Tag Archives: First Nations

Canada, Featured, First Nations

Begin by listening

The National Day for Truth and Reconciliation is an occasion for remembrance and also for understanding

Orange Shirt Day
✎  WAYNE K. SPEAR | SEPTEMBER 30, 2022 • Current Events

FATHER HUBERT O’CONNOR was principal of the St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School the year Phyllis Webstad was born. Six years later, in 1973, Phyllis arrived at the school wearing the new orange shirt she’d been given by her grandmother.

For decades Indian residential schools greeted their wards with a stock list of indignities: the children’s hair was cut, their clothing stripped away and replaced by a drab uniform, and numbers were assigned to serve henceforth in place of their names.

Phyllis’ new orange shirt was taken, and she never saw it again. At a May 2013 gathering of former St. Joseph’s students, her story became the inspiration for Orange Shirt Day. On May 28, 2021 a bill passed unanimously in the House of Commons, and shortly thereafter in the Senate, designating September 30 the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.

September, the month of this national day of remembrance, is remembered by many Indigenous people as the time of year when those who got to spend summer at home returned to the institution. September is also remembered, with a degree of loathing, as the time when male children were sent into the schools’ fields to pick carrots and potatoes and to perform the many chores of harvest time.

But back to the future Bishop O’Connor. I began with him to underscore the fact that not so long ago predators abounded in the residential schools. At St. Joseph’s alone, dorm supervisor Edward Gerald Fitzgerald and Oblate priests Glenn Doughty and Harold McIntee were serial offenders.

In 1996 O’Connor was convicted of rape indecent assault. Doughty and McIntee served brief prison sentences for indecent assault, gross indecency, and buggery. An RCMP visit inspired Edward Gerald Fitzgerald to flee to Ireland in 2002, where local media reported him living in a “plush” Dublin suburb beyond the reach of Canadian authorities.

A good deal more of the St. Joseph’s Mission Residential School can be had from first-hand accounts — for example Bev Sellars’s memoir They Called Me Number One — as well as from research such as Elizabeth Furniss’s Victims of Benevolence: The Dark Legacy of the Williams Lake Indian Residential School and Margaret Whitehead’s 1981 study The Cariboo Mission: a history of the Oblates.

History, as the Final Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples says, “is not an attractive picture, and we do not wish to dwell on it.” But, as RCAP also acknowledges:

it is sometimes necessary to look back in order to move forward. The co-operative relationships that generally characterized the first contact between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people must be restored, and we believe that understanding just how, when and why things started to go wrong will help achieve this goal.

In other words, truth before reconciliation. We look back for one and forward to the other. The National Day for Truth and Reconciliation is an occasion for remembrance and also for understanding.

On this year’s National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, many Indigenous people will be thinking of the children who suffered loneliness and deprivation, and who in some cases never got to return home. It is a sombre day of reflection but also a day to acknowledge that Indigenous people survived a system designed to erase their languages and cultures.

Today there’s an abundance of articles, books and video concerning every facet of the Indian residential schools, much of it in the voices of those who were there. In my experience they are more than willing to tell their stories. The simple act of listening is where both truth and reconciliation begin.⌾

Current Events

Standing In for the Wet’suwet’en People

Wetsuweten
This article previously appeared in the February 25, 2020 edition of the National Post.

We have data for almost everything, but we lack information about what the Wet’suwet’en think and why they think it

✎  WAYNE K. SPEAR | JANUARY 26, 2020 • Current Events

WHEN DID YOU LEARN TO SPELL “Wet’suwet’en”? If you’re like many Canadians, you hadn’t yet heard of this First Nation, in British Columbia’s central interior, when the latest cable bill arrived. Now, everyone has a view. If opinions could be shipped to market, millions of barrels of them would be headed to Kitimat, B.C., for export.

