Basically, I compare Olympics marketing imagery and rhetoric with the living conditions and activism of indigenous peoples here in Canada. (The post is about a Canada-wide context, more so than it’s about Vancouver and the VAN Organizing Committee per se.)
I invite you to skip the blurb about me, at the start of the post.
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Lisa helped to edit the writing, and Gwen fixed formatting problems that I had left in there.
I also appreciate other help from Laura, Annick, and Steve.
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The post stems from a relatively brief e-mail that I had sent in to Sociological Images back on May 24th, 2009. After writing some thoughts on Flickr posts here and here, I had sent the e-mail to the web site editors to connect the same sorts of native issues to Olympics marketing that already was circulated around here in Canada.
Then, after May, I published a piece about some native activism in Ontario, and I became very involved in pro-native campaigning against the tar sands — for the sake of wider climate justice. (I have posted about climate justice issues here.) (So far, I mainly have been a climate justice activist in a local Mobilization for Climate Justice group; but I also have started to form collaborative connections with people in other areas of the U.S. and Canada.) And, over the past two weeks, I was very involved in anti-Olympic protest organizing, which I mainly joined because of how the day of action was connected with tar sands issues.
In a “Feminism and Race” Women’s Studies grad course that I was in last term, I also worked through some indigenous and climate justice issues. That course helped a lot with the writing that I did for the Sociological Images post.
“Many hope an Obama presidency will provide the antidote. In his historic campaign, ‘hope’ has been, unsurprisingly, the mot juste, along with ‘change’ and some other feel-good sentiments.”
Richard Kim in The Nation -
“Waiting for the barbarians” (October 16th)
( … “the Republican Party’s electoral strategy of sowing resentment and fear … has finally taken on a life of its own” …)
Gwen at the Sociological Images blog -
“Stigmatizing Obama” (October 2nd)
(About how someone deemed Obama a “half-breed muslin” on a sign on their yard)
Zachary Pickens at Common Dreams -
“No slave to the racism of others” (July 20th)
(… “Posters we have seen with our own eyes, racial slurs spoken about Obama we have heard with our own ears, false accusations have been allowed to stand unchallenged by those that know the truth.” …)
Red Jenny at her blog -
“Visual hybridity”
(… “These interesting photographs illustrate how we construct the race of people of blended heritage” …)
Lisa at the Sociological Images blog -
“Black and white twins”
(… “[an illustration of] how skin color (which is real) is translated into categorical racial categories (which are not)” …)
Lisa at the Sociological Images blog -
“A simple lesson on the social construction of race”
(… “if we consider a wide range of people, it becomes clear that skin color comes in a spectrum, not in categories” …)
“lenin” at the blog Lenin’s Tomb -
“The blackness of Dessalines”
(On one way in which racist hierarchies were subverted in Haiti during the early 1800s)
Selected exerpts (which I’ve also edited — a little) -
“According to the United Kingdom’s National Housing Federation, one in four residents are facing ‘fuel poverty,’ spending more than 10 percent of their household income on fuel bills. By the end of 2009, 5.7 million UK households will be spending at least 10 percent of their income on energy bills. That’s a 100 percent increase since 2005.”
“The United States Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration estimates each American household will pay, on average, $1,182 in heating costs this winter — a 20 percent increase from last winter and a 65 percent increase from the winter of 2003/04.”
“Yet, a closer look reveals that this pain isn’t shared equally. Costs are a reflection of a host of factors including geography, consumption levels, and the quality of energy used.” (The author then discusses two examples: American “Northeasterners” and American “Westerners.”)
“This energy crisis is creating an opportunity for us … to take back our power.”
“In addition to considering what we use and how we use it, we must consider issues of [social (rather than biological) ] race and class. The impacts of rising temperatures, fossil fuels prices, and heating and food costs disproportionately impact the most vulnerable among us.
Those are photos of stencil spraypainting on a sidewalk in London, Ontario, Canada. (Here’s the location on a map.) That sidewalk is between a museum and a “land registry office” “court house.”
For those of you who don’t know this, the Canadian flag is up-side down in those images. The first image also is a different take on the official Canadian national anthem, which actually begins with “Oh Canada, our home and native land” — rather than “Oh Canada, our home on native land.”
I expect that most people here in Canada don’t think of indigenous people when they hear or sing the part about “native land.”
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There are more than a few of those two stencils spraypainted in the area — along with another one. Here’s a photograph of that third stencil:
“At the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, two young African Americans from San Jose State University won first and third place in the two-hundred-meter dash, gold medalist Tommie Smith setting a world record in the process. On the podium, receiving their medals alongside Australian silver medalist Peter Norman, they gave the Black Power salute. Bronze medalist John Carlos wore beads that signified the lynchings of his fellow African Americans. They were shoeless to represent black poverty. Norman joined them in wearing Olympic Project for Human Rights badges. Their actions suggested that great bodily gifts could not be separated from bodily suffering, or conscience. It was a beautiful moment, one of the iconic moments of the 1960s. As athletes, they had represented their country magnificently; as human beings they had testified to the complexity of that nation and their place in it.
In response, International Olympics Committee President Avery Brundage banished the two men from the rest of the games and a spokesperson called their act ‘a deliberate and violent breach of the Olympic spirit.’ The Olympic spirit by this measure insists that athletes be bodies without minds and hearts. But the insistence that athletes not ‘politicize’ the Olympics is really an assertion that the politics of the Olympics be determined by [government leaders], not movements and [other] individuals, most particularly not participating athletes. When authorities say we should not politicize something, they mean that the politics of the status quo should not be questioned.”
