Humbug, I say!
The McDonalds on the downtown corner of 22nd St and 2nd Ave is being torn down and turned into a parking lot. Part of the reason is that the corner is notorious for street people hanging around out front of the McD’s on city benches, to the point where council debated removing the benches (which, I’m sure, would totally fix the issue of homeless people downtown).
I think the parking lot is a ready-made celebration of Mitchell. All that needs to be done is put up a sign reading “Paved Paradise.”
McDonald’s is paradise?
That seems like a good way to celebrate someone who really doesn’t seem to want to be celebrated.
I don’t know much about Joni Mitchell (she was a little before my time), but I’ve read a few articles about this situation and I’m not sure I’d be so hard on her. I get the impression that she’s just frustrated with the multiple past plans to “honor” her in Saskatoon that have fallen through (a statue, a museum, a wing in the local art gallery and a cafe with her name) - when others proposed those ideas she got involved, but they all didn’t get funding and fell through. So now she figures that if they really want to do something this time, then they can do it without her help or after she’s dead.
Also, apparently there’s some issue with an old friend of her family holding on to some of her mother’s memorabilia (scrapbooks Joni’s mom made about her career). This friend was supposed to be holding on to them to put in a museum or something, but Joni now says she just wants her stuff back.
In the article I linked above, it seems like her comments about Saskatoon being bigoted are because in the old proposal for a museum in her name she wanted to feature First Nations culture and "how settlers and churches treated First Nations ". So since the museum never happened, I guess she thinks that was at least partially due to bigotry.
I don’t know much about Joni Mitchell - is she part Native? Why on earth would a museum dedicated to her musical career and impact have a significant portion of it related to First Nations? It just seems odd to me. There’s nothing wrong with a museum about FN, but why her?
Well yes, that’s the bizarre aspect of it all. The “bigoted community” part of the interview read as if she was saying that the reason the previous plans had fallen through was because she wanted some First Nations elements included and we’re all racist and opposed to that. I haven’t got the foggiest idea of how she’s connected to the First Nations communities. If she had a reputation for lobbying for reconciliation for residential school treatment, or for resolving treaty land claims, or even just for improving conditions on the west side, then maybe this would make sense. But if she has advocated for the First Nations communities it’s news to me.
Meanwhile, there’s Wanuskewin Heritage Park on the edge of town and historical sites relating to the Riel Rebellion scattered all over the place to the north. It’s perfectly true that there are plenty of racist asshats in the city, but there’s no lack of museum/memorial-type recognition of the past as it relates to the original inhabitants of the area. Nor does that have anything to do with why previous plans fell through. The wing of the art gallery, for example, isn’t happening because the plans to reno the Mendel Art Gallery fell through in their entirety when the mayor and the major donor decided they wanted to blow $80 mill on an entirely new gallery instead.
I get that she’s annoyed by these various past attempts to acknowledge her, but really I don’t see how insulting a quarter million people is a good way to deal with those frustrations.
You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.
Did she cure cancer? Solve world hunger? Negotiate peace in the middle east? Figure out how many licks to get to the center of a tootsie pop? No. None of these important things.
Someone should rename a park in her honour and invite her to the unveiling of the dedication plaque. Then have the wrong name on the plaque: “Kim Mitchell”.
Oh no! It’s a gophernado!
I’ll have to write the station (Q107 in Toronto, where Kim Mitchell is the afternoon DJ) to be sure, but I think Kim Mitchell may have had Joni Mitchell on his ‘Damn! I wish I wrote that!’ feature once or twice…
“New museum slammed for not using the term ‘genocide’ to describe aboriginal relations exhibit” That’s…interesting.
From the article:
Shall we conclude that her usage of the word ‘genocide’ equates with her usage of the word ‘dictatorship’? Kind of weakens her message somewhat except with the perpetual guilty crowd, I suppose.
Her argument focused on the Canadian ratified UN declaration on genocide
Article 1
The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.
Article 2
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
© Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Typically when people discuss genocide the focus is on the intent to destroy, in whole or part, the physical membership of the group. This woman is taking a much broader view and arguing that the long term practice of the Canadian government to assimilate First Nations is a cultural genocide, with partial group destruction being incidental. That’s not an unheard of argument but it’s not a mainstream understanding of genocide.
It’s wrong, but it isn’t nearly as wrong as I would like.
Why do I keep hearing the word “dictator” to describe Stephen Harper?
In what way is the current administration any different than other Canadian majority governments?
Just how much effort should be made in the 21st century to keep a tribal based hunter/gather culture from disappearing?
It doesn’t take a concerted effort of the government to kill it off. No, but it takes boat loads of money and forcing people to remain on reserves in poverty to keep the remnants of it going.
But then we have Ernie Crey, who says:
It looks more like not using the word “genocide” is a good choice, since there seems to be legitimate debate on how accurate such a negative, loaded term actually is.
That’s a good question; based on doing no research but just going from my own overall feeling, he doesn’t seem much different from former PM Chrétien. A majority government is going to make decisions that supporters of the other party aren’t going to like; it doesn’t make them a dictator. As my husband said when hearing PM Harper was a dictator, “I hadn’t heard that they cancelled the next federal elections.”
(Sorry for the triple post - I have three separate threads of ideas going on. 
)
This is something that I think people around the world are just going to have to get used to; the world moves on, people and cultures change, and if the only way to keep your culture alive is to artificially force it, it is going to fall away at some point. It’s not just North American Aboriginal people who are experiencing this; it’s happening to all kinds of people from around the world, and there’s not much we can do about it.
From my own ancestry, my mom’s people are Mennonites. I speak a couple of words of Low German and make a couple of Mennonite dishes. I’m sure old Mennonites aren’t thrilled by their progeny becoming 99% Canadian and 1% Mennonite. When people immigrate to Canada, in two generations, their kids are as Canadian as anyone (often to the older folks’ chagrin). I really don’t see anything that makes Aboriginal culture immune to this.
That’s a different question. For no other group in Canada does the federal government have a direct fiduciary relationship. Consequently the federal government’s actions, both direct and implicit, towards first nations are an expression of government policy and that policy has effectively been a more or less concerted effort to culturally erase first nations with the indirect effect of decimating lives and tribes. I’m guessing those actions are the basis for Pam Palmater’s genocide statements.
The problem is, without rewriting the Indian Act and removing the Canadian government from their fiduciary obligations we’re stuck with policies that seem to continue to inflict misery and poverty conditions on reserves.
Happy Canada Day, everyone!