Canada

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSQEmgEm0gA&hl=en&fs=1]

The video above was posted on Spacing Magazine’s blog, and I absolutely loved watching it. Listening to it alone would’ve sufficed, but seeing the grainy Technicolor technology was fantastic. It reminded me of all the film I used to watch in class on reel-to-reel when the lights would be shut off and the screen pulled down in front of the blackboard.

I specifically remember the “film” about apple cider production in Ontario, tornadoes, volcanoes, and many others.

So, if you want a nice, brief history of Toronto and Ottawa, watch the video…it was nice to get rebuffed on that information.

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I am dumbfounded. I’ll tell you why in a paragraph or two.

Listen, I will not pretend to know what is going on in Canadian politics. It is one of the priorities on my list.

Why? You may ask that for good reason. Well, I just like to know when someone is lying to me. I like being able to call “bullshit” when someone in the political spectrum , or someone speaking for one of those boobs, says something completely outrageous. I don’t like hearing things, and gobbling them up like a nice little consumer. I like to know the details.

For starters, our robotic, yet intelligent, Prime Minister of horse-puckey has made a move that I am FINALLY impressed with. He stated today that under the current definitions and rules around saying food in Canada is “Made in Canada” there are problems… As of right now, if 51% of the work being done to prepare food, and make it consumer-ready is done in Canada, companies are legally allowed to say Made in Canada. Which is a stretch, to say the least…I think we’ll all agree.

“Hey gringo, these bananas were grown in Canada…well, that’s not entirely true. You see, we grew them in South America and then they were juggled and handled and banged around vociferously in some shit-hole cannery plant in Ontario, so technically, they’re Canadian…right?”

No. I want to know where my food is grown, prepared, and “managed”.

Stephen Harper has made a promise, of sorts, to adjust this rule, so the definition is less clandestine and malleable to make sense to only those who work in the industry. Food must be grown and prepared fully in Canada to have the label Made in Canada. If it isn’t, it must say where the other “components” (a fruit salad mix, I guess?) are from.

I just love how Harper said something along the lines of, “It’s what Canadians want, so we have to provide it,” as if this dude gives one ounce of care what “Canadians want”. I digress. I must tip my cap to the man who I know to be intelligent and otherwise incompetent. He made good with me on this story.

And in other “news” The Globe and Mail has FINALLY decided to write about The North Pacific Garbage Patch! Holy geez! Someone at Phog told me that I would be happy that it was finally being covered. While reading the piece, I was floored, yet not surprised (we have a Conservative government) to read this admission from Diane Lake, a spokeswoman with the Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans. She “said that while the ministry is aware of the North Pacific Gyre, it is conducting no real research on the extent or effects of the plastic pollution.” Perfect. Nice work Diane. Nice to see you give a shit. You know, Canada has a border that kinda touches the Pacific Ocean. Hey wait! That’s one of the words in the North Pacific Garbage Patch! Come to think of it, we’re North too…but, we don’t really need to be studying this. You know, it’ll all go away, like climate change, and racism, and mental illness, and corporatocracy raping us from dusk till dawn…yeah, someone else is taking care of it, I’m sure.

Here’s a shortlist, from The Globe and Mail, of what Captain Moore has been finding: A trail of Taco Bell wrappers, Dolls and action figures, Umbrellas, Tarps, Bottles, Tofu containers(for those of you who think you’re saving the earth with tofu. Maybe we need to be writing letters to tofu companies asking them to consider new packaging?), Lego, Grocery bags, Foam coffee cups, Checkers, Furniture, Toothbrushes, Cigarette lighters, Syringes, Rubber ducks, Basketball shoes

See, this is exactly the kind of thing that should make backbones stiffen. It should make you, reading this, totally annoyed with the laissez faire attitude of people who are paid by us to work for us. These are the issues that will be affecting your family’s family’s family. But what can we do besides thinking globally and acting locally? I’m actually shocked that the fishing industry in the west hasn’t pulled a page from the Argentinian farmers’ handbook.

Get angry at this lack of interest in your job, your industry, and your culturally significant knowledge. Stop fishing until the Department of Fisheries and Oceans decides to look into stemming this abuse in the oceans, and possibly even going so far as to suggesting that maybe we are drowning in our own plastic…and that we should step back from it…sloooowly…with biiiiig steps.

