After meeting Marilyn James and spending even a modicum of time in her spiritual enlightening presence, it’s obvious to anyone paying proper attention that she is the ultimate Matriarch in the place of the bull trout, and that those who wish to honour the truth of this colonized realm should respect her voice and instructions because she is speaking the words of her ancestors via the land itself who have been here since at least a thousand years before that mythical guy named Jesus Christ was ever born.
Far too many aristocratic WASPy settlers in and around the White Heritage City spend way too much time belittling the matriarch of the Autonomous Sinixt because they feel in their infinite arrogance that she is too angry, or that she presents her case in argumentative ways, or that she uses inappropriate language that makes it too uncomfortable for them and their misogynistic cohort to handle the harsh truths and rightful rage in her magisterial wisdom and inherent benevolence. Any supposed progressive do-gooder who is non-Indigenous and tries to unwisely get involved with decreeing which other First Nations have the right to supplant Marilyn and her peoples’ rightful claims that have been proven by cultural anthropology is playing an imperious part in the oligarchic racket whether they know it or not.
Trustworthy Marilyn James, the Autonomous Sinixt & their resilient ancestors have every right to be angry with an anglophile mob unwilling to recognize the inalienable powers invested in the people of the Frog to guide and decide what goes on in these landscapes, waterways & airsheds, which them and their descendants have protected and stewarded since time immemorial. When the anti-Indigenous usurpers of devious Nelsonia and their complicit schemers in its billionaire-friendly political media scene (such as the Kooky Mountain Cultists) refuse to treat the ongoing designation of the Sinixt as extinct (by the sneaky Canamerican cartel that ransacks these sacred headwaters and misnames an insipid podcast after their hereditary beauty) like it’s the most important story and budgetary focus that ever was in the Valley of the Lost Souls, they inadvertently reveal their fascistic tendencies to lord white male power over those they deem beneath them, instead of doing what they should morally do to help the besieged First Nation at all costs in the name of justice and reconciliation.
When the opportunistic ringleaders at Shitty Hall and the gangster Capitalist Theatre conspire with their delusional ilk to deny and defy the justified authority of the Autonomous Sinixt to influence events on the local stage and beyond, let alone engage in meaningful consultation over all forms of civic and regional governance such as wildfire management and fishing policies, etc., these corrupt goons backed by the armed enforcers of financial might are perpetuating the cycle of violent gaslighting and systemic repression being perpetrated by the industrial titans who’ve been ruining this slice of paradise since before the atomic age, which they continue to aggravate with their robbery of material resources and theft of right-of-ways that were never theirs to squander and steal.
The Columbus Basin Distrust and their complicit grant-giving subsidiaries may be doing some ill-begotten good by funding the Blood of Life Collective which stands up for the Autonomous Sinixt through a helpful settler and Indigenous collaboration, but the CBT’s cataclysmic dams that flooded all the pithouses and burial grounds of those who were here well before colonization generate billions of annual bucks for the authoritarian forces that do their damndest to suppress our local Indigenous and deprive them of their rightful place at the head of the societal table. Passive-aggressive Nelsonia is the kind of monarchic enclave for white supremacists that can put up a sign at its industrially corroded Cottonwood Creek which unknowingly admits how they’re failing to restore the kokanee salmon which sustained the Autonmous Sinixt for millennia, even while the corporate villains are unethically asserting their dominion over the degraded body of water and completely ignoring the Indigenous’ essential role in rectifying this institutional farce that has proven to be an outright tragedy.
So if you’re non-Indigenous and you have a social conscience, next time you hear some yokel redneck or conservative right-winger in yuppie disguise badmouth Marilyn James or anyone affiliated with the heroic survivors from the Autonomous Sinixt, make sure you check their great white settler’s privilege and remind them how our supreme Matriarch’s enduring occupation of Crown land is the longest in Canamerica, and that the reason it’s been permitted to go on for so long by the aggro minions of Brutish Colonia is because no-one can prove that she doesn’t have every right to be there, behaving exactly as she pleases, in league with her generous ancestors and their ancient peaceful ways which were exploited and denigrated by the ruthless conmen of then and today.
It is great to see Marilyn practicing her Smum iem, which is described on the Autonomous Sinixt website at sinixt.org as, “the traditional governance body of Autonomous Sinixt. This means we retain the right to make decisions for ourselves rather than the governments of Canada, British Columbia, the USA or the Band Council systems created by these colonial governments. We were tasked by the Creator to look after our unceded, ancestral təmxʷúlaʔxʷ (homeland) and all within it for future generations. We have carried out this duty for thousands of years. We continue to uphold our traditional laws of whuplakn and smum iem by working to protect and preserve the land and water, cultural sites and the distinct dialect – Snslxcin spoken by our ancestors. We also work hard to protect our ancestors themselves”.
On behalf of forstmedia.ca, “we would like to acknowledge that we live and work on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of Sinixt Peoples. We make this acknowledgment to show our respect for the tmxʷulaʔxʷ (homeland), and Sinixt Nation. We feel privileged and grateful to be here, and we invite those reading this to explore their own relationship to place”.