Behind the headlines – Derrière les manchettes
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RED SPARKS UNION presents…
Criminalizing Peoples’ Liberation Movements: Scrap the so-called terrorist list
Public Forum and Discussion
Thursday, November 14, 2013, 7:00 p.m.
Kwantlen Polytechnic University, 12666 72nd Ave, Surrey, BC
https://www.facebook.com/events/1445233262369775/
Friday, November 15, 2013, 7:00 p.m.
SFU Harbour Centre, 555 W. Hastings St, Vancouver, BC
https://www.facebook.com/events/537044583045788/
How is anti-terror legislation being used to criminalize peoples’ liberation movements from Palestine to South Asia to Indigenous people in BC?
How are immigrant and refugee communities and Indigenous peoples affected by these policies?
Why is the Canadian state so determined to label people’s liberation struggles as terrorism?
What can we do to break through the chill and support peoples’ genuine struggles for liberation and social & economic justice?
Speakers
Khaled Barakat: The impact of ‘terror’ designations and lists on Arab people’s struggles and Arab communities in Canada.
Kerry Coast: Terrorist labeling of Indigenous peoples’ struggles: Ts’Peten (Gustafsen Lake) to today
Charlotte Kates: Terrorist designations and lists in historical context.
Pragash Pio: The ‘war on terror’, repression of the Tamil national liberation struggle & criminalization of the Tamil community in Canada.
Jeff Shantz: Canadian ‘anti-terror’ legislation: targeting people’s liberation struggles.
Toghestiy: Canadian state surveillance and repression of Indigenous land defenders in occupied B.C. Lire la suite / Continue reading From Ts’Peten to Tamil Eelam: Liberation Struggles are not Terrorism!
 ILPS-Canada Indigenous Committee members and supporters participate in Cabin Build. Biimadasahwin means “life” in Ojibway. It is the name that Darlene Necan has given to a project to build homes, a gathering place and return to her traditional territory.
The Indigenous Commission, part of ILPS-Canada, organized resources and people power to help build a cabin home on Darlene’s family trapline starting at the beginning of June, 2013. It has been a great success, building a home, raising financial support, creating community, and it is far from over.
“They’re not just building a cabin at the end of a logging road on the Sioux Lookout highway. They’re building solidarity.” — The Dryden Observer: “Those Left Behind: Toronto activists join Savant Lake residents excluded from Saugeen First Nation for 30 years”
For latest developments on the Cabin Build, including excellent photos and videos visit:
Website: http://ilpsindigenouscommission.wordpress.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/IlpsIndigenousCommissionCabinBuild
Reclaiming Home: Cabin is finished, but it’s only the beginning!
On Friday June 21, 2013, Darlene Necan, of the Ojibway Nation of Saugeen No.258, made her contribution to Aboriginal Day by completing a cabin home on her trapline, or ancestral hunting grounds. Since the beginning of June, Darlene, members of her community, and the ILPS Commission in Support of Indigenous Struggles worked closely together building the cabin and lasting relationships.
In 1979, Darlene was promised housing. For 3 decades, she has remained homeless. Her homelessness did not stop her fight for housing for her people, though it made the struggle that much harder. In 2011 – without institutional or government support – Darlene and other Saugeen members came together to build a log cabin for Ameila Skunk, an elder in the community who was suffering frostbite year after year due to living in a building originally built as a chicken barn in 1911. Before the Idle No More Movement came on the scene and before the journey of Nishiyuu, Darlene led a walk with Saugeen women, men and youth for 28 days from their community to Parliament Hill in Ottawa in September of 2012 to inform government of the lack of housing in their community.
The cabin build project began because Darlene had the courage to step out yet again, extend her trust to members of the ILPS Commission and try another avenue in her struggle. As of Aboriginal Day this year, Darlene has a home and has returned to living on her ancestral lands.
