[Indigsol] Fwd: FW: CITIZENS' INQUIRY SUBMISSION: ROBERT LOVELACE

[Ben Powless]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Peter McMahon <pmcmahon at metrowaste.com>
Date: 2008/4/30
Subject: FW: CITIZENS' INQUIRY SUBMISSION: ROBERT LOVELACE
To: "Rose Moses (E-mail)" <paintedturtle at hughes.net>, "Jiim Albert (E-mail)"
<jim.albert at sympatico.ca>, "Glen jackson (E-mail)" <gjackson at kos.net>, "Ben
Powless (E-mail)" <powless at gmail.com>



Hope you all have a chance read Roberts letter and pass it on


-----Original Message-----
From: Uranium News [mailto:uraniumnews at mail.ccamu.ca]
Sent: Tuesday, April 29, 2008 5:14 PM
To: greenlynndaniluk at mail.ccamu.ca
Subject: CITIZENS' INQUIRY SUBMISSION: ROBERT LOVELACE




CITIZENS INQUIRY SUBMISSION: ROBERT LOVELACE

(Robert submitted this handwritten presentation to the Inquiry via surface
mail. Acting Ardoch Algonquin First Nation Co-Chief, Mireille LaPointe, read
the presentation at the Ottawa Inquiry on Robert's behalf. -LD)

My name is Robert Lovelace. I am a member of the Ardoch Algonquin n First
Nation. Our traditional homeland is within the Ottawa River Valley among the
Madawoska, Mississippi and Rideau watersheds. Our community also uses the
Nation River watershed. The Ardoch Algonquin First Nation is with the
greater Algonquin Nation of the Anishnabeg People.

I am writing to you from the Central East Correctional Centre in Lindsay,
Ontario on the 50th day of incarceration. I have been imprisoned because I
refused to submit to Judge Douglas Cunningham's order for y community to
leave their peaceful protest and permit Frontenac Ventures Corporation
access to our traditional homelands to carry out exploration activities,
including deep core drilling for uranium. I have been sentenced to 6 months
and fined $25,000. In addition, Co-Chief Paula Sherman was fined $15, 000
dollars and the community $10,000 and the community's defence and counter
claims to  a $77 million dollar lawsuit was dismissed by Judge Cunningham
leaving the First Nation completely vulnerable and without representation.

In my defence, and as explanation for actions taken by the Ardoch Algonquin
First Nation, I gave evidence about the Algonquin understanding of land and
the responsibility for protecting the land with Algonquin Law. This
knowledge comes to us through oral traditions: through stories, songs,
principle saying and ceremony. It is shared collectively. No one person
holds all the knowledge with requires people to come together and contribute
what they know for the greater good. We also turn to our elders who through
their long experience of living and cumulative use and understanding of
knowledge can instruct with intelligence and wisdom. In this way Algonquin
law continues to be profound and dynamic.

The Algonquin understanding of land begins with creation and in the context
of its expressions in Anishabemowin (the Algonquin language). For Algonquins
creation does not centre on human beings or on a determined plan of an all
powerful god. The face of creation is shaped by vision, which gives spirit
form. Mater, in its diversity and sameness dances in a whirl of changing
shapes, arranged by harmony, balance and compliment. In this animate matrix
all being are alive. The air, water, stone and the fires of the earth and
sun are living beings. Like all the creatures who fly, walk or swim, what
exist within a symbiotic reference with all life, either real imagined or
symbolic is linked to spirits of a living world. If the creator directs any
attention towards human being it is with benign indifference as the great
spirit observes the artifice of life's vision with equal interest. Like all
creatures, humans are created whole but not in the image of the totality of
life. In fact humans are understood to be one of the most dependent of all
creatures lacking a fundamental understanding of purpose, which leaves them
vulnerable and ignorant. Humans through like all other creatures have a will
to survive, instincts to prevail, logic discipline and imagination to adopt
and prosper. Like other creatures the highest achievement of human beings is
successful integration into the immense complexities of the local. Failure
is to be alienated to the marginal and superficial grasping and exploiting
without caution anything that merits consumption. The later is what we call
Windigo. Being humans is not about mitigating heaven and hell or any other
godly realms. Being a human being is about activating the gifts of truth,
courage, love, respect, honesty wisdom and honour the principles which allow
Anishnabeg to stay true to the human purpose of protecting the land and then
human purpose of protecting the land and the human family.

