ownership.
Over the past few hundred years, the Crown and later the Crown in right of Canada acted upon the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and pushed its claims further westward making treaties as it went to cement and clarify the relationship with First Nations. This process continues today in BC. In effect this meant that, in exchange for a few benefits flowing to First Nations, the Crown gained control of lands and resources such that it was able to issue title, permits and licenses for use of land. If you own land privately or you lease it or you have a permit to operate on Crown land or you extract resources from the land, you are a treaty beneficiary. You are a treaty person.
Some of the most ridculous opposition to treaty rights comes from people who believe that First Nations should not receive special benefits or have their treaty rights enshrined in the Constitution. This is the same Constitution, by the way, that guarantees the freedom for people to make ridiculous speeches about First Nations. Most who opposed to treaty rights would have a fit if their free speech rights were taken away, but the rights have exactly the same weight in Canadian law: the are protected in the Constitution.
Opposition that is littering comments sections around the web essentially comes down to this: we should tear up the treaties and just have indigenous people assimilate into Canadian society. But this is a ridiculous position. If we tear up treaties, then the contracts are broken and the ownership of the land reverts to First Nations.
If people want to restart the relationship, fine. I’m sure that First Nations will be more than happy to return the billions of dollars of benefits for the trillions of dollars of land value. Then we can start negotiations again. What would you pay now for the right to own private land, or the right to earn a living extracting resources? Trust me, setller governments got the bargain of the millenium. Never has so much been given away for so little, the billions that flow to First Nations every year are a small portion of the trillions that are earned off of formerly Aboriginal-owned lands..
Every Canadian is a treaty person. Every Canadian benefits from treaties made with First Nations, and every Canadian has responsibilities under those treaties as well. First Nations have rights and under treaty have responsibilities too. Idle No More is simply about respecting that we have a relationship and that we all have to live up to it. It is very difficult to do so when huge numbers of your “partners” don’t even acknowledge that they have made a bargain that benefits them.
So allies, make this point to your friends and those who don’t understand the relationship. Ask them where they think the right to own land comes from? It comes from treaties. If they don’t believe you, point them to the Delgamuukw court ruling which says that Aboriginal title cannot be single handedly extinguished by the Crown. It’s simple. When you realize how much you have gained through the power of a longstanding and honourable relationship, you should be thankful. If you still resent the benefits and rights that First Nations enjoy under this relationship, then offer back your land and your ability to make a living and feed yourself and keep your hard earned tax dollars. You cannot be a Canadian without inheriting the legacy of treaty makers. You cannot have the benefits without the responsibilities. This country would never have existed without these agreements and that is why they are protected.
Such a small price to pay for such a huge benefit. Why not celebrate and honour the agreements that make Canada possible?