Read about her passing on Indian Country Today.
On its Twitter page, ICT also suggests you check out a discussion of her life and legacy on NPR Radio (note: it starts about a third of the way through, so don’t be thrown off at the beginning).
And last but not least, you can watch her full-length interview with OETA, The Oklahoma Network.
[Image via NewsOK.com]
The Aboriginal Healing Foundation (AHF) has just released The Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement’s Common Experience Payment and Healing: A Qualitative Study Exploring Impacts on Recipients. (PDF of study available here.)
The Common Experience Payment (CEP) is a component of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement and is intended to monetarily recognize and compensate the experiences of former Residential School students.
The study — a follow-up to the 2007 AHF report, Lump Sum Compensation Payments Research Project — builds upon 281 interviews with First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Residential School Survivors. (Full disclosure: my mother and my friend Rick Harp co-authored the Lump Sum report.) Its aims were two-fold: to understand the impact of CEP on individual healing, and, to find out the roles of support services for CEP applicants.
I’d like to highlight one of the findings about the CEP related to healing:
[M]ost participants saw no connection between money and healing. No amount of compensation could repay the language and cultural losses incurred from a residential school system that lasted for 150 years and involved generations of Aboriginal children. Hence, for about half of the Survivors in the study, compensation made no difference to their well-being.
As well, another major conclusion of the study was that the application process triggered reactions ranging from “discomfort and a sense of loneliness to feelings of panic and pain leading to depression and self-destructive harm, including addictive behaviours and suicidal tendencies.” For these reasons, there was the expressed need for supports and services for those going through the CEP process.
This paper is one of many in a series of valuable AHF research publications that I’d recommend people read, and I was saddened to learn that federal funding for the AHF came to an end as of March 31, 2010.
[Image via wherearethechildren.ca]
Made refugees from our own territories, we’re hardly ‘immigrants’ to cities
A new study from the Environics Institute highlights the fact that many Aboriginal people who live in cities “have no plans to return to their home reserve,” reports the CBC.
Leaving aside for the moment just how complicated it would be for most of us to even contemplate such a return, I wanted to briefly share a thought that always arises when I encounter this idea that Aboriginal people are ‘new’ to Canada’s cities, implicitly suggesting that “home” reserves are the norm and the urban environment is therefore aberrant for us.
See, I take the long view — the long, long, lonnnnnng view. Fact: many of what are now Canada’s cities were our homes to begin with; that is, before we were booted off our lands and forcibly re-located to — more often than not — areas much less suited for settlement and habitation.
Why? Well, let’s just say non-Aboriginal peoples knew a sweet piece of land when they saw it — and they took it. What a deal: lands already scouted, groomed and modified for optimal human use over decades if not centuries. “Thanks, guys! Now, get lost, will ya?”
In her 2004 talk, “Three Myths about Aboriginals in Cities,” urban geographer Evelyn Peters spoke of “the historical reality” underlying such Aboriginal mobility trends, involuntary or otherwise:
In 1901, only 5.1 percent of Aboriginal people lived in urban areas, and that percentage had only increased to 6.7 percent by 1951. Yet, many Canadian cities emerged in places used by Aboriginal people as gathering spots or settlement areas. When we talk about Aboriginal urbanisation, then, we need to keep in mind that urbanisation patterns are linked to actions that removed Aboriginal people from emerging urban areas. These actions vary from situating or moving reserves away from cities, to enforcing a pass system, to moving Métis communities, to the geographies of government policies.
Remembering this history is not just a nod to political correctness. It reminds us that urban Aboriginal people do not arrive in cities like other migrants, national or international. Clearly, Aboriginal people face some similar challenges and create some similar opportunities. However, unlike other migrants, many Aboriginal people are travelling within their traditional territories.
So, in reality, if we are to speak of Aboriginal ‘immigration’ into cities, let’s try to consider the fact that, for many of us, moving to cities is really just moving back home.
[Image via quinn.anya]
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/manitoba/story/2010/03/31/urban-aboriginal-peoples-hope-city.html?ref=rss#ixzz0kL14mnrm
Aboriginal Canadians have been allowed to vote in federal elections for 50 years now. But who’s voting?
It was the fall of 1993 and the Canadian federal election campaign was heating up. I was in Grade 10, and one of my history assignments was to poll people in my community about the parties they were leaning towards. I spent an evening calling about 30 friends and family of voting age, and as expected, not even half planned on voting. I brought the results back to my history teacher the next day, who was shocked and appalled by the apparent “complacence” of people on my rez. “I don’t know how to say this,” he asked me in front of the rest of the class, slight condescension in his tone, “but are people in your community, um…”
“Dumb?!” piped up one of my non-Aboriginal classmates from the back of the room. I politely reminded them both that for the most part, First Nations people had never really felt part of Canada in the first place, and that’s why something like Oka happened just a few years earlier. I said you can’t blame Aboriginal people for not voting if the process or the political parties never engaged them.
Not much has changed since then, or since Aboriginal Canadians were first granted the right to vote 50 years ago. Prior to Prime Minister John Diefenbaker’s announcement in the spring of 1960, Aboriginal Canadians had to give up their treaty rights and renounce their status in order to cast a ballot in federal elections. The system that uprooted and manipulated the lives of Native people now granted them a voice in determining its future.
But people haven’t exactly been flocking to on-reserve voting stations to take advantage of that. Turnout is still very low. In the federal election of 2008, two-thirds of eligible voters showed up in Manitoba’s urban and largely affluent Winnipeg South Centre riding. But in the northern, predominantly Aboriginal Churchill riding, only about one third of voters cast a ballot.
A big reason for federal election apathy is no matter who’s running the big show, most people on-reserve only see two real political influences on their lives: their immediate Chief and Council, and Indian and Northern Affairs Canada. The various parties can campaign all they want on the rez, but whoever wins will just be the same old INAC to a lot of people. It won’t be until there’s a bigger presence of Natives in the House of Commons that attitudes will really start to change. Ultimately, it may take what people across the country have wanted for years – an actual “Indian” Minister of Indian Affairs.
Seventeen years removed from Grade 10, I vote in every election. But I’ve been an engaged urban Anishinaabe for the past 12 years. Friends and relatives my age on the reserve still don’t really vote. They don’t relate to MP candidates, and election after election, they never see any change in their community. They won’t vote until these wannabe politicians speak for them, and not to them.
[Image via shareski]
The Anishnabek of Eastern Ontario are supporting opposition by some students to Nipissing University’s plans to name a new library after the province’s former premier, Mike Harris.
Nipissing is slated to get $15-million for that library thanks to the generosity of businessman Seymour Schulich. North Bay is in the riding of the former premier.
Harris, if you’ve forgotten or didn’t know, is the person that the Ipperwash Inquiry identified with these memorable words: “I want the fucking Indians out of the park.”
Heavily armed Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) teams moved in shortly after upon an unarmed group peacefully occupying Ipperwash Provincial Park. The attack turned violent. Anishnabe Dudley George was shot and killed.
A grad from North Bay Teacher College, Harris brought in testing of both students and teachers in the province, reduced the powers of local school boards, and provoked the largest teacher strike in Ontario history.
Nipissing students have competing Facebook pages. As of Sunday, March 28 @ 12:59 pm, here’s how they stack up:
AGAINST: 2,120 members 2,240 (Mar 29) 2649 (Apr 3)
FOR: 88 members 101 (Mar 29) 121 (Apr 3)
