Twenty-First-Century Debt Collectors: Idle No More Combats a Five-Hundred-Year-Old Debt

Self-determination. Survival. Sovereignty. These are the principles driving the Idle No More movement and the ideas that have consistently driven Indigenous peoples in North America to fight against their colonizers’ destructive designs on their bodies, lands, and spirits. From the genocidal actions of Manifest Destiny and residential boarding schools to Sand Creek, Wounded Knee, and reservations, the governments of the United States and Canada have persistently colonized the Indigenous peoples of this continent in word and deed. Idle No More is an ongoing grassroots effort created by four First Nations women in Canada that has attracted global attention and support. On its website, the group calls for the repeal of provisions in Bill C-45, which became law in 2013, “(including changes to the Indian Act and Navigable Waters Act, which infringe on environmental protections, Aboriginal and Treaty rights) and abandon all pending legislation which does the same.” In cooperation with Defenders of the Land, this growing Indigenous network also calls on Canada to increase proportional representation with regard to “all legislation concerning collective rights and environmental protections”; to live up to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and to “respect the right of Indigenous peoples to say no to development on their territory”; and to “officially repudiate the racist Doctrine of Discovery and the Doctrine of Terra Nullius and abandon their use to justify the seizure of Indigenous Nations’ lands and wealth” (Idle No More 2013). The “vision” of Idle No More seems simple: “Idle No More calls on all people to join in a peaceful revolution, to honour Indigenous sovereignty, and to protect the land and water.” However, peaceful revolution is a complicated goal that requires an understanding of why these women were motivated to act in November 2012.

Idle No More by Kevin Konnyu.

Indigenous women lead their communities with visionary leadership skills; deep cultural knowledge; and a central focus on spiritual faith, honesty, and integrity. As they have since before the European invasion, Indigenous women are responsible for the health of their communities and have always taken this role seriously. Under continued assault from external and male-dominated political forces, such as the Indian Act, Indigenous women need to possess and exercise forms of political empowerment to maintain and improve the day-to-day lives of their people. Idle No More presents an Indigenous vision of politics that surpasses the control that state sovereignty has over contemporary Aboriginal life. The women leading Idle No More are twenty-first-century debt collectors who have created an attention-grabbing model for decolonial Indigenous feminism that builds upon a rich history of Indigenous resistance to colonial control over land, culture, and lives: a movement that empowers Indigenous women on the path to achieving social justice for Indigenous nations. As other contemporary movements respond and react to injustice and the trampling of rights through street protests and occupation of public spaces, the Idle No More movement is trying to shift the contemporary discourses of rights, sovereignty, and nationhood by arguing that it is Indigenous women who ought to ultimately hold the political power of Indigenous nations, or at the very least have an equal seat at the debate table. According to Leanne Simpson in Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-creation, Resurgence and a New Emergence, “Western-based social movement theory has failed to recognize the broader contextualizations of resistance within Indigenous thought, while also ignoring the contestation of colonialism as a starting point. … Part of being Indigenous in the 21st century is that regardless of where or how we have grown up, we’ve all been bathed in a vat of cognitive imperialism, perpetuating the idea that Indigenous Peoples were not, and are not, thinking peoples—an insidious mechanism to promote neo-assimilation and obfuscate the historic atrocities of colonialism” (2011, 32). In this respect, Indigenous nationhood entails a fundamentally different understanding of political power than that seen in Western European–style politics. Cheryl Suzack (Anishinaabe), editor and contributor...