I must also place this in here…as I was listening to Q on CBC with Jian Ghomeshi, I heard the guest talking about food, and mentioning our good friend Michael Pollan. It was “Montreal writer Taras Grescoe on the search for ethical seafood” talking about his new book, Bottomfeeder. I kind of want to read this now. The “Q on CBC” in the first sentence of this paragraph is a direct link to the podcast of this show. It was a GREAT interview, worth listening to…

I bit off more than I could chew. Now I want to get into the whole argument we had at Phog last night…about bananas, how we won’t be eating yellow ones in 5 years, and about the plague/waste of sandwich (Ziploc) bags.

Another time.

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Indian.

I was listening to someone on the radio the other day, and I caught the story in mid-
flight. They were talking about an “Indian community” where a tragedy occurred. I immediately thought about a potential fire, earthquake or flood in India…you know, where Indians live?

But when the discussion continued, I realized they were talking about the shooting on the central Alberta reserve, where the 23-month-old toddler, Asia Saddleback, was shot in a drive-by incident by a 15 and 18 year old boys.

The incident spurred me to do more than shake my head, as my wife was present, and I spouted, “Can we not get names right yet?” I’m sure she was a little caught off-guard. I continued, “Scientists downgraded Pluto from being a planet to a ‘dwarf planet’ and no one makes the mistake anymore. Who doesn’t know that Pluto isn’t a planet? But we still use the term Indian! How long ago did we realize we didn’t live in India? How long did it take Columbus and Co. to realize that they weren’t in India? I just don’t get how we still use that term.”

I’m not someone who is oversensitive about this kind of thing. I just believe that terms have power. They have domain over our perceptions of people and groups of people. And when our First Nations who are “Natives” as they are native to Canada (so far as anyone in anthropology can postulate: i.e. they may have traveled to what is now The Americas when there was still a Bering land-bridge between both east and west hemispheres of the globe) are being called Indians, because explorers were ass-backwards and thinking they were in India, I think it is a foolish piece of our lexicon.

I doubt anyone can question the validity of Natives not being from India, nor living in India, yet we accept the label of Indian. Why? We let go of “planet” for Pluto, but we can’t seem to let go of Prince (The Artist Formerly Known As Prince), because the name change was stupid, contrived, and egotistically artsy. We saw the name-change as silly, and we kept the original. For the record, I love Prince, and his Superbowl halftime show clobbers every halftime show, since of before, so badly it’s embarrassing. I digress.

We also weren’t fooled by the Freedom Fries, 10-year-old-behavior charade, and we all just stuck with french fries. But these two instances were lame to begin with. They were clearly media events, designed to get attention. Calling Natives by the name Indians is a lack of sensitivity to a people who had more than their identity taken from them at the arrival of white explorers. Indian IS NOT akin to Freedom Fries. It is more important. It is not some publicity stunt to rally nationalism.

Very few people know that I went to El Salvador when I was 18. I remember very clearly the reaction to the term “American” whenever is slipped out of someone’s mouth. People in South or Central America are not particularly pleased with residents of The United States of America calling themselves “Americans” as if they’re the only people living in “America”. People in Central America, El Salvador for sure, see this is pompous, as they know that they are also Americans, except their name has the prefix “South” attached to it.

If people can be this sensitive to the naming of their national identity, or global identity, I don’t understand how the word Indian has not been actively discouraged in favour of the term Native.

We can respect the name changes of people like Mohammed Ali from Cassius Clay, Malcolm X from Malcolm Little, Kareem-Abdul Jabbar from Lew Alcindor, Pope John Paul II from Karol Wojtyla, because it seems that name changes pertaining to religious identity, or freedom from someone else’s name are legit. So how can Indian not be considered anything less than a non-identifier of First Nations Peoples or Natives?

Any clarifications on this subject would be appreciated. I ask these questions and rant like this to better understand. To understand how a nation, how a hemisphere fails to adopt a respectful, mindful, geographically accurate name for an unfairly marginalized group of original inhabitants of what we call Canada and the United States.

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