The Doctrine of Discovery

Since the Doctrine of Discovery was issued by a Papal Bull in 1493, Western Europeans have used this document as legal justification for the genocide, colonization, extraction, and profit from the theft of land and its resources in what they called the New World.

Extraction Empire

Globally, more than 75% of prospecting and mining companies on the planet are based in Canada. Seemingly impossible to conceive, the scale of these statistics naturally extends the logic of Canada’s historical legacy as state, nation, and now, as global resource empire.

Canada’s Indian Reserve System served, officially, as a strategy of Indigenous apartheid (preceding South African apartheid) and unofficially, as a policy of Indigenous genocide (preceding the Nazi concentration camps of World War II).

This is mechanism for the Canadian genocide.

Marc Miller, Minister of Indigenous Services

Two years ago, the RCMP promised to modernize and reform its culture, to do better, and that Indigenous Peoples and their communities were entitled to the best there was of the RCMP. This is the minimum standard to be upheld. There is work to do.

A good white Canadian telling us how systemic racism works: through intransigent bureaucracy and the learned helplessness of its citizens as land theft and genocide on behalf of the Crown continues unabated.

Canada is racist.

The Indian Act is genocide.

You can tell by what they are not saying, “You are right. We stole this land. We had no right. We are giving it back and giving up our power, because we have neglected to fulfill our end of the treaties and promises. We have been getting rich off of your resources and we are paying back what we stole. That is the least that we can do.”

The mechanisms of our compliance with the dominant system are designed into the system:

• Social: learned helplessness (individuality)
• Economic: trained incapacities (specialization)
• Political: bureaucratic intransigence (authoritarianism)

Call It Democracy

A culture of learned helplessness, trained incapacities, and bureaucratic intransigence are the social, economic, and political mechanisms of coercion that have worked so effectively over 153 years to design, build, and maintain a genocidal, apartheid state.

The Canadian genocide operates on the basis of exclusion, division, and disempowerment:

• Social: learned helplessness
• Economic: trained incapacities
• Political: bureaucratic intransigence

Watch the Canadian Prime Minister make the argument that institutions such as the Federal Government of the Dominion of Canada and the Catholic Church are set in their ways and inherently resistant to change. Change does not come from institutions, designed to maintain the status quo.

If the issue of changing the name of a building in Parliament is going to take more conversation and more time, clearly time is on the side of Canada, but not on the side of the Indigenous Peoples. Democracy, capitalism, and constitutional monarchy are weapons of the state.

The goal of white supremacy is to disempower through the ongoing threat of violence to legitimize the social, economic, and political architecture designed to manufacture the consent of the governed to the rule of law and the Crown.

A culture of learned helplessness, trained incapacities, and bureaucratic intransigence are the social, economic, and political mechanisms of coercion that have worked so effectively over 153 years to design, build, and maintain a genocidal, apartheid state.

It is not possible to make incremental changes to a killing machine to mitigate the harms. The Nazi regime had to be dismantled. The Canadian genocide ends with the dismantling of the Canadian regime. Declare the claims of the Crown to the land illegitimate. #LandBack

The solution is simple. But white supremacy is about power. Letting go is hard. Until the mind of the White Supremacist changes, the public relations spectacles will continue, and the violence of the RCMP and the bureaucratic apartheid state will escalate genocide and ecocide.

Individualism and the illusion of legislative representation disempower the solidarity of collective action, enabling the public consent and complicity in the Canadian genocide with impunity. Change would require agreement, coordination, and collaboration.

We have a model for change that we can borrow from corporations that have weaponized collective consciousness, action, and governance. The design process has been proven as a successful model for global domination, monopolizing human time, energy, and resources.

However, with greater disillusionment in the promises of our institutions, we are experiencing multiple systemic failures, leaving us with deep dissatisfaction in the existing reality with no sense of a desirable, feasible, or viable alternative.

We are all designers. We can reclaim our power from the authoritarians to which we have abdicated our collective power. We can reclaim our social influence, economic capacity, and political agency. Indigenous History: Learning from the past to create a future that works for all

We invite people to collaborate with us in the process of changing the world by first changing ourselves through the process of design.

We are exploring how we imagine, design, and build the future together.

We will begin by recreating our own realities by starting with an understanding of our relationships with each other and to all living beings and to the universe of shared experiences in which we find ourselves.

We will begin with an appreciation of the complexity, diversity, and unity of this Creation that binds us to each other as neighbours and kin.

We acknowledge that we are living on the unceded territories of those who have lived on these lands from time immemorial. We seek to share the good things of this earth, taking only what is given, living in reciprocity by giving back more than what we have been given.

Design Professionals of Canada

DesCan invites you to participate and be part of the change.

I tried to be part of that change by focusing on the process of decolonizing design. However, it seems that the community was not ready for this approach, and I was excluded.

I have learned that exclusion zones are the modus operandi of Canadian social, economic, and political systems.