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Jody Porter was a reporting powerhouse at the CBC and advocated for human rights and Indigenous rights in Northwestern Ontario for decades. But she had complicated feelings about her work toward the end of her life. Jody passed away on July 19, 2022 and we are re-airing a conversation where she talked about these complicated feelings she had about her legacy. This interview originally aired in 2020.

Jody Porter worked for CBC in Thunder Bay for more than two decades. Her work on the injustices faced by Indigenous people in Northwestern Ontario from Grassy Narrows to Thunder Bay was cited in many hearings and reports including the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. And yet, she viewed her work with a very critical lens toward the end of her life after she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.

In July, Jody succumbed to cancer and died at the age of 50. We are re-airing a conversation Jesse had with Jody in November 2020 during the Brayden Bushby trial.

Featured in this episode: Jody Porter, senior reporter at CBC News

Further reading:

Support Canadaland at canadaland.com/join

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#802 Jody Porter And A Complicated Legacy

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Jody Porter was a reporting powerhouse at the CBC and advocated for human rights and Indigenous rights in Northwestern Ontario for decades. But she had complicated feelings about her work toward the end of her life. Jody passed away on July 19, 2022 and we are re-airing a conversation where she talked about these complicated feelings she had about her legacy.

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Art not only has the power to inspire, it can also be a powerful catalyst for change. Nowhere is this more evident than in issues of truth and reconciliation, as Carey Newman well knows. Recently appointed as the inaugural Impact Chair in Indigenous Art Practices with the University of Victoria's Faculty of Fine Arts, Newman brings his passion for decolonization and Indigenous resurgence to this new position.

A multi-disciplinary Kwakwak'awakw and Coast Salish artist, master carver, filmmaker and author, Newman strives to highlight Indigenous, social and environmental injustice through his art practice. In addressing the impacts of colonialism and capitalism, he uses material truth to unearth memory and trigger the necessary emotion to drive positive change. He is also deeply engaged with community and incorporating innovative methods derived from traditional teachings and Indigenous worldviews into his process.

Newman was most recently UVic's sixth Audain Professor of Contemporary Art Practice of the Pacific Northwest. Now as the Impact Chair in Indigenous Art Practices, he is jointly appointed to UVic's Department of Visual Arts and the Department of Art History and Visual Studies, where he will teach both graduate and undergraduate students, as well as continuing his own research and cultural production.

Newman is the third of four inaugural UVic Impact Chairs to five-year research positions funded by the university's strategic framework initiative. His appointment also reflects UVic's commitment to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs), specifically the UN SDGs on reducing inequalities and on fostering peace, justice and strong institutions.

Newman discusses the intersection between his art practices and social issues, as well as his hopes to build new relationships while challenging Canada's historical narrative.
Q. How can Indigenous art practices promote meaningful intellectual exchange and community building?
A. My artwork is inspired by, and responds to, a wide spectrum of historical and contemporary social issues. It is rooted in Kwakwaka'wakw and Sto:lo world views that see governance, law and arts as inextricably interconnected: I include all of these when considering the potential impacts of Indigenous art practices. I think about this Impact Chair position as being not just about the process and practices of Indigenous art making, but as an opportunity to discover what is possible when the distinctions between disciplines are removed, and the processes of creative production and intellectual exchange are transformed by not only changing who participates, but also the questions we pose, how we approach finding solutions and the metrics we use to evaluate success.
Q. How do you hope to use this position to build new relationships between truth, art and reconciliation?
A. When I think about the goal of reconciliation, the process begins with learning, understanding and accepting truth. I make a distinction between understanding something intellectually and feeling it on a fundamental or emotional level. I make the same distinction between being taught or told something and discovering that same thing through personal realization. That small distinction makes an enormous difference when it comes to how willing a person is to participate in, or make the sacrifices necessary for transformational change . . . like reconciliation. We know that art can be a catalyst in the process of discovering and sharing truth. We also know that art has the power to inspire people to action. This position provides me the time and resources to continue making art that addresses injustice and asks difficult questions. It also provides the opportunity to write about and critically reflect upon the process, and in doing so gain a better understanding of what works or doesn't work and why.
Q. How can the arts help challenge the historical narrative of Canada's colonial truth?
A. Throughout history, music, dance, literature and visual arts have all been used to confront various forms of injustice and inequality. When it comes to the genocide wrought by colonial Canada, generations of artists, scholars, activists and knowledge keepers have advocated for awareness and called for change by varying degrees of confrontation and inspiration. The work of reaching hearts and minds and then turning them to action is slow, but recently we have seen how quickly the confirmation of unmarked graves at residential schools transformed the perspective and galvanized the commitment of many in this country.
Q. How does that translate into your own art practice?
A. In my own creative practice, I build upon the work of those who came before me, making artwork that looks at how the colonial foundations of Canada have created the social, ecological, racial and economic injustices we face today. I believe that by understanding this history and recognizing how it is perpetuated today-and maybe embracing some Indigenous ways of being-we can dismantle what makes it systemic, and eventually live up to the altruistic self-image that has long been embedded in Canada's national identity.
Q. How can this position better bridge the space between institutional and community-based learning?
A. Something that unsettles me about the way scholars and institutions engage with community-based knowledge systems is how academia views research as proprietary. Whoever publishes something gets credit and is cited as the "expert," regardless of where the knowledge came from, or how many generations contributed to its development; even with ethics reviews and consent forms, this practice is extractive. In oral traditions, storytelling is the way knowledge is carried through generations, so it is natural to share information-but just because something is freely told, it doesn't mean the rights to it have also been given. Better understanding this nuance between rights and responsibility will go a long way toward building stronger relationships between academia and communities.
Q. What projects are you currently working on?
A. Every project seems to take longer than expected, so they always end up overlapping, but as I begin my term as Impact Chair in Indigenous Art Practices, there are two projects that I am particularly excited about. The first is establishing the unCentre for Arts and Decolonisation, a legacy of the Witness Blanket that will take an anti-oppressive, anti-racist, nonhierarchical approach to collaboration. My goal is to encourage more interdisciplinary creative/research projects that address the root causes of systemic issues that broadly impact society, including (but not limited to) Indigenous injustice, systemic racism, gendered violence, the climate crisis and global inequality. The other one is a conceptual art project called "The Seedling" that will ask us to transform our relationship with land, reconsider who and what our governance serves, and challenge us to change our actions and sense of collective responsibility today by radically expanding the timeline we use when planning for the future.

