This article was originally published on the German Pirate Party website, as a guest blog contribution for Indigenous Peoples Day: https://www.piratenpartei.de/2017/08/09/indigenous-peoples-day-2017/
One of the main political issues that the Pirate movement tends to focus on is surveillance. But one aspect of this that we must acknowledge, especially in Canada, is how state surveillance specifically targets Indigenous people and communities, and why that is the case.
Canada’s existence as a nation state is rooted in colonialism and the cultural genocide of its Indigenous people. Canada’s surveillance-industrial complex is rooted in this colonial mindset, and the Canadian government works to uphold its colonial authority. Indigenous communities, particularly those connected to Indigenous sovereignty and environmental movements (e.g. pipeline opposition), are heavily targeted by police and spy agencies in Canada, whether it be a local or provincial police force, the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), the National Energy Board (NEB), or Canada’s equivalent of what could be seen as “deep state” actors, such as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS), and the Communications Security Establishment (CSE).
The RCMP is Canada’s federal police force, and they have been responsible for vast amounts of human rights abuses since their establishment in 1920. Indigenous communities are one of their main targets. Their past atrocities include the state-ordered abduction of Indigenous children from their families, and their forced placement into the residential school system where they were robbed of their culture, language and familial ties, and subjected to severe mental, physical and sexual abuse in order to “kill the Indian in the child”. The last residential school closed in 1996, but its horrifying legacy of intergenerational trauma will last forever. The McDonald Commission was launched in 1977, which was an investigation into the crimes of the RCMP. This resulted in the formation of the CSIS in 1984, which is now Canada’s main spy agency.
To this day the CSIS and the RCMP work hand in hand with various other sectors of government to infiltrate, monitor, collect and store data about any individual they please, particularly those considered “threats” to national security. However, one of the fundamental problems with how Canada’s intelligence agencies evaluate so-called “threats” is that very often those labelled as threats are simply fighting for their rights or the rights of others. For example, a threat can be an Indigenous person advocating for basic human needs that so many of us take for granted, such as clean air and drinking water that are often lacking on many indigenous reservations, or treaty rights, which are legal agreements between indigenous nations and the Canadian government that were meant to facilitate mutually beneficial relations. Many of the demands of Indigenous people involve land ownership, fair use of natural resources and informed consent prior to the approval of infrastructure projects such as pipelines.
The CSIS and the RCMP are known to have monitored pipeline protests and acts of civil disobedience across the country, such as those against the Energy East, Northern Gateway, Keystone XL, and Line 9 pipelines. Project SITKA, for example, was an operation spearheaded by the RCMP that focused on protests consisting of mainly Indigenous activists who live on lands crossed by these pipelines. They oppose the project because of the danger presented by ever-so-common oil spills that would poison the land and water that their community depends on to survive. Project SITKA names 313 people of interest with a special focus on 89 individuals with more extensive files, including headshots, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, social media profiles, and information on their whereabouts within Canada over time that was based on data from tracking these individuals for several years.
Project SITKA came about in 2014 as a response to Idle No More, a movement that started in Canada and focused on Indigenous mobilization against bill C-45 that removed thousands of bodies of water from being federally protected through the Navigable Waters Protection Act. The movement eventually expanded into a more general fight against environmentally destructive projects, such as expansion of the Alberta Tar Sands construction of oil pipelines without consultation and consent from the communities impacted. The movement demands the Canadian government upholds treaty agreements and fights for Indigenous self-determination.
Canada’s economy holds a codependent relationship with the oil industry. As of now, there seems to be no elected politicians who are serious about breaking that codependency and challenging Big Oil’s dominance. Indigenous people are leading this fight all over the world, and as reported by the National Observer, the spies in Canada are quick to defend corporate interests against these so called “extremists”:
Meanwhile, numerous documents refer to the threat that Indigenous protesters posed to the energy sector’s interests. For example, the 2007 minutes of a meeting at CSIS headquarters with the RCMP, various intelligence services and energy company executives, reveal that one of the top items on the agenda was “Aboriginal Protests and Occupations.” In a 2014 RCMP report entitled “Criminal Threats to the Canadian Petroleum Industry” it notes that “Due to the environmental and land-use implications, the anti-petroleum movement… has been able to align itself with violent aboriginal extremists.
Indigenous activists in Canada are standing up and fighting back, and have been for many years. As a result, they are punished through privacy violations, stalking, threats, and incarceration from police and spies whose job it is to silence them in order to maintain the status quo. In 2017, we can only imagine which operations are taking place as we speak. Since 2015, the Anti-Terrorism legislation, also known as bill C-51, has granted even more power to our spy agencies than they had at the time of Project SITKA. When the information comes to light, the amount of surveillance, infiltration and overall quests for power by malicious state actors targeting the very people who were here long before Canada was known as Canada, will without a doubt be staggering to us. Concerned about its Canadian implications, the CSIS is known to have monitored the Standing Rock protests. The Trudeau government’s approval of more pipelines, despite the outcry from Indigenous communities across the country, means that it is quite possible for situations similar to the one at Standing Rock to occur in Canada in the coming years.
Colonialism will always represent an inherent power imbalance between the colonizer and the colonized. The colonizer is a settler government, in this case the Canadian government, that took power by force through military occupation of land that previously belonged to the now-colonized group, Indigenous Canadians. Human rights are only guaranteed by this settler government if they do not conflict with their own interests. In other words, the demand for clean drinking water is perceived to be outrageous and even criminal if it gets in the way of a profit source, such as a new oil pipeline. Under the colonialist settler narrative of the Canadian government, if you put your body on the line to defend the Earth or even just believe in doing so on the principle that life can be sustained longer than the capitalist economy, then you are a violent extremist and Big Brother is watching you.
On Indigenous Peoples‘ Day and everyday, let us keep in mind that we cannot fight back against spy agencies and state surveillance in Canada without recognizing its inherent roots in colonial violence, both historic and ongoing.
