Peter Knighton or John Shafer
Office of the Hereditary Chief
Independent State of Qwa-Ba-Diwa
Information Office (Canada)
P.O. Box 35015
Victoria, BC
V8T 5G2
Canada
Terri John
Lil'Wat Peoples Movement
P.O. Box 79
Mount Currie, BC
V0N 2K0
=======================================
Qwa-Ba-Diwa
The Sovereign Nation of Qwa-Ba-Diwa is an independent,
indigenous nation on the South-West coast of Vancouver Island
which is asserting jurisdiction over approximately 2500 square
kilometres of ancestral territory.
One of the most impressive remaining examples of ancient
temperate rainforest, including the magnificent, awe-inspiring
Carmanah-Walbran valleys, Qwa-Ba-Diwa is under attack from
multi-national logging companies Fletcher-Challenge, MacMillan
Bloedel and their contractor, Pat Carson Bulldozing.
Home since time immemorial to the Qwa-Ba-Diwa people, this
exceptional coastal rainforest contains some of the oldest and
tallest trees in creation. These majestic forests support the
greatest diversity of wildlife anywhere on the continent,
including the only conclusively identified breeding site of the
marbled murrelet, now officially designated as threatened by
extinction by the destruction of its old growth habitat.
Operating under licences illegally granted by the Province
of British Columbia, with the knowledge and profit of Canada, the
ruthless, avaricious and rapacious appropriation of Qwa-Ba-Diwa
must be stopped. To this end, the traditional Qwa-Ba-Diwa
leadership has returned to their land from which they were
removed by the Federal Department of Indian Affairs to resume the
burden that the Hereditary Chiefs Nytom are charged to protect,
forever.
Many native nations have not consented to the surrender of
their sovereignty by signing a treaty, which is the precondition
for the exercise of jurisdiction by foreign non-native
governments. This colonialist usurpation is fraudulent,
treasonous and genocidal. Canada and the Province of British
Columbia are bound to respect the independence of Qwa-Ba-Diwa.
In practice, however, these foreign governments continue their
shameful oppression of native peoples.
The United Nations Human Rights Commission studying Canada's
treatment of the Lubicon Lake Cree in Alberta concluded that
"effective redress is not possible within existing legal or
political institutions". The international indigenous advocacy
organization, INCOMINDIOS, considers Canada "one of the last
colonial countries". Amnesty International has stated that
"Canada's treatment of aboriginal peoples is barbaric."
We native and non-natives who are working with sovereign
native nations are appealing for your help. We receive no funds
from anyone but the public, and from our own hard work. All
peoples will be welcome to the protected lands of Qwa-Ba-Diwa to
enjoy its immense beauty and spirit, but right now it is
unprotected, and is now being logged. We need activist support
now!
Write your politician and tell them to recognize the
independent statehood of Qwa-Ba-Diwa, demand that existing Law be
addressed, demand a halt to the ecocide of the last old-growth,
and call for immediate nation-to-nation negotiations with ours
and other sovereign nations. Thank You for your support.
"Soon my people's lives will be lived out in a wasteland of
devastated forest, rather than in a paradise. This must not be.
Stop this monstrous sacrilege, this holocaust of nature, this
final act of genocide in the spiritual destruction of my people."
His-tah-too-qwa Nytom
AKA Peter Knighton.
Donations: Please make cheques and money orders payable to
"Qwa-Ba-Diwa Defense Fund", care of the Independent State of
Qwa-Ba-Diwa Information Office (Canada), P.O. Box 35015,
Victoria, BC, Canada, V8T 5G2.
Visitor, Participation, or Media inquiries welcome.
Kleco, Kleco
(Thank You)
============================================
DECLARATION
Re:Ecocide as Genocide
We, Ketl-leel-mecum, Terri John, Loretta Thomas, Peter Knighton,
Ray Pierre, Marion Lee, Sandie Daniels, Henry Sauls, and
Tsemhu7qw, native persons inhabiting ancestral homelands of the
Pacific North West beyond the treaty frontier, SOLEMLY DECLARE AS
FOLLOWS:
1.The ethno-biological continuity of life as our ancestors knew
it is at the point of no return throughout the Pacific North
West. The systematic alteration of the ecology in which our
autochthonous cultures flourish correspondingly, inevitable and
self-evidently entails the systematic destruction of the
continuity of our human cultural identity--for the character of
our human cultural identity is by definition dependent upon
continuity of the bio-cultural identity of our forests.