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Carey Newman (Visual Arts/Art History & Visual Studies) at careynewman@uvic.ca

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Impact Chair focuses on Indigenous art practices - University of Victoria

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Art not only has the power to inspire, it can also be a powerful catalyst for change. Nowhere is this more evident than in issues of truth and reconciliation, as Carey Newman well knows.

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Canada's crime rate just hit a 45-year low. It's been dropping for years-down by half since peaking in 1991. Bizarrely, the country recently cleared another benchmark, when the number of people incarcerated hit an all-time high. Dig a little further into the data, and an even more disquieting picture emerges.

While admissions of white adults to Canadian prisons declined through the last decade, Indigenous incarceration rates were surging: Up 112 per cent for women. Already, 36 per cent of the women and 25 per cent of men sentenced to provincial and territorial custody in Canada are Indigenous-a group that makes up just four per cent of the national population. Add in federal prisons, and Indigenous inmates account for 22.8 per cent of the total incarcerated population.

In the U.S., the go-to example for the asymmetric jailing of minority populations, black men are six times more likely to be imprisoned than white men. In Canada, the Indigenous incarceration rate is 10 times higher than the non-Indigenous population-higher even than South Africa at the height of apartheid. In Saskatchewan, if you're Indigenous, you're 33 times more likely to be incarcerated, according to a 1999 report, the most recent available.

This helps explain why prison guard is among the fastest-growing public sector occupations on the Prairies. And why criminologists have begun quietly referring to Canada's prisons and jails as the country's "new residential schools."

Related: Indigenous women share their stories of resilience

In some Prairie courtrooms, Indigenous defendants now make up 85 per cent of criminal caseloads, defence lawyers say. At Manitoba's Women's Correctional Centre in Headingley, as many as nine in 10 women were Indigenous, according to one recent count. At nearby Stony Mountain Institution, Indigenous men make up 65 per cent of the inmate population. Often, they're there because they failed to comply with a curfew or condition of bail. Or they're a low-level drug offender, caught up in Canada's harsh new mandatory-minimum sentences.

That's one reason for the upsurge. In the past decade, Stephen Harper's government passed more than 30 new crime laws, hiking punishment for a wide range of crimes, limiting parole opportunities and also broadening the grounds used to send young offenders to jail.

But the problem isn't just new laws. Although police "carding" in Toronto has put street checks, which disproportionately target minority populations, under the microscope, neither is racial proﬁling alone to blame. At every step, discriminatory practices and a biased system work against an Indigenous accused, from the moment a person is first identified by police, to their appearance before a judge, to their hearing before a parole board. The evidence is unambiguous: If you happen to be Indigenous, justice in Canada is not blind.

Chapter 1 - The street check

On Dec. 10, 2014, Simon Ash-Moccasin, a Regina teacher, actor and playwright, was walking to a holiday party for Briarpatch magazine, where he sits as a board member. He says officers began tailing him as he approached Casino Regina in the city's downtown core. Ash-Moccasin "fit a description," he was told after asking why he was being stopped. "I know which one that is," the Cree-Saulteaux 41-year-old later told Maclean's. "There's only one."

Ash-Moccasin has a good understanding of arrest protocol thanks to an acting gig with the Saskatchewan Police College, teaching trainee officers how not to collar a suspect. He plays the bad guy.

