This article was last updated on April 16, 2022
Canada: Oye! Times readers Get FREE $30 to spend on Amazon, Walmart…
USA: Oye! Times readers Get FREE $30 to spend on Amazon, Walmart…Dates: June 5, 2013 to November 30, -0001
Location: Various cities and communities
Immigrants in Support of Idle No More Find a local event in your community: http://idlenomore.ca/ As racialized migrants, immigrants, and refugees, we express our support for the Idle No More movement, a movement of Indigenous surgence/resurgence across these lands. We express our solidarity in opposing the omnibus budget Bill C-45, which includes Indian Act amendments regarding voting on-reserve and Indigenous land “surrender” and “designations” as well as changes to the Fisheries Act and the Navigable Waters Protection Act. We are allies of Indigenous peoples’ asserting their rights and sovereignty and protecting the lands and waters. The history and current reality of Canada is a racist and genocidal one, marked by the forced dispossession of Indigenous peoples’ lands and extraction of their resources, the suppression of Indigenous customs, governance, and laws, and the attempted assimilation of diverse Indigenous nations, cultures and identities. As a result, Indigenous people disproportionately experience poverty, illness, homelessness, and imprisonment. Unprecedented numbers of Indigenous women have gone missing or have been murdered. As racialized migrants and refugees, we came across many oceans or continents, a hundred years ago or yesterday. Ongoing Western imperialist military occupations, most recently through the War on Terror, and land takeovers facilitated by capitalist and corporate-driven free trade agreements such as NAFTA continue to be a prime reason for the repression, destitution, and migration of our communities from the Global South/Third World. Increasingly racist and exclusionary immigration policies criminalize and target migrant and refugee communities with increasing deportations, lack of permanent residency, systemically low wages, cuts to basic services including emergency health care, and a recent Tory government Refugee Exclusion Law (Bill C-31) that mandates incarceration for many refugees, including children, in prisons upon arrival. Enduring decades, if not centuries, of colonialism, empire, racism, impoverishment, violence and displacement; paying a Head-Tax, growing up in internment camps, living in constant fear of deportation and denied access to basic services, unable to be reunited with our family members, working long hours for less than minimum wage in dangerous industries/sweatshops; deemed “illegal,” “undesirable,” or “terrorist” by the Canadian government (and often Canadians), many of us have struggled to find stability and to make homes here on Turtle Island. But we recognize that our homes are built on the ruins of others. We are on the lands of Indigenous peoples: lands unjustly seized, unceded lands, treaty territories. With humility and gratitude, we affirm our solidarity and support for the sovereignty not of the illegal Canadian government or its immoral laws but of those communities whose lands we reside on.
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