2.Materialism and spiritualism are not opposing and antagonistic
forces in our native culture. Rather, over the eons they have
been reconciled in an equilibrium. That equilibrium is maintained
by our paramount cultural value: respect. In our culture, the
goal is to take from the material world enough to survive not
only as physical beings but also as spiritual beings. In
contrast, we observe that in the non-native culture surrounding
us enough is not enough. More is better. We observe that
materialism and spiritualism are opposing and antagonistic forces
in that non-native culture.
3.Our ancestors taught that this was not our business to try and
change. Ours was to accept the world basically as we find it, and
to leave to Mother Nature and to the Creator the education of
this rapacious new race of people overrunning our homeland. Our
principle of respect meant that it was not up to us to dictate to
the whites how to live. Instead, our principle of respect led our
ancestors to adopting a live-and-let-live survival strategy with
the transplanted race of europeans who came to occupy our
country. Respect means coexistence in a relationship of peace and
friendship--with all beings and things--and indeed there is not
crucial difference between beings and things, for everything that
exists is entitled to respect.
4.The Kings and Queens as the hereditary guardians of England and
on behalf of the transplanted race agreed to conform with our
principle of respect. As a matter of law the respect was to be
mutual and universal. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 confirmed
for all time that "the several Nations or Tribes of Indians with
whom We are connected and who live under our Protection should
not be molested or disturbed in the Possession of such Parts of
Our Dominions and Territories as not having been ceded to or
purchased by Us are reserved to tham or any of them as their
Hunting Grounds."
5.Today we observe that in practice the respect paid to this
agreed law has not been mutual. We gave our word. The whites gave
their word in writing. We have kept our word. They have broken
their writing. In terms of the Proclamation, we have not
"molested or disturbed" the whites. But they have both "molested"
and "disturbed" us. The crucial point, for legal purposes, is
that this breakage was carried out, in practice, by local white
governments which did not possess the jurisdiction to repeal or
to amend the paramount law enacted by the Imperial government.
Thus the breakage of the paramount law describes the fraud,
treason and genocide committed by the legal and political
establishment of local government rather than a change in that
paramount law.
6. In consequence, the whites and their native collaborators are
not so much governing us as attacking us--treating us as
squatting trespassers in our own homelands, destroying our
forests, killing our people. Under the smoke screen of crimes
masquerading as federal and provincial laws the whites are waging
a war of physical and psychological intervention and attrition
upon us. systematically we have been physically killed, infected
with diseases, beaten, imprisoned, threatened and sexually preyed
upon. We are psychologically held up to contempt and ridicule,
patronized, brainwashed, bribed, corrupted, threatened, and then
criminalized for trying to defend ourselves. Their lawyers and
politicians, who should uphold the paramount law, are effectively
their generals and their police their storm troopers in the
unremitting campaign to take everything and leave us nothing.
Although it is all illegal, immoral and unjust, nevertheless the
usurpation of our native jurisdiction to govern ourselves as a
free people in a free land continues. Today, the white judges are
the commandants of our concentration camps--the reservations onto
which we are herded and from which we are forced to watch through
the fence of chicanery the invasion, clearcutting, pollution and
tortured death of the body of our Mother, the Earth, our home and
native land.
