Aboriginal Issues

Canadians need to be made aware of the ways in which non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are interfering in Indigenous participation in Canada’s natural resource sector.

These organizations — which are almost all foreign entities with Canadian branches — hire activists and promote misleading commentary about Canada’s oil and gas sector and First Nations’ interest in development. These organizations, which include the Sierra Club, Stand Earth, World Wildlife Federation and Tides Foundation, have garnered a great deal of sympathetic attention from the national and international media.

The potted version of the nation’s history favored by the likes of Ben & Jerry’s is meant to delegitimize the United States.

Ben & Jerry’s ice cream wants the United States to return the Black Hills to the Lakota.

Which raises the question: Once this transfer takes place, will the Lakota turn around and give the Black Hills back to the tribes they took them from?

The RCMP has a long and honourable history, and has served Canadians well. RCMP top brass and regular officers have always insisted on doing their job in their own way. They have robustly specifically resisted all attempts by politicians to interfere in their clear mandate to enforce the law.

However, in May 2021 at Kamloops, the RCMP abandoned that honourable tradition, and abdicated their most important responsibility.

Reconciliation between Canada and its Indigenous population is marked increasingly through words — spoken in land acknowledgements and written as names on things. A national public opinion poll suggests there is a wide disconnect between those words and how most Canadians feel.

A solid majority of Canadians accept that injustice to Indigenous people in Canada amounts to genocide, but few think they have personal responsibility, even for injustices continuing today; few even blame the government. And while land acknowledgements, accepting this country is on Indigenous territory, are common in official circles, they are often received with indifference; even those saying them don’t often believe it applies to them.

“Crappiest Genocide Ever”

Sucker Creek First Nation Chief Roderick Willier remembers never feeling safe during the decade he spent at a residential school in northern Alberta.

“I always had to stay on high alert when I was there,” Willier said, as he recalled his time between the age of seven and 17 at St. Bruno’s Indian Residential School in Joussard, Alta., about 335 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.

“I was always told, ‘Oh, you got to be careful of them [at residential school].”‘

In 2021, the Governor General assigned Kimberly Murray the role of special advisor to Justice Minister David Lametti on “Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites Associated with Indian Residential Schools.” Halfway through that mandate, she has submitted an interim report . Two of its recommendations reach beyond her mandate, in ways that should concern us.

First is the recommendation for affirming “Indigenous data sovereignty.” Murray states: “Indigenous data sovereignty involves amending the laws that put power in the hands of government institutions, universities, and church organizations — the ‘creators’ or copyright holders of documents — and shifting that power back to the Indigenous people that are documented within records.”

First Nations leaders in British Columbia are “very disappointed” by a recent report that residential school deniers tried to dig up suspected unmarked grave sites at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.

News of the undated incident was made public Friday in an interim report from Canada’s independent special interlocutor for missing children and unmarked burial sites associated with residential schools — a harrowing system of assimilation sponsored by the federal government and multiple Christian churches for more than a century.

Continued genocide???

Courts have noted since the 1990s and early 2000s that negotiations outside the courts are the ideal way to resolve Indigenous land claims, but these disputes are still dealt with by courts and administrative tribunals. As of early June, the federal government reports that 1,082 specific claims for compensation have been settled, with another 590 in progress.

Now, Parliament is taking steps to bring the ball into its own court. This should be a positive development, but under the leadership of the Liberals and the passive response from Conservatives, it’s possible we could end up with a worse land claims system than the status quo. The frameworks being studied and considered lack regard for what the consequences would be for Canada’s very existence, especially if the government became overgenerous with land.

Most municipal council meetings go unnoticed. Not so for one recently in Val d’Or, Que., when fear, anger and racism bubbled to the surface and a shouting match erupted with hate on full display.

“There’s an Indian pissing outside!” cried one man, a resident.

“It is always the Indigenous,” a business owner said, outraged.

The French seem to have no difficulty expressing themselves.