I know the politicians’ positions, and I know where Extinction Rebellion and the Toronto anarchists stand. The only opinions I’ve had trouble sourcing are those of the Wet’suwet’en, whose interests every side of the aisle claims to be supporting. Did voting occur, and what were the results? I’ve read reports on consultations, but nowhere have I found voting data. The closer you get to the ground, the muddier things become. Amber Bracken, in her article, The Wet’suwet’en Are More United Than Pipeline Backers Want You To Think, mentions a survey that found 83 per cent of the Witset First Nation’s members were against the pipeline. The company that undertook this survey, she adds, doesn’t seem to exist anymore, and if there was ever a document, it appears to be unpublished. Whatever the views of the people, the Witset band council eventually voted to support the pipeline. Further east, 70 per cent of the Nak’azdli — another branch of the Dakelh tree — rejected an agreement with Coastal GasLink in a 2015 referendum that the chief overturned three years later, and the First Nation became the last nation to sign on. Less than 15 per cent of Nak’azdli’s 2,000 members voted.

Accurate, relevant data are critical — that’s why governments collect them. Every day, data firms solicit opinion on a range of matters. How popular are Canada’s political leaders? What do Canadians think about their health-care system? Do they trust the media, and how much? How do they feel about immigration, affordable housing, climate change? According to the Environics Institute, 49 per cent of Canadians say they’re better off than their parents were at their age. (Thirty years ago, that number was 60.) Seventy-one per cent of respondents answered “No” to the question, “In your opinion, is Alberta treated with the respect it deserves in Canada or not?” These aren’t just numbers, they are the raw materials for future political campaigns, government initiatives and public policy.

We have data for almost everything, but we lack information about what the Wet’suwet’en think and why they think it. As Robert Jago has written, “we don’t know how many chiefs are opposed to the pipeline, we don’t know for certain what percentage of people in the Wet’suwet’en country support or oppose the pipeline and we don’t know if the pipeline was approved by a referendum, a town hall or a simple vote in council. With that information gap, people grasp onto whatever numbers are presented to them.”

Some of the examples are trivial but make the point. A report coming out of a Feb. 19 public meeting, at a Houston, B.C., movie theatre, asserts that “about 200 people gave up three hours of their afternoon” to express community support for a pipeline. That’s a decent turnout in a town of 3,500, which is precisely the point that the author of the article wants you to absorb. I mean, imagine if only one-quarter of that number had turned out. Well, you don’t have to imagine, because there’s an article for that outcome, too, stating that “around 50 people were in attendance.” That’s not a small discrepancy. It’s a difference of magnitudes, like winning a majority government versus deciding you’d like to spend more time with your family.

Lyndsey Gilpin’s Feb. 21 article for the Columbia Journalism Review, A Pipeline Runs Through Southern News Deserts, concerns a 965-kilometre natural gas pipeline along the eastern coast of the United States that has much in common with the Coastal GasLink project. Both face opposition and are currently stalled, and both run through what Gilpin calls “news deserts” — areas where outside media “parachute in to cover major updates or catastrophes,” but otherwise ignore. The burden of reporting on these projects is left to local citizen-journalists and under-resourced independent media, and in the absence of consistent national reporting, the likelihood of misinformation and confusion increases. The people who live in news deserts are typically poor and, Gilpin writes, “stand to lose the most … from a lack of information.”

As if this lack of reliable information isn’t bad enough, some non-Indigenous pipeline opponents will tell you that the numbers don’t matter, because democracy is a Western colonial construct and what matters is the hereditary chiefs, not the views of the people. Nonsense. Band councils and traditional leadership have differing mandates and represent contrasting governance systems, but hereditary leaders are not monarchs, just as guesstimates aren’t facts. The concerns and aspirations of ordinary people matter. And we need to know what they are. ⌾

Current Events, Politics

The AMC and Indigenous Media

Arlen Dumas

We cannot trust native politicians to deal with their dirty laundry. We need our Indigenous media for that.

✎  WAYNE K. SPEAR | JULY 19, 2019 • Politics

YEARS AGO, while working for a national Indigenous organization, I’d sometimes get a GTTM, or Going To The Media call. The jist of these would be that the Chief, or whatever figure of authority, was guilty of crimes that the caller—isolated, powerless, and alone—was unable to challenge. She (or, as was less often the case, he) would adumbrate the transgressions, ending with the flourish”If you don’t help me then I’m going to the media.”

