On May 4, 2018, the Montreal Gazette published the first of a series of articles exposing the identity of an important international neo-Nazi propagandist residing in Montréal, an individual only known up to that point by the pseudonym “Zeiger.” The journalists at the daily made public the results of an investigation conducted over many months by Montreal-area antifascists to identify and expose “Zeiger,” who had long been active in the most extreme wing of the alt-right fascist movement, notably as an editor and administrator of the Daily Stormer website, widely considered the most influential international platform for neo-Nazi propaganda of the last decade.
“Zeiger,” who turned up at the white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 11–12, 2017 (where he was videoed shouting the slogan “Gas the K***s! Race war now!”), and who has led various neo-Nazi organizing and mobilizing efforts, as well as information campaigns, is in fact Gabriel Sohier Chaput,[1] an “information technology consultant” who was then living in the Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie neighbourhood in Montreal.
Gabriel Sohier Chaput, in the middle, with other white supremacists at the infamous «Unite the Right» gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia, August 12, 2017.
Sohier Chaput disappeared into thin air the day after the first article was published. An arrest warrant was issued for him in November 2018, and almost two years later, the Gazette revealed that Sohier Chaput had finally come in from the cold to face charges of inciting hate.[2] His first appearance will be at the Palais de Justice in Montreal, on Tuesday, November 24, 2020.
Oddly, unlike their anglophone counterparts, the major francophone media have paid very little attention to the entire affair. Whether this is a matter of indifference or an expression of frustration at having to pick through the crumbs dropped by their anglophone colleagues, the limited coverage means that the francophone public hasn’t heard much about it. The original French version of this article is an attempt to fill this lacuna for posterity.
The main purpose of the exercise, however, is to guarantee that Sohier Chaput can never shake off the stink and pestilence of his statements and actions.
If he pleads guilty, there will not be many lines of defense open to him. He might claim that his neo-Nazi period represented a moment of personal confusion and act contrite, but the length (2012–2018) and, above all, the depth and sophistication of his engagement would potentially raise serious doubts about the sincerity of such excuses. Another possibility is that he could argue that the whole thing was nothing more than a misunderstanding and claim that his political engagement in numerous Nazi propaganda projects was nothing more than one big joke. That, after all, was the lame defense he and his comrades presented the day after his doxxing. Unfortunately for him, the defense of irony or that he didn’t really mean it won’t stand up to the information presented in this article, and we hope the prosecution finds a way to debunk this defense if it is proffered.
On the other hand, he could seek to avoid a trial by pleading guilty and accepting the legal sanctions, which would be relatively light if he has no previous criminal record. A judge could oblige him to apologize before the court for the negative impact of his past actions and allow him to return to a relatively normal life once he pays a fine and makes a symbolic donation to, for example, an organization that advocates for the rights of the Jewish community.
This would leave him at his leisure to quietly reintegrate into Quebec society and the Montreal community. We cannot allow him to return to a normal life that easily.
The hate speech formulated and promoted by Gabriel Sohier Chaput led to equally hateful actions that had serious consequences in the real world. For example, the Iron March forum that Sohier Chaput moderated laid the basis for the terrorist network known as the Atomwaffen Division, whose members have been involved in a series of murders and violent crimes driven by the ideology Sohier Chaput and his collaborators put forward.
Let’s be perfectly clear: Gabriel Sohier Chaput applauded the murder of homosexuals and trans people and openly yearned for the subjugation of women, the elimination of Jews, and the systematic segregation of non-white populations. Not only did he yearn for all of that, he devoted all of his intellectual energy to the development of a fascist political culture and a mass movement that could achieve his “final solution.”
There must be consequences for that sort of crime, and we find those proposed by the justice system far from satisfactory. We have frequently said, and we repeat here: real justice is not to be found in the courts, and, for us, forgiveness is not an option.
Gabriel Sohier Chaput should have to carry the weight of his online footprint for the rest of his life, and we truly hope that our actions help ensure that that is the case.
The articles in the Montreal Gazette asserted that Sohier Chaput was “a major neo-Nazi figure and one of the most influential white supremacists in North America”; here, we will demonstrate that this is true, using his own writings and interventions. What follows is a detailed overview of this person, his ideas, his actions, and the political milieu he comes from. We have included a certain number of links to supplementary resources for those who want to dig a little deeper.
Comments Off on Old Myths, New Peoples: The “Eastern Métis” and Indigenous Erasure
Oct312020
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
A Zine from Sabordage Distro
*Note to the reader: This text is a compilation of excerpts woven together by a narrative written by the authors. When text is italicized, this means it is an excerpt from another text. The author’s name will be located at the end of this excerpt.
The era of Justin Trudeau’s state-led reconciliation is desperately trying to keep itself alive. As it crumbles, something raw and real is laid bare (again): how desperate many white settlers are to get on the right side of history by telling and collecting stories about how different things are “now” from “back then”. One of these stories has always been about a romanticized, state-led version of reconciliation.
Reconciliation – as a term – is about resolving a conflict, returning to a state of friendly relations. It can also mean the bringing together of two positions so as to make them compatible.[…] So how can the Canadian state reconcile with Indigenous peoples? They certainly can’t “go back” to a state of friendly relations because there never existed such a time. Reconciliation can only mean eliminating the conflict by enmeshing Indigenous and settler communities,[…]making conflicting positions compatible. This means assimilating Indigenous peoples by having them give up their claim to sovereignty in exchange for the promise of the economic equality within Canada. And it means Canadian people get to devour Indigenous ideas and symbols into their own settler stories, their own canadiana. This is the only path possible under the Canadian state (Tawinikay, 2018).
The state’s attempt to create this compatibility through a framework of reconciliation is one attempt among many to erase Indigenous peoples as a past, present and ongoing challenge to the legitimacy of the Canadian state, its foundational myths of Confederation, and settler claims to the territory it attempts to govern. Indigenous erasure is a way to secure a settler future.
The focus of this text is about the way white people contribute to longstanding attempts by the state to devour and consume Indigenous peoples’ cultures through stories and narratives that transform them into Indigenous people. We’re talking about the growing trend of settler self-indigenization, or “raceshifting” as many call it – a process through which white people reinvent themselves as Indigenous, often mobilizing these claims to undermine actual Indigenous people and their struggles for self-determination.
In “Quebec,” and east of us, specifically, we are witnessing huge numbers of white settlers self-indigenizing, in large part through the colonial court system. These self-indigenizing white people most often gather under the name of “Eastern Métis,” forming a wide variety of fake “nations” through which to lobby for state recognition and economic gain. These kinds of identity claims frequently reach the courts when individuals or groups seek hunting or fishing rights, or wish to counter land claims being made by Indigenous groups. While these claims have largely failed to stand up to even Canada’s legislative tests to prove Indigeneity, they are indicative of ways that whiteness continues to function as a tool of Indigenous erasure. We discuss in detail some examples of this phenomenon in later sections of this zine.
This zine collects a few long excerpts of certain texts we believe expand upon current theoretical and practical understandings of self-indigenization in “Quebec” and Eastern “Canada”. This zine is not intended to take a stance on Indigenous nations’ membership policies nor to tell Indigenous people who have been disconnected from their families, communities and cultures through colonial violence that they are or are not Indigenous. We are concerned simply with white people, white families, white communities, who are trying to build a political force in order to lay claims to land, hunting and harvesting rights, and other material gains at the expense of Indigenous people. Our goal with this zine is to equip ourselves and our communities with the information to counter this force.
We are not interested in fuelling the notion that the Canadian state’s legal frameworks designed to determine status or community membership for Indigenous people have any legitimacy. On the contrary, we wish to repeat what Indigenous people speaking out against raceshifting continue to put forward: that kinship ties are what determine belonging, and that membership in a given community should be able to be determined by that community, not by the state, or an organization of white people. We realize that Canadian legislation complicates and muddles the terrain for anti-colonial struggle. It is both a primary mechanism the settler state has to attempt to control Indigenous peoples, and at the same time, a mechanism many Indigenous people must often turn to to fight the state and capitalism. Through its attempts to curtail and create the conditions for resistance through its laws and surveillance, the state reinforces its narrative of being a legitimate, political and legal entity. This obscures the reality– the deepest angst of the state and settler society– that it is always a foreign, occupying force.
We write this in 2020 at a moment in so-called Canada when waves of economic disruptions have been sweeping across this occupied land in response to the RCMP’s raid on Wet’suwet’en land defenders protecting the Yintah from attempted pipeline construction by Coastal GasLink. The train, port and road blockades led by Indigenous communities (including notably Gitxsan, Kanien’keha:ka and Mik’maq land defenders) and backed by other actions – carried out by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous supporters – have promoted and actualized a vision of anti-colonial struggle that moves far beyond statist promises of reconciliation. We also write in a moment when COVID-19 has also shut down Canada and its economy in a very different way, yet man camps still continue in Northern B.C as do many extractive projects across this continent. Once again, we see blockades popping up and injunctions being burnt in response. We position ourselves here because this raceshifting wave is not merely in tension with, but has, and will continue to, come into direct conflict with Indigenous land defenders and water protectors we seek to be in struggle with.
