Synchronicity, Bananas and The Lost City of the Monkey God

I am not sure if one could call it synchronicity or not but I am always surprised as to how often what I read for pleasure somehow gets connected to what I am thinking about as I read bits and pieces from the various mainstream media outlets. Last week, of course, various media outlets were all commenting on the forest fires in the Amazon forest. A subtext to all of the concern was the fact that Brazil was doing very little, if anything, to fight the fires and that they seemed reluctant to allow other countries to tell them what they must do. As a side point, it is interesting to note that the world's attention span is so short that there is little news about the fires being posted this week. How can an event be the ecological disaster of the decade one week and not be newsworthy a few days later?

At the same time, I was reading the news about the fire, I was listening to Douglas Preston's The Lost City of the Monkey God as I did some spinning and weaving. It is not a great book and there were a number of times that I was glad that the audiobook app allows one to speed up the reading. Preston only spent ten or so days in the Honduran rainforest with the expedition that uncovered a massive city buried in the jungle and therefore had to "pad' the book with a lot of detail about both the various myths and expeditions to find the city and a lot of history both pre European contact and what has happened in the last hundred or so year.

There is a long history of companies - specifically fruit companies - clearing great swaths of forest to plant fruit like bananas in Latin America. The bananas, which is not a fruit native to the Americas, was being grown so that they could be shipped to the US market. There were huge profits to be made especially because the companies were so willing to manipulate and in many cases outright control the governments of those countries. Safe labour practices and environmental stewardship were not considerations for companies. They destroyed thousands and thousands of acres of forest so that we could eat fruit. They brought down, without shame, any government who tried to exercise any control over the rampant rape of the countryside. The companies subjugated the population to create a docile workforce - it was the worst type of colonialism.

The fact that the destruction of the rain forest is still occurring today should not surprise us. That does not mean that we should be complacent about it but rather that as with all things - eventually, we reap what we sow. Before we demand other countries to stop doing what we did for decades, we must demonstrate that we are prepared to change our behaviour. If a country has become fiscally dependent upon the income from harvesting such crops and therefore sees no choice but to expand the amount of agriculture land, we need to assist them in developing other ways of generating income that are less destructive to the environment. That may mean for example, that we will have to pay significantly more for items coming from those countries. We shaped those countries activities by our consumer behaviour. We need to change those behaviours.

Indigenous Membership - Who is eligible

For some Federal politicians or senior bureaucrats, it must feel as if they cannot do anything right. Take for example the government' Bill S-3 which received royal assent nine or so months ago. S-3 is a bill designed to correct an error. In determining who had First Nation status, it was the rule that any Indigenous woman who had married a non-indigenous man lost her status for all time as a member of a First Nation community. Indigenous men who married a non- indigenous woman had never lost their status. S-3 got rid of that discrimination. We should all cheer that the government has deleted this sex-based discrimination from its legislation. Really - who would complain?

It turns out that some First Nation communities have some concern about the number of individuals who have applied for status but who have never had any contact or involvement with what is now their home community. These concerns raise some valid issues that someone needs to resolve. I am just glad it is not me. Questions raised include:

- If the individual has never had any contact with the community or does not speak the language or has no cultural connection to the community- are they really part of the community?

- If the individual has never had any connection to a community but their grandmother or great-grandmother did - is that community obligated to provide supports and services to the individual? Does that individual get to vote on band issues?

- What percentage of Indigenous blood/DNA should a person have before they are eligible to be given status?

As almost all First Nations communities have limited resources, clearly these issues need to be resolved. And they are not new issues. Anytime a community has limited resources, the membership debate is always at least in part, about who gets access to the resources. Some First Nation communities are right in wondering how many of the 17,000 people who have applied for Indigenous status have done so, not because they want to right a wrong, but rather because they see some benefit in gaining access to a status card.

Politicians and senior bureaucrats need to accept that changing a law, while it may on the surface correct a wrong - may not be the only or the best solution. Clearly, it was sex-based discriminatory to disenfranchise some Indigenous women from their rights and status as members of a First Nation community. That wrong is not corrected because her great-grandchildren now get to call themselves Indigenous. I am not sure what the solution is - perhaps we cannot always correct the wrongs of the past. Perhaps there is no fixing the damage that was done. Perhaps the best that we can do is to ensure that the communities that are expected to welcome these new members into their family are strengthened and given time to decide for themselves what is best.

Empowering individuals or communities is not about letting people do what we allow them to do - empowerment is acknowledging that communities have the right to do what they decide to do.