Help them I did, and not because they had threatened. I had the good fortune of working for an ethical and competent agency, and if someone was misusing our resources I wanted to know about it. My experience was that people rarely if ever fabricated a claim: even when mistaken they believed every syllable of the indictment to be true. So for example a caller notes the purchase of a new dishwasher by a recently funded Director of Health, or whatever it may have been. Well obviously the Director is stealing funds from the program. What else could it be?

The story of Arlen Dumas, Grand Chief of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, is not a new dishwasher story, but it is a Going To The Media one. Two women have told the newspapers about unsolicited texts from the Chief and a third says she and Dumas once had consensual sex. The Chief claims he is victim of a politically motivated smear campaign, and while he admits to sending messages he says that he was responding to an earlier request for advice. Some of these messages came through the account of a Charles Forbes. Dumas says that he has nothing to do with this account, that someone is impersonating him online, and that he has hired a third-party firm to investigate.

For days now this matter has been covered by CBC, CTV News, Global News, and the Winnipeg Free Press. But it was the reporting of the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network that triggered an unspoken community rule not to air the dirty laundry where outsiders can see it. I was already well acquainted with this rule when I was getting my first Going To The Media calls over twenty years ago. According to early reports the AMC women’s council stated they would investigate but Chief Francine Meeches, chair of the council, told CTV News that they have no mandate to do so. A women’s council statement later asserted that they will no longer be part of “a media frenzy based on little more than Facebook posts.” The AMC itself took the side of Dumas and against a “media circus which focused on unfounded allegations.” APTN’s Beverly Andrews asked a question about Dumas at a Peguis First Nation press conference and was told to leave. A July 12 article quotes Francine Meeches saying that “APTN’s credibility is BS. It seems more are losing faith in your organization. You represent those who are against First Nations not in support of First Nations.”

Who knows where the Arlen Dumas story will go tonight or tomorrow or next week or month. What endures is this toxic idea that Indigenous media should cheerlead our politicians while burying stories which cause embarrassment in the world outside—especially stories of incompetent, abusive, or unethical community leaders. It’s true that “those who are against us” (a phrase that almost certainly refers to white people) —might read them and discover therein justification of their prejudices. But Going To The Media is also a path of last but necessary resort in the seeking of remedies that cannot be had in isolated communities dominated by powerful families. The Grand Chief’s laundry may or may not be dirty. We cannot trust our politicians to tell us. We need Indigenous media for that. ⌾

Current Events

We’re in no mood for explaining ourselves to Canada

We don’t need, and we don’t want, a devil’s advocate to set us right about the value of Indigenous lives

✎  Wayne K. Spear | February 11, 2018 • Politics

I CAN’T IMAGINE ANYTHING worse than losing a child.

Now consider, for just a moment, how weak that sentence is. A cliché, wrapped around a euphemism, squatting on a conjecture. I don’t want to imagine the death of my son, or even to write the words, and I definitely don’t want to know what it’s like. Grant me the bliss of ignorance, now and forever.

Colten Boushie

The trial of Gerald Stanley is about the death of a son, about pain that requires no explanation, about the worst of all possible nightmares come true. If Mr. Stanley were sitting in a cell at this moment, the family of Colten Boushie would be mourning a loss all the same. For those who knew and loved Colten, there is today an expansive, terrible hole the universe will never fill. Every parent across Canada can sympathize with this, and so too everyone who has lost a brother or sister. Some things are universal.

But some aren’t in Canada, and the trial of Gerald Stanley is about this too. When the acquittal arrived, I was shocked but not surprised, like Indigenous people everywhere. I felt a sickening, heavy weight come down on me. I was angry and sad, outraged and hopeless. I wanted to kick something over. Instead, I went to bed, thinking it best to check out for a while.

My show the next day was about Indigenous identity, and how we’re all different from one another. I couldn’t have arranged worse timing for this topic. Yes, we are all unique, but in the hours and days after the judgement of innocence was announced, we felt the same emotions and expressed ourselves in a shared language of pain. Indigenous people experienced the Stanley trial the same way because our lives have been shaped by common experiences. We know instinctively that other Indigenous people get it, without anyone having to explain a single thing.