The writers of this zine are white, settler anarchists engaged in struggles against the Canadian state and settlerism. One of us is of Red River Metis and French Canadian (and other European) descent, and grew up sometimes hearing narratives equating the Indigeneity (or lack thereof) between those two ancestries. The other grew up in a predominantly white, Euro-American household. In this family, there were no stories about whose territory they were in (Ojibwe) nor how they related to the history or people of this land.
In another version of the story of our lives, the colonial ships that brought all the settlers over from Europe might have sank. In those timelines, these writings might not need to exist. But, this is not the version we are left with. Instead, it is necessary to participate in a discussion about white people, raceshifting and the way it accelerates Indigenous erasure. Self-indigenization is intimately tied to white supremacist desires to belong – to belong through the displacement of those who are seen as obstacles to our belonging, and to belong by creating myths of our own longstanding ancestral connections to the territories which we find ourselves on. These emotional and relational processes are what Tuck and Yang (2012) describe as “settler moves to innocence”. Understanding these narratives as moves to innocence offers a framework to address and dismiss the deeply colonial, white settler angst that propel these raceshifting fantasies and actions. Integral to raceshifting is storytelling; specifically, the stories white people tell ourselves and each other about a distant, Indigenous ancestor in order to give legitimacy to their process of self-indigenization. King (2003) writes, “Stories are wondrous things. And they are dangerous […] For once a story is told, it cannot be called back. Once told, it is loose in the world.”
The “Eastern Metis”
The phenomenon of self-indigenization in “Canada” is one with a long history; it is intimately tied to the long-standing, ongoing Canadian project of erasing Indigenous people for the sake of capitalist expansion through colonial settlement and resource extraction. One of the most common ways that white self-indigenization takes place in Canada is through claims to “Eastern Metis” identity. Self-indigenization in the context of the Eastern Metis refers to the “tactical use of long-ago ancestors to reimagine a “Métis” identity […] These “new Métis” often find legitimacy because of settler confusion over forms of Indigeneity based on kinship and belonging” (Leroux & Gaudry, 2017).
Specifically, what this looks like most often is white, french descendent settlers digging through their genealogical trees to find long ago (1600s) Indigenous ancestors and using this remote, isolated ancestor to identify themselves as “Eastern Métis” today. Further on in this zine, we share some detailed case studies concerning the Eastern Métis phenomenon and the histories of the groups leading the charge. But first, it is important to give an idea of the scope of this situation.
According to Canadian census statistics, between 1991 and 2016 there was a massive increase in the numbers of people self-identifying as Métis in Eastern Canada. In 1991, Quebec saw 8,690 people self-identifying as Métis compared to 2016 when it jumped to some 69,360 cases – a total increase of 698%. In Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in 1991, also home to large numbers of french descendant settlers, the difference was an even more drastic increase of over 10, 000% over the same period. There are more than 70 organizations representing those newly self-identifying as Metis in Eastern Canada, as well as additional similar organizations in Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire (source: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/171025/dq171025a-eng.htm and http://www.raceshifting.com/ ).
The surge in “métis” communities in Québec: only the beginning?
Demographic research in Québec has demonstrated that a significant majority of the descendants of seventeenth-century French settlers today have at least one Indigenous ancestor, likely from one of the thirteen Indigenous women who married settlers prior to 1680 (Leroux, 2018; see also Beauregard 1993). Due to the relatively small number of initial French settlers and the subsequent high levels of intermarriage among French-Canadians up until WWII, a large segment of the French-Canadian/Québécois population is likely to have multiple Indigenous ancestors. That said, having two, three or even five Indigenous ancestors more than ten generations ago represents no more than 0.1 to 1 per cent of a person’s ancestors overall (see Charbonneau et al. 1990; Vézina et al. 2012). In fact, the same research conducted primarily by Québécois researchers in French, strongly suggest that it is more likely that today’s French-descendant population has a greater number of English ancestors and ancestors from another European ethnicity (German, Belgian) than Indigenous ancestors (Leroux, 2018; see also Desjardins 2008).
Raceshifting and its myths
Stories carry individual and communal memories between generations, intimately tying one’s sense of being to a particular place, region, territory. Storytelling can be an act of preserving and asserting sovereignty over a place and/or community. Indigenous peoples’ struggles for autonomy and liberation from the settler state gain power through the transmission and integration of their stories over time. Struggles are carried on for generations, unfolding in their telling and retelling across decades and centuries. In the case of the Eastern Métis, however, storytelling has become the means through which white people eradicate their present day and historical complicity within settler-colonial processes. This eradication happens through a process of storytelling that relies on ancestral DNA testing, family mythologies, and genealogy and gains legitimacy through colonial legislation. Prompted by either real or imagined threats to land access, or a burgeoning self-indigenization movement of those around them, the infrastructure for self-indigenization (which includes DNA testing, Eastern Metis organizations, and genealogy forums and other resources specifically designed to find Indigenous ancestry) can be accessed to allow a white person to find a distant, real or imagined, Indigenous ancestor, often as far back as the 17th century, or 10+ generations ago. Armed with this supposed proof of their individual contemporary Indigeneity the white person in question can find others around them to reinforce their new identity, sharing stories as a means to legitimate their claim to lands, rights, and resources and create the conditions for others like themselves to follow the same path.
Discussing the relationship between narrative, power, land and imperialism, Said (1993) states:
The main battle in imperialism is over land, of course; but when it came to who owned the land, who had the right to settle and work on it, who kept it going, who won it back, and who now plans its future—these issues were reflected, contested, and even for a time decided in narrative […] The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them. (xii/ xiii)
Most white settlers feel a deep, existential angst about not being from this land. This often manifests in a kind of compulsive need to find a way to legitimate their ongoing presence as invaders/occupiers. Many white people dealing with this settler-colonial angst turn to stories to alleviate this angst, stories that offer a pathway to belonging. Many too, create stories as an attempt to benefit economically from the land– to continue to gain from its exploitation as settlers. When white people try to self-indigenize or raceshift, our actions, attitudes, and stories contribute to ongoing attempts to deny and overtake the cultural and political lifeways that Métis, First Nations and Inuit peoples have on the various territories across the land currently called North America.
Tuck and Yang (2012) argue, “directly and indirectly benefitting from the erasure and assimilation of Indigenous peoples is a difficult reality for settlers to accept. The weight of this reality is uncomfortable; the misery of guilt makes one hurry toward any reprieve.” Deloria (1998) states, “The indeterminacy of American identities stems, in part, from the nation’s inability to deal with Indian people. Americans wanted to feel a natural affinity with the continent, and it was Indians who could teach them such aboriginal closeness. Yet, in order to control the landscape they had to destroy the original inhabitants.”
The raceshifting narrative is one that continues the processes of displacement and erasure initiated by the early colonists that arrived to Turtle Island. Settlers are those who come from a different land/ territory, supplant Indigenous laws and epistemologies, become the law, and impose their origin myths over that given area. As King (2003) suggests, “you have to be careful with the stories you tell. And you have to watch out for the stories that you are told.” The raceshifting occurring in Eastern Canada is supported by the stories told by white settlers in an attempt to remake history and try to secure the future of the settler state in this place. It is important to develop the ability to detect these stories, to make visible how they function in order to disarm their proponents and challenge settler self-indigenization when it arises in the broader struggle against the state and settler colonialism.
Tuck and Yang (2012) write, “everything within a settler colonial society strains to destroy or assimilate the Native in order to disappear them from the land – this is how a society can have multiple simultaneous and conflicting messages about Indigenous peoples, such as all Indians are dead, located in faraway reservations, that contemporary Indigenous people are less indigenous than prior generations, and that all Americans are a ‘little bit Indian’.” While their discussion takes place in the so-called US, there are significant parallels to the settler impulse and desire to belong that exist within so-called Quebec and Canada, and the particular histories of this place are worth attending to.
Why Eastern “Metis”, why Quebec and Eastern Canada?
