Last Wednesday, native rights activist Ward Churchill asked a capacity audience of over 500 at U of T to consider what makes a child of five want to inhale gasoline. He then asked them to consider what would make seven out of ten children in a community want to.

He was describing the First Nations population of North Manitoba five years ago, where 70 per cent of children under age 12 inhaled toxins that they not only knew to cause permanent damage, but that they knew to be fatal.

Churchill is an enrolled Keetoowah/Cherokee and Professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is a member of the Leadership Council of Colorado AIM and former national spokesperson for the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee. He is the author of A Little Matter of Genocide, Struggle for Land and Pacifism as Pathology.

After being held up from his last visit due to the events of September 11, Churchill greeted a lively audience at OISE. His strong knowledge of academic rhetoric was scathingly undercut with biting criticism. His mission for the night was not to conduct a lecture. Rather, he saw himself “planting seeds, nothing more.”

He took up the topic of globalization by asking whether it was a new phenomenon. The title of the night was “Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss: Globalization, Genocide and Resistance.”

He spoke of an American past rooted in the acquisition of profit. “Columbus went out for gold and greed,” he said, not in the name of science. He then described North America as the hub of globalization, and turned his attention to the effects that globalizing powers have had on the indigenous population of Canada and the US, then and now.

Churchill told the audience that the use of the term “post-colonial” to describe present-day North America is a “slick sleight of hand.”

“When my people are decolonized we will talk about post-colonialism,” he said, pointing out that no native scholar, to his knowledge, uses the common academic term.

He appealed to those opposed to corporate globalization to prioritize their forms of protest. Before the songs, the demonstrations and the coalitions, restore self–determining rights to native people, said Churchill.

“You have to decolonize native North America, priority number one.”