Star Blanket Cree Nation has announced that ground penetrating radar searches at the site of the former Lebret Indian Industrial School found more than 2,000 “hits” over the past year.
“This information is going to hit home. I am not going to lie,” said Sheldon Poitras, the project lead on the search.
Poitras said not every hit means there is an unmarked grave, as some could be anomalies like rocks or tree roots.
For three years, the RCMP officer had come to see Margorie Hudson at the Berens River First Nation, on the eastern shore of Lake Winnipeg, and tried to persuade her to become the first
Indigenous woman in Manitoba to join the force.
In the third year, Hudson relented, wrote the exam and was accepted.
She recalls clearly the first words she heard as an RCMP trainee from the man who had been recruiting her.
“‘They’re accepting you,’ he said, ‘But don’t ever quit. Please don’t ever quit,’” she recounts. “I said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Because they think you’re going to quit because you’re an Indian.’
A new report says there is no evidence that Thomas Lagarde dit St. Jean, a man born in the early 1800s near Montreal, was in fact Algonquin.
This is significant, because more than 1,000 Canadians claim to be Algonquin because Lagarde is one of their ancestors.
They are among the approximately 8,000 members of the Algonquins of Ontario (AOO), an organization on the verge of concluding a billion dollar land claim agreement with the governments of Canada and Ontario.
On May 30, 2021, the Canadian Federation of Students issued a statement to Canadian schools, declaring: “On Thursday, May 27, the remains of 215 Indigenous children were found buried in an unmarked mass grave at the Kamloops Residential School [in British Columbia]. These were acts of cultural violence, genocide and colonialism.”
Within days, this unsubstantiated assertion was dialled back by Tk’emlúps Chief Rosanne Casimir, who conceded that the alleged discovery by ground-penetrating radar was not a “mass grave,” but rather possible “individual, unmarked grave sites.” This is important, because “mass grave” usually points to a massacre. But there is no evidence for illicit death at Kamloops or any of the other 150 residential schools over the course of their tenure. In the interlude since the May 27, 2021, announcement, numerous evidence-based articles testifying to that fact by researchers in indigenous affairs have appeared in the Dorchester Review, C2C Journal and the National Post, as well as in these pages.
Nevertheless, the incorrect CFS statement remains to this day on their website.
A wooden totem pole taken from an indigenous Canadian community nearly a century ago is to be returned.
The decision to return the House of Ni’isjoohl Memorial Pole was announced by directors at the National Museum of Scotland who said the ‘difficult legacies’ associated with its display had forced them to reconsider its future.
Plans are under way to send back the hand-carved totem pole to the Nisga’a in British Columbia after a delegation requested its repatriation in August.
h/t
In recent years, there have been a series of high-profile media exposés of people who are falsely taking on an Indigenous identity. They are being called “pretendians.” The word blends “pretend” with “Indians.” It’s a cute word, too cute. The use of the word pretend makes it sound like a game, like something fun, like action with no consequences. People don’t cause harm when they pretend, and pretending has an air of innocence about it because that’s what children do.
Over the past couple of years, Hollywood has been increasingly involved in Canada’s natural resource development. Whether through tweets or promoting a campaign, a number of Hollywood actors have been clear in their opposition to Indigenous resource development. Many activist actors have said they believe industry is “funding the violation of Indigenous rights.” But that’s simply not true. Spreading that fabrication is disinformation.
Activists, advocates criticize CSIS for weighing if rail blockades could be classed as terrorism
Activists and advocates who’ve been targeted for government snooping in the past are denouncing what they see as the Canadian Security Intelligence Service’s “vilification” of First Nations activism.
They say they know the state is watching, but it still came as a surprise to learn CSIS secretly weighed whether rail blockades could qualify as “acts of terrorism” in reports beginning in November 2020.
“It is an absolutely ridiculous sentiment to me that in 2022 when Indigenous people make a stand for their lands and their water, we get called terrorists,” said Skyler Williams, a prominent Mohawk activist from Six Nations of the Grand River in Ontario.
Coastal GasLink attack, church burnings, rail line blockades are terrorist acts. Own it.
Should Canada’s system of residential schools for Indigenous peoples be seen as genocidal? Canada’s members of parliament seem to think so. Members of all parties unanimously supported, on Thursday, a motion stating that “genocide” is exactly the appropriate word.
Members of Parliament gave unanimous consent Thursday in favour of a motion calling on the federal government to recognize Canada’s residential schools as genocide.
Leah Gazan, the NDP member of Parliament for Winnipeg Centre, introduced the motion following Question Period Thursday afternoon. Gazan brought forward a similar motion in June last year, but it did not receive unanimous consent.
That sets a pretty low bar.
Canada’s civilian spy service assessed whether First Nations land rights activists who disrupt trains should be classed as a “terrorist threat” to national security alongside the likes of Al-Qaeda and ISIS, according to declassified documents.
But the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) eventually decided the label wouldn’t stick after probing the issue in secret, internal studies whose findings were shared with government officials in an unclassified March 2021 counterterror briefing.
Often used for university and job applications, practice allows non-Indigenous people, be it innocently or cynically, to benefit wrongly.
On my application to McGill, one of the first questions I was asked was whether I self-identify as First Nations, Inuit or Métis. As someone who not only self-identifies, but more importantly, actually is First Nations, I checked the box, and that was it.
A Toronto-based Indigenous non-profit is close to cancelling plans to build Ontario’s first Indigenous healing lodge owing to funding shortfalls, a potential setback to the Trudeau government’s objective of expanding the country’s network of Indigenous-run correctional facilities.
Thunder Woman Healing Lodge Society says it’s $2-million short of the total needed to construct a seven-storey residential complex that would house federally sentenced women.
Mi’kmaw astonomer says we should acknowledge we live under Indigenous skies
As we mark Canada’s National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, we can consider how science as an institution has the same duty to participate in reconciliation as the rest of society does.
For science, reconciliation can mean, among others things, acknowledging the history of racism and exploitation of Indigenous people and their lands that science perpetuated. But another important part is understanding and incorporating Indigenous perspectives in research.
h/t DM
