Photo Credit: No2010.com

While many aboriginals in Canada are joining in the celebrations and taking part enthusiastically in Olympic planning and promoting, there is a group in Vancouver who stand firm in their opposition of the games saying they are “big business at the expense of the natural world.” The Olympics Resistance Network (ORN) established in Vancouver and mainly based in the Coast-Salish territories is focusing its efforts on stopping the holding of Olympic games on stolen native land.

The ORN holds that “BC is unique in Canada in that most of the province is unceded, non-surrendered Indigenous territories,” and that promotional and Olympic construction on this land (especially in the mountains) desecrates and disrespects sacred indigenous land. “The mountains, pure & undisturbed, are essential to the survival of all people…The mountains are the most spiritual place for us,” the ORN stated.

In addition to their most-touted line: “No Olympics on Stolen Land,” many ORN members are angry at what they are calling the misuse of funds. To them, the billions of dollars being spent getting Whistler and Vancouver ready for the Olympics is a slap in the face while poverty-stricken first nations people are “paying with their lives with inadequate housing and health care.”

On the ORN website, organizers are going so far as to actually call for a cross country mobilization to “extinguish the Olympic torch,” calling it a symbol for greedy corporations to invade native territories with the help of the government.

Over the years leading up to the Olympics, the ORN has been doing more than just distributing pamphlets and posting blogs on their website. In 2003, a Secwepemc delegation traveled to Switzerland to make a formal complaint to the IOC, informing them of ongoing violations of Indigenous & human rights in this country.

The ORN is pushing hard for the accomplishment of their aims. At the extreme, these goals include something that most people will agree will never happen – the return of what they call stolen indigenous territories that make up most of British Columbia. As much as this may seem like a fair solution, it’s clearly not a solution that will ever be reached. I believe the ORN’s most viable prospect for success will be whether the money and efforts the government is putting into the preservation and celebration of aboriginal culture today (in ORN’s opinion a ploy to buy aboriginal support for the Olympics) continues after the thrill of the games has come and gone.

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Tags: 2010 vancouver winter olympics, aboriginals, First Nations, protest

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 6th, 2010 at 8:42 pm and is filed under Olympics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.