On Sunday, August 8, Ward Churchill was the keynote speaker at the 15th annual Under the Volcano: Festival of Art and Social Change, Celebrating Peoples Resistance to War, Occupation and Empire, Vancouver, British Columbia.

Hello my relatives, it’s good to see you here. And isn’t here a beautiful place, and isn’t this a beautiful day? It is my honour to be here in this corner of illegally occupied America along with you. Before I go into what is it I have to say, I have to bring you greetings from the elders of the Keetoowah Band of Cherokee, my people, and from the Colorado chapter of the American Indian Movement of which I am a part, and from Gwarth-ee-Lass, otherwise known as Leonard Peltier, who today as I speak to you continues to sit in a cage at the federal maximum security prison at Leavenworth, Kansas; not for anything anyone including even his prosecutor at any point in the past twenty years has been prepared to say that they actually believe he did. But rather as a symbol of the arbitrary ability of the federal government of the United States to repress the legitimate aspirations to liberation of indigenous peoples within its claimed boundaries. And there’s a difference between a claim and a reality, and that difference is why Leonard is there.

The difference between that claim and that reality is why I say that this is illegally occupied land. British Columbia was never ceded by the indigenous people who own it; it is still their land. It is burdened under the oppressive weight of colonial laws. But we’re all here to oppose a vast variety of things. We’re to embrace one another, we’re to embrace this day, we’re to embrace this festival, but we embrace in opposition, we embrace in opposition to imperialism. We embrace in opposition to racism; we embrace in opposition to ageism, and classism and sexism. We’ve got lots of ‘isms’ and they’re accompanied by ‘ologies’ and we’re opposing the lot. And we do it in a random fashion, don’t we? Each of us has our own little pet project, our own little organization, and we run off and that’s the most important thing in the world and we don’t understand the nature of our opposition, to what it is we oppose. So let’s see if we can get a little clarification on the table here about how this process works.

Because its all coming under a rubric of what they now call globalization, and globalization is a word that’s trotted around like it was new, like the reinvention of the wheel, like that was something new, different, novel, and unique, that needs to be understood in terms exclusive to itself. And I want to break this down two ways. It reminds me of something I was taught by an elder who was very important to me, on the Pine Ridge reservation back about 20-25 years ago. Well, a while longer than that…It was told to me by a person by the name of Matthew King. That was the formal given name, he signed the paperwork, and the government brought out “Noble Red Man