How Canada’s ‘settler-colonialism’ explains its support for Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians

 

Indigenous scholar Veldon Coburn introduced a panel discussion on the similarities between Canada and Israel on Friday with a blunt observation.

“Nobody’s slaughtering my people anymore,” he said. “They’ve taken everything.”

Coburn, whose mother is a status Indian and whose father’s side descended from white settlers, is Anishinaabe, a citizen of the Algonquins of Pikwàkanagàn whose reserve at Golden Lake, Ontario is a mere 6.9 square kilometres.

“That’s what was left for us out of about 145,000 square kilometres,” he told an audience of about 30 in the Windsor Grand Room at Mount Allison University.

He noted that while Indigenous dispossession is all-but complete in Canada, Israel is currently inflicting extreme violence on Indigenous Palestinians in the occupied territories of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem because it is determined to take their land.

Coburn, who is a professor of Indigenous studies at the University of Ottawa, said that although mainstream media do not show it, the “horrors and atrocities” committed by Israel in Gaza during the past week would turn anyone’s stomach.

“More Palestinian children were killed this past week. It’s incomprehensible and it’s difficult to avoid words like butchered, massacred, slaughtered,” he said as he introduced Jeremy Wildeman and Muhannad Ayyash, co-editors of the 2023 book Canada as a Settler Colony on the Question of Palestine.  (more...)

How Canada’s ‘settler-colonialism’ explains its support for Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians