“Aboriginal Fatigue”

The Edmonton-Ottawa memorandum of understanding will be meaningless if First Nations are given a veto, even in areas they don’t legally control

If there is one takeaway from the recent memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the federal and Alberta governments on a potential new oil pipeline to the West Coast, it’s that Canada needs to abandon the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and return to our own framework for reconciliation: Section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982

OneBC Caucus is proud to present Making a Killing: Reconciliation, Genocide, and Plunder in Canada. Making a Killing is a feature documentary film exposing the massive scandal behind the taking of wealth, land, and power from the Canadian public to benefit indigenous tribes. It debunks the worst lie in Canadian history: the lie that 215 bodies were found at the Kamloops Residential School and that Canadians committed a mass murder against indigenous children. Making a Killing is the first documentary film produced by an elected caucus.

h/t Mauser

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) is a non-binding resolution from an international body. Even so, it is exerting a tangible influence in Canada on issues ranging from a move in B.C. to rename streets, towns, and cities, to a push to grant rivers “legal personhood.”

UNDRIP is a United Nations resolution passed in September 2007. The 15-page document contains 46 “Articles” that put forth a vision of the rights of indigenous peoples worldwide.

Assembly of First Nations chiefs voted unanimously on Tuesday to demand the withdrawal of a new pipeline deal between Canada and Alberta, while expressing full support for First Nations on the British Columbia coast that strongly oppose the initiative.

Hundreds of First Nations leaders are gathered this week in Ottawa for their annual December meeting, where high on the agenda was the federal-provincial memorandum of understanding for a bitumen pipeline to Asian markets announced last week.

The deal contemplates changing the federal ban on oil tanker traffic in northern B.C. waters, but AFN delegates responded by passing an emergency resolution affirming their support for the moratorium.

It’s an awkward time in the upper echelons of the Canadian cultural establishment. It’s come to light that influential indigenous author and former broadcaster Thomas King, isn’t actually indigenous at all.

It matters, because King has spent much of his 82 years claiming to speak on behalf of the indigenous peoples of North America, and his role in shaping Canadian perception of their First Nations has been enormous. His books have served as standard texts in Canadian schools and universities for over 20 years.

Frog Lake First Nation member Hans McCarthy has won a landmark Federal Court decision giving individual band members the right to access documents detailing how their community’s money is managed.

McCarthy, an indigenous activist, partnered with the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) to compel Indigenous Services Canada to release band council resolutions governing the Frog Lake trust fund, which holds revenues from natural resources on band lands.

If Canadians care to understand why our country is increasingly fractured, one key driver is the notion that non-Indigenous Canadians — “settlers” as they are called — should be grateful to live anywhere in the Americas.

The “settler” label is mostly directed at those of British and European ancestry. But it can apply to anyone whose families arrived from anywhere — Africa, Asia, the Levant, the Pacific — who were not part of the prior waves of migration to the Americas.

Two First Nations are suing the Manitoba and federal government, claiming land and mineral rights to the southwest corner of the province, where the annual value of oil and gas produced exceeds $1.3 billion.

Canupawakpa Dakota First Nation and Dakota Tipi First Nation filed a statement of claim in Court of King’s Bench on Thursday, asking for a declaration of title and subsurface rights over the entirety of the Williston Basin in Manitoba, including oil rights “and the right to economically participate in the extraction, development, and production of subsurface minerals.”

The lawsuit says the area is unceded ancestral land, and the Dakota were “deliberately and strategically excluded from the numbered treaties,” meaning their inherent rights, including title, have never been relinquished.

The Cowichan followed a decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in 1997, Delmaguukw, which held that in the absence of a treaty ceding their lands, any band is entitled to aboriginal title over any area to which they can prove their ancestors had exclusive possession in 1846.

And the court decided that to assist bands in proving the fact of possession in 1846, the band could introduce 7th generation hearsay evidence, passed down through generations, as to what land was occupied in 1846. This reversed a common law prohibition against first hand hearsay evidence that applies in every other lawsuit that goes before the courts.

(Incognito)

Katsi’tsakwas Ellen Gabriel says she was sitting in the Japanese consulate in Montreal when she started to learn how far Canada’s spies can reach.

It was two years after Gabriel was the Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) spokesperson during the military’s 1990 siege of Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawà:ke, commonly called the Oka Crisis. That summer, a botched police raid on a small blockade ignited a tense 78-day armed standoff, as activists fought to stop a golf course expansion from desecrating a cemetery at Kanehsatà:ke, near Oka, Que.

In 1992, Gabriel was invited to an Indigenous conference in Japan and planned to travel on a Haudenosaunee Confederacy-issued passport. But she couldn’t get a visa, so she went for a meeting to find out why.

I wonder how the Aboriginal/Islamist alliance has been doing?

An Indigenous offender who got a “huge break” when a judge gave him house arrest for sexually assaulting a woman who was celebrating her engagement to another man just got another one for violating the conditions of his sentence.

Nelson Lesage was sentenced to house arrest in July 2024 for sexually assaulting a woman while she was asleep with her fiancé at Lesage’s home in Fort Providence, N.W.T.