“THE AMERICAS BELONG TO THE FRENCH”, SAYS QUEBEC PREMIER. MORE FALSE PRETENCES!
MNN. Feb. 18, 2007. It looks like these colonists, otherwise known as the “hit men” from Europe, never give up. They keep trying to stick their clubfoot boots into Turtle Island. One of their longtime secrets was recently revealed to us. It’s called the “toponomy strategy”.
At a news conference France’s prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin was told by Quebec premier Charest, "North America belongs to the French, and we want it back.” He added that, "The city of Quebec is the French capital of the Americas." Did any French ever come over here? We know that their street people from who knows where were sent here. Many are still around today, hanging out at the “Old Brewery Mission” and pouncing on our cars at street corners trying to wash our windshields for a handout.
A doctoral student in the study of toponomy (place names) recently told us that between 1910 and 1967 it was Canadian colonial policy to suppress Onkwehonwe names. They wanted to eliminate the “savage” names of “Canada”. These ignoramuses didn’t even know that Canada is a Mohawk name for the land they’ve stolen. Even a lot of names like “St. Lawrence” that sound European were really lame attempts to articulate our place names.
They wanted the names to be English and French so that Canada would become a “white English country”!! “Quebec” means “strangers” in Algonquin. What could be stranger than Quebec’s claim to all Onkwehonwe territory on Turtle Island? Quebec will become "Pepe le Pu". Are they going to change Canada to a French name like “Poutine”, “Celine Dion” or “Déjà vu”? Is Quebec City going to become “Tabernack”? Is the Western Hemisphere going to be called “Menage a Trois”?
Then in 1970’s the United Nations set up a Permanent Commission on the Standardization of Geographical Names. At a 1987 meeting in Montreal, it was decided that all countries should collect and record the indigenous names for all parts of Inidgenous land. This was considered to be very important work because so many indigenous names are disappearing. Place names are the last words of a language to be lost. In 2007 all countries will be reporting their findings. Canada hasn’t done its homework again. So it wont have much to report. Like so many teenagers, they think they can bluff themselves out of jam!
In the 1960’s Canada decided they did not need this “name killing” policy anymore. They felt it had done its job. Besides, people decided Indigenous People were groovy, especially since they thought we had made us extinct. They think, “We have a few pickled specimens displayed in our museums somewhere”. Most Indigenous languages had been buried, they thought.
In Quebec the toponomers broke us down into linguistic groups and interviewed the elders. They did them all except the Mohawks. Surprise! Surprise! Why? Is it because the entire St. Lawrence Valley and the Great Lakes watershed is Rotinonhsonn’onwe/Iroquois, the city of Montreal is “Tio ni tio tia kon” in Mohawk, the City of Toronto is “Atoronto” and the province of Ontario is “Oniatario”, to name a few. Our names are tied to our areas. How did foreign names like “Paris”, “Hamilton”, “London” and “Buckingham” become North American? They tried to turn Turtle Island into a colonial fantasyland even before Walt Disney came on the scene.
We became popular specimens and white people started doing a lot of research. One enthusiastic young scholar developed a whole toponomical method for studying place names of small geographic features. After doing a lot of work that was approved by a French thesis supervisor, the research got the kibosh from an external examiner in Ottawa.
Demands were made to take out all Onkwehonwe place names and all references to the United Nations. This scholar told us, “We need to protect the original names of the territories from disappearing”. Someone from Ottawa said about the thesis, “All of that is shit! I don’t want to be part of your jury” [to help you get a Phd.] Another person from the university said, after reading the thesis, “Don’t ever talk to me again. Otherwise I will disqualify you from your thesis”. This scholar now has to find a new jury that is not racist.
In some cases the toponomy names are all that’s left to tie us to our land. Replacing them with names like “British Columbia”, “Cornwall”, “Chateauguay”, “Caledonia”, “Nova Scotia”, “New Brunswick”, “Trois Riviere”, and “Halifax”, to name a few, is part of a tactic to discredit our ties to the lands of our ancestors. They are trying to make people believe that Turtle Island was “empty” when they arrived. That will sound unbelievable when people find out that every single place had an Onkwehonewe name. Yes, toponomy is a precise science. To the invaders, killing off most of us is considered “high tech” sport and very precise!