While the cabin finally gives Darlene a home and base from which to further her organizing for housing and treaty rights, it is only the beginning. She will be creating a gathering place on her land. With the ongoing help of the ILPS Commission, Darlene, her family and community members will build on her trapline the infrastructure for a summer camp for youth from different Indigenous communities, and meeting place, and a school for treaty teachings, crafts and music for youth, and more.
We know that the struggle to protect the land, defend treaty rights, and ensure that everyone has a home – is a longterm struggle, demanding longterm relationships and lasting action. We understood the cabin build as a concrete action necessary for the building of a base from which Darlene, a powerful grassroots indigenous woman, could lead the struggle in and beyond her community.
Looking at the finished cabin home, Darlene said, “life is good when one recognizes that life is to be cherished and held in truth, with things done right by extraordinary truehearted people.”
Click here for Indiegogo Campaign to see video and donate now!
In recent years, resource extraction has intensified under the Harper government in Canada, as capitalist profit-making is increasingly “fueled” by the rape and plunder of the land and its resources, especially the ancestral lands of Indigenous peoples.
 As part of its work to defend land defenders and build people’s power, the ILPS-Canada Commission in Support of Indigenous People’s Struggles is supporting grassroots women from the Ojibway Nation of Saugeen located in northwestern Ontario, Canada. This part of Ontario has been tagged the “ring of fire” for the intense resource exploration and extraction activities unfolding on stolen and colonized land. As signaled by the Idle No More movement in Canada – a movement that forced the world’s attention onto Canada’s internal colonialism – there is a rising movement against colonialism across “Turtle Island” [the traditional name for North America shared by many Indigenous nations]. And the most important fronts of these struggles are directly on the ancestral lands of Indigenous peoples and nations, like the women of the Ojibway Nation of Saugeen.
Click here to read more about recent work of the ILPS Commission in Support of Indigenous People’s Struggles
Conditions on their reserve are intolerable. Members of the community face extreme poverty and homelessness, while mining and forestry companies profit off destroying their land and traditional food sources. In organizing to exercise treaty rights by building homes on their traplines off-reserve, the group of women are led by Darlene Necan, a hunter and trapper, and spokesperson for off-reserve members
They calling for support from people within and outside her community to help Darlene in building a log cabin that can also serve as a gathering place. She will then lead the building of homes for other young homeless families who want to return to living on the land.
The ILPS Commission in Support of Indigenous People’s Struggles is stepping up to meet Darlene’s call for material support. We are now organizing a two week trip to Darlene’s community to bring activists from a variety of different communities and organizations to help in this direct form of people to people solidarity. It is not just the home that were building – we are also building the all-important personal and political relationships upon which a political movement to seek social justice requires.
We are asking for $5,000 - as an achievable online goal – to cover the cost of building materials and transportation in order to start and complete the cabin build in two weeks. However, we need another $5,000 to sustain this home-building movement work during and beyond the trip. Please help us surpass the goal on this site!! The money will go to the ILPS Commission in Support of Indigenous People’s Struggles, which will purchase all the supplies and organize the transportation to the territory.
We have beautiful gifts to offer for your much appreciated donations! We have a variety of hand-made Native crafts made by a young family in Six Nations of the Grand River Territory, as well as by an Ojibway woman who is helping to organize this cabin build project. We are offering back issues of the Upping the Anti Journal – a Journal of Theory and Action. We can also offer the Land Defenders Mixtape – a mix of revolutionary tracks from Native and non-Native artists who all speak to the need to defend the land.
The Impact
Your contribution will help address one of the most fundamental injustices created by colonialism. It will go directly to a struggle to address homelessness and protect the land. A fight for social justice and Mother Earth, is a fight for all of us.The grassroots group of Saugeen women and the ILPS Commission in Support of Indigenous People’s Struggles are experienced in leading and supporting strong efforts to seek justice for Indigenous communities. Faced with continued inaction from local, regional, and national leaders, Darlene and other women decided they had to take action themselves. In 2011 – without institutional or government support – they came together to build a log cabin for Amelia Skunk, an elder in the community who was suffering frostbite year after year due to living in a building originally built as a chicken barn in 1911. Thanks to the efforts of Darlene and her friends, Amelia Skunk now lives in a safe, warm, and well constructed log cabin home. For more info and photos:
Before the Idle No More Movement came on the scene and before the journey of Nishiyuu, Darlene led a walk with Saugeen women, men and youth for 28 days from their community to Parliament Hill in Ottawa in September of 2012 to inform government of the lack of housing in their community.