It is not random that the nation to which so many self-indigenizing white people are claiming membership is the Metis nation. Eastern Metis movements capitalize on and further worsen pre-existing misconceptions about Metis-ness. Metis, as a post-contact Indigenous people, are often misunderstood to be Metis just on the basis of their “mixedness”, and thus as less Indigenous than First Nations peoples or Inuit. In Quebec and other french-speaking areas, this is further complicated by the fact that the word “métis” literally means mixed in french, and is used to refer to “mixed-race” people. Leroux (2019) explains the history of this linguistic confusion in his book, Distorted Descent, p. 4-6:
The idea of “métissage” has a specific lineage in French thought and linguistic practice […]. According to Pierre Boulle, the term “race” entered into French usage sometime in the late fifteenth century, most likely borrowed from the Itallian razza. “The term was first associated with lineage,” Boulle argues, “rather than fixed, physically defined differentiation between broad human groups”. According to Boulle, the term itself was not neutral, since for much of its first century of circulation it referred to innate or inherited character/ traits, especially those associated with aristocratic rule. Historian Guillaume Aubert concurs with Boulle, explaining that by the second half of the sixteenth century, “the term ‘race’ began to be used interchangeably with ‘blood’ to express the notion of ‘family’ or ‘lineage’” in metropolitan France. In Aubert’s understanding, the main motivation for the development of the concept was to regulate mésalliance, or marriage between two people of different ranks in society. Aubert explains further: “according to early modern French aristocratic ideology, the most dreadful consequence of a mésalliance was the type of children it produced. In most French texts of the period, these children were designated by the term ‘métis,’ defined in contemporary texts as the mixing of two different ‘species.’” In other words, in metropolitan France the term “métis” originated as a pejorative term that marked out the boundaries of social and political deviance along what resembles today’s notions of “class” and “race”.
Predating his European contemporaries by a couple of decades, French physician and intellectual François Bernier proposed an entirely different approach to understanding “races,” one based primarily on physical caracteristics, in 1684. Historian Siep Stuurman has called Bernier’s work “the first attempt at a racial classification of the world’s population, one that foreshadowed later anthropological understandings by more than a century. […]
The primary way in which the term “métis” is used in French today is in keeping with the legacy of Bernier’s seventeenth-century biological understanding of human “races.” Used in this sense, “métis” resembles the English-language concept “mixed-race”, though in Canada the term “métis” is used much more commonly in French than “mixed-race” is in English. […]
Despite its complex origins in the cauldron of colonialism, if, in French, the term “métis” was limited to a parallel usage of mixed-race, most of the linguistic confusion jumping to English would be resolved. The main difficulty with the term “métis” in Canada is that it is also used to refer to an Indigenous people in French (and in English). Using the term “métis” to refer both to biological mixture between two individuals imagined to be of different “races” and/ to a distinct Indigenous people with a specific history, relations, and territories on the northern plains inevitably leads to some misunderstanding. This linguistic confusion is certainly not the sole or principal basis for debate and/or conflict, but it is worth noting given the tense deliberations about the nature of indigeneity currently brought forward by the self-indigenization movement[…]
However, in addition to this linguistic context, the specific colonial narratives that circulate about French settlement play a role in the high numbers of French descendent white people in Quebec and Eastern Canada, formerly “New France,” raceshifting. Leroux (2019) explains, p. 8-9:
Generations of French Canadians and French-Quebecois historiography have cycled through a number of powerful narratives about relations betwen French settlers and Indigenous people. […]
Much of the recent historiography on the French regime has self-consciously sought to reconcile Indigenous people with French descendants through blurring the lines between whiteness and Indigeneity, mirroring a range of efforts in popular culture. According to these new origin stories, early French colonists and the Indigenous peoples whom they encountered created a novel form of “intercultural reciprocity, better still, an ethnocultural synthesis — a fusion of horizons — in which Quebec emerges as an entirely new society,” political scientist Daniel Salée has explained. “The image is a seductive one.”[…]
While all available evidence from the French regime (1608-1763) suggests that Indigenous women only rarely married French settlers, scholarly research and popular culture have nonetheless turned the “myth of metissage” into a relatively uncontroversial truth in Quebec and (French) Canada. At its basis is a nationalist belief in the innate kindness of French settler colonialism in New France, especially as it relates to its British (and to a lesser extent, Spanish) counterparts. (Leroux, 2019)
In addition to these linguistic and narrative specificities’ impacts on the Indigenous peoples whose territories are occupied by people who are raceshifting, there are also impacts on the People whose name is repurposed for the movement. It becomes necessary to distinguish the Métis people from the white people calling themselves Eastern Metis.
What makes the Métis an Indigenous people, they say, is the development of their own political institutions, linguistic practices, and cultural forms that depended on ongoing kinship relations with Cree, Saulteaux, Assiniboine and Dene peoples. “Métis are a people, not a historical process,” wrote Gaudry in 2016 for the Canadian Encyclopedia. Plenty of mixed unions happened throughout Canadian history, he wrote, but the children of most of those unions found their place in one of their parents’ communities—or both. “Historical Métis,” he wrote, were not the automatic result of “mixing,” but “were real human beings who had choice in the matter and who created a political and social entity on their own accord.”
(Leroux, 2018, Self-Made Metis).
As Gaudry (2018) writes in Communing with the Dead: The “New Métis,” Métis Identity Appropriation, and the Displacement of Living Métis Culture, supplanting contemporary Métis people and communities and replacing them with people whose claims to Indigeneity consist only of their:
self-proclaimed personal connection with long-dead Native people relies on and reinforces the continuing existence of actual Métis communities. It is the “discursive disregard of living Métis that locates the promise of Métis cultural revival in blood memory, genealogy, and lineal descent— connections to the dead— rather than a connection to the living culture of Métis communities. This is what Circe Sturm refers to as “a presumed void of Indianness,” the belief that contemporary Indigenous communities either don’t exist or are less capable of providing commentary about their own existence than authoritative outsiders, including those interested in reviving a lost identity. But there is no Métis cultural or political void to fill, no void of Métisness. (Gaudry, 2018)
Métis communities continue to exist, passing language, culture, and struggle through generations. What Métis, and other Indigenous people make clear time and time again is that membership in their communities and a right to claim connections to them is based on kinship and “who claims you”, rather than biologically essentialist, race based theories of lineal descent.
As Jennifer Adese, a Métis woman raised in Ontario, explains, being raised with a lot of exposure to “Eastern Métis” claims to Indigeneity skewed her understanding of what it was to be Métis. “I did not identify as Métis when I was younger because the claims of such people around me made me come to think Métisness was a vacuous thing,” because “nothing connected the people making the claims other than the claims themselves” (Adeese, Todd & Stevenson, 2017). In addition to the harm of this alone, the necessity of debunking the claims of the Eastern Métis can, according to Adese, take away from the work of anticolonial struggle against the impacts of colonization on the Métis Nation.
Current and past struggles by Métis people doing this important work have been used as fodder for the Eastern Métis movement. For instance, in judicial decisions legislating hunting rights for Métis people, white people have seen an opportunity to secure access to land and hunting grounds, especially when this access is “threatened” by land claims or other actions by the Indigenous nations whose lands they are on.
Raceshifting in action: Case study One
In October 2004, a small group of hunters gathered in a large tent in the Chic Choc Mountains, south of Gaspésie National Park. Raymond Cyr, the director of an organization that delivers education for people with physical disabilities, had joined his cousin Marc LeBlanc, a hunting and fishing guide, for the moose season. A tourist haven in the summer, the region becomes a hunting and fishing destination when the leaves start to turn.
Rugged four-wheel drive and all-terrain vehicles, fully loaded trailers and weathered campers crisscross the network of old logging roads off the winding path of Highway 299, which cuts through the stark limestone cliffs of the Cascapédia River valley.
[…]
LeBlanc had been active in the area since 1992. But as the cousins sat in their tent together that fall day, twelve years later, they faced a quandary: an agreement in Gaspésie between the provincial government and the Gesgapegiag Mi’kmaw community would set up a Mi’kmaq-controlled territory which would offer outdoor activities for a fee (in French, the term is “pourvoirie,” which refers to both the territory as well as the entity controlling it). Under Gesgapegiag’s plans, the territory would include an interpretative centre and hiking and horseback-riding trails, as well as outfitting services such as guiding, accommodation and meals.
The chief of Gesgapegiag at the time, John Martin, explained in a regional news report that the project aimed, in part, to decrease pressure on the local moose population by managing the number of hunters in that area. In 2005, 102 moose had been killed in the territory of the proposed project—seven by Mi’kmaw hunters, and the remaining ninety-five by non-Mi’kmaw hunters.
[…]
The agreement had been officially in the works since 1999; by the time of Cyr and LeBlanc’s hunting trip in October 2004, it was receiving substantial media coverage. If it went forward, it would join nearly seven hundred other privately operated outfitting territories in Québec, including about a dozen in Gaspésie and several dozen managed by Indigenous communities. It would have been the second pourvoirie operated by the Mi’kmaq, and, throughout the process, the Gesgapegiag negotiators had insisted that the project was central to their efforts to reconnect with their historical territory and build their economy, as it would employ about twenty community members. Nonetheless, many locals were angry. […]
Cyr and his hunting group were also upset. Facing the possibility of either having to pay a fee to access the territory or having to seek a new hunting territory—and already annoyed by the incursion of logging into the area—Raymond Cyr developed an alternative proposal. He, LeBlanc and a small group of hunters who hunted on adjacent territory had a habit of meeting in a communal tent every evening during the short moose season to discuss the day’s hunting. During one of their nightly get-togethers, according to court documents and the recollections of three people present, Cyr suggested that members of the hunting party claim an Aboriginal identity. Each, after all, likely had long-ago Indigenous ancestry—scholarly estimates in historical demography reckon that a majority of the descendants of early French settlers have at least one Indigenous ancestor. And in Cyr’s case, he says, he was sure that he did; his family had always talked about it.