Another doctoral candidate is having a similar problem. After eight years of researching the relationship between our people and Canada, it was obvious there was something strange going on. The work was on cognitive categories affecting decisions that are made on Indigenous issues by the Supreme Court of Canada. One thesis supervisor resigned in protest over the perspective that was taken without ever reading anymore than the introduction. Demands were made to remove key evidence. By studying the way brain pathways are set early in life, this scholar was able to explain why judges that make statements in defense of our rights go on to quash them. They think society will fall apart if the existing hierarchical system is not maintained. They think that law is based on blind obedience to command. The scholar was told to take out all references to aspects of British legal history that support our rights.
Onkwehonwe have always resisted colonialism. We see what it has done. The ecology is a disaster. People have come here from all over the world and turned our land into a toxic garbage dump. These lost souls are sick. They’re out of balance with nature and don’t know who their ancestors are.
Anyone with a passion for truth and academic rigor is going to get into trouble in a Canadian university, especially if they want to acknowledge the importance of the Indigenous people to our birthright. A prominent scholar who is well known for getting big grants from the Canadian government so she can study us, did one on the Mohawks of Kahnawake without ever visiting us. She published a misleading report, in French, for students to use in their studies.
The universities have always been the training ground for the pampered “elite” who are put in positions of control of colonial society. They just look at “Jesuit Relations” and other “refined” studies. That’s where the developers of the strategies of genocide and marginalization come from. Today students are no longer just from this “ruling class”. The universities are filling up with naïve descendants of displaced peoples from all over the world. Some have great academic success until they make the mistake of applying strict academic methodology to Canadian history and geography.
This brings them to our doorsteps. If they recognize our presence and our history of the post contact period, their careers go on the rocks. Their academic work is rejected. The website for the chair on Aboriginal Land at the University of Quebec at Montreal actually admits that “anyone who takes a position that supports aboriginal rights will be academically sidelined”. They won’t get grants to support the research and they won’t get hired.
The universities are not an oasis of academic freedom. The outside influences of the internet and elsewhere are out of their hands. Some students are actually going out and talking to people. Others are looking in the archives for themselves. Both the federal government and many religious orders are keeping documents hidden from the public because they don’t want people to know how well-founded our rights really are.
We have always expressed a policy to change all the colonial names of streets, towns, cities, provinces and everything to Onkwehonwe names. It may be confusing at first. This was done quite successfully in other parts of the world. For example, Spain tried to suppress Catalonia. In the 1960’s the simple act of buying a Catalan dictionary was an “under the counter” deal riskier than buying pot or porn. In the 1970’s it became legal to use Catalan again. It was taught in school. Places reverted to their original Catalan names.
For the last 30 to 40 years the French have been trying to take over Canada systematically. Charest’s remarks about the Americas “belonging to the French” falls in line with what was started in the 1960’s. For example, all public services have to be bilingual throughout Canada. Almost everywhere one has to be French speaking to get ahead.
When is someone going to tell Charest that colonialism is over! “The takeover of Turtle Island”, and the Americas for that matter, by the French is at the ready, says Charest. The British are rotten colonizers. The French are worse. Woe to us if they force the pre-revolutionary French mores on the people around us. The Quebecois like Charest aren’t satisfied turning Quebec into a feudal state. They want to drag all the colonists in the whole Western Hemisphere into 11th Century Europe with all of the 20th Century pollution they’ve created. We don’t even exist for them.
Spain still has control in south and central America, some of the most brutal colonizers in the world. Colonizers everywhere want to put more guns in the hands of the police and military. The governments they control are modeled after Fascist regimes that have a history of killing and marginalizing us. Toponomical censorship is a technique of cultural genocide. They want to eliminate every last trace of the tie of our ancestors and our future generations to our land.
Trouble makers like these scholars had better be careful. They are a problem to the agenda of the colonial states that are squatting on our land. It wouldn’t surprise us if these scholars were being spied upon by the mechanics of control like the police, army or secret police. Hitler needed the Gestapo, the army, the police and the propaganda to set up his terrorist state.
Kahentinetha Horn
MNN Mohawk Nation News