In real life, Ash-Moccasin initially refused to give his name. An officer threw him against a wall, he says. One attempted to cuff him without reading him his rights. He says he was shoved, headfirst, into the backseat. He was briefly detained until his record check came back clean. Before being released, officers told Ash-Moccasin, who was wearing a distinctive green camouflage jacket, that they were looking for an Indigenous man dressed all in black, with no front teeth, trying to hawk a TV.

Ash-Moccasin is among several Indigenous men and women in Prairie cities who allege they are being unfairly, and illegally, singled out. In June 2015, Maclean's (working with Vancouver's Discourse Media) attempted to figure out whether their experiences are indicative of a larger issue. Eight Freedom of Information (FOI) requests were filed with major Western Canadian police agencies, looking for race-specific data on discretionary police stops for jaywalking and arrests for drug possession. In the end, they didn't supply any data. The Edmonton Police Service estimated that producing one set of data-for instance, race-specific data on arrests for drug possession-would cost Maclean's $7,693. In Saskatchewan, municipal police are exempted from Freedom of Information laws, and the Regina Police Service instructed their legal counsel to refuse the request.

Related from Discourse Media: Survey indicates Indigenous people targeted by police in the Prairie provinces

To approach the issue from a different perspective, Maclean's and Discourse Media (with the support of Canadian Journalists for Free Expression) surveyed more than 850 post-secondary students in Regina, Saskatoon and Winnipeg, to see whether there was any difference in the likelihood of being stopped for Indigenous and non-Indigenous students.

Survey results show the odds of an Indigenous student from the sampled population being stopped by police were 1.6 times higher than a non-Indigenous student, holding all other explanatory variables (like gender and age) ﬁxed. Indigenous students will be stopped more frequently, the study indicates; whether or not they were engaged in or close to an illegal activity when stopped by police had little influence in explaining the results. This suggests staying out of trouble does not shield Indigenous student from unwanted police attention.

The survey produced other unsettling data. Indigenous students were more likely to "disagree" or "strongly disagree" that their racial group is viewed positively by police. An Indigenous student had a 69 to 84 per cent chance of "disagreeing" or "strongly disagreeing," depending on their age; a non-Indigenous student had a 10 to 21 per cent chance of responding the same way. Students were also asked to share three words that they feel describe police officers. The most common words non-Indigenous students associate with police-"helpful," "authority"-differed dramatically from those chosen by Indigenous students: "racist," "scary."

In September, three reporters from Maclean's and Discourse Media spent two days in downtown and North Central Regina-at the Cornwall Centre mall, at Victoria Park, in churches, and in residents' homes-speaking with dozens of Indigenous residents about police interactions. Half spoke of unwanted contact with police. Of them, a majority felt they were stopped because of the colour of their skin. Two people alleged they were detained when it was determined they had unpaid fines relating to animal bylaw infractions. Others said they were found to be in breach of a condition of bail or a release program during a random stop.

Criminals, meanwhile, have learned to exploit biases. In Saskatchewan, non-Indigenous men and women are recruited to carry drugs and weapons for Indigenous gangs, says Robert Henry, a Saskatoon academic whose Ph.D. research focused on Indigenous street gangs. "They use their whiteness to move around police stop checks."

With frustration rising, some Indigenous citizens have begun filming what they believe are incidents of racial profiling. In a video recently uploaded to Facebook, Andre Bear, a clean-cut, 20-year-old aspiring teacher, is stopped by police in Saskatoon while returning from baseball practice with his 18-year-old friend. When Bear asks why they were pulled over, an officer tells him: "Shut up, passenger." "We have a reason," another says: "Licence and registration." Eventually, they're allowed to go. No reason is given for the stop.

Police say complaints of racial profiling are without substance. The Saskatchewan Public Complaints Commission, which investigates complaints against municipal police, says not a single allegation of racism by a civilian against an officer with any municipal police force in the province has ever been substantiated. Police say random street checks are necessary, acting as deterrents, helping solve crime and keeping the public safe.

One Indigenous officer in Western Canada, who spoke on condition that his name not be used, told Maclean's he was stopped "again and again" growing up; but he argued that proactive policing, focusing on hot spots, helped bring down violent crime across the West-by fully 61 per cent in Winnipeg in the last five years. Indigenous people, who are three times more likely to be victimized, are primary beneficiaries, he added.

There are signs tactics may be changing. The Winnipeg Police Service, under Chief Devon Clunis, who was raised in the city's troubled North End, is testing a new approach to policing in that neighbourhood. Dubbed the "Block-by-Block" program, it zeroes attention on a 21-block area, and brings families concentrated help from social service and health agencies, community groups and schools to try to tackle problems-like substance abuse or domestic violence-before police need to be called. "From day one, I said, 'We are going to dramatically change the way we police in this city,' " Clunis told Maclean's. He calls it "crime prevention through social development." Results are due in spring.