Other Ways You Can Help
If you are not able to contribute funds, we would also greatly appreciate donations of tools and camping supplies. Email: ilpsindigenouscommission@gmail.com And of course, please spread the word about this important project far and wide! Click here for Indiegogo Campaign to see video and donate now!
Warm greetings from the member organizations of ILPS-Canada on the founding of the newest country member of the anti-imperialist family of the International League of Peoples’ Struggle.
The founding of ILPS-Netherlands is a victory for the people of the Netherlands but also a major step forward for all the peoples of the globe united in opposing imperialist wars, aggression, oppression and exploitation.
As the first country Chapter in Europe, the founding of ILPS-Netherlands comes at a particularly important time as the continent is rocked by a major imperialist crisis bringing hunger, unemployment and repression in its wake while the working and oppressed peoples stand up and fight back. It is thus fitting that your Assembly is being held under the banner: Defending the Rights and Welfare of the People at this time of Crisis in Europe and the Netherlands!
We in Canada, who founded our Country Chapter in May 2011 after years of preparation and months of intense discussions and exchanges, know how difficult it is to struggle out our differences and find our points of unity and then join together in an anti-imperialist united front.
Of course the founding of the country Chapter is fundamentally the first step, albeit a major one, in raising the level of the anti-imperialist struggle in the Netherlands, and working with the over 350 mass organizations in over 40 countries around the world united in the League.
It is crucial that country Chapters of ILPS be built within imperialist countries like the Netherlands. The people of the world have felt the ravage of monopolies like Shell, Philippines, ING Groep and Fokker Technologies. These monopolies amass wealth and power by exploiting the peoples of the globe and the people of the Netherlands – industrial workers, service sector workers, women, youth, students, migrant and undocumented workers, gender-based communities and political refugees.
The members of ILPS-Canada salute your initiative and look forward to working closely with you in the struggle against imperialism.
Long live the struggles of the working and oppressed peoples of the Netherlands!
Long live ILPS-Netherlands!
Long live the International League of Peoples’ Struggle!
– ILPS-Canada Coordinating Committee, April 14, 2013
Statement and Call for Solidarity On International Women’s Day 2013
As we raise our fists on International Women’s Day, we stand in solidarity with women around the world struggling for genuine liberation.
Over 100 years ago, The International Working Women’s Conference suggested March 8 to celebrate and unite the resistance efforts of working women around the globe. That day is now known to be International Women’s Day. This year on March 8th we call on all people to remember and celebrate the roles working women play in advancing the struggle against imperialism, capitalism, colonial occupation and patriarchy.
 Working class women are among the most oppressed sectors of society, but they are also one of the most resilient. Organizing against imperialist aggression, capitalist exploitation and patriarchal values, world wide working class women, peasant women and other toiling women struggle for just and living wages, safe working and adequate living conditions, and ultimately an end to capitalist super-exploitation.
From Turtle Island, Palestine, the Philippines and Tamil Eelam, women are confronted by sexist violence that is rooted in capitalism, occupation, imperialism and patriarchy. During the past 20-years in Canada over 600 Indigenous women have been murdered or gone missing. These deaths and disappearances have gone unpunished and unexplained by the Canadian state whose policies result in femicide against Indigenous women to further facilitate the theft of ancestral land. The Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP) of the Canadian state has turned Filipina women into a captive workforce, where the violence and exploitation of employers is undocumented or erased. Rape has been used historically as a tool of imperialist occupation and war, as too many Tamil and Palestinian women can attest.
While working class and marginalized women bear the brunt of capitalist exploitation and imperialist aggression, women have never been idle. And on March 8th, 2013 we encourage everyone to rally in solidarity with women’s liberation struggles around the world.