At the Toronto #JusticeforColten gathering, a speaker said she was exhausted by reconciliation. Aren’t we all. At times like this we’re expected to go on television or to write moving newspaper articles explaining ourselves to Canada. Everything we have lived and known is fodder for debate: the suffering of Indian residential school survivors, the legitimacy of our expressions of pain, the continued existence of our communities. We are told that our past is something to get over, and that our aspirations for the future are impractical. As for our present, we should show more gratitude and get on with assimilating.

When I was twenty-four, the Oka confrontation taught my generation of Haudenosaunee that our lives were of less value and importance to Canada than golf. We were forever changed by the Summer of 1990. Twenty-eight years later, our young people are living their Oka, by which I mean they are having their place in the Canadian scheme of things underscored and re-affirmed. The message is clear: it’s okay and even necessary to shoot an Indigenous person over a quad, because a quad is a valuable piece of property.

Ah, but what about the other side? Balance and fairness. The devil’s advocates and the debate?

Some things are universal, like the grief of a bereft parent. Canadians should at least be capable of expressing sorrow over this without having it explained to them. Unfortunately, Indigenous people are forever expected to educate the country and to give an account of ourselves, over and over and over again, as if Canada would be moved by our pain to change its direction. We’re exhausted, and we’re in no mood for explaining ourselves right now, and after this week we may never be again.

Current Events

Colten Boushie’s Death Must Have a Purpose

For Indigenous people, change is often a matter of life or death

✎  Wayne K. Spear | January 30, 2018 • Current Events

RCMP ROOFTOP SNIPERS were at-the-ready when Gerald Stanley arrived in North Battleford last April for his three-day preliminary hearing. There was drumming and a show of support for the family of Colten Boushie but no violence. There’s been no violence of any kind in the months since this Indigenous Rodney King (as some have called Boushie) was shot in the back of the head while sitting in a car stalled on Stanley’s Biggar, Saskatchewan property. The family has made it clear that what they want is not blood but justice and change.

Colten’s death must have a purpose. While his death revealed a deep divide that exists between many within this province, it has also brought us here to this courthouse, where we could come together and ask for a fair trial for everyone involved. We, Colten’s family, hope that this preliminary hearing and the issues that it raises about our relationships with each other will generate further discussion and dialogue to help us bring our communities together.

Biggar, Saskatchewan

It’s an understatement to characterise this sentiment as dignified, but then what isn’t an understatement when speaking of confronting the death of a child. As the family were grieving their dear lost son and grandson and brother and nephew, strangers were posting hateful comments on social media. The rooftop snipers, presumably deployed to snuff an incipient Indian uprising, turned out to be unnecessary. But there was rabble rousing and racial hatred to be shot down in the other column of the deep divide ledger, so the Premier stepped in to denounce racists and their racism. Before long a Browning municipal councillor named Ben Kautz had resigned over a posting on the Saskatchewan Farmer’s Facebook group, where a number of other mean-spirited comments could also be found. As if losing Colten wasn’t bad enough, random citizens heaped contempt on the family’s pain, and still the family called for healing.

There are good reasons why Indigenous people call for healing and peace at times like this. The first and perhaps most compelling is that we need healing and peace. At roughly five percent of the population, Indigenous people are not going to win a contest of force against Canada, and we know it. But there also isn’t an appetite for perpetuating the hatred and violence that has been commonly experienced by Indigenous people, for generations, whether in the residential schools or on the street. Far too many of us have become experts in trauma, intergenerational violence, and hate. We don’t just want something better, we need it, in a life-or-death way.

Last week the RCMP cleared themselves of a charge of misconduct made by the family of Colten Boushie. The officers can’t recall doing or saying the things that witnesses affirm that they did and said, in the course of their investigation of the Baptiste home. At the time of Colten Boushie’s death the RCMP issued a press release suggesting he was connected to an investigation of property theft. Then the RCMP allowed the 2003 Ford Escape in which Boushie was shot—a critical piece of evidence—to go to the salvage yard before it had undergone forensic (blood spatter) anaysis, thereby jeopardizing the integrity of any later trial. “The RCMP were, best case scenario, negligent,” the family lawyer Chris Murphy told a journalist. Still the RCMP seem to think they have done nothing wrong, which apparently means that they haven’t.

