Grassy Narrows Blockade

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The Grassy Narrows Blockade has been carried out since 2002 by an Indian tribe of around 1300 members of the Anishinabe people in the Canadian province of Ontario , the Grassy Narrows First Nation. It is directed against the deforestation of their traditional area, which they consider an indispensable source for their culture. International and national support as well as spectacular and long-lasting actions have made the occupation known beyond national borders. In 2008 the companies involved stopped their projects, but as long as the negotiations with the political groups in Toronto have not been concluded, the blockade is to continue.

course

When, on December 2, 2002, sisters Chrissy and Bonnie Swain, members of the Grassy Narrows First Nation, an Indian tribe based in northwestern Ontario, felled trees to block the path of a logging company on their reservation , they lost one for six years ongoing open discussion. The subsequent blockade by around a thousand members of the tribe, which calls themselves Asubpeeschoseewagong First Nation , was directed against unwanted logging by Abitibi Consolidated in its approximately 2,500 square miles of traditional territory.

Although there has been a contract with the then government since 1873 (see Numbered Treaties , No. 3), the provincial government has repeatedly given permission to fell trees. In 2002 around half of the area had already been cleared. Since the culture of the Indians is strongly dependent on their natural environment, this was tantamount to cultural genocide . This was the motive for human rights groups to support the tribe, along with conservationists. Amnesty International got involved, Christian Peacemaker Teams , but mostly people from neighboring towns in Ontario. The Rainforest Action Network (RAN) coordinated the ecological groups and increased the pressure on paper dealers. In February 2008, the logging company Boise Inc. promised not to buy any more wood from the region. For this purpose, RAN had marked the corresponding paper in order to give the buyers a boycott option. As a result, the main customer for Grassy Narrows wood was canceled.

Abitibi did not even try to break the blockade, which was exacerbated by the fact that the school was moved there throughout the summer of 2003. Instead, the company initially moved to more remote areas. But on June 3, 2008, AbitibiBowater , the world's largest newsprint company , announced that it would no longer claim its logging licenses, which are valid until 2024.

With the blockade of the TransCanada Highway on July 13, 2006 at the latest, the longest blockade in North American history was in the world press. Even earlier, in order to find their way into the press, one had resorted to a spectacular procedure, in which a woman chained herself to a truck of the largest timber company in the world, Weyerhaeuser , and the like.

Like all First Nations , the Grassy Narrows First Nation had been subjected to forced assimilation attempts by the Canadian government until the 1970s. Their children were separated from their families and had to attend so-called residential schools , in which they were no longer allowed to speak their mother tongue under severe sentences. The Prime Minister of Canada officially apologized for this in June 2008. The tribe also suffered from mercury poisoning caused by the Reed Pulp Mill Company , which flooded the First Nation's wild rice fields with sewage. In addition, dam construction fell victim to cemeteries and holy places, and finally to the deforestation process that is still common in Canada.

The success of the tribe should also help other tribes in Canada, such as the Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug First Nation in northern Ontario, or the Haida on Haida Gwaii, located off western Canada . But that would require the fall of Ontario's Mining Act , a law that allows exploration firms to expropriate virtually anyone who lives on mineral resources.

See also

literature

  • Anna J. Willow: Clear-Cutting and Colonialism: The Ethnopolitical Dynamics of Indigenous Environmental Activism in Northwestern Ontario , in: Ethnohistory 56/1 (2009) 35-67

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