As brothers and sisters united against imperialist and colonial aggression, we will not bend before the exploitation and violence. We will fight, we will struggle and we will continue resisting until women’s liberation is achieved. Women’s liberation is tied to the liberation of the oppressed classes and peoples and cannot be realized until the capitalist patriarchal system that thrives on gender, class, and racial inequalities is smashed.
ILPS Canada calls for an end to the economic exploitation of women, an end to sexual violence against women, an end to colonial occupation and imperialist aggression!
Statement by the International Women’s Day Organizing Committee 2013 (Vancouver, Canada)
On March 8th International Women’s Day we raise our fists in solidarity with women struggling for emancipation and we stand united in defense of women’s rights, for genuine liberation for all women.
Women resist colonial occupation!
Today we rally on unceded Coast Salish territory; the traditional territories of the Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. Indigenous women bear a great burden of colonial occupation and yet across the globe it is Indigenous women who keep the fires of resistance burning in the face of displacement, ethnic cleansing, and genocidal attacks on Indigenous culture, history and traditions.
Indigenous women have never been idle! Palestinian women assert their right to return to the lands from which they were expelled by the Israeli colonial settler state. In India, Adivasi women struggle to protect their ancestral territories despite extreme state violence.
Women resist imperialist plunder of the land and natural resources!
Women lead pivotal struggles for environmental and economic justice in opposition to mining and extractive industries, tar sands, fracking fields, oil and gas pipelines, mono-crop agribusiness, and imperialist military aggression which leads to the destruction and poisoning of the earth.
Former Filipina political prisoner Angie Ipong spent 6 years in prison for joining peasant and Indigenous communities in their land struggles. Freda Huson and women of the Unist’ot’en clan of the Wet’suwet’en are defying pipelines and development aggression on their territories. Wahu Kaara and millions of women across Africa are fighting displacement, development aggression and colonial debt exploitation. These brave women inspire us to protect the Earth and our future generations!
Women resist capitalist exploitation!
Women’s reproductive labour continues to form the basis of capitalist profit as women provide privatized labour in the home and are segregated into ‘women’s work’ such as teaching, nursing, food service, and household management. Women’s work is devalued, and despite decades of struggle, women in Canada continue to be paid only 70% or less of what men earn. In Canada women comprise the vast majority of migrant workers from Asia, forced to migrate by neoliberal economic policies, providing deskilled and cheap labour, privatized health care, and modern-day domestic slavery to the Canadian middle and upper classes. Lire la suite / Continue reading Women at the Forefront of Emancipation: Resisting Structural Violence and Exploitation!
ILPS Canada – Statement and call for solidarity
On February 14 Spirit Sisters and those that love them will be holding vigils and marches demonstrating their commitment to “NO MORE STOLEN SISTERS”. Indigenous grassroots women and those who stand in solidarity with them will be raising their voices and rallying in the streets demanding justice and for a national public inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous women. We at ILPS-Canada share their demands, commitments, and will be taking it to the streets in support.
The first memorial vigil was held in 1991 in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside in response to the murder of a Coast Salish woman on Powell Street. From anger, despair, and mourning women took action to create an annual march on Valentine’s Day to express compassion, community, and their commitments to end the disappearances of Indigenous women. The women’s memorial march continues across this land to honour the lives of missing and murdered women and to demand justice in their absence.
The Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC) under the Sisters In Spirit Program reports that over 600 Indigenous women have been murdered or gone missing over the last 20-years within the politically constructed borders of the Canadian nation-state. The deaths and disappearances of these women have been ignored, gone unsolved, and unpunished. Despite clear evidence that this is an ongoing issue, the federal government decided in the fall of 2010 to end funding to Sisters in Spirit. Instead monies in the amount of $10 million have been dedicated to a central RCMP missing person centre; an institution that has historically failed to adequately investigate into reports of disappearing indigenous women. Building on the momentum of past actions we must rally together against the continual feminicide of Indigenous women and the impunity of Canadian state institutions and actors that stand as gatekeepers preventing justice for all indigenous peoples.