But Cyr’s plan was met with some disbelief, as one fellow hunter, a police officer named Benoît Lavoie, expressed skepticism:
“We’ve never had rights, only Indians have had rights, us, we don’t have any,” he said, according to court documents. Cyr boldly responded with four fateful words: “Read the Powley decision.”
R. v. Powley was the first major Aboriginal rights case concerning Métis peoples. The Powley decision resulted in “the Powley Test,” which laid out a set of criteria to not only define what might constitute a Métis right, but also who is entitled to those rights. Although the Powley decision defined Métis rights as they relate to hunting, many legal experts and Métis leaders view the Powley case as potentially instrumental in the future of recognizing Métis rights.
[…]
The Powley case outlined a set of criteria known today as the “Powley test.” This test is used to define Métis rights in the same way that the Van der Peet test is employed in defining Aboriginal (Indian) rights. Once a right is identified, The Powley test is a process that can be used to assess whether is the claimants are entitled to exercise Métis rights.
Yet, since the Powley decision, there has been a remarkable expansion in claims to Métis identity in Québec, including from a number of new organizations (Gélinas and Lamarre 2015: 341). Results from the 2011 National Household Survey bear this phenomenon out: Quebec had the highest provincial increase in Métis self-identification between 2006 and 2011 at a remarkable 47 per cent, with an even more astonishing increase of 158 per cent between 2001 and 2011 […] To put it simply, the existence of a test for Métis identity, coupled with a fundamental lack of understanding as to how difficult that test is to actually meet, seems to have created an inaccurate roadmap to Indigeneity that various individuals and organizations are using to build their claims.
(From Vowel & Leroux, 2016, White Settler Antipathy and the Daniels Decision)
The Powley case influenced other Métis rights-based legal challenges, such as R. v. Daniels (2016).
Daniels v. Canada
The Supreme Court decision in Daniels v. Canada resolved an important constitutional question regarding which level of government has legislative authority over Métis and non-status Indians. Unfortunately, many of the organizations and individuals commenting on the case have been drawing sweeping and incorrect conclusions about the decision, often suggesting that Daniels clarified who is Métis or non-status Indian. These flawed interpretations of the Daniels case have led to an upsurge in white settler claims of Indigeneity, which will likely ratchet up tensions between settlers and Indigenous peoples, as well as among Indigenous peoples themselves, for years to come. While the undermining of Indigenous rights through these types of claims is a phenomenon generations old in the United States (see Sturm 2011), this tactic remains relatively novel in Canada. […]
What’s the problem with Daniels?
The Daniels decision has been welcomed by an incredible range of organizations and individuals. While there is certainly cause to be optimistic, particularly for Indigenous people who, over the course of the past few generations, have been disenfranchised by Canada’s colonial governance regime, there is also much with which to be concerned. In particular, we are troubled by how the Daniels decision, read in conjunction with several complementary SCC decisions over the past decade or so, has emboldened a range of so-called Métis organizations to claim Aboriginal identity and those rights flowing from it.
While the decision itself did not involve issues of identity or rights, the following statement, offered by Justice Abella on behalf of the Court, has been seized upon by self-declared Métis organizations: “Métis’ can refer to the historic Métis community in Manitoba’s Red River Settlement or it can be used as a general term for anyone with mixed European and Aboriginal heritage” (Daniels v. Canada 2016). The statement seems relatively banal but taken out of its context, the Court may seem to be arguing for a position that facilitates white settler nativist fantasies of being “Indian.”[…]
Current interpretations of Daniels tap into a long-held desire to erase Indigenous peoples by taking their place. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012) refer to this tactic as “settler nativism,” and describe it as a method of maintaining white settler privilege while claiming an Indigenous identity. In essence, such imaginative claims allow white settlers to feel that they belong on stolen Indigenous lands. In essence, such imaginative claims allow white settlers to feel that they belong on stolen Indigenous lands. This need for belonging seems particularly strong in Québec, where nationalist notions of a Québécois homeland exist in uneasy tension with Indigenous antecedence. However, Québec is hardly unique in this; the search for legitimacy and settler futurity exists everywhere that white settler colonialism operates.
(From Vowel & Leroux, 2016, White Settler Antipathy and the Daniels Decision)
Meanwhile, back in the Chic Choc Mountains with Leblanc…
Within eighteen months of their initial discussion in the tent, LeBlanc incorporated an organization he called the Gaspé Peninsula Métis Community (GPMC). Under that name, the group began lobbying against the Mi’kmaw project. “By following the right approach, there might be a way to obtain an injunction against this project [Aboriginal outfitters],” LeBlanc told a local newspaper in July 2006. “We’re going to tell the federal government that we have Métis people in Gaspésie and that our territory is currently being stolen.
We’ll ask the Government of Canada to give us time and the financial means to survey the number of Métis, write the history of the Gaspésie Métis community, and stop the outfitters project.”
Before long, the GPMC’s intervention as an “Aboriginal” people and the group’s broader political opposition had succeeded in slowing down the progression of the Mi’kmaw project, which was eventually shelved by the government. […]
Leblanc’s comments were just a harbinger of things to come. Twenty-five such organizations representing self-identified “métis” people in Québec have been created since 2004, about twenty of which were still active as of summer 2018. Data collected from organizational records and media reports show that ten of these organizations alone had at least forty-two thousand membership-by-fee at the end of 2017.
(Leroux, 2018, Self-made Métis)
Raceshifting in action: Case study Two
Across the St. Lawrence River from Gaspésie in Nitassinan, In Innu territory, a process eerily similar to the founding of the Gaspé group had unfolded eighteen months beforehand. The Communauté Métisse du Domaine du-Roy et de la Seigneurie de Mingan (CMDRSM) became the first Québec-based organization to attempt to meet the Powley Test as an intervenor in a case that went before the Québec Superior Court in March 2006. Known colloquially as the Corneau case, it involved the illegal construction of hunting camps on public land.
The CMDRSM’s creation—in Chicoutimi, at the head of the Saguenay River, just over a year before it intervened in the case—was directly tied to the negotiation of a comprehensive land claim in the area. The Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean and Côte-Nord regions have been home to an active, generations-long movement against Innu rights to hunt and fish. Starting in 1864, the government restricted the Innu from salmon fishing on the ribbon of rivers that flow into the lower section of the St. Lawrence. A protracted battle between the Innu and police, as well as white residents, who were backed by the government, carried through the 1970s and 1980s, likely resulting in the death of two Innu fishermen (while the Innu suspected that the fisherman had been murdered, no charges were ever laid). After this period, which came to be known as the “Salmon Wars,” Innu fishing rights were partially restored to most of the rivers in the territory as the government finally began to realize that its position was legally untenable.
In 2000, a framework agreement was announced that would have further recognized Innu harvesting rights over a large regional territory. Though the agreement was opposed by grassroots Innu activists—it would have meant waiving any rights to future litigation—it nonetheless led to a significant backlash among local white Franco-Québécois residents, including hunting, fishing and landowner organizations, as well as municipal governments and politicians. The opposition spawned three white rights organizations in the region, two of which were believed to have mobilized thousands of new individual and corporate members within two years—the Fondation Équité Territoriale (Organization for Territorial Fairness, or OTF) and the Association pour le Droit des Blancs (the Association for White Rights, or AWR). This “white rights” activism generally took the form of attacking the Innu framework agreement, with members speaking against it at public hearings and giving comments to media. […]
André Forbes, the founder of the AWR, became a key founding board member of the CMDRSM and the “chief ” of its Métis Côte-Nord “clan” in 2005, making him the de facto leader of its membership in a large region along the North Shore. Prior to his mercurial transformation into a “métis chief,” Forbes was one of the most outspoken leaders of the white rights movement in the region. In an article for Québec-City based daily le Soleil; he argued that the treaty negotiations represented “hateful politics that create social tensions like those in Israel.” At a rally, Forbes also coined the term “Red Taliban” to refer pejoratively to Indigenous peoples in the region, summoning a toxic mix of anti-Indigenous and Islamophobic symbolism.