But for those repeatedly targeted by police attention, the impact can be profound. "It makes you feel like you're less human, like your life is worth less," says Bear, who was nine the first time he was first stopped, walking home from school in downtown Saskatoon. He's stopped every few months, he says: "When I was younger it made me ashamed-of having brown skin, of growing up where I did."

Peter Daniels, a soft-spoken Cree father of two from Regina, began crying when voicing fears his young sons might soon become targets of police attention, the way he once was. Like him, both boys wear their long, brown hair in braids. His eldest, now 10, was relentlessly teased in school last year because of it, and told his father he'd thought of harming himself. "You wish that police, that people, could look beyond the stereotype, and see you for who you are."

In Regina last month, the SPCC conceded that video and audio recordings did not "contradict" Simon Ash-Moccasin's account of his unlawful detention; and the ministry of justice determined there was "no lawful justification for the use of force." But the SPCC refused to say Ash-Moccasin was racially profiled. He was "by unfortunate coincidence," the "only person observed in the immediate vicinity," SPCC chair Brent Cotter found. No police will be disciplined.

Chapter 2 - Bail denied

On a recent day, some 70 per cent of defendants who parade past a judge via video link from the Winnipeg Remand Centre are Indigenous, many dressed in jail-issue, baggy, grey sweatsuits. It is a grim cattle call: The Indigenous 18-year-old female accused of stealing meat from a Superstore, the 19-year-old man from Shamattawa, Man., given 25 days for missing a parole check-in. He's been homeless since aging out of foster care, where he was abused and repeatedly left out in the cold. When they pleaded out, their cases often wrapped up in under five minutes, sentencing included. This is bail court, and it is here, at this early stage ahead of trial-with its rigorous standards of due process and proof-that a criminal defendant is most vulnerable. For a majority of Indigenous accused, their case ends here, multiple front-line lawyers told Maclean's.

Maclean's spent two days observing the scene. Duty counsel lawyers in Toronto and Winnipeg admit they rarely spend more than 10 minutes with a defendant. Sometimes, it's as little as five. In Winnipeg, some met them in court: In hushed, hurried phone calls-their hands over their mouths to mufﬂe their words-these lawyers rushed through the deal on offer from the Crown. It was unclear whether some of the accused, with intellectual disabilities and fetal alcohol spectrum disorder were equipped to understand proceedings. Repeated interruptions hammered home the point: "Miss, when can I go home?" a 53-year-old Cree man, who pleaded guilty to public intoxication, asked the judge immediately after his sentence was read out.

No province except P.E.I. denies bail more frequently than Manitoba: Just three of 10 inmates in the province's overcrowded jails have been sentenced to a crime; the rest are in remand custody, awaiting trial.

Though Canada's bail laws were reformed four decades ago, grounded in the notion that someone accused of a crime should be released on bail to await trial unless they are a threat, spooked judges are making it increasingly hard to obtain bail, especially for Indigenous defendants, criminal lawyers say. The number of Indigenous people denied bail jumped 92 per cent in the 15 years leading up to 2009, according to federal data.

In Winnipeg, many were appearing at bail court because they'd missed a court appearance or curfew. Some were homeless, and told the court they'd missed a summons as a result. Some had trouble remembering the many conditions of their release, which can now number as many as 34.

Charges for violating conditions like these are soaring. In B.C., fully 40 per cent of criminal court matters are now "administration of justice" offences, which include breaching conditions of bail or probation, according to a recent study. Alberta found that 52 per cent of Indigenous prisoners had been incarcerated for a breach, almost twice the rate for non-Indigenous prisoners, according to a 2011 report by the province's justice branch.

Two years ago, 19-year-old Jonathan Champagne (his name was changed because he was a minor at the time of his arrest) was granted bail after an arrest on a charge of sexual assault. He claims it never happened. A few months later, while walking down Portage Avenue in a favourite red T-shirt, police stopped him on suspicion he was wearing gang colours. Champagne has never been in a gang. He doesn't use drugs. Police searched him, finding a paring knife in his shorts pocket. He was arrested for carrying a concealed weapon. This time, the judge refused to let him out on bail. The 17-year-old, who was shuttled between 10 homes in four cities growing up, was devastated: A few months earlier, he'd been placed in a tough, but loving home with a corrections officer. He's come to trust the family, a first. But the nine-month wait to trial meant losing that placement.

His lawyer, Billy Marks, appealed the judge's decision. His foster parents were so convinced of Champagne's innocence they agreed to foot the $500 monthly cost of an ankle monitoring system to strengthen his case. But the judge refused to budge.

Behind bars, Champagne was vilified and targeted. After admitting to wanting to end his life, he was placed in segregation. He spent 23 hours a day in a tiny cell, fed through the door and released to "the cage," a tiny, enclosed exercise yard for an hour. He'd walk in circles until his time was up. "It got to the point where I didn't want to be alive anymore," he says.

