Feb 13 | When anger gives life (Letters from the Coast)

I just wanted it to stop.

The kid, a boy from a large and troubled family, had been harassing me since day 1 of grade 7. I don’t remember the content of his taunts specifically, only that they were annoying and relentless.

In my classroom, he had been talking at me nonstop for what felt like hours. What really galled me was that it wasn’t in whispers. It was quite audible, but my teacher ignored it, like she ignored most of the things that happened in class. This was nothing new. I had never received any helpful advice from adults, who told me to “just ignore it,” who belittled me for being a baby or a tattletale or “too sensitive.”

It didn’t occur to me until I was an adult that the whole notion of “tattletales” is deeply abusive and fucked up. There was no nuance to it when I was a kid, no sense of the term referring to kids who report on others to garner favour. In my experience, it was only ever used to shame kids who spoke out about being bullied.

How long could I possibly ignore it? This was only one incident in a series of constant bullying for my entire childhood.

I realized in that moment that no-one was going to stick up for me.

So finally I shouted, “Can you just shut up for once?!”

The kid was shocked for just a minute, and then continued on, this time with help from some of his friends.

And, of course, the teacher scolded me for talking.

I couldn’t take it. The chatter was so constant I felt like I was going crazy.

I ran out of the room in tears.

For the rest of that year and two of the following, one of the kid’s friends, the one I grew to despise the most, called me “Crazy Clare.”

Adult authorities never helped me.

Even my own mother couldn’t be trusted. I remember tearfully telling her later that year about the disgusting abuse these same boys had hurled at a substitute teacher, about how they had told her to stick a popsicle stick up her ass.

My mother was livid. “Well why the hell didn’t you say something?!”

I stared at her, flabbergasted. Seriously? Did she not know what would have happened if I had?

It became clear over time that all official systems of justice that I had encountered were fundamentally broken. Authorities could not be trusted to protect the weak. The weak shouldn’t even trust the strong to care about their problems.

It’s taken me thirty-five years to realize one uncomfortable but honest truth.

If I had punched that kid, he would have shut up.

Sure, my hand would’ve hurt, and I would’ve gotten in trouble.

But honestly, comparing that imagined future to the possibility of the abuse ending? Worth it, and more.

And I only would have had to do it once.

This is how I feel as I watch the live Twitter and Facebook feeds of a small group of Wet’suwet’en people and their hereditary chiefs, facing off against the RCMP at Unist’ot’en camp, on the shores of the Wedzin Kwah (colonial name Morice River), about 130 kilometres from Smithers, BC.

The issue is a complicated one. Twenty Indigenous nations along the route of the proposed pipeline (the source of the blockades) are in support of the project. Some members have told media that they need the jobs, that they feel they have been adequately consulted by Coastal Gas, and that they trust their elected band councils. Some feel that the land and water defenders are a minority trying to hold them hostage, and that they have leveraged support from people who don’t know anything about the situation or Wet’suwet’en culture. The conversation is anything but simple, and I’m aware of my own privilege as an urban white kid.

I’m also aware that for centuries, Indigenous Peoples have been subjugated by the RCMP, which supposedly keeps our country safe and “in good order.” This institution, rather than protecting the most vulnerable among us, too often spends its time at the beck and call of corporations, willing to do their dirty work of forcing people off the land so that it can be put into the service of the state’s greed.

Is this what our tax dollars are for? For empowering armed thugs to terrorize hereditary chiefs, elders, and unarmed civilians? For paying them in order that the rich may become richer and ravage the planet which gives us life and is already groaning under the weight of our excesses?

It has been proven beyond doubt that, in the wake of the Delgamuukw victory establishing Aboriginal title, the resource industry has been actively suppressing any Indigenous resistance to development. They weaponize rhetoric and say that environmental activists and land and water protectors don’t care about jobs. They act like no possible alternative to ongoing colonialism, corporate deception, and mass planetary genocide exists.

When people speak out, they gaslight and abuse them, and empower others to do it for them.

On Friday evening, I went and stood with others blocking the intersection at Hastings and Clark near the port with Indigenous and settler activists. We chanted, listened to speeches, and danced to the music from a speaker as we passed the time.

We were flanked by cops blocking the road to traffic along Hastings, fine to allow us to protest on stolen land without sustained harassment, because so many of us were white, and because we were in the city where press could easily find us and watch the actions of the police – unlike at Unist’ot’en camp itself, where the RCMP act with impunity, expanding exclusion zones without regard for appropriate legal channels, busting into homes without warrants, and employing K9 units against unarmed matriarchs in ceremony.

I watched as a truck passing through a back alley aggressively fishtailed in front of some kids holding the line facing north toward Powell Street. They jeered at him.

This was the second time a similar incident had occurred in the last couple of days.

I bobbed along to A Tribe Called Red, Rage Against the Machine, and “F*** the Police” by N.W.A., trying to keep warm.

As a Christian, I am committed to embodying an ethic of nonviolence in my personal life. I still believe in the one who saved me, an innocent victim of state violence.

But I will never enforce that rhetoric on anyone else.

Jesus went willingly to the Cross to make a point.

I cannot, under any circumstances, insist that the oppressed hold onto perceived righteousness by lying down for the state to run over. I will not demand innocent blood from the abused.

Civility has never saved us. Wishing that the abuse would stop will never save us. Praying for the abuser to feel shame for their abuse will never save us.

Anger can and will give life.