(Leroux, 2018, Self-made Métis)
White settler stories of Eastern Métis as a move towards “settler nativism”
Since the white settler can apparently never return to their lost European homelands once generations removed, they continually appropriate, develop, and redevelop tautologies that claim Indigenous land, create‘realist’ representations of those lands that disrupt Indigenous ways of knowing, and invent an originary identity across time and space that is designed to regenerate itself anytime it becomes dislodged. (Wysote & Morton, 2019)
In this vein, simply because a story is told and retold does not make it true. Wysote and Morton (2019) explain that contemporary declarations of white settlers about their legitimate claims to land or an Indigenous ancestor – under the system of settler colonialism – remains an unwavering commitment to whiteness and settler futurity. Stories that turn white settlers into Indigenous people serve to naturalize colonial violence against First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples as though this current configuration of settler power is logical and irrefutable (Wysote & Morton, 2019). This is what Tuck & Yang (2012) identified as “settler nativism,” a move towards innocence to shake off the complicity within the past and present system of settler colonial violence.
Settler nativism
In this move to innocence, settlers locate or invent a long-lost ancestor who is rumored to have
had “Indian blood,” and they use this claim to mark themselves as blameless in the attempted eradications of Indigenous peoples. There are numerous examples of public figures in the United States who “remember” a distant Native ancestor, including Nancy Reagan (who is said to be a descendant of Pocahontas) and, more recently, Elizabeth Warren and many others, illustrating how commonplace settler nativism is. Vine Deloria Jr. discusses what he calls the Indian-grandmother complex in the following account from Custer Died for Your Sins: […]
Whites claiming Indian blood generally tend to reinforce mythical beliefs about Indians. All but one person I met who claimed Indian blood claimed it on their grandmother’s side. I once did a projection backward and discovered that evidently most tribes were entirely female for the first three hundred years of white occupation. No one, it seemed, wanted to claim a male Indian as a forebear.
It doesn’t take much insight into racial attitudes to understand the real meaning of the Indian- grandmother complex that plagues certain white [people]. A male ancestor has too much of the aura of the savage warrior, the unknown primitive, the instinctive animal, to make him a respectable member of the family tree. But a young Indian princess? Ah, there was royalty for the taking. Somehow the white was linked with a noble house of gentility and culture if his grandmother was an Indian princess who ran away with an intrepid pioneer…
While a real Indian grandmother is probably the nicest thing that could happen to a child, why is a remote Indian princess grandmother so necessary for many white [people]? Is it because they are afraid of being classed as foreigners? Do they need some blood tie with the frontier and its dangers in order to experience what it means to be an American? Or is it an attempt to avoid facing the guilt they bear for the treatment of the Indians? (1988, p. 2-4)
Settler nativism, or what Vine Deloria Jr. calls the Indian-grandmother complex, is a settler move to innocence because it is an attempt to deflect a settler identity, while continuing to enjoy settler privilege and occupying stolen land. Deloria observes that settler nativism is gendered and considers the reasons a storied Indian grandmother might have more appeal than an Indian grandfather. On one level, it can be expected that many settlers have an ancestor who was Indigenous and/or who was a chattel slave. This is precisely the habit of settler colonialism, which pushes humans into other human communities; strategies of rape and sexual violence, and also the ordinary attractions of human relationships, ensure that settlers have Indigenous and chattel slave ancestors. […]
Ancestry is different from tribal membership; Indigenous identity and tribal membership are questions that Indigenous communities alone have the right to struggle over and define, not DNA tests, heritage websites, and certainly not the settler state. Settler nativism is about imagining an Indian past and a settler future; in contrast, tribal sovereignty has provided for an Indigenous present and various Indigenous intellectuals theorize decolonization as Native futures without a settler state. (Tuck & Yang, 2012)
On Decolonization, Reconciliation and Erasure
Settlers who try to mimic stories of Indigeneity support and intensify state-led attempts to erase Indigenous peoples who are always already an existential and material threat to the legitimacy of the Canadian state. This is one reason the settler state will never be compatible with Indigenous peoples who are grounded in their territories, stories, cultures and protocols (Paraphrased from Tawinikay, 2018).
Visions of decolonization (led by Indigenous peoples), rather than reconciliation or self-indigenization require a certain level of acceptance of one’s settler position. We propose this acceptance not to promote “settler” as an individual identity we embrace, grow comfortable with, or fight to preserve. Neither do we promote any kind of settler futurity, but we propose this word to describe the kinds of relationships we, as settlers, have to the various territories we have come to live on, in many cases, over generations. Patrick Wolfe (2013) explains, “it is important not to be misled by voluntarism. The opposition between Native and settler is a structural relationship rather than an effect of the will. The fact that I, for example, am an Australian settler is not a product of my individual consciousness. Rather, it is a historical condition that preceded me. Neither I nor other settlers can will our way out of it, whether we want to or not. No doubt our respective individual consciousnesses affect how each of us responds to this shared historical positionality, but they did not create it and they cannot undo it.”
For settlers, Tawinikay (2020) proposes a direction:
See yourself for what you are, for who your community is. Act in ways that bring about a world where reconciliation is possible, a world in which your people give back land and dismantle the centralized state of Canada. Don’t romanticize the native peoples you work with. Don’t feel that you can’t ever question their judgment or choose to work with some over others. Find those that have kept the fire alive in their hearts, those who would rather keep fighting than accept the reconciliation carrot. Don’t ever act from guilt and shame.
And don’t let yourself believe that you can transcend your settlerism by doing solidarity work. Understand that you can, and should, find your own ways to connect to this land. From your own tradition, inherited or created.[end of excerpt]
Just as we are against empty, immaterial references to reconciliation by politicians seeking only to maintain colonial order, so too are we against the unhelpful proposals that decolonization be sought through an awareness that “everyone is Indigenous to somewhere,” or that everyone can become Indigenous to here.
“Decolonization is not an “and”. It is an elsewhere.” (Tuck & Yang, 2012)
“Decolonization […] is about repealing the authority of the colonial state and redistributing land and resources. It also means embracing and legitimizing previously repressed Indigenous worldviews.” (Tawinikay, 2019)
Beauregard Y (1993) Mythe ou réalité. Les origines amérindiennes des Québécois: Entrevue avec Hubert Charbonneau. Cap-aux-diamants: La Revue D’histoire Du Québec 34: 38–42.
Desjardins B (2008) La contribution différentielle des immigrants français à la souche canadienne-française. Annales de Normandie 58(3–4): 69–79.
Gaudry, A. (2016). Respecting Métis nationhood and self-determination in matters of Métis identity. Aboriginal history: A reader, 152-63.
Leroux, D. (2019). Distorted descent: White claims to Indigenous identity. Univ. of Manitoba Press.
Leroux, D. (2018). Self-made métis. Maisonneuve: A Quarterly Journal of Arts, Opinion & Ideas.
Leroux, D., & Gaudry, A. (2017). Becoming Indigenous: The Rise of Eastern Métis in Canada. The Conversation.
Leroux, D. (2018). ‘We’ve been here for 2,000 years’: White settlers, Native American DNA and the phenomenon of indigenization. Social studies of science, 48(1), 80-100.
Pipeline companies threaten violence to communities, salmon and wildlife with drilling under sacred headwaters.
(Unceded Yintah / Secwepemcúĺecw Territories): Coastal Gaslink pipeline in Wet’suwet’en territory and Trans Mountain Pipeline in Secwepemc territory are both currently preparing to drill under our clear rivers, from which we have drawn sustenance since time immemorial.
In the past few days we have seen Indigenous women interrupted during ceremonies in both territories, and arrests and incarcerations in Secwepemc territories, for enacting their sacred responsibilities. The Trans Mountain Pipeline weaves through over 900 rivers and creeks, threatening both Secwepemcetkwe (Thompson) and Fraser River systems. The North Thompson is connected to the Adams River, a vital spawning habitat for chinook, coho, and pink salmon, and home to one of the most important sockeye runs in the world. Any leakage would immediately threaten the pacific salmon who spawn in the Secwepemcetkwe (Thompson) and Fraser River basins.
In an open letter to the Prime Minister dated November 26, 2016, our late Secwepemc leader Arthur Manuel wrote to Trudeau:
“The salmon and the rivers they inhabit have taken care of our people for centuries and we are obligated as Secwepemc people to protect the Thompson River system for future generations.”
In this the Secwepemc stand in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en people, who have been fighting to protect Wedzin Kwa (Morice River) from pipeline incursions for over a decade. Wetʼsuwetʼen means “People of the lower drainage” and Wet’suwet’en people’s lives are inseparable from the life of the Wedzin Kwa river, which we have protected for thousands of years, and which has in turn fed us and governed us through our hereditary leaders and knowledge-keepers.
Sleydo’ Molly Wickham, spokesperson of the Gidimt’en Checkpoint, states:
At this time our rivers, the lifeblood of our nations, are facing drills, toxins and invaders. Indigenous people are standing up to state violence, big industry and corporate greed for the future of all of humanity–of all life on our yintah. We stand with our Secwepemc relatives in their struggle and ask all Indigenous peoples and our allies to stand up for the salmon, the clean drinking water, the animals and our future generations. We will not let them kill us. We will always be here.
