OCCUPIED TUCSON CITIZEN
The day of our last solstice, in the Maya Long Count Calendar, is the day the previous creation ends. The people of the land of the Maya, direct descendants, in Ciapas, Mexico, 40,000 strong wearing masks and flying Mexican and Zapatista flags, silently took 5 cities before marching back into the jungle from where they came, and Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos released this statement:
DID YOU HEAR IT?
It’s the sound of their world collapsing.
It’s that of ours resurging.
The day that was the day, was night.
The night will be the day that will be the day.
DEMOCRACY! LIBERTY! JUSTICE!
Adi Ejekayani of Mexico City, last fall in the Aztlan Boxing Gym in South Tucson spoke of the Peace and Dignity Journeys’ transcontinental trek in honor of water as “…just one part of the manifestation of the grand prophesy…” of this “…time of reconnecting of the people of the (Americas)…” She spoke of “…water as the source of the connection of our souls…” and how “…women have a closer relationship to water…” She said, “The dying water is speaking to us and this is why women are rising up all over the world.”
Sylvia McAdam, Jess Gordon, Nina Wilson and Sheelah McLean of Saskatoon, Canada were the four women rising up last November to bring awareness about the dangerous impacts of Canada’s Bill C-45. The Idle No More actions, which sprung out of those teach-ins, are also just parts of the manifestation of this grand prophesy of unity.
As we woke to the willful and wonton wasting of the world and it’s resources by the 1%, in the wake of the Arab Spring, the Occupy Movement, European Anti-Austerity uprisings, the people of the land witnessed women wielding wise words of the grandfather on the world wide web and are Idle No More.
Over 200 gathered at the Tucson Mall performing what some on Facebook have fondly referred to as a “flash roundy.” This techno dada twist on the ancient round dance ritual has become the signature event of the Idle No More Movement. Hundreds of these “flash roundies” have taken place across North America and around the world, with singers and drums in the center encircled by mobs moving round dancing to the throbbing rhythms.
The Movement’s first global call to action was on International Human Rights Day, Dec. 10, which coincided with the beginning of a 30-day long hunger strike by Chief Theresa Spence. Successive call outs for Jan 11, the day of Tucson’s protest, and Jan.28 which met the return of Canada’s MP’s with hundreds protesting on Parliament Hill in Ottawa as 30 events rocked Canada, nearly 50 events worldwide that day.
More radical actions have included blockades of transcontinental Canadian highways and railways, commuter arteries in Toronto, a rail spur delivering uranium to a Sarnia, Ontario processing plant and the eviction of pipeline workers in Northern British Columbia.
Solidarity has swelled to include Palestinian groups, Campesino Committee of the Highlands (Guatemala), numerous Christian Churches and multi faith partnerships, enviro groups worldwide, trade unions and academics. Support continues to grow.
The wasteful, extractive, exploitative, dominating, destructive systems of the 1% are failing as foretold. The original people of the land rise after centuries of genocidal oppression and make claims for cultural sovereignty, air, water and land to sustain life for future generations. We must lift those claims up as our part of the manifestation of this grand prophesy.
We will not have a sustainable world to live in and there will be no justice if we ignore the righteousness of these claims.
As long as we except religion it is like walking a race in quicksand; we’ll never win. Religion is the initial source of what put us in this position in the first place, so all who are of Indigenous American descent that are religious; your fighting a serious war & not only against the Canadian, Caribbean Islands, US, Central & South American Government & or people, but against yourselves. Where is your morality & self consciousness of what we have endured do to the hands of the very Christian Religion, government & ancestors of the of the people who put us in the situation we ar presently in? WAKE UP!
Koree, I think there is a great folly in the view you put forth. Although I myself am not religious, I am well aware of both a positive and negative legacy of religion. I think it’s comforting to blame everything on religion, because it allows us to overlook something much deeper: that the will to dominate and exterminate is all-too-human. Stalin did not require a religion to construct an archipelago of gulags across the Soviet Union.
I think you have failed to consider the full history of, for example, Christianity, which started as a radical, leveling social force which was only later co-opted by states to serve the much older purposes of war and oppression.
If you think that Europeans would never have considered appropriating lands and decimating people without Christianity, then I posit that you have failed to understand some of the basic pitfalls of human nature. You have a major blind spot, and I believe you’re covering it up by pointing your finger out at The Other.