The Olympic Torch Relay came through Montreal yesterday. The festivities took place at the Jacques-Cartier square in the Old Port. There was a protest. In the article on the CBC website a statement announce that “riot police had to intervene Thursday night to push back protesters at celebrations marking the arrival of the Olympic torch.” I’m not sure that they had to intervene, but they did.
More troubling than that claim, however, were many of the comments that readers left in the comment section below that story, which were made primarily in response to the protesters’ cry: “no Olympics on stolen native land.” Like this one:
“Those protesters are the poorest loosers. Your great great great grandparents lost the battle and yet you still receive compensation and still whine! Protests like this keep the firm divide and racist rampant, they shouldn't be surprised that racism is so strong with silly protests like this. Should there be a protest about money going to reserves? That'd be racist right? It's a double edged sword, except one side is as sharp as a butter knife.”
which at the time of writing this article had been approved 31 times and disapproved 7.
or this one:
“Just get over it already. All land on this little blue ball has been stolen time and time again. We should be more worried about how our sovereignty has been stolen by private bankers and big corps. Lobbyists have stolen our politicians, Americans are stealing our water, China is stealing our fish, at some point you have to let it go and watch some olympic Hockey - GO CANADA!”
which was approved 95 times and disapproved 17.
or this one:
“"No Olympics on stolen native land."??????
This really makes me angry.
This is MY LAND too; and I encourage International sport competition on it.
How disrespectful of these protesters!
I normally encourage human rights protests but this one has absolutely no clear or logical objective.
Thank you for reading.”
which was approved 32 times to 8 disapprovals. All of the comments that seemed reasonable to me, received overwhelming amounts of reader disapproval. Other popular comments on the message board involved mindless Quebec bashing. The Olympics seem to represent some kind of powerful if mixed-up symbol for many people in this country, as does the issue of Indigenous rights and when their beliefs are challenged they gut-react with a kind of mean-spirited, racist anger - an anger that need not be well articulated because it is dominant and powerful.
The protesters began gathering around 5:30 PM. Jacques-Cartier square was full of lights and tents for various olympic sponsors - Coca Cola, Royal Bank of Canada and so on.
Early on one person was tackled by the police and taken away because he had tipped over a large, round Coca Cola bin and was banging it with its lid.
Other people stood around, eagerly awaiting the arrival of the Torch. They waved their Canadian flags and their Coca-Cola flags that said “open happiness” and beat their plastic tambourines decorated with the Royal Bank of Canada Logo. Many were confused and irritated that Protesters were possibly going to disrupt the party by whining about whatever their grievances were.
Most of the people, at least as far as my own experience indicates, do not know very much about the Olympics and generally have a good feeling about them. They associate the Games with international cooperation, peace and the payoff of hard work. That alone would be enough to turn me off of them, but it is also not really true. They have a strong legacy of rights violations and misappropriated funds. This is true to such an extent that they were investigated by the UN for human rights violations a few years ago.
In Vancouver it is now against the law to display any signs that don’t reflect positively on the Olympics. Homeless people must go into shelters when the police order it and a recent news article reported that homeless people are being bused out of the city as also happened there for the 1986 Expo.
The “no Olympics on stolen native land” slogan is meant to bring attention to the fact that despite the Games’ massive appropriation of Indigenous imagery for promotional purposes, the governments of British Columbia and Canada refuse to acknowledge their historical and continuing colonial role. Despite the profitable rhetoric and imagery that British Columbia and Canada like to show everyone about multi-culturalism and respect for Indigenous peoples, the fact remains that Vancouver is located on land for which no treaties were ever signed, that many Indigenous peoples continue to live in poverty, that the government is largely unrepentant about the ethnic-cleansing they conducted against them for centuries, contentious developments related to the Games are happening on Indigenous territory, and since they are not economically useful to dominant settler society, they are given little real support.
But mentioning any of that seems to amount to little more than whining and nay-saying, in light of peoples’ desire to experience the Olympics for two weeks and feel good...
For a while the protesters held the area in front of the main stage, until about half an hour before the torch runner arrived, when all of them, along with whoever else happened to be standing near them, were forced against a wall and surrounded by riot police. No one was permitted outside of this cordon once it was established. A panicked looking rich woman tried to bargain with the officers. Initially she was denied. Eventually she was let out and so was I because I had been standing beside some people with Coke and Canadian flags and so seemed less threatening because of that.
The rest of the people remained encircled by the police until the event was over. The flame arrived. On the large screen played a montage of torch footage - images of Canadian runners and then what looked to be a scene from Leni Riefenstahl's famous Nazi propaganda film about the 1936 olympics -only with the seig hailing crowd edited out from the background. This was later confirmed to be true by a CBC report. There was a choir and an African band. At every spectacle like this that I have ever been to there is always a choir and some kind of Ethnic presentation. The choir is supposed to represent unity and the the Ethnic musicians or dancers show understanding or something. This is part of the message of hope that invariably, every one of these events will be trying to spread. At the end the presenter told the crowd that they had now taken part in a piece of history. I imagined them at some point in the future thinking about the time that they had taken part in history.
All the while, no one seemed to have any interest in the protesters or the police who all just waited quietly in their dark corner.
Instead whoever remained once the flame had been passed on went to watch the DJ with the glowing hat, the choreographed dancers and the fireworks.
Then the protesters were dispersed in the direction away from the crowd. A bystander asked me what was going on and I said that there had been a protest against the Olympic ceremony.
“That’s kind of mean, isn’t it,” one of them said to me. I didn’t respond.