Our creation stories if told one after another would take days if not weeks
to recite. A lifetime is not long enough to understand the cumulative wisdom
and knowledge of the stories. However, it would not take a listener long to
understand that it is the land that gives shape to the spirits in physical
form. Each place, each watershed, each ecosystem moulds and shaves,
revealing pragmatic variations. The colour of eyes, the length of limbs, the
metabolic rhythms that regulate fibre and fluid, the lay and colour of hair
are traded for harmony within the ecosystem. Serendipity is tested and
retested, accepted and rejected in minute detail that takes ages to preserve
and to be changed again and again. It is enough to know that as human beings
we are appendages of the land, made of the same earth, flowing in the same
waters, breathing the same wind, warmed by the same fire.

We live in a critical age. Never before has humanity faced such great peril
and never before has the human conscience been so alive in its collective
recognition and understanding of the way forward. As a species we have
become intimate with almost every ecosystem on the planet. And beyond that
we have an empirical understanding of the beginning and end of this
universe. However, our human systems embrace a self-defeating dilemma
through reactive resistance or acquiescence to Solomon's lament that
everything is vanity. And while the real choices seem ultimately confusing,
now is the time that we must decide the fate of generations to come.

There is no mystery that as a species we have fallen from grace. There is
great suffering among humans in this world because few have privilege and
many do not. Even in the so called developed nations the gap between rich
and poor is widening. The indigenous wealth, in economic terms called
"virgin wealth", which has been rapaciously extracted from the earth without
consent or concern is now long past the point where demand exceeds supply.
The great European Empires who rose in five centuries from the cheapest
labour in the world to indulgent affluence are now consuming their own
children with debt, unable to sustain or curtail superfluous excess. While
our parents and grandparents honestly believed they were creating a better
world. We know now that their dreams were not sustainable. We know that.

Politicians, guided by the power of the privileged class, promise that the
dream of perpetual affluence is still possible. It is not. For millions upon
millions of human beings, impoverished and separated from their indigenous
relationship with the land, the proof is clear, development as defined by
Colonial nations of this world is merely theft and murder and when we bring
it on ourselves it is suicide. To put one stone upon another without
ultimate acceptance of the consequences is to kill both the meaning and
spirit of our sacred relationship with the earth. Modern leaders plead with
us to accept the most obsequious forms of racism, classism, sexism and human
and environmental injustice as an abeyance of our own uncontrollable decline
in the hope that we will choose the inevitable, a binary of privilege and
poverty as the only sustainable reality. It is in this sense that Ontario
promotes uranium exploration, mining and the extension of a highly
subsidized nuclear energy policy. With the current Ontario leadership there
is no turning back, there are no efficient alternatives, there is no
preparations for the end of social an cultural consumerism, as dependency on
fossil fuels becomes too expensive. For the present government in Ontario
one unachievable promise replaces another.