These were his options: Spend nine months in jail and fight the charges, or plead out. The Crown had approached Marks to say they would agree to jointly recommend time served if his client pleaded guilty to sexual assault. The guilty plea broke Marks's heart. "But at the same time, I could see what was happening to him."

He is hardly alone. Many plead out, even when they're innocent, because they can't make bail, putting them at risk of losing jobs, housing, and custody of their children, defence lawyers told Maclean's. The simple act of having an Indigenous lawyer, meanwhile, can almost double the number of "not guilty" pleas at first appearance to 49 per cent, according to one federal study.

Eddy Cobiness, a 49-year-old member of the Buffalo Point First Nation in Manitoba, told Maclean's he pleads guilty every time he's charged, even when he didn't commit the crime he is accused of: "I just say: 'Okay, yeah'-just to get out. Every day away from your kids is another day of making memories you lose."

Denied bail and faced with the prospect of a lengthy stay in an overcrowded jail, more and more are pushed into perverse choices in this era of mandatory minimums. "What would you do?" says Winnipeg criminal lawyer Greg Brodsky. "Do you want to lose your kids? Your job? Or do you [take the plea, and] just go home?" Increasingly, he says, justice resembles a "rush to resolve cases by the best bargain you can make."

Chapter 3 - Sentencing

Two years ago, Jim Scott, a soft-spoken Saskatoon defence lawyer, grew so troubled by the harsh sentences he was seeing handed out to Indigenous offenders that he set out to study all publicly available, online criminal decisions in Saskatchewan, starting in 1996; there, 81 per cent of adults sentenced to provincial custody are Indigenous, more than anywhere else in the country. 1996 was the year the Criminal Code was amended to push judges to consider conditional and restorative sentences, particularly when sentencing Indigenous offenders. Three years later, in R. v. Gladue, the Supreme Court was even more explicit: Sentencing judges must recognize an Indigenous offender's history of dislocation, disadvantage, addiction and abuse.

Still, Scott felt that judges in the province mostly "tuned out" whenever he presented a Gladue submission. This wasn't just frustrating; the resulting sentences were "unlawful" in his mind: "The Supreme Court wasn't making a suggestion, the law requires it."

So he analyzed sentences for all crimes in Saskatchewan; Gladue reforms, his data showed, have failed miserably. Indigenous offenders were sentenced to more than twice as much jail time as those where there was no indication the offender was Indigenous. It was three times higher for hazardous driving and 10 times higher for assault with a weapon. The problem is, on the Prairies, where Gladue is most "desperately needed," it's been "virtually ignored," says Jonathan Rudin, with Aboriginal Legal Services of Toronto.

The Saskatchewan Court of Appeal (SKCA) has been called out by legal scholars, including the University of Toronto's Kent Roach, who in 2010 wrote that the SKCA has made clear "in a number of cases," that Gladue will "make little, if any, difference in the sentencing of Aboriginal offenders in serious cases." In 2012, the Supreme Court was forced to reiterate its stance in R. v. Ipeelee, calling out lower courts by noting that Gladue applies in all contexts, and that failing to apply the principle is sufficient grounds on its own for appeal.

Like Scott, retired B.C. judge Cunliffe Barnett was perturbed by rulings he saw emerging from the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal. Two years ago, he reviewed all the court's publicly available criminal cases involving Indigenous offenders in Saskatchewan, from 1999 on. His data showed an eight per cent application rate for Gladue in cases with an Indigenous defendant. In some cases, Barnett felt the Conservative-appointed appeals court was "actively avoiding stating the person was Indigenous at all."

"Too many judges will say: 'I understand Aboriginal people,' but they don't have a clue," says Barnett, who sat on the bench for 38 years, first in B.C.'s Interior, then in the territorial courts in the Yukon and Northwest Territories. "They've made judgments on Aboriginal people for years. But they've never set foot on a reserve. They've never talked with ordinary, Indigenous people."

Scorching judicial criticism like this is almost unprecedented. The SKCA, bound by principles of judicial restraint, could not issue a response; but one came via retired SKCA Justice W.J. Vancise, who vigorously disputed Barnett's findings. The SKCA has "written extensively on this subject," he wrote in the Saskatoon StarPhoenix.

One of the most troubling examples of disparity in the courts-and a reason for the sentencing imbalances Scott found in Saskatchewan-is the country's increasing use of the dangerous offender designation. It was designed for irredeemable monsters like serial rapist and murderer Paul Bernardo. More than 80 per cent have convictions for sex offences. Some call it Canada's death penalty. Just 3.7 per cent of "DOs" ever leave prison, according to the latest corrections' data.