Over the last two decades we have witnessed the dramatic decline of our salmon as a result of toxic extractive and urban development on our territory, as well as fish farms, invasive species, and climate change. These pipeline expansions pose the most direct risk yet.
The drilling alone threatens not only salmon spawning habitat but the balance of the entire ecosystem and food chain they rely upon. The sockeye are tenacious, fighting their way thousands of kilometres upstream from the Pacific Ocean to reach their spawning beds in Secwepemc territory. Wedzin Kwa joins the Skeena and runs through the canyons out to the Pacific Ocean. We cannot risk putting any more obstacles in the salmons’ way.
Our traditional land users and stewards—those who exercise our right to hunt, fish, gather, and practice our culture—are the ones who truly understand the potential impacts of the pipeline. It is these members of our nations who will feel the effects of the pipeline on our rights and our food sovereignty most acutely. It is these members who have authority over our lands the government of Canada has failed most.
When we protect our rivers from invading industries, and insist on our rights to fish and hunt on our territories, we are criminalized, harassed and jailed. In Secwepemc territory, there were 5 arrests yesterday and 3 indigenous land defenders were sentenced to 28 days in Canadian jail.
By refusing to seek the free prior and informed consent of our people, and instead opting to sign deals and agreements with a few of our federal Indian bands, the government of Canada has undermined the authority of the proper rights and title holders of Secwepemcúl’ecw and the Wet’suwet’en yintah.
We send our love and greetings to all of Creation and to all of you. We send our love and greetings to Wet’suwet’en Territory, Mi’kmaq Territory, Algonquin Territory, Secwepemc Territory, Inuit Nunangat, and to all Indigenous Peoples who are gathered on their territories fighting colonial violence.
We see you and draw encouragement from our shared fight for justice. We as Haudenosaunee people have inherited a sacred responsibility to protect the lands, waters, and sustenance for the coming generations.
We will fulfill our commitment to our children as our ancestors did for us. This responsibility is something that no one can interfere with. We were placed on our lands by our Creator. We have been here for 10,000 years and we will be here for 10,000 more.
Settler governments need to wake up to the reality that Haudenosaunee people aren’t going anywhere. We have always defended our territory. We have stopped development for 83 days at 1492 Land Back Lane. We will keep defending our territory.
We demand Provincial and Federal governments respect Indigenous Peoples’ sovereignty over their lands/waters. We demand #1492LandBackLane remains under Haudenosaunee control and our sovereignty over the Haldimand Tract respected. We demand an end to the criminalization of Land Defenders everywhere.
We want to thank you all for your support. We’re facing criminal charges, a $20 million injunction, and ongoing police violence. This is unacceptable. State sanctioned violence against Indigenous Peoples must end. Your actions today are helping to keep us safe.
Please continue to support our legal defense fund – the longer we are on the land, the longer our court cases drag on, the more people are charged.
Our cousins, our aunties, uncles, and life-long friends are being arrested. Our allies, artists and cooks, journalists and researchers are being arrested. Despite this intimidation people keep showing up to bring supplies, showing us endless love and support. Indigenous Peoples have a right to live and exist in their home territories.
The days of forcing Indigenous Peoples off of their lands is over. We trust you will return to your homes safely to your friends and family.
– Haudenosaunee Land Defenders at 1492 Land Back Lane
Right now in Mi’kma’ki, commercial fishermen are physically threatening, intimidating and harassing Indigenous people over their livelihood catch of lobster. The violence has escalated in the past few days, and seems likely to continue to escalate. The RCMP have been filmed allowing commercial fishermen to steal and poison lobster, burn vehicles, smash windows, throw rocks at Mi’kmaq people and attack chiefs and women.
What’s happening in Mi’kma’ki is a prime example of how race operates in so-called Canada, with the state protecting the side of big business and using white working-class people to project their force onto the non-white population. Examples of this can be found all over the country.
In August, 27km camp on Wet’suwet’en yintah was burned to the ground by arsonists, and somehow the state has no leads or interest in pursuing the case, even though there were public facebook posts calling for that specific action to be carried out.
In Secwepmeculecw the Tiny House Warriors have faced near constant harrassment from white supremacists who even set up a camp and barbeque within a stone’s throw from Indigenous women, girls and two-spirit folks in order to harass and intimidate them.
In Algonquin territory non-Indigenous hunters continue to disrespect and threaten Indigenous people on their own territory, who are protecting the moose population from being over-hunted.
In Six Nations territory the police continue to harass and arrest Indigenous people, unchecked by us the greater community at large.
When is enough enough? Why aren’t we shutting the country down? The white supremacist settler state cannot continue unchecked. There must be action. This is a callout to all settlers and supporters to take actions where you stand, how you see fit. Transportation routes are vulnerable, we proved this in the spring. It doesn’t take many people carrying out subversive actions to cause the state immense damage.
Update on continued struggle to resist the Coastal GasLink pipeline threatening the Wedzin Kwa headwaters on Wet’suwet’en territory. For more info, follow Gidimt’en Checkpoint.
Our headwaters are under attack. Our way of life is at risk. Coastal Gaslink is weeks away from test drilling beneath Wedzin Kwa – the river that feeds all of Wet’suwet’en territory and gives life to our nation.
We continue to reoccupy our territories – to prepare our foods, to hold our ceremonies, to teach our children what it means to be Wet’suwet’en.
We have to protect ourselves. We have to protect what we have at all costs. We need your support now more than ever.
A message from Sleydo, Molly Wickham, spokesperson for the Gidimt’en Checkpoint.
Visit www.yintahaccess.com to come stand with us, to donate, or to find out ways you can help.
Artificial Intelligence AI labs, recipients of several $100M in government funding, are working to put “machine learning” algorithms in the service of a long list of industries. Under an “ethical” facade, some applications will simply allow well-placed capitalists to further enrich themselves. Others aim to reinforce repression, whether detecting shoplifters at the supermarket with automated video surveillance, developing facial recognition tools that work even on partly covered faces, or “predicting” crime or the probability of a prisoner re-offending.
5g Wireless Networking The unprecedented bandwidth of 5G technology enables the deployment of AI on the scale of a city in real time. Every movement becomes trackable thanks to thousands of cameras integrated into a centralized surveillance apparatus. This vision is already in practice in more than one European “smart city”. Countless sensors dotting public spaces, in businesses, cars and public transit, and worn on our bodies aim to make every action the object of calculation, prediction and control, all under an eco-friendly label. By its pervasiveness, a web of algorithms is made invisible and therefore impossible to resist.
Robotics and Automation Self-driving cars. Robotized warehouses. Cashierless stores. Delivery robots that call the cops when they are attacked. An infrastructure is being deployed that will change the world of work and our living environment permanently. We don’t mourn the disappearance of back-breaking and boring jobs. A dehumanizing pace is imposed on the remaining workers, who must keep up with the machines and productivity software or be shown the door. Meanwhile, what measures of social control and what exploitative schemes await the new excluded masses of an age of technological unemployment?
Life in Front of a Screen Possibilities for authentic relations between humans and with our surroundings are increasingly erased in service of a virtual hyper- connectivity. Understanding, discovery, and the search for meaning are reduced to production of data. Attention deficit, memory problems, loss of emotional skills and imagination, disrupted sleep, musculo-skeletal pain, anxiety, loneliness, depression: the symptoms of addiction to online technologies are worsening as the proportion of the population that has spent their entire lives immersed in touch screens grows.
Journalists recently reported on arrests in relation to online threats against Horacio Arruda, Quebec’s public health director and the public face of Quebec health policy in the context of the pandemic.
These arrests bring to light the involvement of a section of the far right in mobilizations against mandatory masks, social distancing, and other measures put in place to minimize the risk of contagion in public places.[1] In a July 31 blog post, the antiracist blogger Xavier Camus reported a post by QAnon true believer Fabrice Descurninges, which included the home address of Horacio Arruda. Camus also reported – with the aid of numerous screenshots – on a similar post by Sylvain Marcoux, whom he described as a “violent conspiracy theorist.”
Marck Lelou is one of numerous pseudonyms used by Sylvain Marcoux on Facebook.
One week later, the main media outlets in Quebec (including Radio-Canada, La Presse, and the Journal de Montréal) reported that Sylvain Marcoux had been arrested “for having allegedly harassed Dr. Horacio Arruda and his family on social media.” Surprisingly, none of these media outlets mentioned Marcoux’s political ties to the most hardcore sections of the far right, specifically to the scene around the Fédération des québécois de souche, despite the fact that these ties are easy to find with a simple google search. This nationalist polemicist and Nazi fetishist who ran as an independent candidate for provincial office had benefited from similar kid gloves treatment from those few journalists who had cared to report on his 2018 electoral bid…
While he is by no means a leading light of the Quebec far right, we feel this presents an opportune moment to review Marcoux’s political itinerary over the past decade.
