I am so tired.
The Mi’Kmaq people are fighting for their right to fish for lobster, and white people, almost exclusively are pissed about it. From the way that I understand it the Indigenous community in Nova Scotia are allowed to fish all year round, meanwhile the white Commercial fishers are only allowed to fish during certain times of the year.
I understand how these commercial fishermen are seeing all this money flowing through the fingers of the Mi’Kmaq people but they also seem to forget the fact that the Indigenous community has to work twice as hard to make half as much money to survive on.
It’s as simple as that.
What pisses me off about this fucking issue is the fact that the white community is still trying to suppress the indigenous community as they have been doing for the last fucking centuries.
People forget that the last Residential school in BC wasn’t closed until nineteen eighty-four. For context, that means that it was closed the year after I was born, thirty-six years ago.
And Indigenous communities around the fucking country, are still playing catch-up. They are still dealing with the generational trauma caused by those schools. They are still dealing with PTSD, depression, anxiety, stress, drug addiction, homelessness, poverty.
The destruction of the Indigenous communities around Canada are still rebuilding after the damage caused by white people, and now y’all wanna destroy their ability to make money all year around because you’re afraid that when it’s your turn you won’t make enough.
That’s the fear, and yet the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, an organization I used to work for, says there is nothing to worry about and that there will be plenty of lobster for everyone.
As someone who used to work there, I can confidently say that they make an extra special effort to track the different animal species around the country, and if they say there is nothing to worry about, then this isn’t about how many lobsters you’ll be able to catch during the legal season.
This is about you seeing people who don’t look like you succeeding, and that pisses you off, because you’re racist piece of shit.
If y’all were just angry protesting, I’d understand that, but as I see it, setting an entire fucking dock on fire just because you’re pissed off that you’re basically on forced vacation is the antics of a childish racist.
I have no empathy for these white people telling Indigenous people they can’t earn a living from doing something their families have been doing for centuries before y’all dragged us over here.
I have absolutely zero problem supporting the Indigenous community, because it’s the right thing to do, and yet so many of you seem to believe that what the white people are doing is okay.
We’re talking violence, we’re talking destruction of property, we’re talking acts designed to cause terror and fear in the Indigenous community. These are hate crimes, that are deliberately not being classified as hate crimes, and that scares the shit out of me more than anything.
I have always known that my life did not matter to the average Canadian, I learned and realized that while I was raped for days on end by white supremacists who came after me because of the color of my skin.
I learned that from teachers who made fun of me for trying to learn, instead of teaching me how to do better with kindness and grace. I learned that from Principals who told me that what I knew was racism, was absolutely not racism, because we don’t have that in the Catholic community.
My life has never mattered to the average Canadian, but to see so many people willfully choosing to ignore what is happening to the Mi’Kmaq people is disturbing on a level that I cannot express through words.
These people aren’t fishing to make money, they are fishing to survive, it is their only source of real income, and you would destroy their property and the opportunity for them to feed their kids out of jealousy?
The people around Canada should be grieving right now, but we’re stretched so thin we don’t know where to point our pain, we don’t know what to do to make things better.
So I ask you from the bottom of my heart, to think about your neighbor, to think about the fact that the person living next to you might be a person of color, or an Indigenous person who has suffered exponentially at the hands of their white counterparts.
I ask you for just one moment, as you cast your vote in BC this week, and in Canada this year, that you think about someone other than yourself, and ask yourself what you can do to help.
You can vote for the party who is going to do the best lawful good for our country, a country filled with people from every country on this planet. A country filled with a rainbow of colors with people from every Creed, Nation, Size and Color.
I won’t tell you who to vote for, or who I voted for, but I will say that when you choose to vote, for just one second, I hope you think about yourself…AND those you care about…and even those you hate. Because your vote has the ability to affect all of our lives.
Good luck and God speed,
Devon J Hall
Loud Mouth Brown Girl 