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Tom Monto

BIPOC -- a terminology more universal than deep

A new acronym BIPOC has been put to use apparently just in the last three years --

BIPOC -- Black, Indigenous and People of Color.


It may seem repetitive but I guess State-side historically "People of Color" meant Asians and Mexicans. Mexicans are often shaded darker than whites due to inter-marriage with Indigenous people in the Americas. Mexicans are darker than the Spaniards that gave them the language they now use, and thus darker than the "white" of the usual Europeans.


So probably in days of yore there were two main terms -- Black and People of Colour, Indigenous people being often ignored.


Of course each group and sub-group has its own history. The experience of Indigenous is different from the Black experience, both before and after slavery. Yes I am talking about Canada here. British North American colonies once allowed slavery. Halifax newspapers of the 1700s carried ads offering rewards for run-away slaves. Sad.


Indigenous people in Canada were not enslaved, in other parts of the Americas yes, but in Canada there was no labour shortage apparently.


This point was made in recent New York Times article

"...Charmaine Nelson, an art history professor at McGill University, said that the history of black and Indigenous people in Canada calls for the distinction between them and other people of color. In some parts of Canada, mainly east of Ontario, Indigenous people were colonized but not enslaved, she said, unlike Africans who were subjected to chattel slavery everywhere...."


Is she inadvertently implying that west of Ontario Indigenous were enslaved or that west of Ontario Indigenous were not colonized?


All across Canada the Indigenous people were colonized. Indigenous usually taken to mean First Nations in the south country, Inuits in the far north, Metis on the Prairies. (People of "mixed blood" in Ontario and Quebec are an intermediate classification whose ultimate placement is still being worker out.)


Metis are often not recognizable by look. For instance, Peter Lougheed was Metis, a later product of intermarriage between white and Inuit in the old fur-trading days. Other than his short stature, this was not evident.


And the colonization experience endured by the various Native groups varied considerably.


Out east an Indigenous nation suffered the worst result possible. All the Beothuks were killed off through one way or another. within a couple generations of the first white men's arrival.


And all across Canada their old way of life vanished - on the prairies through the near-extinction of bison. Pushed into reserves, small segments of the wide open land that was once theirs, or thrust into the usually uncompromising and brutal hardscrabble struggle to make a living in capitalist white Canada.


Enslaved no. Blacks did have that experience in Canada until the early 1833, in the U.S. until the 1860s. And then after that their experience as a group was again different experience of the Indigenous.


The treaty system in western Canada began about the time that Blacks were freed in the U.S.


This was not coincidental. U.S. blacks were freed during the U.S. Civil War, although of course the war was mostly due to economic reasons rather than the freeing of the blacks as a social cause. When that war ended, there were millions of trained soldiers now without employment, free from family or home ties, looking for adventure or another war. Canada had already been invaded by the U.S. twice -- in 1776 and 1812 -- and saw that the west if not secured would be easy bait for the U.S. army or mercenaries to take over.


Signing treaty was important to show that at least the inhabitants of the area recognized the dominance over the West by the Canadian government, as well as opening the door to settlement under Canadian rules. The settlement would provide international legal right to the land against possible U.S. seizure.


So treaties were important for the forming of the land we now call Canada. It is of course hardly short of a crime how the treaties were broken since then -- how the obligations of the government toward the Natives was disregarded time and time again.


Under treaty, the government of Canada (or the King or Queen if you will) believed it officially obtained the land and everything it contained. Natives likely only thought they were agreeing to share, not give up.


First Nations peoples were pushed onto reserves, sometimes not even their ancestral lands, such as the Papaschase band being made to live on the Enoch reserve. Unable to sell the production of their reserve farms without approval of the local Indian agent and unable to leave reserve without a pass issued by that Indian agent.


After the end of slavery Black-Canadians and U.S. blacks had problems but they never faced that.


And Indigenous became the invisible visible minority. Either hidden away on reserves in the North Woods or in cities where sometimes their only subtle difference in skin shading, not noticeably different from so-called black Germans, meant that they could join with the white society without facing racism. Only now being noticed in the halls of power and still in too many cases not having access to piped water.


And the word indigenous does not need to just apply to Natives of Canada or in the U.S. There were first peoples in every place, except Antarctica, where the colonizing powers moved their troops, traders, missionaries and settlers. Blacks were the indigenous people of Africa, for example.


Through countless millenia, humans had adapted themselves to best suit the local environment - the weather, seasons, animals, plants, water or lack thereof. And through this time, every land except the least habitable, was gradually filled by early humans. There were no blank areas on the map for whites to move into without disrupting those already there.


Chelsey Luger, a wellness trainer at the Native Wellness Institute, and an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, a tribal nation in North Dakota was quoted making this point:

“Indigenous is a redundant term if [not] anything else,” Ms. Luger said. “All people of color are Indigenous. A lot of people of color are not acknowledged as and don’t have a connection to that idea because their Indigenous identity has been erased through assimilative techniques or just the connection to our stories and our history has been violently taken from us.”


The Indigenous people of Canada, about two percent of the population, now have various and visible avenues of communicating their identity.


APTN tv channel for one.


Too bad that the Aboriginal radio station went off air after about four years in operation. During its time it was brilliant although someone simply reading a government document clause by clause to fill each Sunday was a bit of a bore!


Still there is no Stingray music channel for Aboriginal music.


So BIPOC may be a useful term but where possible, time should be taken to express the understanding that Blacks, Prairie Natives, West Coast Natives, eastern Canadian Natives, Chinese, Japanese, Inuit, Latinos all have had different experiences as separate groups and as individuals. As have had members of other different groups and individuals themselves - whether Quebecois, deaf, blind, Scottish, Irish, German, etc.


Individuals of each of these - each struggling to survive, thrive or get ahead under capitalism with nothing but their energy, health and relative intelligence - face the same obstacles. I think this should be taken as grounds for us to work together, for us all to try to make an easier road to at least more financial security and happiness - a road that can be used by all of us.


Thanks for reading.


(source of the quotes: Sandra Garcia, "BIPOC What Does It Mean?" New York Times, June 17, 2020)


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