7.By casting nets across the mouths of our rivers the ancestors
of the whites taught our ancestors they could break the
continuity of our salmon runs, and starve us into submission. By
having their priests and ministers promise us everlasting life
they grouped us around churches, and thereby broke the cyclic
patters of our economy. By outlawing our potlatches they broke
the legal, economic, political and social ties that bound our
people holistically as nations. By kidnapping our children and
beating their native languages out of them in residential and
white schools they brainwashed our culture out of existence. By
apprehending our children and giving them to whites they broke
the family unit. By the whites' systematic removal or prohibition
of alternative life support economies, native Elders have been
made physically dependent for survival upon white social welfare
payments, and in consequence many live in constant terror that by
speaking out against white tyranny natives in general and
themselves in particular will be deprived of the necessaries of
life. By training our children to be contemptuous of the ways of
their parents the white establishement inculcated in our children
a mirror image of the whites' sickness of racist ideology,
thereby turning native against native, and by this means
perpetuating the genocide to the point where today we stand at
the brink of the plunge to the whites' final solution to the
problem we constitute for them by our very existence and
persistence. Today if remains the Indian Act system, with its
network of nepotism, syncophancy to bureaucrats, and economic
manipulation of a people reduced to abject dependency, that
carries on the genocidal tyranny of the white master
race--through the medium of the fostered "band" and "reserve"
mentality of the priviledged class of native collaborators: the
Indian Act elected "chiefs" and councillors. Being appointed by
these puppets, the paid Indian task force members and
constitutional negotiators active in the Canadian constitutional
revision process are fifth columns. thus even the process of
reform is prejudiced by the white system's monolithic and
omnipresent usurpation of the connective relationships between
persons and property--a usurpation that leaves no alternative to
survival. Compared to Esson, Harcourt and Mulroney, Hitler is a
crude amateur. White Canada and British Columbia have made a
painstakingly "civilized" and refined art of the same end process
that the Nazis overzealously hurried.
8.In furtherance of their legal and political position the above
persons have, in several distinct proceedings both in the
domestic law and in the international law systems of the
non-native race, focused the legal issue upon the prima facie
ultra vires character of the Indian Act and of the Supreme Court
Act under paramount natural, international and constitutional
law, and upon the genocidal consequences to native society of the
breach of the said existing paramount law. That is, since our
lands are beyond the treaty frontier therefore the federal and
provincial governments have no jurisdiction. The whole legal
point of the treaty process is precisely that it is the means
specified by the Imperial government whereby local governments
can acquire jurisdiction in relation to the yet unceded Indian
territory, including the Pacific North West which is specifically
designated "Indian territory" in all of the crucial
constitutional legislation referable to what is now called
British Columbia. The The point is that some of British Columbia,
where treaties have been made, is within the treaty frontier. As
to those parts the whites have, in virtue of those treaties,
acquired jurisdiction. As to the rest of the Pacific North West,
it remains for constitutional purposes unceded "Indian
territories". White, that is federal and provincial, jurisdiction
does not exist in such Indian territories--that is the whole
point of the term as used in the constitutional legislation. In
these circumstances none of the federal acts, like the Indian Act
and the Criminal Code, apply to the part beyond the treaty
frontier, which is the part we are concerned with today.
similarly none of the provincial legislation, such as the
Wildlife Act and the Land Titles Act, and the Crown Lands Act,
applies either. Most importantly of all, the legislation
governing the non-native courts does not apply, for exactly the
same reason the other legislation does not apply. That is, since
the federal and provincial legislatures do not have jurisdiction
themselves they can not possibly vest jurisdiction in the courts
they create. If they could, their courts could in virtue of the
interpretive monopoly over the dispute resolution process be able
to achieve indirectly the illegal result the legislatures
creating them could not achieve directly. for this reason, the
very process of non-native courts exercising jurisdiction beyond
the treaty frontier is inherently illegal. What is more, since
for practical purposes it results in the shifting of control of
the tax authority and resource use from natives to whites it is
fraudulent. Since that particular form of fraud is deemed by the
Royal Proclamation to be contrary to the Queen's military
interest and security, the fraud is treasonable. since the fraud
and the treason have genocidal consequences, therefore the
wrongful exercise of jurisdiction breaches the Convention for the
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 1948.
The immediate purpose of this declaration is to have
existing law straightforwardly addressed, respected and
implemented. This entails pursuading the very legal establishment
that is the brains behind the crime to indict and to convict
itself. This may take time. In the meantime, the genocide and
complicity in genocide of out native culture and hence our native
people will continue. For this reason, our second objective
herein is to persuade the fist that beats the people down in the
field to pull some punches. We have to believe that the Royal
Canadian Mounted Police has some officers who would prefer to be
the strong arm of the forces of good rather than of evil, of law
rather than of anti-law. We ask them independently to assess
this our declaration and the existing law upon which it is based.
We ask that having done so they seek to persuade their own
colleagues not to blow upon the smoldering holocause, for without
their life giving breath the fire of genocide would go out. They
key to humanity's great promise, Never Again, is the realization
"Just Following Orders" is no defence.
