Surveil this!

“Native extremism” – that’s the guise under which Canada’s spy agency eavesdropped on Indigenous activists from 1988-1999, according to a CBC Indigenous investigation that was published this week, built on reams of documents old enough to have been declassified and released in access-to-information requests, but still heavily redacted.

The program apparently ramped up in the years following the Siege of Kanehsatake, a response to Kanesatake and Kahnawake’s refusal to accept utter colonial domination of Kanien’kehá:ka lands.

In those days, protecting what’s left of Kanesatake’s lands from nine more holes for a golf course and a condo project in Oka was considered extreme. So extreme, apparently, that there’s not a community member who was alive then who doesn’t remember what it was like to see their own territory crawling with Canadian soldiers.

In light of this recent history, the revelation that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) used its might to secretly surveil Indigenous activists is not exactly a surprising one. After all, how many Mohawks were faced with evidence in 1990 or afterwards that their words had not been safe from the gluttonous ears of authorities, no matter how innocuous?

But the investigation is nevertheless a disturbing and urgent reminder that for all the transgressions and crimes against Indigenous communities that are known, there are many more lurking beneath the surface, all of them built on a worldview that the following things are extreme: resisting land theft; protecting the environment; demanding clean water; proclaiming economic sovereignty; and fighting for the rights of Indigenous children to be given the same opportunities as any other.

After all, CBC Indigenous obtained a report from the spy agency’s counter-terrorism branch that named even things like fishing rights and taxation as areas that could provoke conflict. And it’s not shocking that Canada feels insecure, that it worries about Onkwehón:we fighting back, because there’s plenty of reason to.

After all, representatives of the state know as well as anybody that the state has perpetrated many injustices to earn the ire of this country’s First Peoples and, what’s more, that the state isn’t ready to make these things right - not fully.

That’s why when Canada’s eyes and ears rove in search of information to weaponize against people it considers its own citizens, when the state works to assert its ultimate control over every inch of land and water inside what it calls Canada, little could be more extreme than speaking the truth that this country is not in fact God’s gift to Europeans, that this country is little more than an imaginary construct that can and will change, shift, and one day cease to exist.

There might be no going back to a time before colonization, but that doesn’t make Canada legitimate. It may be Canadian politicians who claim the privilege to define rights and Canadian courts that apply them, but the Haudenosaunee have had the Kaianere’kó:wa (Great Law of Peace) before that side of the Atlantic even knew Turtle Island existed.

That’s just to say, what happens in Canadian justice is not inherently just, and what happens in the halls of Parliament is far from it.

From 1988-1999, Canada treated Indigenous activists as domestic terrorists. The question is, in this era of lip service to reconciliation, does Canada still view advocacy for justice as extremism? Does it still view saying “enough is enough” as extreme?

Today’s espionage documents are sealed and will be for a long time. Even when they’re released, we’ll never know the truth - at least not if you consider that to consist of the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

To this day, Indigenous activists targeted from 1988-1999 can’t obtain their own files and can’t even confirm the existence of their own files. Among those who have tried is Katsi’tsakwas Ellen Gabriel, who was denied entry to Japan in 1992 because of the government’s files, but still received this boilerplate answer on CSIS. She, and all the others who have been targeted, have a right to know the truth, the full truth.

Unfortunately, that’s probably not forthcoming, and one day, when the truth about the era in which we now live comes out, we’re sure it’ll come with a heavy-handed application of the black marker.

But anyone who is paying attention won’t be surprised when those documents all those years from now reveal things weren’t as different today as some would have liked to think.

First of all, while the CBC Indigenous investigation covered the period ending in 1999, we all know the surveillance state didn’t exactly shrivel away after 9/11. Nor did the advent of new communications technologies make your thoughts any less protected from the prying eyes of what 1984 calls the Ministry of Love.

But if all that wasn’t enough, how about how today’s land defenders are treated by a government that preaches reconciliation from one side of its mouth?

Look no further than the treatment of the Wet’suwet’en people and their allies, who have poured so much of themselves into fighting against a destructive pipeline snaking through their territory, one the government has no right to put there. It’s well known they have been surveilled and arrested, their most fundamental rights sacrificed at the altar of private capital.

The Narwhal reported just last week that Canada’s spies are becoming more attentive still to obstacles to resource extraction projects, which Carney’s government has pitched as projects of critical national importance.

Meanwhile, the RCMP, while it has on the one hand made overtures to Indigenous communities, on the other it has infiltrated the private lives of Onkwehón:we. And it has failed to fess up, refused to justify itself when confronted by the organizations tasked with holding them accountable.

In 2020, Global News reported a privacy rights watchdog had been waiting three years for a response to a 2017 report on surveillance of the Yinka Dene Alliance.

The Alliance’s subversive activity? Opposing Enbridge Gas.

The fight for justice, for the environment, for the land continues - it’s not going anywhere - and the state, if its mission is to protect the status quo, is right to worry. But for a decade we’ve had a federal government that claims it wants to be a partner in building a new future, together.

So, when today’s files are declassified, a generation or more from now, which side of Canada’s mouth will we find out was speaking loudest when it comes to Native rights to land, water, self-determination, privacy, and just basic respect?

What will tomorrow’s files say?

TED Staff