Seats and forms of power : How power can creates inequalities and tensions between people?

The notion I’m going to deal with is Seats and forms of power. The power is the ability to influence the behavior of people. There are different types of power, economic, political or cultural. To live together and be a community, people have to respect the same rules and laws. Even if it creates social cohesion, it also can leads to conflicts and tensions. How power can creates inequalities and tensions between people? I will answer this question by relaying on various documents illustrating the situation in Canada.

Language is a form of power, the more it is widespread, the more influential the country from which the language originates. Canada's official languages are English, spoken by 57, 8% of the population, and French spoken by 22, 1% of the population. The others languages are aboriginal languages and languages spoken by people whose mother tongue is neither French nor English. This distribution of languages in the country shows the cultural influence and domination of the two European powers besides the state’s leader is Queen Elizabeth II. But this domination creates inequalities and tensions between the descendants of the colonizing countries and the descendants of the first nations. This is illustrated in the extract of “Borders” wrote by Thomas King which talk about citizenship. The story take place at the Canada-American border. A Blackfoot mother and his son want to go to Salt Lake City, on the American side, to see her daughter. When the woman have to identify herself, she says that she is Blackfoot. Even if the Canadian border guard understand her, she says that she has to be Canadian or American to go through customs. The mother don’t give in and stays suborn, because of that, they can’t follow the normal procedure to pass the border. This shows the unequal rights between the different inhabitants of Canada. Here, the Blackfoot identity isn’t recognize as an official statute, this people don’t have the same rights than others so, it create conflicts. In this situation we can see the power of Medias, in fact they influence the authorities to let them pass. If they wouldn’t let them pass, public opinion would be against them because of how they treat native people.

The power that the European powers want to keep creates conflicts between the different inhabitants of Canada who don’t have the same rights. In the excerpt above, the conflict ends peacefully, but we don’t have to forget that sometimes, to keep their influence, the colonial powers clash at the expense of native people who don't have enough military power to win.

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