Next Spring Gerald Stanley will go to court, where he will face a charge of second-degree murder. In the meantime his rural Saskatchewan house has been put up for sale as he prepares for a new life either inside or ouside of prison. He has expressed regret for the death of Colten Boushie, just as Ben Kautz has expressed regret for his Facebook post, just as the RCMP has said it’s sorry for offences taken in the course of its faultless  investigation. The Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities (SARM) meanwhile agitates for a broadened right to defend property against trespass. The two solitudes of Saskatchewan, the reserve and the farm, remain as estranged as ever, and Indigenous people everywhere hold their breath in anticipation of a trial they don’t dare allow themselves to believe will be fair and impartial.

Colten Boushie is gone and the white cattle ranchers found guilty of property theft of their neighbours remain alive and well in the community, despite their crimes. There is indeed a deep divide, deep as the chasm between life and death.

Current Events, First Nations

NatChief PB is Doing Very Good Great Things at the AFN

I watched the AFN Special Chiefs Assembly. This is what I saw

✎  Wayne K. Spear | December 7, 2017 • Current Events

IF YOU FOLLOWED THE Assembly of First Nations Special Chiefs Assembly this week, like I did, you heard two federal cabinet ministers (and omg one of them is Indigenous) say that Canada did some very no good very bad things in the past—but the Trudeau Liberal government is a new and different government altogether. And on account of this differentlyness very good great things are going to happen to us very soon because. WAIT shouted the chiefs WE HAVE SOME QUESTIONS ABOUT THAT but the Ministers had to leave the moment their speeches were over. Just like pretty much every Minister at an AFN gathering ever but different.

National Chief Perry Bellegarde said much the same things the government people did—almost as if his speaking notes were coordinated with those of Ministers Carolyn Bennett and Jody Wilson-Raybould, who omg is Indigenous just like the rest of us. NatCheef B-Garde enjoys one of the warmest Crown-Chief relationships of the AFN’s history, so it was no surprise when his leather went all buttery-soft and he said dreamily that we are “in the midst of a tremendous opportunity” and that federal money is about to rain down upon us from the sky, along with big bucketsful of inherent Indigenous rights, no strings attached. The dangers, said Ency BeauGardz, are acrimony and division. Also, totally unrelated, there’s a National Chief election next year. The takeaway is that we must re-elect NC PeeBee (don’t get all dividey now, Chiefs!) and then also PeeEMJayT, so the wonderful things we have been promised will happen. In their second terms, for sure. Because.

Who Wants an Eagle Staff, Yo!

No Indigenous person outside of Ottawa actually knows what the AFN has been up to over the past few years. There’s an UNDRIP which sounds like a plumbing issue (if you’re fortunate enough to have actual plumbing) but isn’t. Also the AFN wants to close The Gap, which is fine because no Indian shops there anyway. None of us can point to a single improvement in our lives and say “Thank-you, National Chief, for this wonderful [fill in the blank]” but most of us can point to something that really sucks, like undrinkable water and moldy schools, and say ruefully that nothing appears to be changing. Fortunately that is all going to change lickety-split, because there’s a new Prime Minister in town who loves us, and we know this because tears fall from his dreamy bedroom eyes when he apologizes. He cares so much that, for the first time in Canada’s history, a federal government has a plan for the Indigenous people that is going to be great for them. We are going to love it! And it’s going to be different from the past because in the past governments never came up with ideas to make the Indians better-off.

For some reason there are Indigenous people who don’t trust the government or the AFN. (No, really.) These people say silly things like “Well what’s the plan exactly?” And by people I mean, of course, dangerous radicals. One of these unhinged extremists, the AFN’s Anishinabe Elder, Elmer Courchene, suggested that the AFN Chiefs were guilty of collaboration, which he defined as traitorous cooperation with the enemy. Whoa there, cultural Marxist SJW Elder Courchene! Not only that, he accused the AFN of disrespecting elders, then brought up National Chief Bellegarde’s gifting of an eagle staff to Marc-Andre Blanchard, Canada’s representative to the United Nations. I mean, what has the world come to when a Chief gets grief simply for handing sacred Indigenous objects over to random white guys?