But a growing number of Indigenous offenders are being jailed for life this way. The number of annual dangerous-offender designations has doubled in the last decade, to an average of 40 per year. The proportion of Indigenous designations recently hit 29 per cent, up from 23 per cent in 2007. In Saskatchewan, which has the highest number of dangerous offenders per capita in the country, 80 per cent are Indigenous, according to Scott's data. Some are there for "really ludicrous offences," says a doctor who acts across Canada as a witness in such cases. "There is a good reason they call Saskatchewan 'Alabama north,' " the doctor adds. Scott's data shows the provincial Crown's office logging a 98 per cent success rate in these cases. Only two of the 98 dangerous and long-term offender applications Scott reviewed were dismissed.

In one 2014 dismissal, a judge ruled against the Crown's application for a mentally ill Indigenous woman who had spent the previous five years tied to a bed and could no longer stand or walk.

In 2005, Andy Peekeekoot, a 25-year-old man from central Saskatchewan's Ahtahkakoop Cree Nation, was charged for his role in a bar fight with two Caucasian men in Shell Lake, Sask. No one was seriously hurt; one of the men involved ordered another beer when the 90-second fight ended. But Peekeekoot waved a knife with a four-inch blade he said he'd found at a nearby lake. That incident would lead to his dangerous-offender designation, even though he'd never even served serious time-a penitentiary term of two years or more.

As a young man, Peekeekoot racked up a list of offences, many for fighting or spitting at guards in jail; on all but one occasion, lawyers pleaded him out. He was, undeniably, violent. His most serious conviction was for stomping a man in a brawl when he was 22, causing the victim brain damage.

In court, Peekeekoot didn't help himself. During his dangerous-offender hearing, he fired one lawyer; another quit at the most critical phase for the defence, concluding his client had lost confidence in him. The judge ordered Peekeekoot, with a Grade 6 education, to continue. He was barred from making copies of court documents, barred from bringing court documents to his cell to study. In any event, he couldn't "make heads or tails of [them]," as he told Judge Lloyd Deshaye.

He'd been forced to appear in a heavy, anti-suicide smock, after an undisclosed incident, and was naked underneath. His hands were cuffed. He was being held in segregation.

At one point, a concerned Indigenous court worker stood: "Do you know about his childhood?" Eric Ahenakew asked the court. He urged the judge to consider the systems that had failed to protect Peekeekoot as a boy, to consider why he was lashing out, to "get a view of this man as an Aboriginal person." He "wasn't born to be violent," Ahenakew told the court.

Before he turned two, Peekeekoot was made a ward of the state, after being found starving and neglected. Both parents were violent alcoholics and drug users, among many who serially abused him throughout his youth. When he was nine, his mom, who once attempted to stab him, convinced a group of male friends to beat him so badly he was hospitalized. By 10 he was drinking. He was 12 the first time he attempted suicide, after being sexually abused. When he was 13, his father made him watch as he raped a child. He was 14 when he did his first stint in juvenile detention. From then on, he was in and out of jail.

"I can't do this by myself," Peekeekoot kept telling Judge Deshaye. "I've not the means nor the education to do so. There's no way I can continue." The judge concluded Peekeekoot would not be calling any evidence in his defence: "If people cannot or will not work with you I don't have a magic wand that can cure that situation," the judge said.

Barnett, who served 38 years on the bench, believes the judge was "flat-out wrong": He could have appointed counsel. A Gladue report to be used in sentencing could have been ordered. "A judge has a duty to make very certain the information Peekeekoot wanted before the court gets there. It is unconscionable that a court in Canada can think it acceptable that a person be declared a dangerous offender and locked up-almost certainly for the rest of his life-when he has not been heard, and his story has not been told," Barnett says. Peekeekoot understood so little that on Jan. 15, 2010, the day Deshaye was delivering his ruling, he thought court had convened so he could begin the process of finding a new lawyer.

He appealed, but Saskatchewan's high court ruled that it was "not clear the sentencing judge failed to consider so-called Gladue factors." The judge "didn't even describe Andy as Aboriginal," says Bob Hrycan, Peekeekoot's lawyer on appeal. "There was no meaningful analysis of background factors. And in the end, he had no lawyer. That was enough?"

For Peekeekoot, it was also the end of the line. Last May, the Supreme Court declined his application for leave to appeal (the high court approves roughly five per cent of applications, Barnett notes). Hrycan believes Peekeekoot is a changed man. He's 36 now, married, and hasn't had a charge for violence in nine years. Peekeekoot, who is currently housed in a federal prison in Alberta, says he's been clean of drugs and alcohol for 11 years. As a young man he was almost mute. These days, he'll spend hours on the phone, opening up about the darkest chapters of his life, or the tiny fox he watches out in the prison yard. He's come to see that in the warped environment of youth, the men around him earned respect through anger and hostility. In response, he always tried to be "twice as tough."

None of this, Hrycan says, will do him any good: "He'll never get out. We've put someone in jail for the rest of his life for waving a four-inch knife."

