It’s amazing how things that brandish the Maple Leaf (pork products excepted) often go unquestioned. Canadians condemned China over human rights abuses during the 2008 Olympics in Beijing but fail to direct this critical inward gaze when it is contrary to their own nationalist narratives. The announcement that Vancouver was awarded the 2010 Olympic Games drummed up the expected nationalist fervor at a chance to showcase Canadian values on the world stage; the Just Society in action. However, a critical evaluation of the context of the games—how “Canadian values” translate into practice—reveals our rather spotty human rights record.
Despite being billed as “Canada’s Games,” the reality is that they are situated, without permission, on un-ceded indigenous lands.
Canada’s obligation to enter into nation-to-nation relationships to settle any land disputes, established with the Royal Proclamation of 1763, has made all subsequent occupation, settlement and development in B.C. illegal according to Canada’s own laws. Knowing this to be the case, efforts were made very early in the bid process to secure the consent of the indigenous nations on whose lands the Games were set to take place. Consent was gained by four separate payouts to each “Host First Nation’s” Band Council. However, the Band, as a unilaterally created legal-fiction of the Canadian state, does not necessarily represent each nation’s authority. In many cases, it is treated by the indigenous community as the local branch of Indian Affairs rather than the indigenous nation’s sovereign government.
These agreements signed with the Band Councils (and against the will of many of the nations’ traditional sovereign authorities) launched an array of then-justified Olympic development including destructive building projects such as the Sea-to-Sky highway and several ski resort expansions. But this development of leisure and sport tourism infrastructure is only part of larger economic objectives for the region: selling all of B.C. as a leisure-entertainment destination without regard for indigenous sovereignty, or even participation. This accelerated process is eroding indigenous sovereignty, and the resulting ecological devastation threatens the very survival of the Native communities on whose lands this development would take place.
Despite this, the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC) has appropriated indigenous imagery for the Olympic mascots. Miga, Quatchi and Sumi, who are taken directly from traditional oral narratives. Expressing indigeneity in cartoonish stereotypes, Sumi, originally a powerful Salish shape-shifting trickster (whose image now bears a strong resemblance to a dollar store Hello Kitty rip-off) is presented as both an indigenous guardian spirit and a “Canadian” who dreams of “sharing his forest and mountain home with the world.” This sanitized version of Salish history makes it appear as if the Salish people were anxious to “share” their home with British invaders (and now Canadian Olympic organizers). So willing, in fact, it took coastal bombardment, starvation and extra-judicial executions on the quarterdecks of British warships to get old Sumi and the Salish to “share their home” with future Canadians.
This cleansed, family-friendly history is commodified and literally sold to tourists who imagine romantic lives of indigenous people but remain blind to their daily struggles against violent colonial circumstances that manifest themselves in personally destructive behaviours like alcoholism and suicide.
Indigenous commodification doesn’t end at the mascots. There’s also the symbol of Vancouver 2010, the Inukshuk, used as the symbol of British Columbia’s Olympics, a province without Inuit, drawn up by a design firm equally devoid of Inuks.
In the city, the urban poor (many of whom are indigenous as well) don’t fare much better. VANOC has been working with the City of Vancouver to “re-develop” the strong, vibrant Downtown East Side, long spectacularized as a slum of vice and drug abuse to disguise it as the home of poor urban communities. The logic is, to “spread the problems out.” Translated, this means the break up of communities and the dismantling of social infrastructure used as grassroots solutions to combat poverty and marginalization.
Despite Canada’s liberal democratic pretensions, all of the Olympic fanfare can be shown for what it really is, a weak nationalist distraction from the things that really matter: indigenous, social and environmental justice. While many Canadians are preoccupied with medal counts, sleek corporate sponsorship and other vanities, land is destroyed, people are displaced and human rights are violated.
With less than a year before the Vancouver Opening Ceremonies, the focus should not be on the Games as much as the havoc and destruction that will be left in their wake. As the Olympic Countdown Clock in Vancouver hits the one-year mark, it’s time to evaluate the real legacy of the 2010 Olympic Games.
Adam Gaudry is a Métis student, a member of the Queen’s Native Student Association and part of Resist 2010, a Kingston-based collective of anti-Olympic activists.
All final editorial decisions are made by the Editor(s) in Chief and/or the Managing Editor. Authors should not be ed, targeted, or harassed under any circumstances. If you have any grievances with this article, please direct your comments to [email protected].