#J28 is International Day of Action for Idle No More movement.

I see a striking gap of understanding between poverty and wealth. The level of poverty seen through the  lens of the outsider is no match for the  mental consciousness lived within the neat rows of Canadian suburbia. Lived reality is something experienced only through the cultural lens of ones identity. What privilege lives on the other side of the lens, the viewer, the observer? What exists outside those lens, the missing parts of the story that puts it all together to make sense of it all? 

Poverty comes with a feeling, a gnawing, a hunger, a pang in the stomach, something that threatens and pulls at ones skin, distorting ones face, ones eyes. But then so does privilege. It comes with its own blinders, its own posturing. Both poverty and privilege, calling each other, unable to name the experience. 

Who are the Idle No More allies? I myself prefer the term ‘ally’ to ‘settler’, argue as you may. I see our allies, standing within the drumbeat,  with  a slight sense of uncertainty and discomfort-  but moving to the beat, feeling, sensing and believing. Commonality lives in moment, a belief in the residing relationship between humanity and the environment.

Who are the allies of the Idle No More movement? A believer in better democracy? Inner city residents? Public servants? Greens? Senior Citizens? Unions? hippies?   

The Lived reality bringing poverty and privilege together; there is another way, another way to live, another way to experience each other. This way exists in the higher structures of our indigenous languages, it lives in the stories of place, of being. It exists armed with only a song and a drum beat, that calls out an invitation to share and live a new reality, Idle No More.

I raise my hands