Chapter 4 - Segregation

In prison, Indigenous offenders serve much harder time than anyone else. Indigenous inmates are placed in minimum-security institutions at just half the rate of their non-Indigenous counterparts. They are more likely to be placed in segregation, accounting for 31 per cent of cases; and, once in isolation, they'll spend 16 per cent more time there. They account for 45 per cent of all self-harm incidents. Nine in 10 are held to the expiry of their sentence, versus two-thirds of the non-Indigenous inmate population. They are more likely to be restrained in prison, to be involved in use-of-force incidents, to receive institutional charges, to die there.

Many of these disparities are known because Howard Sapers, the correctional investigator of Canada, made a point of tracking race-speciﬁc corrections data. Two years ago, troubled by the surging growth of the Indigenous inmate population, he issued a special report on it in Parliament, blaming systemic racism and cultural bias. It was one of only two the office has ever issued, to "signal this was a very important matter requiring urgent action." It received "anything but," Sapers says now, bitterly. Last year, the federal government announced he was being replaced (a process interrupted by the election, which left him on the job).

An Indigenous offender's problems begin with intake, Sapers says, where their risk level is often consistently over-classified by the Custody Rating Scale; it determines whether they belong in minimum, medium or maximum security (and almost everything else about their time behind bars). For years, the federal government has been ignoring repeated demands to reform these and other assessment tools used on the Indigenous inmate population. The latest, in September, came in a blistering Federal Court ruling. Justice Michael Phelan ordered Correctional Service Canada (CSC) to stop using them on Indigenous offenders, arguing they are "susceptible to cultural bias," and can produce "junk" data.

"This is not an issue the CSC missed inadvertently," Justice Phelan wrote, noting the U.K., Australia and the U.S. have all studied such assessments to ensure they are reliable for cultural minorities. "It has been a live issue since 2000, on the CSC's 'radar screen,' and the subject of past court decisions. It is time for the matter to be resolved." CSC immediately appealed.

Part of the problem is that the marginalization experienced by some Indigenous peoples gets turned into "risk": intergenerational trauma, alcoholism, a history of abuse, a lack of education, employment, a bank account or even hobbies make it more likely an inmate will be housed in maximum, and classed "high risk."

Cruelties are built into the system. The main reason Indigenous women-who account for 78 per cent of all self-harm incidents in prison-are moved to higher security levels is due to self-harm, including suicide attempts, according to a 2008 report by the Ontario Women's Justice Network.

Kinew James, who died months before the end of a 15-year sentence while incarcerated in Saskatchewan, is frequently compared to Ashley Smith, who strangled herself to death at Grand Valley Institution for Women in 2007 as guards watched. Both were incarcerated as teens. They struggled with mental illness and self-harm, were frequently moved, and spent long stretches in segregation in a system that didn't know how to deal with them. But James had a resilient streak. She believed she was stronger: "I'm not Ashley Smith," she said at a Kitchener court appearance in 2011, when a judge noted the likeness. "I have a lot more strength. I got my Grade 12. I want out of jail," she told him. "I know I will get out."

She never did. The 35-year-old Anishinaabe Native, a member of the Roseau River First Nation in Manitoba, died Jan. 20, 2013, while incarcerated at Saskatoon's Regional Psychiatric Centre. All day, she'd been complaining of being unwell. By night, she was moaning and crying, pressing the distress button in her cell. According to one media report, corrections officers responded by muting or shutting it off. Other inmates reportedly began calling for help. When it did come, just before midnight, James was unresponsive.

James was then transferred to hospital where she was declared dead, apparently from heart failure.

She was then a few months shy of being released. She'd been incarcerated at 18, initially sentenced to six years, for manslaughter; but inside, her mental health spiralled downward, she lashed out, and her sentence doubled. She was known to take blame for others, and had been charged with assaulting guards, sometimes when they tried to stop her from harming herself. She cut herself, and self-strangled. Her Ojibwe name, Keshebawnodinnuke Kinew, means "eagle in the whirlwind."

The data on Indigenous female offenders are grim: 91 per cent admit to having been sexually or physically abused; and nine in 10 report using drugs or alcohol the day they offended, according to the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies. Many enter the prison system with a host of mental health needs requiring services and programming. Some instead end up in segregation.

Despite a host of severe mental health diagnoses, including borderline personality disorder, paranoid schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder, manic type, fully six of James's 15 years in prison were spent in isolation. Sometimes she was held in barren cells so small she could touch opposite walls at once. She was there 23 hours a day, "let out for a half-hour in the yard," says her sister, Cheryl Smith, of Winnipeg. At one point she spent almost two years straight in segregation. She was then under "management protocol," a super maximum designation allowing inmates to be held indefinitely in segregation; when it was quietly ended in 2011, 100 per cent of inmates so designated were Indigenous. James was sometimes so starved for human contact she would lie against her cell floor, her face pressed against the crack beneath the door, to hear voices.

