[van-announce] Anti-Columbus Rally {Friday @ 5:30}

[Anti-Poverty Committee]

*please forward*

Anti-Columbus Rally-
Britannia Shipyard
5180 Westwater Drive Richmond
Friday June 6th @ 5:30 - 7:30 pm

Contact: Kat Norris (604) 682-3269 Extension: 7718
Indigenous Action Movement


CELEBRATING THE LEGACY OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS IS CELEBRATING THE ON-GOING
CAMPAIGN OF GENOCIDE AGAINST INDIGENOUS PEOPLE

The Indigenous Action Movement and supporters will hand out educational
pamphlets at the Britannia Shipyards in Richmond where the replica of the
Christopher Columbus ship the Nina is docked until June 15, 2008.

The Indigenous Viewpoint:

Honoring Christopher Columbus is like honoring Hitler in terms of his
utter disregard for the human rights and dignity of a people because of
their race, namely the Indigenous people of Haiti, Hispaniola in the
Caribbean, people of South Africa. His exploits lead to the forced
colonization and genocide of the original inhabitants of the Americas. The
Columbus influenced "indian removal policy" was used to force our people
away from their lands, using war tactics such as starvation, biological
warfare, burning down of villages and savagery such as murder, rape,
mutilation, despite the fact that European leaders acknowledged that our
natural rights were to have been respected.

It is said that Columbus saved Indigenous people from having to survive
the wilderness and lives of war, yet the lives of our people were no
different than the early ancestors of land all across the hemisphere. We
survived off the earth and our land and its resources remained intact and
unharmed. Technology and modern advances have only destroyed this earth
and OUR country.

Our reality as Indigenous people in respect to our survival and struggle
for justice for the past 500 years is cause for commemoration. We have
survived premeditated genocide, colonization, murder, rape and pillaging.
We have suffered deliberate loss of our resources, language, roles, of the
right to represent our people. The advent of the imposed reservation
system caused our men the loss of the right to feed and provide for our
own people.

In occupied Canada, in British Columbia, the celebration of the past 150
years of imperialism, calls for a transformation of thought as the First
Nations people demand the true history to be acknowledged at all levels,
in government, education, within society. Occupied British Columbia is
committed to a New Relationship and states that the Treaty Process is
founded upon respect, reconciliation and recognition of Aboriginal title
while providing promises through these treaties which threatens to do
exactly the opposite as we will lose our lands, titles and rights.

New school texts need not perpetuate the ideologies of racist colonialist
thought that glorifies a man whose exploits included the onset of the
atrocities of the slave trade, slave labor, sexually related disease, and
the decimation of indigenous people.

Loewen, in his book, “Lies My Teacher Told Me,”
http://www.uvm.edu/~jloewen/ calls Columbus a racist, murderer, “ who
forced Native people into slavery as laborers, scouts, sex slaves and dog
food for his men.

The Indigenous Action Movement and supporters will will hand out
educational fact sheets.

“As Indigenous people we reject the historical misconceptions that exalt a
slave trader, a murderer who is not worthy of exaltation. It's time
society wakes up to our reality and not buy into the doctored spin that
allowed such a legacy that gave birth to the death of millions of
Indigenous people." Kat Norris, Indigenous Action Movement

Promo For Tourists Re: Replica Nina
http://vancouver.kijiji.ca/c-events-Step-Onboard-the-Nina-W0QQAdIdZ50506707

What Children Learn About Columbus:
http://events.askacop.org/columbusday.html

2004 http://www.survival-international.org/news/144