Along side the blind faith in continued development, political leaders
continue to accept the degradation of the environment as a natural law of
economics. Politicians tell us that they know best. Despite their obvious
allegiance to a privileged and insulated clientele, they assure the less
privileged that they alone have insight into the future, a higher standard
of legal and social justice and a single-mindfulness for the welfare of
humanity. They at once point to the unspoiled "wilderness" as a national
treasure while over seeing its spoilage through central management. Over the
past two decades environmental protection legislation has not been
strengthened. In fact it has been consistently compromised through a lack of
funding and abridgements to legislation. What we thought we had in Ontario
by way of environmental protection while discursive of quasi-judicial levels
remains at best the whimsy of the political party in power. The principles
of environmental protection as a dynamic discipline are for less known among
Ontario leadership than the results of their latest popularity poll or the
info-advertisements of some jaded pundit in the National Post. The
dependency on "virgin wealth" in their minds is confused with divine
authority advance by colonial ideology. Continuing down this seeming
relentless path of consumption and waste will draw humanity ever closer to a
threshold where neither the lessons of the past or the promises of the
future have any applicable meaning.

I am not a scientist but I have informed myself about the nuclear industry.
Not for one moment do I believe that nuclear energy is clean or cheap. I
have seen the pictures from Chernobyl and Three Mile Island and read much
about the devastating effects on people and the environment. I have learned
that the leading industrial diseases in the United States are caused by
ionizing radiation. I spent the better part of my youth listening to
strategic Air Command Bomber's take off and return with their cargos of
Atomic weapons, commanded by politicians with marginally sophisticated
technology and less than honourable political agendas. I understand that
Canada's "virgin wealth" in yellow cake uranium has left this country
virtually untraceable and found its way into the processing plants of the
likes of Saddam Hussien. This is not a clean technology when millions of
tons of radioactive waste from mining is deposited into lakes and ponds with
no intent on the part of industry or government to mitigate the cost and
damage to future generations. There is nothing clean about open pit mining
that demands the burning of exorbitant amounts of fossil fuels to extract,
process and transport the raw product. Conservative estimates of the costs
of fossil fuels in mining uranium are ¼ of the economic output in the life
of a nuclear reactor. This estimate does not include the impact of expended
carbon emissions on the environment.  Spent uranium following the fission
process presents even greater costs and concerns. The National Academic of
Science reported in February 1958 that "the cost of story radioactive
fission products temporarily to cool them, of extracting long lived isotopes
and shipping waste to disposal points for ultimate disposal will have a
major influence on the economics of nuclear power." Fifty years later not
one county using nuclear power generation has solved the problem and the
cost of temporary storage continues to escalate.

Economically speaking if I were only concerned with return on my investment
I would put my money on nuclear power. No other industry in Canada has had
the level of environmental protection costs exempted than the nuclear
industry. Besides the assurance that environmental protection will not
encumber business, every loan-shark in the world knows that there is no
greater profit than in an enterprise that is unable to pay off the initial
loans. In the future the cost of nuclear energy will not only fuel inflation
but it will also reap the highest rates of investment return. Ontario has
reached a threshold where existing first generation nuclear reactors are
some 15 billion dollars in debt and unable to draw down the debt any
further. The present premier's solution is to borrow more money to build an
even costlier second generation in an era where private energy conservation
due to rising prices will be the normative challenge of every household. You
can bet that it will not be the McGuinty loan sharks. Those who will pay the
cost will be working and retired, the poor and indigenous people.

I have come to understand that uranium and the military industrial complex
that it feeds, is the forbidden fruit of our generation. It is the turtle
with the ring of moss on its back. It is the glittery box on which Pandora
speculates. My investment in the future will not be in uranium nor its
allied industries. I chose the morality of Algonquin Law and I will let
posterity be my judge. I have never been reconciled with Solomon's view that
all is vanity. The beauty of a frozen swamp in the middle of winter is not a
self-absorbed pretension. The beauty of a rainbow, a sunset, a fungus
growing in layers along a fallen tree, a world independent of human comings
and goings, all in all, never less than any which may be contrived. The goal
of living is not in attaining beauty but in accepting it. Desire is what
blinds us to invent beauty, to invent confections for the heart and mind.
And in doing so we live our lives out as caricatures on Vanity's stage. As
an Anishnabeg person I am not long our of the forest and I know that water
in its natural form is beautifully clean, the wind is warm and full of song
or cold and clear, the earth after a billion years still smells fresh and
clean, one see will produce ten, a hundred, even a thousand fold. I know
that the earth is a quiet place as though listening to itself. When it
speaks it does so in an immense diversity of voices, some cautious, some
cautioning, all beautifully distant but urgent to be heard. It is such a
world that vanity seeks to erase.