WARNING: this article includes explicitly racist and antisemitic screenshots.
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Marcoux first appears online as part of the “hardline” and right-wing nationalist milieux. Over a span of a few months in 2011, he wrote 13 articles on Vigile.Quebec, a website that offers an open tribune to pro-independence and nationalist writers of various tendencies, and which has become dominated by the far right over the past years. The subjects of his writings at that point were the standard fare for frustrated identitarian nationalists: denouncing the PQ for not being serious about independence and condemning multiculturalism as a threat to Quebec identity.
Perhaps encouraged by his initial efforts as a writer, Marcoux came out with a (very) short booklet in 2012: Pour un ralliement national canadien-français. Published (somewhat surprisingly) by Guerin, which described it as a “manifesto”, this text is a call for an ethnic nationalist project for an independent French Canada. The author notes the recent use of the term Québécois to designate the descendants of French colonists in Canada, and rejects it, but other than that the booklet is not very noteworthy. Despite his footnote about Jews being a particularly xenophobic group, and passages about Indigenous people denying their claims to sovereignty (while also claiming a European presence in North America going back over 1,000 years), the kind of racism implicit in his call for nationalism to be based on French Canadian ethnicity is sadly not at all beyond the pale in Quebec. And indeed, in 2012 Marcoux was still claiming that the nationalism he was proposing, while cultural and ethnic, was not racial – regardless of their skin colour or personal origins, anyone who identified with and assimilated into French Canada could be a French Canadian:[2]
“Pour le Ralliement national, le « nationalisme » n’est donc pas fondé sur la « race » (morphologie, couleur de la peau…), mais bien sur la culture, c’est-à-dire l’ensemble des modes de vie et des convictions que partage la population vivant au sein d’un même territoire.” (Trans. : “For the Ralliement national, ‘nationalism’ is not based on ‘race’ (morphology, skin colour, etc.) but on culture, that is to say all of the ways of life and beliefs shared by the population living on a common territory.”)
He would write a couple of articles on Vigile.Quebec in 2013, but nothing more.
It is fairly clear that Marcoux had begun relating to the organized far right in Quebec by this point. After all, the assertion that one is not “racist” but simply preoccupied by “culture” is the exact same position put forth by the main far right currents throughout the West. Culture is implicitly understood as homogenous and static to the point of being frozen, rather than heterogeneous and constantly changing. It follows from this definition of culture that any criticisms or alternate views coming from Indigenous people or immigrants are viewed as intrinsically suspect, representing a threat to the dominant culture by their very origins. Leading to the clichéd garbage we hear from certain nationalists about immigration and multiculturalism representing “Trojan horses” which undermine French Canadian culture. The fact of the matter is that there are more similarities than differences between “biological” and “cultural” racism: in the final analysis, they are both essentialist views of identity which serve to justify discrimination, exclusion, and repression.[3]
In 2012, the Comité citoyen pour l’interêt du Québec – an otherwise unknown identitarian groupuscule – organized a talk where Marcoux could discuss his book. The Fédération des québécois de souche, which operates as a kind of clearinghouse for the fascist and white supremacist (or white “nationalist”) movements in Quebec, gave it a rave review, all the while criticizing his cultural as opposed to racial take on nationalism. A criticism that it would seem Marcoux took to heart.
During those years the FQS was collaborating closely with two other now-defunct fascist groups, la Bannière Noire and the Légion nationale. The three groups worked together to hold a number of small demonstrations, including an annual “March against Denationalization” held in Montreal in 2011 and in Trois-Rivières in 2012. Marcoux attended these marches, and was even interviewed by the media at the Trois Rivières rally. Insisting he was not a member of the Légion nationale, he rehashed the cultural-racist anti-immigration line described above, complaining that the majority was losing its standing, but insisting he was not a racist as “culture is between your ears.” Marcoux also gave an interview to the FQS on March 23, 2013, during a “militant action” at Montreal’s City Hall.
Marcoux spent much of the past ten years (2013-17) as a municipal councillor for the town of Saint-Majorique-de-Grantham, close to Drummondville, while also working as a welder. In this regard it is worth mentioning that Tradition Québec, a far-right Catholic traditionalist group with close ties to the FQS, has organized and promoted a series of religious services by Father Damien Duterte and Mgr Donald Sanborn, both “sedevacantists” theologically to the right of the larger and better-known Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX).[4] In 2019 three such events were held in the municipal hall at 1966 St-Joseph O., presumably with permission from the municipal council which Marcoux had served on for several years. It turns out that Marcoux himself lives (or lived) just across from the municipal building in question. Don’t worry, we’re not calling on anyone to “bang on his windows.” In fact, it turns out his place is for sale, if anyone is interested…
A photo of Sylvain Marcoux’s office at his home in Saint-Majorique-de-Grantham, from the page of a real estate agent. Note the “Black Sun”, a nazi symbol, on the wall.
From “Cultural Nationalist” to Hardcore Nazi
By the time he first came to our attention a few years ago, Sylvain Marcoux was already an out and out neo-nazi: social media posts denying the Holocaust, claiming Hitler was “the most beautiful soul ever on earth”, and talking about Jewish conspiracies to commit genocide against “white populations”. Indeed, he is one of the more virulent and vile racists on social media.
In March 2017, two months after Alexandre Bissonnette murdered six people and injured nineteen others in the Quebec City Mosque Massacre, Marcoux was on the website of Horizon Actuel Québec’s Nomos web-tv show, opining that there had been no deaths, that it had been staged and was all just “big liberal anti-Québécois grandstanding.”
Sylvain Marcoux claiming that the massacre at the Quebec City Mosque on January 29, 2017, was fake news.
Sylvain Marcoux hanging out with Robert Proulx and La Meute in an underground parking lot in Quebec City, August 20, 2017.
Marcoux has also been a regular at the various “big tent” mobilizations over the past years which were generally organized under the auspices of national-populist groups like La Meute and Storm Alliance. For example, he was spotted in a certain underground parking lot in Quebec City on August 20, 2017. He was also present at the anti-immigrant demonstration at St-Bernard-de-Lacolle on May 19, 2018, where he was interviewed by La Meute’s bumbling video crew, giving us this somewhat grotesque window into his way of seeing the world:
Meute.tv : (…) The oligarchy… (…)
Marcoux : It’s the Jews … The real term is “Jews”. You were speaking before about taboos, there is no taboo. It is Jewish messianism … The Jew wants to dissolve the white nations. I am not afraid to say it. It’s not supremacist to stand up and say you’re white and proud to be white. The other races stand up for themselves, there is the Ligue des Noirs here in Quebec, imagine if there was a League for whites… The corrupt media, media working precisely for those Jews … When I say “Jews”, it’s Jewry. It’s Bronfman who is behind Trudeau … he works for his team.
Meute.tv : You think it is about money power, beyond immigration (…)
Marcoux : It is more than money, it is really about dissolving the white nations, drowning them with immigration. Immigration… or even miscegenation.
Meute.tv : Don’t you think that within Canada there is less immigration in the other provinces than in Quebec? (…)
Marcoux : Look, in Quebec… Go take a walk in Toronto, there is immigration there, whether legal or illegal, the goal is the same, the result is the same. (…)
Meute.tv : The antifas claim that —
Marcoux : There is no such thing as antifa, antifa doesn’t exist. The antifas are just the shocktroops of that damned Jewry, the globalist mafia. Jewish messianism, freemasons … When I say “freemasons” people turn their heads … All the internationalist organizations that want precisely to dissolve the white nations, the West, Canada – the United States was white originally – Europe, France, Germany, Denmark, England …
Meute.tv : It is worldwide…
Marcoux : No, it’s whites, the white countries. There is no immigration in Saudi Arabia. The Jews are kicking their asses to get rid of them. They got rid of 40,000 recently, and they send them here … with a UN programme (…)
Things had clearly changed for Marcoux (either his views, or his willingness to be candid about them) since his declarations a few years earlier that his politics were not about race, just about “culture”. We are reposting below a series of screenshots to make things clear; taken from his main Facebook account (now deactivated) and his secondary accounts, they confirm where Marcoux situates himself. Note that many of the antisemitic articles posted by Marcoux come from the democratieparticipative website, a French neo-nazi website modeled on the Daily Stormer. [see the images at montreal-antifascist.info]
Sylvain Marcoux, Candidate in the Provincial Elections
Marcoux’s politics were on full display in 2018, when he ran as an independent candidate in his riding of Drummond-Bois-Francs; he spoke to journalists about banning Islam, and how Muslims belonged in psychiatric asylums, and revisited other far right talking points, including about the so-called “Great Replacement”:
Screenshot of Marcoux explaining his anti-immigrant programme in the 2018 provincial elections
Journalists treated him as an oddity, but none decried the racism at the heart of his campaign, nor did any report on his (fairly easy to find) links to the organized neo-nazi movement in Quebec. Yet for all his efforts and despite this kid-gloves treatment, “the people” were clearly indifferent. He received only one donation of $100 (from his campaign manager, Julien Chapdelaine – himself active in Catholic traditionalist circles and Tradition Québec), and 250 votes (just under 1% of the total in his riding).
