e come together for Mayworks and May Day strong in our conviction to building lasting alliances and strong communities.

Mayworks' theme this year is connection working class struggles. We see the anti-capitalist struggles around the world as the same fight we wage against the Liberal government is Victoria.

This year we are witness to an unprecedented scale of capitalist globalization. Since US President Bush's election and 9/11, the world is faced with an open campaign of permanent war-making, increased racist profiling, and repressive laws that directly attack minorities and the poor.

Here in BC, with a right-wing neoliberal agenda being advanced by the Liberals, we also see this global injustice, but at a local level.

The past is the key to understanding each other's struggles and to find common ground to unity. We can look at the history of Indigenous Peoples, whose fight for sovereignty and against colonialism startedlong before the many recent anti-globalization events.

We aspire to see a structured movement against capitalism, built by the grassroots. We call for solidarity with all "racially profiled peoples," immigrants and refugees, with the rank and file of trade unions, and with left and community organizations.

Mayworks' unique contribution to left alliance building in BC is particularly felt through the presence of people's art and culture.

We see the role of the artist as a voice against oppression, and for working class culture. This is the basis for sustaining our movements. Especially now, with the commodification of culture by entertainment, big business, and corporate media, people's culture is the life blood that nurtures our struggles.

Songs of resistance fifty years ago, songs of resistance today... The message against McCarthyism fifty years ago is echoed today with the message to Gordon Campbell and his masters.

Enjoy this year's festival!

Connections, Not Conspiracies
By Mordecai Briemberg

Seattle to Quebec to Genoa: our numbers, our capacities, our optimism were growing. Those with power publicly worried, indeed quarreled, among themselves over how to respond, with carrots or sticks or both. Yet today we in B.C. have barely noticed, let alone celebrated, the largest-ever anti-globalization protest, the gathering of between 300 to 500,000 people in Barcelona in March.

Between Genoa and now was September 11. September 11 marks a reconfiguration of the political culture, the division into “the good” and “the evil”. Stimulating a profound popular xenophobia, the American state publicly proclaimed a policy of permanent war-making, war without geographic or time limits. This was the beginning of their major counter-offensive against our movements, our campaigns focused on halting the acronyms: FTAA, NAFTA, MAI, IMF, WTO.

The power-holders displayed a face little evident to our movements against the acronyms. Their state, that some imagined to be in the process of dissolution, supplanted by acronyms, reappeared - active and aggressive. To paraphrase Mark Twain, the rumors of the death of the state had been greatly exaggerated. And its apparatus of repressive laws was significantly expanded, with little opposition. War with its massacre of civilians in the attacked country also makes a profound appeal to racist passions, directed abroad and at home; it refurbishes as well a male-dominant, soldier-culture, whittling away without direct attack the advances feminists have made in the recent decades.

Yes, for a brief moment there was an anti-war movement that filled the breach of the paralyzed anti-globalization movement. And this anti-war movement made some beginning effort to challenge the racism at home and abroad of the war-makers. But the anti-war movement soon fizzled. This was not the first but the third time in the last decade an anti-war movement fizzled. The movement against the first United Nations’ war on the people of Iraq fizzled; the movement against the NATO war on the people of Yugoslavia fizzled next. Now when it is so clear that the fourth major war of the “new world order” has been meticulously planned, to target the people of Iraq once again, it has been only the heroic popular resistance of the Palestinian people in the Israeli occupied territories that has derailed the timing of a U.S.-U.K. invasion. Here, where we are, there is a bare murmur of an anti-war movement.

Now our energies seem focused on a much needed response to the Campbell attacks. Corporate globalization, or the capitalist destruction of the commons and the common good, has come home with a vengeance. As the slogan says: they are all Enron, we are all Argentina.

There is much to do. It seems there is “too much to do”. Corporate globalization, war making and empire building, racist profiling, soldier culture, and repressive laws. For those in power these fronts of attack are a co-ordinated strategy. They too have a lot to do, but they see the connections and they focus their energies.

We are at a point when we must do the same. We must discover the connections to be able to focus our energies, without simply hopping from one foot to the other. We are at a time when thinking is practical, when we need better ideas to understand the major facets of our world and their connections. Honest, open, tough-minded thinking, thinking together democratically, is a priority.

Mayworks is an important opportunity for us to do this. Make time to contribute.

Weytk

In the early 1900s John St. John was a member of the “Bows and Arrows”, Local 526 of the IWW on the Burrard Docks, made up of Squamish and Burrard natives and a diversity of migrant workers. John St. John was a migrant worker in solidarity with native workers against capitalist exploitation.

Indians are workers. Native people have participated in almost every resource based industry in this country from fishing to mining and building the railroad. Native people were often forced to become workers under colonial rule for resources they had managed and nurtured for thousand of years. Native people took part in strikes and we fought for workers rights and yet our history in terms of the working class movement is silent. Often Natives who sided with strikers or unions were blacklisted and had to go back to subsistence living or find other jobs. Where was the union for those who sacrificed the most? Even today many Native people work in some of the most dangerous occupations including gas and oil pipeline work, often through unceded Native territory pitting Native against Native one side wanting to feed their families and the other wanting to exercise traditional rights.

Native people are not considered part of Native people are not considered part of Canadian labour history but it is time to reclaim our part in working class culture and to fight within it for recognition of Aboriginal title and self-determination, an end to racism and solidarity against colonial capitalism.

Marching through the streets, leafleting, postering, occupying, blockading and striking, we need to demonstrate our unity through action. It is not enough to say we support such and such a struggle, it’s not enough to invite a Native speaker to open your event, a support letter is not enough, we need to work together not just to stop the cuts, but to stop capitalist exploitation of all people everywhere. Our fight is not with each other, our fight is not over a few fish or a few logs, our fight should be against corporations who profit while workers are exploited, people live in poverty and our environment is destroyed. We know our common oppressor, but we often don’t understand each other’s struggles. Solidarity means knowing and trusting each other, it means recognizing our diversity and our common goals. Today, there is potential for a unity we have not seen for a long time, workers, students, women, people of color, queer, immigrant and Native, working against globalization, capitalism, and here in BC, the Liberal government.

Resistance is our legacy, Native people have resisted for 500 years here on Turtle Island. My ancestors fought for the preservation of our culture and our ways and in every Native territory in BC we have fought, been killed and fought again against the destruction of our culture, against colonization, globalization, against capitalism. We need to honor our place in these occupied lands; we are in Indigenous territory and it is here that we need to start.

Recognizing Indigenous rights to traditional territories and practices ensure that together in honor and in trust we will build a new tomorrow.

In Solidarity, Tania Willard

Bio: Tania Willard is a member of the Secwepemc Nation and the current editor of Redwire magazine a publication of Redwire Native Youth Media. Tania is also an artist and her work on Native working class history will be on display at the Mayworks art show.