Cracked Earth and Chocked Voices: Exploring the Dynamics of Sustainability in the Narratives of Native Canadians

Canada’s Agenda 2030 aims towards the sustainable development of the nation and abroad. The agenda is a challenge for the Canadian government to advance equality and prosperity in the country by “leaving no one behind”. It means Canada wants to create an inclusive society by recognizing the rights of the country’s indigenous people. Sustainable development means economic developments without depletion of natural resources. The Canadian state policy which wants to progress by including the indigenous people must realize that nature is an integral part of the indigenous worldview. Indigenous people worship and value natural resources. Therefore, it becomes necessary to understand how indigenous people view Canada’s sustainable development. In this paper, I want to explore the dynamics of the role of sustainable development in the lives of the indigenous people of Canada. To analyze such an aspect I would focus primarily on the status of the natural resources of land and water in Canada and study it in relation to the worldview of native Canadians. The paper will focus both on literary texts and factual texts simultaneously to comprehend Canada’s aim for sustainable development. I would like to look into Jeannette Armstrong’s novel Whispering in Shadows to portray the meaning of nature in the indigenous worldview. Armstrong’s novel is a depiction of the effects of polluting “Mother Earth” and thereby questions the meaning of development in the colonizer’s capitalist society. Simultaneously I would go beyond the realms of literary texts and study videos and Facebook posts as texts on the digital platform. These digital texts record the actual experiences and emotions of the native Canadians to bring out facts and narratives that question Canada’s aim towards sustainable development. These facts will mainly concentrate on the land and water issues of Canada. For instance, a critical study will be done on the dichotomy in the sustainable procedure of carrying crude oil from under the earth's surface by the Trans Mountain pipeline and the Kinder Morgan But indigenous Canadians protesting against these pipelines bring out an alternative narrative that question Canada’s progress. To portray this alternative narrative, I would look into Facebook posts of indigenous Canadian people who voice protests on social media. The power of social media in the twenty-first century is undeniable and the Facebook posts can serve as texts to help us to investigate development from both the view-point of the state and the view-point of the indigenous people. Indigenous people of Canada also face the basic crisis of clean drinking water. Water means life to indigenous people and conserving water is part of “all their relations”. It is ironic that indigenous people who value water are unable to get their basic right to clean drinking water. The paper also aims to bring out the fissures in the Canadian government’s aim to provide clean water to indigenous people and the indigenous peoples fight towards claiming their right to clean water. The juxtaposition of the indigenous people’s protests against the state’s development projects and their fight against clean drinking water with Canada’s agenda towards sustainable development by 2030 questions the politics of including the indigenous people within the state-policies. In this paper, I thus wish to explore the dynamics in the politics of inclusions in building a sustainably developed nation-state, Canada.