panikiskiaq:

It really grinds my gears when non-Indigenous people make up ridiculous reasons why Indigenous sovereignty is unfathomable and that “colonization happened, we can’t undo it so you might as well stop complaining about it.”

Like someone once said to me “Oh my god but if we give you your land back there will be millions of refugees and that’s not okay.” 

First of all, why is it so unimaginable that we would simply become citizens of the Algonquin nation in this scenario? (Ottawa is unceded, unsurrendered Algonquin territory. It always was Algonquin land, and always will be Algonquin land.) When Newfoundland joined confederation in 1949, my grandparents became Canadian citizens, they didn’t get deported to Britain. That makes absolutely no sense.

Second of all it undermines the idea of our nations being sovereign nations. As if we never had borders, as if we never had law and order, as if we never had urban multicultural centres. As if we didn’t have all the same things other nations have. It promotes the whole “primitive people running around lost” myth, which facilitated colonization in the first place.

And lastly it promotes the idea that the only thing that (for example) makes me Mi’kmaw is my blood quantum. Not the way I was raised, not the community I belong to, not the language I speak, etc. The amount of cultural exchange, trading, multicultural societies, etc. that we had and some of us are really out here thinking we were always “100% Mi’kmaq” or Cree or Anishinaabe or whatever else. Surprise y’all, people all over the world always been fucking. There’s a reason why Mi’kmaq stories talk about Inuit and about Indigenous peoples from South America.

Anyway this has been a PSA. Until next time, peace and love.