AND WE MAKE THIS SOLEMN DECLARATION conscientiously, asking
the Great Spirit to bear witness and to hold us accountable for
the truth of its contents, and instructing that it be entered in
courts of law, native and non-native, to be accorded the same
force and effect as if made by virtue of legislation regulating
oaths and declarations.
SEVERALLY DECLARED for foreign and non-native court purposes
before me in the Indian Territory beyond the treaty frontier this
29th day of May, 1992.
=======================================
CARMANAH, MY CARMANAH
I am His-tah-too-kwa, spokesman for my brother Cha-baht Nytom
and all our forefathers called Cha-baht Nytom, in whose trust
the Creator placed the ownership and care of Carmanah. The
human people of Carmanah, the Qwa-ba-diwa, like the winged
people of the air, the furred people of the land, the finned
people of the water, the tree people, the stone people, and
all else that makes Camanah what She is--our Mother
Earth--constitute the burden that the hereditary Chiefs Nytom
are charged to carry, to protect, forever.
The hereditary Chief of the English land and people
pledged his honour to help the hereditary Chiefs Nytom of
Carmanah fulfill the great protection trust imposed by the
creator upon all such hereditary servants of the Mother Earth
and all Her peoples, human and non-human, animate and
inanimate, past present and future.
The Queen of England has forgotten the immortal trust to
which our honour is jointly pledged, and must now be reminded.
My mission now is to place the law that binds the Crown
of England and Canada before the International Court of
Justice and before the Queen's Imperial Privy Council, so that
these high guardians of the rule of law can remind the Crown
of of its duty. the International law of the world, the
constitional law of Europe, England and Canada, the native law
of Carmanah--these three speak with one voice, in
harmony--they tell us the rule of law requires humankind to
respect the great trust imposed by the Creator to care for our
Mother the Earth.
The federal government of Canada and the provincial
government of British Columbia break the rule of law. In 1880
the federal Parliament legislatively created an artificial
political concept, and called it the Indian Act "band". Its
function was to compete with and eventually to drive out of
existence the traditional native government. Thus, one Indian
Act section expressly deems it illegal for Hereditary Chiefs
to speak whenever the "band" should speak. This domestic law
of Canada and the puppet governments it established was, and
remains, illegal. It breaches the Queen's constitutional
undertaking to respect the integrity of native traditional
government until such time as a treaty should be made between
the Crown of England and the Chief, Cha-baht Nytom. No such
treaty in accordance with the mandatory provisions of
international and constitutional law has ever been concluded.
Carmanah lies beyond the treaty frontier.
Fraudulently, treasonably and genocidally the federal and
provincial governments have since 1880 through a program of
monetary bribes persuaded these unconstitutional puppet band
governments to speak, whenever non-native society wanted to
steal the resources of Mother Earth from their true protector:
Cha-baht Nytom. This is irrelevant to the legal status of
Carmanah and Her resources. For though the voices of
Qwa-ba-diwa, the human people of Carmanah, and their Chief,
Cha-baht Nytom, have been drowned out by the pathetic duet
between the "band" and its master, the federal government.
the "band" has not a spoonfull of dirt it can call its own.
Not owning Carmanah, it cannot extinguish the Creator's trust
invested in Cha-baht Nytom forever to preserve Carmanah.
Most recently the federal and provincial governments are
promoting an obscene scheme to leave a ribbon of rainforest
along the west coast of Vancouver Island. Beyond this ribbon
the rainforest will be clearcut and obliterated, through to
the east coast of Vancouver Island, within years that can be
counted upon the fingers of one hand. My heart breaks. My soul
rebels.
Soon my people's lives will be lived out in a wasteland
of devastated rainforest, rather than in a paradise. This must
not be. For this reason, I now call upon the guardians of the
rule of law, the International Court of Justice and Her
Majesty's Imperial Privy Council, to stop this monstrous
sacrilege, this holocaust of nature, this final act of
genocide in the sprititual destruction of my people.
This is my duty, my life, my meaning. I have no other
choice.
Dated January 28, 1992 at Zantbachli, Tschingel ob Gunten,
Switzerland.
His-tah-too-kwa
AKA "Peter Knighton"
============================END=============================