We at ILPS-Canada extend our support and solidarity to the courageous women and Indigenous organizations working to ensure that the lives of our lost sisters not be forgotten. Their memories inspire us to continue to demand more for those with whom we share a sisterhood. We encourage those in our network to promote and attend the vigils and walks taking place. For a list of the Feb. 14th Memorial Marches happening please visit: http://womensmemorialmarch.wordpress.com/national/ Lire la suite / Continue reading No more stolen sisters!
ILPS Canada -Déclaration et appel à la solidarité
Le 14 février, les «Soeurs en esprit» et les personnes qui les aiment et sont solidaires tiendront des vigiles et des manifestations pour témoigner de leur engagement envers le mouvement «L’ENLÈVEMENT DE NOS SOEURS DOIT CESSER!» (NO MORE STOLEN SISTERS). Ce jour-là des femmes autochtones de la base et toutes les personnes qui sont solidaires avec elles élèveront leur voix et manifesteront dans les rues pour réclamer la justice et la tenue d’une enquête publique nationale sur les femmes autochtones disparues et assassinées. Nous, membres d’ILPS-Canada, nous partageons leur revendications et leurs engagements et nous manifesterons dans la rue avec elles pour les appuyer.
La première veillée commémorative a eu lieu en 1991 au centre-ville de l’est de Vancouver, en réponse à l’assassinat d’une femme Salish de la Côte sur la rue Powell. Des femmes, qui resentaient la colère, le désespoir et le deuil, ont pris des mesures pour organiser une marche annuel en mars, le jour de la Saint-Valentin, pour que les personnes puissent exprimer leur compassion et leur solidarité communautaire ainsi que leur engagement à mettre fin aux disparitions de femmes autochtones. La marche des femmes en mémoire des victimes a continué au cours des années et se poursuit dans tout le pays pour honorer la vie des femmes disparues et assassinées et pour réclamer justice en leur absence.
L’Association des femmes autochtones du Canada (Native Women’s Association of Canada), dans le cadre du Programme Sœurs en esprit, signale que plus de 600 femmes autochtones ont été assassinées ou portées disparues au cours des 20 dernières années à l’intérieur des frontières établies politiquement pour constituer État-nation nommé Canada. Les décès et les disparitions de ces femmes ont été ignorés, les crimes pas résolus et sont restés impunis. Malgré les preuves évidentes qu’il s’agit d’un problème continu, le gouvernement fédéral a décidé, à l’automne 2010, de mettre fin au financement du Programme Sœurs en esprit. Au lieu d’aider le Programme, le gouvernement a consacré 10 millions de dollars à un centre de la Gendarmerie royale du Canada pour les personnes disparues, qui est une institution qui n’a jamais mené adéquatement des enquêtes sur la disparition des femmes autochtones. Pour poursuivre les actions menées jusqu’ici, nous devons nous mobiliser, toutes et tous, contre le féminicide continuel des femmes autochtones et contre l’impunité qui incombe aux institutions d’État et aux personnes qui, au Canada, se dressent comme des sentinelles pour empêcher que la justice soit faite pour tous les peuples autochtones.
Notre organisation, ILPS-Canada, étend notre appui et notre solidarité aux courageuses femmes et organisations autochtones qui militent pour que la vie de nos sœurs disparues ne soit pas oubliée. Leur souvenir nous encourage à continuer de lutter et d’exiger davantage pour nos soeurs en esprit. Nous encourageons les membres de notre réseau à promouvoir les veillées et les manifestations prévues et à y participer. Nous vous invitons à connaître la liste des «Manifestations du souvenir», qui auront lieu 14 février, en visitant le site: http://womensmemorialmarch.wordpress.com/national/ Lire la suite / Continue reading L’enlèvement de nos soeurs doit cesser!
Statement of ILPS-Canada Coordinating Committee
February 11, 2013
ILPS-Canada acknowledges the front-line role that the indigenous people are playing, and have always played, in the struggle against Canadian imperialism.
