My base is animal advocates. Routinely, yall are the folks who help grow the various campaigns I work on and you are who respond when I am in trouble. Without a doubt, the animal advocacy movement has the most unbridled passion and when it manifests in people taking direct steps to liberate other animal species it is the most beautiful thing. That said, I harbour a lot of unpopular opinions that routinely get leveraged by people who claim I am not an animal rights activist and that people should not support campaigns or advocacy I am involved in. My positions around Onkwehon:we (Mohawk: Original People) hunting and trapping is one such example. Both locally - with the Short Hills hunt - and broadly with hunting and trapping across all nations - I recognize my position as a settler/occupier is one in which at best I am a welcome guest. Even if I have and practice ethical beliefs around my relationships with other animal species, I am intent that those practices and beliefs do not become part of a broader assimilationist agenda that implies that these nations do not know how best live on the land and assert their traditional sovereignty. I make this point first, because this is foundational. Even if my second point was not valid, it would be assimilationist to advance these positions onto these communities. The second important point though, is that the aims of the animal liberation movement are not so divorced from Onkwehon:we communities on the land. Yes, one has to give up the idea of global veganism and white saviorism, however, these communities are currently fighting to protect wildlife against resource extraction and it is a battle that is centred around the continuation of that land base and the species that call it home as well. In crude terms, the resource extraction industry kills and will continue to kill farm more wildlife, and in far more irreversible ways, than Onkwehon:we trappers and hunters on the land. That difference in scale is unimaginable. I feel sick when I see these communities targeted with protest OR not specifically acknowledged as distinct from Euro Settler Industry, because these are the front lines. Are we really so short sighted as to not recognize this because these people have a relationship with the land that is different from our own ethical beliefs around animals? Are we so short sighted to not recognize that the development of our own ethical beliefs and practices around animals is/was only made possible through genocide, land theft, resource extraction, sprawl, wildlife and habitat destruction? This is bigger than veggie burgers. I wanted to share this with this context because I saw it on my feed a lot and another story had the headline wiped of the context that these people are trappers. I want to acknowledge that, and also acknowledge that I think what they are doing is extremely important and worthy of support and solidarity. We are heading into the fur season, there is a new national anti-fur campaign, and beyond a hope that we can move away from overt misogyny in our critique of fur as fashion - Id also love to see other settler animal advocates specifically name and acknowledge these communities, the work they are doing on the land, and build a chorus that places the focus back on punching up and targeting the industries and profits that are driving us to the brink. Id love to see an end to fur farming, but Id also love to see an end to resource extraction and pipelines on stolen land. Our relevance as a mass movement, or in building coalitions across the larger environmental and Indigenous solidarity movements, is dependant upon us developing a politic that is capable of acknowledging our social position and not treating these issues as in conflict, or as mutually exclusive. /endrant earthfirstjournal.org/newswire/2014/11/21/dene-trappers-block-oil-companies-in-northwestern-saskatchewan/
Posted on: Sat, 22 Nov 2014 20:58:18 +0000