Loving this short video from the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission, a montage assembling moments from the 6 month carving process behind the Stillaguamish Tribe‘s first traditional canoe in 100 years.
Made of 300-year-old cedar — a century of that spent hidden underwater — the creation of the shovel-nose canoe was headed up by Lummi Nation master carver Felix Solomon.
What a powerful moment this must have been for the participants. Learn the full story on the NWIFC site.
Indian Country Today recently put out its first in a four-part series about the fight to “prevent the widespread violence against First Nations women and girls” in Canada.
“Trafficking our children” begins with the harrowing description of how one 11-year-old was forced into the sex trade on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, an all-too-familiar example of how girls aged 11-to-17 end up as prey for those behind “a larger scheme to find vulnerable, defenseless youth stuck in limbo between homelessness and the long road home.”
But, as the piece points out, not every missing/murdered Aboriginal woman or girl necessarily has links to prostitution. Many are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. The question is whether their cases have been taken as seriously as they should by police.
Chillingly, there is reason to believe that the oft-quoted number of 500+ missing and murdered Aboriginal women/girls is “just the tip of the iceberg,” according to an advocate quoted in the piece.
[ Image via dominionpaper.ca ]
The Tyee recently completed its 6-part series entitled “Native Youth, In Their Own Voices,” which explores many of the shared challenges and dreams of the roughly 75,000 Aboriginal youth in BC.
The articles feature 14 young Aboriginal people from across the province, “from urban Vancouver, to smaller towns, and right through to remote reserves without road access,”
Interviewed over the course of a year, these youth share compelling stories and insights about such topics as school, alcohol and drugs, family, culture and language.
Articulate, real, determined: these are voices that need and deserve to be heard more widely.
One article on culturally-sensitive approaches to education discusses the success of Aboriginal-oriented alternatives at some high schools. There, staff work to assist youth both in and out of the classroom, helping them locate resources for meeting basic needs like food and shelter, safety, connectedness, and self-esteem. These programs do better by their students because they’re flexible, letting them design their schedules around things like work.
Another piece looked at the impacts of the foster care system on Aboriginal youth. We hear about one young woman who was removed from her home because of parental neglect due to drinking, only to be placed with non-Aboriginal foster parents who also drank excessively.
Especially notable are the links cited between family dysfunction, poverty and crime: where income levels are equally low, “Aboriginal families are reported to child protection agencies at the same rate as non-Aboriginal families.” This gives rise to another stat that brings these connections home: “Of children who have been in care in B.C. at some point in their lives, over one-third find themselves involved with the youth justice system by the age of 17, regardless of race — compared to just over three per cent of those who have never been in care.” (Emphasis is mine in both cases.)
All in all, a series well worth reading.
[ Image via TheTyee.ca / Jacqueline Windh ]
Where I grew up, in another time and definitely another place, summer was a time to stock up on food for the winter to come. Working in the garden my mother planted that always seemed waaaay too big for a kid looking for some time off to have fun. Berry picking expeditions that would transform the cellar to a glow of purple saskatoons and crimson raspberries. There always seemed to be more hornets than berries. I don’t know why.
Summer is typically seen as the lazy season by school kids. But for the quiet ones, the ones who don’t have the money to golf or hang out with their friends, and who live a contemporary life without gardens and berries, there are other things to do that fit the season. I stumbled across a couple of websites that make me wish I wasn’t in the working world so I could take advantage.
The first, www.jilaptoq.ca, dips into the Mi’kmaq language. Its interactive dictionary is very useful for those trying to get their heads around how the language uses 16 letters of the English alphabet that don’t quite sound like they do in English.
The “jilapto” project means “leaving your mark.” Though it’s aimed at young people, nothing’s stopping any of us from giving it a whirl. You might come away from summer feeling just a little more worldly.
The other website I tapped into — www.gwichin.ca — is about traditional northern medicines. 
It doesn’t have the same flexibility in many ways as the language site.
That’s because while you can speak Mi’kmaq anywhere and it’s Mi’kmaq, Gwich’in plant names are unique to the Yukon-MacKenzie Valley-Alaska area. This means different names are used for identical plants outside the region, making it potentially tricky to relay their medicinal value due to uncertainty about whether you’re dealing with the same plant in your area.
But looking at the pictures helps. And, as with the language site, you feel just that much more tuned in to the world when you pick up a little of someone else’s local knowledge.
[ Images: discoverytrees catalogue; Verne Equinox of Elsipogtog First Nation; Ingrid Kirtsch, Gwich’in Ethnobotany ]
Even in victory, there is defeat.
A few months back I wrote about the imminent end of a 14-year long battle for a landlease settlement owed to about 300-thousand native people stateside.
It was about land. How novel.
It was about other people making money from resources on indian land. Surprise.
An agreement had been reached to finally settle the dispute by paying out three billion dollars or so, to be divided by the native stakeholders, among them the Blackfeet Nation of Montana, and the Yakima of Washington.
Predictably, the entire effort got snarled in the political mire of Congress. Amend this, increase that; delay this, rethink that….
The whole thing was supposed to be settled by June 15. Then July 9. At this point, the deadline date’s been moved to August 6. And, call me cynical, but I’m guessing that will end up moving to a later date again.
In the interests of disclosure, it’s worth noting that though the fight was led and won by Elouise Cobell of the Blackfeet Nation, there was a lot of opposition both native and non. Some were suspicious of how much the lawyers hired by Cobell were going to make off the settlement. Some about the final sum under discussion (being about 44 billion dollars less than the estimated worth of the arrangement).
So the victory is stalled. I have a sinking feeling I could be writing this up with a new date scratched in where the last one was for years to come.
Sure the wheels of justice grind slow. But when Elouise Cobell started this battle, she was 50. This year, she’s 65.
What should it be called if it takes another 15 years for the final settlement to be awarded? You can’t call it victory.
[images – Justice illustration by Matt Mahurin; photo Ryan J. Reilly, Main Justice]
