“Kill Indians”: Grappling with Graffiti in Thunder Bay

Some mighty disturbing sentiments greeted visitors to the downtown of Thunder Bay, Ontario this week, including this offensive phrase: The “Kill Indians” scrawl seen above was just one of many derogatory if not outright hateful messages spray-painted throughout high traffic areas in TB. According to the tbnewswatch.com, Nishnawbe-Aski Nation Grand Chief Stan Beardy says it’s […]

The Search for the World’s Best Indian Taco

Behold… Same film, different trailer, much funnier… I’d seen the trailers online for a while now and always wondered what it was about. It turns out that the short film (which sadly I cannot find online in its entirety) is the product of Creative Spirit, a Native American film project based in California. Based on […]

What Impact Did the Oka Crisis Have On You?

mediaINDIGENA‘s own Waubgeshig Rice has a stellar piece in today’s Facts & Arguments section of the Globe about the 1990 Oka Crisis. (Although I’m frankly baffled, to put it charitably, by the accompanying picture.) In “Oka helped us find our voice,” Waub nails it when he writes: “We learned what it truly meant to be […]

“The Real Oka” and Other Conspiracy Theories

I read Doug George’s anti-warrior diatribe in Tuesday’s Montreal Gazette (“As I Saw It: The Real Oka Story,” July 13, 2010) with a mixture of shock, horror, and sadness — roughly in that order. It’s clear (to me, anyway) that he doesn’t know the real story at all. In fact, the only sentence I could trust […]

Digital Tools for Learning & Preserving Indigenous Languages

Aniin!  Interested in learning an Indigenous language?  Here are two digital tools that might make it easier: The folks over at the Miyo Wahkohtiwin Community Education Authority have taken their Online Cree Dictionary and turned it into an iPhone/iPad app, free of charge. Not i-based but still just as cool is Isadore Toulouse’s dimdim-based Anishinabemowen (Ojibway) virtual […]