OTTAWA — A panel of Indigenous experts says it will not participate in engagement sessions hosted by an international organization Ottawa hired to provide advice on identifying possible human remains in unmarked graves.
The National Advisory Committee on Residential Schools Missing Children and Unmarked Burials says today that after giving the matter careful thought, it has decided against involvement in the process.
Two men have been charged after a Catholic Church was gutted by fire in northern Alberta.
On May 22, the RCMP was called to help with a fire in St. Bernard Catholic Church in Grouard, which is about 360 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.
The church was built in 1902 and is a provincial historic site.
A police spokesperson told The Epoch Times they could only speak to facts at this point, and not motivation.
Someone should torch the healing lodge they’ll be sent to.
A search for unmarked graves at the former Blue Quills Residential School in eastern Alberta found 19 sites that contained anomalies consistent with burial plots.
The property, located about 150 kilometres northeast of Edmonton, was once a Roman Catholic-run institution. It now operates as University nuhelot’įne thaiyots’į nistameyimâkanak Blue Quills, which is governed by the seven First Nations communities that surround it.
An investigation using ground-penetrating radar uncovered “reflections” in the soil that are indicative of human burials or graves.
Canada has agreed to pay C$800m to settle a land claims dispute with five First Nations, an acknowledgement it failed to honour a treaty signed more than a century ago – and the latest in a string of deals reshaping the relationship between government and Indigenous communities
Over the weekend, officials with both the federal and British Columbia governments admitted successive administrations had broken their promises to the Blueberry River First Nations, the Doig River First Nation, the Halfway River First Nation, the Saulteau First Nations and the West Moberly First Nations.
On April 1, a new website was launched by the Indian Residential Schools Research Group (irsrg.ca) whose mission is to share with the public historical materials concerning the residential-school system, materials that uphold “the highest standards of research, evidence, and logic in the pursuit of the truth, wherever that may lead. Most importantly, we believe only through truth can there be reconciliation.”
When Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland presented the federal budget, the most obvious fact was the size of the deficit. It came in at $40.1 billion, after having been forecast at “only” $30.6 billion in the fall economic update less than six months ago. What caused the deficit to shoot up $9.5 billion in such a short period of time?
Some analysts pointed to supply-and-confidence deal between the Liberals and the NDP, which has led to increases for health and dental care. Others pointed to lower-than-expected tax revenues caused by an unexpected slowdown in the economy. Both lines of analysis are correct, but many things can be true at the same time in the complex world of public finance.
‘Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus’ is a line from an editorial by Francis Pharcellus Church titled, “Is There a Santa Claus?”
It appeared in the New York newspaper The Sun Sept. 21, 1897, and became one of the most famous editorials ever published. Written in response to a letter by eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon asking whether Santa Claus was real, the editorial became so popular over the years, The Sun began republishing it during the Christmas season, including every year from 1924 to 1950, when the paper ceased publication.
OTTAWA – As some private landowners restrict residential school survivors from performing ceremony or searching their properties for possible unmarked graves, a federal minister says Ottawa is open to legislating new protections for the possible burial sites.
Kimberly Murray, who was appointed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government to provide it with advice on how to handle such sites, testified before the Senate on Tuesday about her role and the main concerns she says she has heard from Indigenous communities.
DAYS BEFORE MY termination as a history teacher for being off script, the CBC reported that NDP MP Leah Gazan – who on Oct. 27, 2022 managed to get the House of Commons to unanimously recognize that “genocide” occurred at Indian residential schools – now also wanted legislation to outlaw attempts to “deny” this putative genocide or to make “false” assertions about residential schools. “Denying genocide is a form of hate speech,” said Gazan, the MP for Winnipeg Centre. “That kind of speech is violent and re-traumatizes those who attended residential school.” I certainly don’t wish to retraumatize the many former students at residential schools who suffered from abuse or neglect. Nor do I wish to appear to be an adherent of the theory of Presentism: the tendency to interpret past events in terms of modern values and thinking. I simply wish to tell my story.
It has recently been reported in the ABC that Nathan Maynard, a Tasmanian Aboriginal artist, is seeking the body of an Australian of British descent which will ‘speak to sacrifice for past sins’. Maynard placed the ad in a Melbourne newspaper requesting that they ‘donate their future deceased body to an art installation’.
The B.C. Association of Aboriginal Friendship Centres has called for a public apology after an employee at a Vancouver hotel denied an Indigenous man access to a washroom, which they say resulted him losing control of his bladder in front of onlookers.
The general manager of the Hyatt Regency Hotel says it conducted an internal investigation after the association reported an incident last month.
20 seconds? Canada where the shakedowns never stop! Why didn’t he pee on his unceded indigenous land in the parking lot?
VANCOUVER — A Federal Court judge has approved a $2.8-billion settlement agreement between the Canadian government and plaintiffs representing 325 First Nations whose members went to residential day schools.
On Jan. 31, Dr. Michael Mahon, president of the University of Lethbridge, cancelled a talk that Dr. Frances Widdowson was scheduled to present. Like all scholars, Dr. Widdowson has nuanced views on many issues, and she was going to speak on “How Wok-ism Threatens Academic Freedom.”
Even though President Mahon had not listened to her argument, he nevertheless explained why he cancelled the talk: “We are committed to the calls to action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada. It is clear that the harm associated with this talk is an impediment to meaningful reconciliation.”
The case of Jim McMurtry is now well known to Canadians. He is the Abbotsford schoolteacher who told his class the truth about the claim that 215 indigenous students had been killed and secretly buried at Kamloops Indian Residential School—and was fired for it.
He said that any students who died at the school had likely succumbed to natural causes, mainly tuberculosis. Students who had heard wild stories about children tortured by priests and left in the snow to die were outraged. They complained, and McMurtry was promptly escorted from the classroom in disgrace, placed on indefinite leave, and subsequently fired.
A B.C. high school teacher was escorted out of his classroom by two staff members after telling students the majority of residential school deaths were caused by illness.
“I was walked out like a criminal. They can’t walk a teacher out of school unless the teacher is a direct harm and immediate harm to children,” Jim McMurtry of Abbotsford, B.C., told The Epoch Times. “I wasn’t a harm to children because I made one comment that was historically true.”