I believe that at not other time in history have humans collectively had
such a clear view of the whole frame. At once it is possible to see our
beginnings and the possible futures a head of us. This perspective however
will not last. As we advance further a history of over consumption and
unmanageable waste the opportunities for sustainability and the perceptible
choices become fewer and fewer. Social change does not come easily. The
defences against colonialism have had only marginal success and more often
than not have resulted in violence and counter revolution. However when we
look at the natural world we can see their powerful forces with which human
beings ally. Within our human nature are forces with which we can endure
through the harshest challenges. Collectively, the bonds of family, clan and
community are far stronger than the deceptions that divide us. In pursuit of
positive social change we need to activate within ourselves the gifts
endowed upon us through creation. Perception, logic, discipline,
imagination, courage and insight are only a few of the powerful gifts within
us. We need to activate ourselves to ask less and give more so our local
communities become stronger. We need to embrace silence so when we do speak
the clarity of our voice will be unmistakable.

Changing the intentions of governments can be even more difficult than
effecting social change. I have no doubt that more people will have to go to
prison before Ontario becomes nuclear free and we embrace a society that
undertakes real sustainability. The whole basis of sustainability is local
communities meeting local needs. Big government simply does not fit into
this picture and neither does corporate construction of need fulfilment.
Sustainability is not about turning back the clock but rather the long
overdue evolution of rationalizing real human needs with real earthy
processes. As a society in change Ontario will need every bit of the wealth
now destined for nuclear development to effect the transitions that are
required. Urban structures need to be reinvented. The meaning of labour will
need to be redefined. Eco-cartography will reshape political boundaries. And
most of all people will change culturally. The present energy crisis and the
need for sustainable economies necessitate a renaissance of humanity but
present governments resist such change because the old means of governance;
repression, false promises and popularity contests are not sufficient to
control populations through emergent creativity. For today's governments it
will seem easier to deny, pretend, punish and finally abdicate
responsibility. People need to take initiative on there won and they need to
do so now. There is a great need to defend the earth and our relatives in
creation. Stopping uranium exploitation is definitely an important action in
defending the earth. The coalitions that are created are nexus of shared
knowledge and mutual concern. But simply shutting down the machines, turning
off the taps and extinguishing the lights is not enough to meet the
challenges of an over consumptive society. We need to reinvent ourselves.

Last year when I learned that 30,000 acres of our homeland had been staked
for uranium exploration with the potential for an open pit mine, my first
thoughts were how to protect Algonquin rights and interests. Since then my
knowledge and understanding has grown beyond parochial interests to include
my non-Algonquin neighbours and a struggle that goes further than mere
resistance to colonialism. However my core understanding of what is to be
Anishnabeg (human being), my knowledge of the land (aki) and my acceptance
of the meaning of creation still inform who I am and what I believe. Going
to prison is a small price to pay for one's integrity and even a smaller
price to pay for the right to care for the earth, our mother and home to all
of our relations. Sacrifice is the work that binds us with the rest of
humanity who struggles to preserve their homelands, sustainable cultures and
natural justice. As each day passes I believe more and more that to live
free, active, intelligent, compassionate lives is our inheritance.
Imprisonment is never the end of the struggle for change. It is the
beginning of conviction. To be a human being is to find peace and good will
taking only what you need and giving back everything.

I am humbled to be able to share my thoughts with the Citizens' Inquiry and
I commend all of you for your hard work and sacrifices bringing this forum
to the people.

Robert Lovelace
April 7, 2008
















-- 
"In life we meet extraordinary people who follow us wherever we may go" -
Trisha Nagpal
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