1. What do you call it when 90% of a people can no longer speak their language, when we take their children and place them in an abusive system, when their landmass shrinks to a postage stamp and we try to take more of it by force?
2. Someone like Mathieu Bock Côté will argue that this is a natural byproduct of Quebec’s nation building. But if that’s the case, then why demand sovereignty from Canada? Didn’t Canada just win in the Darwinian game of nation building?
3. You cannot have it both ways. You cannot steal land and claim nation building by divine right but then turn around and cry sovereignty when you lose the game you started. You cannot have the fruits of colonialism with none of the accountability.
4. It’s possible I expressed this quite poorly in French (my second language) and a few have said I was delirious or drunk or pathetic. If I was drunk, I’d be tweeting about Soundgarden... the greatest band there ever was. But I’m not.
5. What’s lost in all of this is Bock Côté’s argument that Mohawks are American criminals who held Quebec hostage in 1990. This is complete and utter bullshit. Mohawks are from Turtle Island, the US/Can are European creations.
6. And while it’s true they historically occupied the St Lawrence and Hudson Valleys, they’ve been in Oka since 1716 by edict of the King of France. By 1990 there was just 6 sq km left of the 700 sq km they occupied.
7. And the municipality of Oka wanted to dig up a cemetery (not an “ancient burial ground”) where Mohawks lay dead and buried so that white ppl could have nine more holes of golf. That’s why the SQ tried to raid the pines on July 11. For golf. Golf.
8. So I look to the people I know, who have no landmass, who want to learn the language of their ancestors, whose white neighbours prospered from stolen land (the land is at least disputed since it’s subject to negotiations presently). I look to that and I wonder what we call it?
9. Bock Côté calls it nation building. He even carefully mentions that the Mohawks were allied to “enemy English” forces because he is only capable of viewing everything through that lense.
10. He derisively refers to Indigenous ppl as “amérindiens” and sarcastically settlers “White” ppl as though race isn’t a white construct. I find it unfortunate the he made himself the victim today as he always does.