Then other radicals jumped in and all hell broke loose. Even the youth took shots at poor nc/pErRyB. Mark Hill, Co-Chair of the AFN’s Youth Council, accused the AFN executive of centralizing power and authority, and he reminded everyone that the AFN is a lobby group and not a government elected to negotiate on our behalf. “The nation-to-nation relationship is between our peoples and the Crown,” he shouted, while setting his hair on fire. (Not really. I made that part up to sound more radical.) NatchyCheef PeBellGeGard didn’t look very happy about any of this, but later on he reminded everyone that this is a pivotal moment for a legacy so we are moving forward with much work to do it’s the grassroots let me tell you the youth they are our future. This didn’t convince anyone, so he pulled an 11.8-billion-dollar bill out of his headdress and waved it around until it was time for everyone to go to the casino.

Books

An iBook, Now in its 2nd Edition! “Residential Schools: With the Words and Images of Survivors”

In 2016, Residential Schools: With the Words and Images of Survivors won the Golden Oak Award. Now in its 2nd Edition, this comprehensive history of Canada’s Indian Residential School System is also available on iTunes  as a deluxe Apple iBook. The electronic version features audio and video enhancements, as well as other additional material. The full colour, hardcover version can be ordered from the publisher here.

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Here is what readers are saying:

“A respectful and informative book about the residential school system written by Aboriginal author Larry Loyie. It includes first hand accounts of many different survivors of the school system as well as photos and documents. This is a heartbreaking, but very important read as it includes the long term effects the school system has had on these families.”

“This is an excellent introduction to the history of the Indian Residential School System in Canada. I truely hope it finds it’s way into every school and church library. The authors compile personal stories, many photographs, and history in a well sequenced telling of the tragic history of relations between First Nations peoples and colonial Canada.”

“Researched and written over the span of almost two decades, the authors document the history of residential schools with first-person interviews (including that of author Larry Loyie) and photographs. It is written in a very accessible way for readers from teens to adults, and should serve as an important introduction to this blight on Canada’s history.”

“Absolutely wonderful overview of Canada’s residential schools, with firsthand accounts and pictures from survivors. Especially loved the “myths” section at the back of the book 🙂 Bravo to the survivors and authors brave enough to share their story.”

“Very comprehensive summary of Residential Schools and their legacy. Great visuals and witness accounts.”

 

Books

The Ottawa Book Awards and new work from Chelsea Vowel

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I’ve been working away these past months at the 2016 Ottawa Book Awards reading list. One of three jurors in the non-fiction category, I drew up my list of finalists this past week, along with my colleagues. I’m pleased to say there was consensus on three of our top five selections. Early in June, I expect, we’ll sort matters out.

There’s an opportunity cost to a commitment of this scale. I agreed to read 21 books in about as many weeks, some of them rather hefty and dense. That’s a lot of hours I could have been doing many other things, but I did enjoy the labour and along the way discovered some books I might not have found otherwise.

Now I have a smallish library of book award books I will be passing along. Only a couple weeks ago I (once again) thinned out the over-flowing shelves, and I’ve no desire to go backwards. Already I have specific books in mind for specific people. And I wish I could tell you what I’ve read and what I thought about it, but until the requisite announcements have been made, I’m keeping my reading list and my thoughts private.

In the meantime, here’s a book I’m looking forward to reading, to recommending, and to giving away. It’s by Chelsea Vowel, more widely known by the name âpihtawikosisân. The book will be released in September but is available now for pre-order.

 

First Nations

The Indian Residential Schools Are Still With Us

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In 2010, I interviewed the former National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, Phil Fontaine, about his many years as a politician. The conclusion of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement negotiations was a few years behind, and I asked Phil for his assessment. What did he think of the agreement?

Never mind that this settlement was, as people like to say, “historic”—at $5-billion and more, the largest court-supervised class action in Canada’s history. Never mind that it had involved dozens of lawyers in simultaneous, multi-city sessions, or that it was front-page news for months and even years running. Indeed, today’s Globe and Mail headline reads “Residential Schools: Bennett puts settlement onus on Catholics.” Who would have thought the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement would be news nearly a full decade after its 2007 roll-out. Maybe Phil. But on that day he shrugged and pulled a face. He was proud of the agreement and said something to the effect that it was the best they were going to get. But there was something wrankling him, and he told me what it was.

