Aboriginal Issues

In the summer of 2019, the Bear’s Den All Nations Traditional Medicine Sweat Lodge opened with great fanfare. Ontario’s lieutenant-governor was on hand for the celebrations on the lawn outside Toronto’s Michael Garron Hospital. So were the federal minister of Crown-Indigenous affairs, two local Liberal MPs, a representative from the Mississaugas of Scugog Island First Nation, and members of the Juno Award-winning rock band, The Arkells.

After the prayers, speeches and ribbon-cutting, they all gathered together for a photo with the eagle-feather-toting guest of honour, Ernest Matton, the Métis elder who also goes by the Mohawk name Atheshsa Niohkwa:rita:a — Little Brown Bear.

Almost three years later, all that’s left of the sweat lodge are a sign with the words “Thank You” and some orange ribbons tied to a chain-link fence. The hospital has shut down its Aboriginal healing program.

Identity politics is the drug trade of woke. Too lucrative for many to ignore.

h/t YY

The Mendacity of Jesse Brown, Lies about ‘Year of the Graves’, and Other Misadventures from the Dark Side of the Looking Glass

“… There are two important things to keep in mind here.

The first thing is Year of the Graves wasn’t even about the legacy of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools – about which I harbour no particularly heterodox views. It certainly wasn’t an exercise in “Residential Schools Denialism,” that sinister construction a certain creepy and clownish professor persists in claiming about Year of the Graves.

I’m not going to be nice about this anymore. Anyone who tells you that’s what’s going on in Year of the Graves is – tenured university post or not – a fool, a liar, someone who simply lacks the gene for embarrassment, or one of those well-meaning types who are susceptible to the faddish excesses of the Words Are Violence community.”

Barn burner of a story.

The furor over my ‘The year of graves’ feature illustrated perfectly what the piece was about

I didn’t want to write about my personal entanglement in it, but that’s what’s happened, so I need to deal with that right off the top and get it out of the way. It’s because of a furor that’s erupted over something I wrote to mark the anniversary of the kick-off of what has been described as a long-overdue reckoning with the legacy of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools.

Last year, Canada began an orgy of self-recrimination when researchers claimed to have found a mass grave at a residential school in British Columbia with the remains of more than 200 indigenous children. The problem is that the ground-penetrating radar used to make this “find” yielded highly suspect results, and not a single grave has been confirmed through an archaeological dig. Now a group of dissident scholars is calling foul on this entire narrative.

More than a dozen residential school survivors from First Nations across the country plan to press Roman Catholic bishops for input on the Pope’s planned stops when he visits Canada in July and the words the pontiff will use in his expected residential school apology on Canadian soil.

The survivors are holding two days of talks in Winnipeg before meeting with Canadian bishops on Wednesday. They hope the meeting will lead to the signing of a new covenant committing the Roman Catholic Church to deeper engagement with First Nations before and after Pope Francis comes to Canada.

That would be the sorry but there are no graves here apology tour.

… In the most extreme cases, fringe activists have been normalized as regular members of Indigenous communities. These are the ones who enthusiastically vandalize public property against the wishes of chiefs and other leaders, and celebrate burning churches. Many draw inspiration from far-left American public figures, who spend vast amounts of time denying the cultural genocide of the Uighurs in Western China on social media. The Uighurs are being systematically rounded up and sent to government institutions where they are forcibly stripped of their religion, language, and culture.

It’s been one year since a B.C. First Nation confirmed the discovery of potential unmarked graves at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, triggering a deeper investigation of the site as well as more searches across the country.

Today, the Tk̓emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation is hosting a memorial to mark that discovery and honour the children whose lives were lost while being forced to attend residential school, whom they have come to refer to as Le Estcwicwe̓y̓ — The Missing.

I have the potential to care less.