A Mother's Gentle Tongue or The Fast and The Furious

On the day that I picked up the first hard copies of my book, Just Business, February 15, I dropped two off at the Lakehead University Student Association's Aboriginal Awareness office. The young man was enthusiastic. He assured me that he would read one copy and give the other to a close friend to read.

So, I returned on March 7,  after travelling through three large provinces of this large nation. What I encountered is recorded below. It still astounds me that words can be easily dismissed in these "institutions of education".

So, think about this.

I was inspired to focus on writing this book after I thought about the demonstrations and blockades that started to pop up across a nation called Canada in 2006. I was inspired after I had worked for years in First Nation communities. There I had heard that the words of elders and mothers must be respected.

But, what words?

The word of the gentle mother? Or of the mothers who began to be praised in the First Nation communications that I began to read in that year? And does race then become the sole determining factor for what mothers we should listen to?

Ironically, the record of 2006 was that mothers with the courage to stand against oppression and exclusion were to be lauded. So, what of the words of the lady who, in the fall of 2010, despairs that things will not change "until violence erupts"? What of the words of the mother in 2011, who held the hand of her dying husband while knowing that the multi-millionaire, who had created the working conditions where he breathed in powdered formaldehyde, built grand castles to his being? What of her angry words that she, a once peacefilled person, was ready to take up a gun? What of the words of the mother, who has withdrawn from politics because she perceives all politicians as crooks and liars?

These are things that I was taught that we needed to write fast, and furiously, about, to stop the reasons for such despair in their tracks.

So, read the extracts of the letters that went, fast and furious, in recent days, to the entrenched and the arrogant. Visit the open letters to citizens and the local First Nation members posted on the Downloads page for more commentary. And, especially, take the time to read the Final Corollary posted at the book's web pages.

Then tell me why we continue to tolerate all of this illegal hypocrisy while we applaud distant nations when their brave citizens stand against stuff like this. Forced to because bullets start to fly.

Because the free word first is made insignificant by the pompously positioned and their appointed.