Phil had many accomplishments over his career. He listed a few. I couldn’t dissent: he’d been more than a few places, made more than a few waves. Yet inevitably when he’s introduced, he pointed out, it’s the residential schools that everyone mentions, and only the residential schools. Everything else disappeared.

I don’t usually commiserate with politicians, but in this instance I knew exactly how he felt. I’ve written on hundreds of topics over the past three decades, but to the degree I’m known for anything at all, it’s the Indian Residential School System. My articles on residential schools, routinely the most-visited pieces on this blog, are about the only thing I’ve composed that could be called “evergreen.” My book on residential schools is by far my most successful book, by which I mean it’s the book that people actually read, more than any other of mine.

I’m not complaining. I am, however, registering genuine surprise. I never expected the article I wrote in May 2002, for the Globe and Mail, to be at the top of the most-read list in May 2016. In the meanwhile I’ve written nearly a thousand essays that have dropped (as they do, for most writers of current event) into the black hole of yesterday. Perhaps I should have expected this. Twenty years ago I’d learned to assert that, just as the Indian residential schools had done decades worth of damage, it would take decades to heal and restitute. Canada may wish to be done with its residential school history, but history is not done with Canada. Not even close.

Today’s Globe and Mail headline refers to the amounts negotiated in Schedule 0-3 of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, by the Corporation for the Catholic Entities, Parties to the IRSSA (or CCEPIRSSA). Why then an “onus”? The short answer is that the (in my estimation) badly-written agreement committed the Catholic Entities to the “best effort” fund-raising of a $25-million “Canada-Wide Campaign.” It didn’t pan out, according to lawyers for the CCEPIRSSA. So the federal government released the Catholic Entities, who ran ~65% of the residential schools, from this settlement obligation.

I mention the badly-written bit because the current mess was created by the agreement, insofar as it is a vaguely-composed document with no clear timelines or enforcements. And what exactly constitutes a “best effort”? Who decides? These and many other questions are not answered by Schedule 0-3, which bears all the evidence of having been drafted by junior lawyers while, elsewhere, the bulk of the effort went into the Common Experience Payment.

All of this makes me wonder where we’ll be five years from now. Or ten, or twenty. With some confidence, I can say that the Indian residential schools will probably be with us. The question is, will we be inching closer to restitution, or slinking yet further away?

Humor

This is an offensive aboriginal stereotype, even if it does describe me perfectly

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haha

I‘M SURE you’ve all seen it: the offensive “Native” stereotype of the guy who has this long, thick, wild-flowing hair and intense, passionate eyes. Often he’s a lean, muscular type—again, passionate and earthy, mysterious, and sexually irresistible to women.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about that I found this week on Amazon.

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This is a book about a time-traveling white female doctor who meets a hot and seductive Sioux warrior from the 1800s. The woman is mesmerized and basically surrenders to this sizzling chunk of Onkwehonwe.

I haven’t read the book, but I’m guessing the plot has something to do with going back in time to acquaint the Sioux of the 19th Century with basic Photoshop concepts, like Layering and Magic Wand. (Yes, that really is a Photoshop term.) Then, in her later novels, I’m guessing Pamela Ackerson will get into more advanced techniques like Masking, Polygon Lasso, Curves, Color Balance, and Lighting Effects.

I can has more? Click here for more!

Current Events, First Nations, Politics

Why Would Anyone Want to Be the National Chief of the AFN?

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Why Would Anyone Want to Be the National Chief of the AFN?

THE ASSEMBLY of First Nations 35th Annual General Assembly, held last week in Halifax, was remarkable more for what wasn’t said than what was. The name of the former national chief was seldom spoken, and the consensus appeared to be for a reconstitution of the leadership as quickly as possible, better to put behind the recent—and unprecedented—disruption.

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First Nations

Looking Beyond the First Nation Control of First Nations Education Act

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LAST WEEK I WAS interviewed for a CBC program on the topic of Bill C-33, the First Nations Control of First Nations Education Act. The name of the program is immaterial. If you look it up, you won’t find me. That interview was tossed, and another guest was found.

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