The indigenous people have never been idle when it comes to demanding their fundamental human, environmental, spiritual, and territorial rights. Canadian capitalism has never taken a day off in its effort to strip the indigenous people of Turtle Island[1] of these rights. From Ipperwash, Oka, Six Nations, and beyond the struggles have continued over the years, the result of tremendous acts of bravery and determination.
The emergence of the “Idle No More” movement has once again put the ongoing struggles of the First Nations back on the centre stage of Canadian politics. As one Native comrade in ILPS-Canada put it : “Our people (all Native peoples) have been pushed for too long. Everyone has finally said enough is enough.”
Idle No More, despite its misnomer, also reflects support among growing sectors of the non-indigenous population whose future is tied to that of the indigenous peoples in the struggle against the capitalist and imperialist policies of exploitation, oppression, imperialist war and environmental destruction.
“Flash mobs,” street demonstrations, teach-ins, and blockades of roads, bridges and railways took place across Canada, dramatically reminding us that the whole Canadian state was built on the theft of the First Nations territories and the dispossession of their ancestral rights.
The oppression, theft and genocide of the First Nations played a fundamental role in the process of capital accumulation and the formation and further development of an imperialist Euro-Canadian bourgeoisie. First Nations constitute “internal colonies” that play a similar role for the Canadian bourgeoisie that the Third World countries generally play for the imperialist countries.
The indigenous people of Turtle Island have fought to ensure the continuing existence of their way of life, which is to live in balance and harmony with nature and Mother Earth in shared ownership of the resources and riches. Our indigenous brothers and sisters tried from the outset to share the resources since the first colonialists and settlers arrived on these shores, sent by the expanding feudal and then capitalist powers of Europe. They bravely resisted attempts to annihilate them using all forms of struggle, but united with those working people and other sectors of the population who were willing to build a life together based on mutual respect.
They proposed agreements with the new arrivals, the Two Row Wampum, 24 Nations Wampum, and 1764 Silver Chain Covenant Wampum, which were founded on Peace, Coexistence and Non-interference. The Native people have diligently honoured these agreements to this day. They have even attempted to get the governments to respect the other numbered treaties which, as an ILPS comrade points out, “were often signed under duress with guns pointed at the Chiefs heads (often killing them), starvation of the people, military intimidation, accompanied by a “sign or else” ultimatum”. Lire la suite / Continue reading Indigenous people never idle in struggle for liberation
The International League of Peoples’ Struggle – Canada (ILPS-Canada) and our member organizations across the country express our solidarity with the Palestinian people resisting the brutal and criminal Israeli assault.
We salute the steadfastness of the people of Gaza who have been on the front lines of resistance to Zionist colonization for more that forty years, from the legendary Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) leader Guevara Gaza who led urban guerrilla forces in the refugee camps against the Israeli occupation, to the resistance that forced the Zionist occupiers out of the strip in 2005, to the countless martyrs of “Operation Cast Lead” and the survivors who continue to struggle daily against the siege.
 (Ismael Mohamad / United Press International) This sickening Israeli attack, this cold blooded murder of Palestinian children, is a punishment because the Palestinian people of Gaza continue to demand their rights: to exist, to resist, to return, and to continue the struggle to liberate Palestine.
It is no surprise that the Harper government and their big business backers march in lock step with Israel. The Zionist project mirrors the Canadian colonial project of continuing theft of Indigenous lands, extinguishing of the treaty rights of Indigenous people and the plunder of their territories for the benefit of Canadian big business.
Moreover, Canada along with its imperialist allies, rely on Israel as a bulwark against any assertion of independence or progressive nationalism that threatens their hegemony in the region. We need to expose and oppose the complicity of the Canadian ruling class and their government in the war crimes committed in Palestine, without having any illusions that policies shaped by the fundamental material and ideological interests of the Canadian ruling class can easily be changed by “public opinion”. Lire la suite / Continue reading Israel’s attack on occupied Gaza: a case of cold-blooded murder – ILPS-Canada
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