FSA Statement on National Indigenous Peoples Day, June 21
June 15, 2023
The FSA celebrates the resistance, courage, and history of Indigenous Peoples on the lands that became BC and Canada. In particular, while stories of Indigenous labour organizing are often ignored in our national conversation, these histories provide us with important examples of the intersecting structures of exploitation and racism that Indigenous working people continue to face.
In BC, the work of Indigenous Peoples was crucial in what became the province’s coal mines, fishing and canneries, transportation, and longshore labour, to name only a few colonial industries. Without this labour, the project of making BC would have been simply impossible at that time.
Yet the labour of Indigenous Peoples was hardly passive. A recent essay on Indigenous labour struggles notes that “once Native people took up wage work for non-Native employers, their work was significant in building the infrastructure of Canada and the U.S. – and they fought against exploitation and racism on the job.” This included strikes against racially discriminatory licensing practices in the Vancouver area.
Indigenous workers routinely refused colonial exploitation in order to continue historic social practices and asserted their sovereignty over the land and the minerals beneath it. “Indigenous people were,” as well, “often active in unions and in strike actions,” writes the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. Indigenous Peoples even provided food to the families of striking settlers during the first job action by an industrial labour force in BC, in the early 1850s at the north end of Vancouver Island, amid threats by colonial managers.
These histories of solidarity and resistance are ones that inspire the FSA, including our current bargaining goals with the employer, as we attempt to make gains for Indigenous members, and in the recent establishment of the FSA’s Indigenous Advisory Circle. Much work remains to be done at BCIT, but the FSA is proud to fight for justice for Indigenous Peoples while reckoning with the past and the ugly truths of colonial capitalism.