The federal government has signed a $20-billion final settlement agreement to compensate First Nations children and families harmed by chronic underfunding of child welfare on reserve, which Indigenous Services Canada said Monday was the largest such deal in Canadian history.
Seven years after Honourary Chief Wilton Littlechild of the Maskwacis Cree Nation helped pen a recommendation calling for the creation of a national reconciliation oversight body, the federal government is finally moving to make it a reality.
It tabled Bill C-29 in the House of Commons on Wednesday, which would establish an independent, non-partisan council that would report annually to Parliament on the state of reconciliation and make recommendations to all levels of government and Canadian society.
While there were abuses at residential schools—which were a result of the Canadian government’s desire to provide free compulsory education to children living on reservations where there were no schools—what we’ve seen is a bunch of crazy lies.
Four years ago, I was one of many who tried to raise the alarm in the media about a Canadian crisis. I called attention to the staggering statistic that 98 percent of girls in Saskatchewan youth jails were Indigenous, and upwards of 70 percent of inmates in Manitoba jails were Indigenous.
These are unacceptable rates by any measure. At the time, 43 percent of women in federal prisons were Indigenous.
Last week we learned that Canada has crossed a terrible threshold: 50 percent of all women in federal prisons are now Indigenous, despite Indigenous women making up only five percent of Canada’s female population.
Two prominent Indigenous voices say they support calls for an Indigenous-led inquiry into systemic racism in New Brunswick, but action is what’s really needed.
Pam Palmater, the chair in Indigenous governance in the department of politics and public administration at Toronto Metropolitan University, and David Perley, a Wolastoqi scholar, spoke at a fundraiser for Dialogue NB, a Moncton–based non-profit, about systemic racism in the province.
Cut ’em off. They can go back to the old ways and not encounter a single white person. When they say, “But in this modern world…”, you say, “The modern world we offered you, and you accepted?”
One year ago today, the leaders of the British Columbia First Nation Band Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc announced the discovery of a mass grave of more than 200 Indigenous children detected at a residential school in British Columbia.
“We had a knowing in our community that we were able to verify. To our knowledge, these missing children are undocumented deaths,” Rosanne Casimir, chief of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc, said in a statement on May 27, 2021.
It is said that a picture says a thousand words; we might say that, in Trudeau’s case, a photo tells a thousand lies about a thousand graves.
Francisco Cali Tzay, the UN special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples, told The Globe and Mail he would not be investigating crimes related to the graves during his trip, a setback for the Assembly of First Nations and other groups who had called on him to conduct an independent probe.
The San Francisco Unified School District announced Wednesday that it would no longer use the word “chief” in employee job titles due to its connection to Native American culture.
The change applies to all 10,000 current employees in the California school district, according to a report by the San Francisco Chronicle.
“While there are many opinions on the matter, our leadership team agreed that, given that Native American members of our community have expressed concerns over the use of the title, we are no longer going to use it,” district spokeswoman Gentle Blythe said in a statement.
Canada’s Justice Minister is adamant that Liberal legislation will begin reversing the country’s disproportionate rate of Indigenous incarceration, but he acknowledges more needs to be done to address racial inequities in the justice system.
In an interview, Justice Minister David Lametti responded to recent criticism that the Liberal government has produced little in the way of policy response to the problem. The Globe reported earlier this month that Indigenous women now make up 50 per cent of the female population in federal prisons, even though just 4.9 per cent of women in Canada are Indigenous. For all Indigenous prisoners, men and women, the rate stands at 32 per cent.
The announcement will confirm the Pope’s trip to Edmonton, Quebec City and Iqaluit during the last week of July, according to confidential sources whom the CBC is not identifying because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Indigenous women across this country were appalled Thursday, May 5, to learn that First Nations, Métis, and Inuit women now account for 50 per cent of the prisoners being held in a Federal Correctional Institution, even though they make up just five per cent of Canada’s female population.
Mayor John Tory released the plan Wednesday morning which aims to guide the city’s actions to advance reconciliation through to 2032.
The 28 goals are spread through five themes, including actions to restore truth, actions to right relations and share power, actions for justice, actions to make financial reparations and actions for the Indigenous Affairs Office.
The Catholic religious order that operated some residential schools in Canada says it will open its archives in Rome to researchers.
