What do Manitoba and the Crimea have in common?

Several events / news stories over the last few months have reignited my thoughts about regional / community identity that I thought I'd left behind when I defended my thesis, getting on to almost 20 years ago.  The first, was the events in Crimea.  The second, closer to home, a question of who should be on the Manitoba Walk of Fame, therefore, who is a Manitoban.

I have to confess I don't of course have the answers, but I want to share my own thoughts.  Crimea is an issue that no sane commentator, let alone politician should touch with a barge poll, especially not a nuclear tipped one.  Academically a very interesting question, is it Russia? Is it Ukraine? Is it an independent Tartar territory, and if so, do the Tartars even have a modernist sense of territorial contiguity, or do they subscribe to some pre-(or post) modern sense of territoriality, where they carry their identity with them, wherever they travel? I have no idea, of course, but I'd be willing to bet that none of the current occupiers or contending occupiers have given this option much thought.  In reality, of course, it is much more than academic. Lives have been lost, and many more before the issue is resolved, and I want to be very clear, that I'm not taking a stance here at all. I only hope somebody figures it out soon.

But the notion of what makes someone belong to a region does raise some questions regarding my second question, who should be on the Manitoba Walk of Fame? Who is sufficiently Manitoban.  On the possible list of contenders are several people who haven't lived in Manitoba or contributed significantly to its cultural wellbeing. I'm thinking of Neil Young who left, as I understand it as a teenager, and only makes sporadic visits, but also luminaries like Marshall McLuhan, who while he certainly may have developed his ideas here, also didn't leave a unique stamp on Manitoba.  Again I'm stumped, but I have some idea, that questions of identity / belonging rest somewhere with the actions of the individuals, and not with the territory itself.  Crimea, like Manitoba is a bounded piece of geography that has had human activity enacted upon it, and that activity, in turn has coloured subsequent activity. It has become an organic being that exists because of the activity it hosts, and the debate about who is, or who isn't a member of the club, whether carried out through military occupation, or much more harmless ponderings of who should be in the Walk of Fame, is but one contributing factor to a set of questions that cannot be resolved easily.

Jus Sanguinis for Cows? Are you what you eat?

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/business/us-bides-time-on-meat-labels-201737521.html.

Follow this link for context, but main point of interest is misguided use of ascription of identity, in this case cattle. Let me see if I understand this correctly.  Because animal is born in Canada it will forever be Canadian, even though it may be plugged full of same hormones, as its American counterparts, as it is raised in the United States.

So I am born in America, but plugged full of Canadian Ideology, cultural markers, but I will for ever be labled American? A wider and more peculiar application of jus sanguinis.  The more I think about this, this probably didn't make sense in a world where, some what naively it was assumed people (and cattle didn't travel), and it certainly doesn't make sense in the contemporary world of global travel.

I'm beginning to wonder if we're entering (or indeed have entered) an aspatial arrangement, and if technology is leading the charge.  A few recent examples have struck me and got me wondering if it was technology that caused earlier shifts in the late eighteenth century that had western european society moving from a non-spatial (or better yet aspatial) world to a more fully spatialised one, a world where ideally there was full congruence between the Nation and the State.

In the current context, I'm struck by communications technology in particular that no longer cares where we are to assign identity (in this case telephone numbers).  Although somehow they manage to charge for long distance calls. Consider for example MTS's recent approach to a lack of numbers. They've chosen to add three digit codes to all new phone numbers, but where in the past this was known as an 'area code' and truly did refer to an area, the new system presumably because of the mobility of the telephones, simply adds these numbers to any new line.  There is no longer a good way to determine where physically a phone number  is located. If this is the case, what was the technology in the eighteenth century that provided the push into a spatial world. Was it, as I had surmised many years ago, the advent of surveying and cartographic techniques, pioneered by Ambros von Amman, David Thompson, and the rest?

Court upholds native fisher's tax exemption, by Alexandra Paul, Winnipeg Free Press, March 22, 2012.


From this story alone, having not actually read the ruling itself, nor analysed the other cases that have ruled on section 87 of the Indian Act, I'm fascinated by what I see as a trend towards establishing 'indianness' (for lack of a better word) by the principle of jus sanguinis, a right that as the old phrase has it can 'be carried on one's back'.  This is in marked distinction to the territorially bounded principle used in other cases.
 In short, it is no longer necessary to remain on reserve, and I assume more to the point for future decisions, to somehow prove that you or your ancestors were on reserve, or in that specific geographical locale at the time a treaty was signed, to claim rights that were promised and reiterated in various court rulings to ones identity as an aboriginal person.

This deserves closer attention, both to the use of section 87 in recent cases, and the increased recognition that your status / rights to conduct business, engage in social discourse, or otherwise exist as a Canadian, are not bound by the border markers of the reserve.