Huffington Post:

The post colonial challenges of Canadian First Nations have had a tendency of appearing much less complicated than many other postcolonial societies -- or at least much less obvious. Some have attributed the silence to highly democratic values and processes in the Canadian society that leave no need for violent objections. Others, however, attribute the silence to structural repression because, they say, Canada has never become postcolonial, it continues to be an actively colonial state.

Whatever the colonial status of Canada may be, the peaceful veneer has been gradually peeling off the society's face lately, as countless ghosts of atrocities, racism and inequalities push their ways back to the surface of the collective conscious, particularly to that of the aboriginal communities themselves.

Ironically enough, as the Idle No More (INM) aboriginal social movement continues to grow and gain momentum, criticisms and methods of facing it sound uncannily familiar to anybody who has followed the Arab Spring. Two of the most regularly repeated mantras are that the people demonstrating on the streets do not know what they want, and that their movement is not going to go anywhere because it does not have a leader.

And then there is the issue of racism, which, like so many other aggressive traits, has a habit of flowing through a deeply disguised language of caring and calm reason -- laced as it may be with supercilious derision or outright contempt. "Trippy references to Mother Earth with paranoid claims about the hidden contents of Bill C-45," is how Terry Glavin, a well known Canadian pundit describes the movement. Tying together the INM, the Ontario First Nation Chief Theresa Spence's hunger strike, and the high rates of poverty and suicide across the Canadian aboriginal communities, Glavin writes: . . .

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