Conspiracy Theories and Where They Can Lead
Which brings us to the present day: Sylvain Marcoux has been charged with disseminating the home address of Horacio Arruda, and calling upon “1,500, 3,000, 15,000 angry nationalists” to go and “knock on his windows.”
Opposition to public health measures in the context of COVID-19 is increasingly widespread, bringing together people who hold alternative health and New Age spiritual beliefs, those who distrust the government or simply feel it is overstepping in legislating people’s personal choices (not always without reason, for instance in the case of Bill 61), and a very significant number of far rightists, who see the current crisis as a critical stage in the globalist conspiracy they believe is besieging the world. One can spot several key figures from the nationalist-populist milieux at the head of the anti-mask movement, including Steeve Charland (former second in command at La Meute) and Mario Roy (Storm Alliance). Many aspects of the purported global conspiracy—which have recently come to include claims about pedophile and Satanist networks— can be traced back to pro-Trump polemicists, networks, and platforms in the United States which are fiercely xenophobic, racist, and sexist[5].
In his opposition to Arruda and his public health measures, as in his passage from “hardline” (but cultural!) nationalism to outright neo-nazism, Marcoux is emblematic of some of the broader trends and dynamics within both the far right and Quebec nationalism that we have worked to expose and combat over these past years.
It is tempting to make fun of conspiracy theorists, and one could go on about how they are stupid and ignorant, hypocritical opportunists. Or perhaps about how marginal they are and how the vast majority of people in Quebec do not share their views. But individuals like Sylvain Marcoux have gotten involved in conspiracy theory-driven movements and push the envelope, making more and more provocative statements, while acting to sustain Quebec’s historic crypto/neo-nazi movement and to introduce its odious ideas to these new political milieux and campaigns. We are currently witnessing precisely such a convergence today in the mobilizations against mandatory masks. This dynamic is reconfiguring the national-populist forces, which are increasingly influenced by the fascist tendencies.
As such, Sylvain Marcoux’s trajectory is primarily of interest for the way in which it reveals the cultural and political transformations going on and gives us an idea of what may be to come.
Marcoux may be an idiot, but he is also potentially dangerous.
[2] To talk of assimilation, rather than integration for instance, itself raises the spectre of threats or coercion, and implies a fundamentally unequal relationship between the historically dominant society and more recent newcomers.
[3] According to which, one cannot ever really “become” French, French Canadian, or what have you; for instance, even after living in Quebec for decades – indeed, even if they are born here – Muslims are still seen as foreigners. It’s all good and fine to make a distinction between “culture” and race understood as a matter of skin colour, according to the essentialist view these distinctions (and not social class, gender, or other kinds of structural social relations) still fundamentally determine who we are, and cannot ever really be acquired or changed. This is connected to the argument that not all cultures are equal, that some are superior to others. One’s cultural affiliation or identity therefore becomes the basis for your place in a hierarchy, justifying various forms of exclusion and domination.
[4] Tradition Québec, led by activists Kenny Piché and Étienne Dumas, was previously aligned with the FSSPX but split from the group 2017-18. It seems TQ felt the FSSPX had become too “liberal”.
The McKenzie Meadows development in Six Nations has been stopped, and a #landback occupation has begun.
SIX NATIONS – Despite high winds and heavy rain, a group of Onkwehon:we land stewards began reclaiming the McKenzie Meadows development in Caledonia, Ontario on Sunday, July 20th. The land, at the corner of Fuller Drive and McKenzie Road on the edges of Caledonia is across the road from Kanonhstaton – “the protected place” – the site of a 2006 land reclamation that made international headlines.
If allowed to continue, the McKenzie Meadows development would see the building of 700 homes on a 108 acre parcel of contested lands.
This multi-national reclamation is occurring hot on the heels of the Highway 6 bypass shutdown, which were held in support of Mohawk Warriors in Tyendinaga who were raided by the OPP for standing in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en.
The general sense of spirit at this site this evening speaks to the overwhelming urge to exercise the responsibility to take care of what little Onkwehon:we lands have been left undeveloped. A handful of community members were informed in April 2019 that the Six Nations Band Council (SNEC) had accepted an agreement on the previously dead deal for less than what was offered in 2013. The sum of $352,000 was funneled into the economic development trust fund and 42.85 acres are tied up in federal red tape awaiting a process to be added to the reserve land base. Those lands lie in limbo, similar to the Birch lands from 2006 and the Pines at Kanesatake from 1990.
The Six Nations Elected Band Council is a product of the Canadian government’s Indian Act and is directly accountable to the Minister of Indigenous Services Marc Miller. It was imposed on the Six Nations of the Grand River in 1924 by the RCMP. As a Federal Government entity the band council doesn’t hold any treaty rights, inherent rights, legitimate authority, over Onkwehon:we people to make decisions regarding their lands and rights.
A map showing the location of the McKenzie Meadows development.
Timeline of events
2003 – Land purchased by 2036356 Ontario INC McKenzie Meadows development. Micheal Corrado and others are listed as owners.
2006 – Hundreds of Onkwehon:we people repulsed an OPP attack on land defenders who stopped the Douglas Creek Estates development from occurring on lands that became known as Kanonhstaton or “the protected place.” An occupation lasting years began, and Kanonhstaton became the flashpoint for many ongoing protests and actions.
2013 – Six Nations Elected Council was informed by the developers of the McKenzie Meadows site that “This two-phased residential development project will consist of a minimum of 700 residential units with a maximum of 1000. The entire land holding is approximately 107 acres, in which Phase 1 will develop 25.2 acres and 200 residential units”. This was NOT supported through the community and therefore declined. The proposed deal was to see $1,250.00 per residential unit being paid to a dedicated purpose account for the construction of Kawenni:io/Gaweni:yo Private School. Minimum of 700 residential units up to a maximum of 1000 $1,250 X 700 = 875,000.00 OR $1,250 X 1000 = 1,250,000.00.
2019: Six Nations of the Grand River says it has accepted an accommodation deal with a developer building two new housing projects in Caledonia. Ballantry Homes has given 42.85 acres of farmland and $352,000 to the Six Nations Elected Council as part of the accommodation deal to approve two housing projects: Beatties Estates and McKenzieMeadows on the east and west sides of McKenzie Road in Caledonia. The first part of the project in McKenzie Meadows is located directly across the street from the former Douglas Creek Estates site where the land reclamation in 2006 took place. A total of nearly 1400 homes are proposed to be built between the two projects.
A demonstration by healthcare workers (« Manif des travailleurs de la santé!!!!! ») has been called for July 18th at the Parc Saint-Laurent in Repentigny. Organized by a collective of patient attendants, « Le journal des PAB », the demonstration has five demands (which are not at all easy to find of the event page…) and is inviting “all healthcare workers in Quebec” to join them. At first glance this struck us as a welcome initiative, but we changed our minds pretty quickly over the past week when we saw that several far-right figures and anti-lockdown conspiracy theorists were inviting themselves or plain out being invited to attend by some of the organizers!
For instance, Steeve « L’Artiss » Charland (the former second-in-command at La Meute, now with Storm Alliance) intends to « show up with his gang » (people who are similarly close to La Meute and Storm Alliance, two notoriously Islamophobic and anti-immigrant organizations). Jonathan « Hex » Héroux, who organized the famous Vagues bleues in Montreal and Trois-Rivières, also announced he would be attending, as did Alexis Cossette-Trudel, the new top conspiracy theorist in Quebec, a fake news pro and expert in post-factual manipulation.
Let’s be clear: these individuals and their groupies are in no way “allies of healthcare workers”. On the contrary, from the very beginning of the pandemic they have been busy claiming the danger posed by the virus is exaggerated (in some cases even denying it exists!), while calling on people to disregard lockdown measures and not respect social distancing. In doing so they have not only been endangering healthcare workers, but also the elderly, people with specific risk factors, and the general public. What’s more, and this is not a minor detail, many of the ideas and theories promoted by these individuals stigmatize and scapegoat a significant number of people working in the healthcare sector, and specifically as PABs: namely, immigrants (whether “regular” or “irregular”) and Muslims.
These individuals, many of whom are right-wingers who have been active for years in Islamophobic and anti-immigrant organizations (not to mention having recently been indulging in panicked conspiracy theories denying the very existence of COVID!), should not be welcome anywhere, as they represent an agenda of division, xenophobia, and crass ignorance.
