I am Aboriginal and a member of the Pipihkisis Cree First Nation. I think it’s important that I respond to your article as it treats Aboriginal people in a pan-indianistic way and characterizes “our” social organization incorrectly, though for good reasons I am sure.

We Cree people did not consider the land as our property. We did not “own the land in common.” Although we were (and are still struggling to be) very communal, we did not consider that the land belonged to us and that therefore it was our property and the “products” of the land likewise. These “products” referred to are actually living beings, our Relatives, neither our property nor products. The Land itself is a living thing, everything is living and everything belongs to the Land. To assume that we thought of it as our property is completely fallacious.

We were tribal and held together by our blood and fictive kinship relationships, not by communal ideas of ownership.

We were neither communists, socialists nor capitalists—in fact there is really no term adequate to define what our relationship with the land was or our social organization (other than tribal) as it defies western conceptions.

The reason the bourgeois find communism repellent is not for any primal or visceral repudiation of some misty far-off and shameful communistic (tribal according to you) origin, but because it runs contrary to the instilled (and distorted) beliefs of individuality which capitalism needs in order to exist.

Meegwetch for your time.

Nehi Katawasisiw
Pipihkisis Cree Nation

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