After prolonged stays in segregation James would sometimes "see things, hear things," and get lost in fantasies, says Kim Pate, executive director of the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies, who knew James well. In 2013, Colorado barred inmates with serious mental health issues from being held in segregation. "There is ample evidence Kinew's death was preventable," says Pate. "It screams out the need for oversight and accountability for corrections."

James was told she'd never reach Grade 4, but managed to earn her high school equivalency certificate behind bars. She was fully shackled and carrying a body chain at her graduation. No one was permitted to attend. These were among privileges James had to earn, to work her way out of segregation and management protocol, says Pate. At times, she was barred from keeping photos of her family, from having crayons. An overheard swear word was evidence of non-conforming behaviour, a higher standard than anything demanded of male inmates, says Pate.

Before she died, she'd begun post-secondary coursework for Athabasca University. She wrote poetry. "Six months later, she would have been home," says Cecil, her brother, a band counsellor at Roseau River. Her death will be the subject of a public inquiry in Saskatchewan in April. Last week, a judge denied a request to seal a report into her death.

"There is a group in Canada that keeps mysteriously dying,'" says University of Toronto sociology professor Sherene Razack. "We have convinced ourselves that we are improving. The reality is systems are in place to keep reproducing this."

Since no data on the race of those dying in prison in Canada exists, Razack undertook a study of in-custody deaths in Saskatchewan; her study found that Indigenous men account for roughly 50 per cent of all male deaths, many from suicide, head-injury or fatal encounters with police. Many of these deaths occur because officials "will not touch, examine, or closely monitor Indigenous people in their care," Razack says. "This indifference kills."

Chapter 5 - A new start

"Courtroom's open," Judge Marion Buller-Bennett says with a wide smile, ushering everyone waiting in the corridor into the second-floor courtroom at the New Westminster Provincial Courthouse. As the gallery fills, Buller-Bennett, a member of the Mistawasis First Nation in Saskatchewan, leaves the judge's dais, pulls up a plastic chair, and asks everyone to introduce themselves. Several she greets with a few words in their language, thus opening B.C.'s First Nations Courts, which operates unlike any other courtroom in the country.

Legal jargon is barred. Formalities are not observed. There is no prisoner's dock, no microphones. Babies, noisy kids, coffee, laughter-all are welcome. Elsewhere, a judge might threaten sanction after an interruption or outburst. Buller-Bennett encourages them.

During a hearing for a 28-year-old Cree man who pleaded guilty to a drug offence, a recovering crystal meth addict stood up to commend his progress. Someone else suggested he consider Warriors Against Violence, an anger management program geared to Indigenous men. Another piped up with the number of a bus that will take him directly to it. Before he left, the Sandy Lake First Nation man, choking back tears, thanked the judge for acknowledging him-a "first," he said. As he was leaving, someone grabbed him in a bear hug. "You're doing great man," he said. "Stick with it."

Indigenous offenders can only appear before B.C.'s First Nations Court if they are entering guilty pleas (and their charges must be minor, and without a mandatory minimum sentence). They then work with the judge and two courtroom elders to come up with a "healing plan," a 12-month suspended sentence, which generally includes a stay in a residential treatment facility, anger management and parenting classes, addictions and cultural programming.

Most appearing before Buller-Bennett on that day were intergenerational survivors of residential schools. Their stories rarely deviated from a grim narrative: harrowing childhood, substance abuse, incarceration-almost always for crimes fuelled by or to feed their addictions.

"Rather than apply another Band-Aid," Buller-Bennett explained to the court, the point is to "help deal with what's causing the problem, often addiction." To monitor progress, the offender is required to return every two months. A missed appearance triggers a bench warrant, as in regular court.

At the completion of sentences, Buller-Bennett holds "graduation ceremonies." Two elders blanket graduates in red and black fleece, among the highest honours in Coastal First Nations culture. Not one got through it dry-eyed.

Buller-Bennett has said recidivism rates in the eight-year-old court, based on Cree teachings, beliefs and values, are low. Similar courts in Australia have more than halved recidivism rates. As in the Australian courts, elders tend to say things a judge might not. "It's like being publicly scolded by your grandma," Rose Falla, an Indigenous magistrate who helped establish Koori Courts in Australia's Victoria state told Maclean's.

But Jonathan Rudin sums up the problem: Where these innovations are most needed-Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta-is exactly where you see the "most intransigence, the fewest innovations."

These same critiques could also be levelled at Ottawa, which, for a decade, has been ignoring calls to reform biased correctional admissions tests, bail and other laws disproportionately impacting Indigenous offenders. Instead, it appears to be incarcerating as many Indigenous people as possible, for as long as legally possible, with far-reaching consequences for Indigenous families. "[Indigenous people] are not there because of a crime spree," says Sapers. "They're there because of the impact of social factors, government policy and mandatory minimum sentences."

This situation does not help increase public safety: incarceration has almost no effect on bringing down crime, and it increases the likelihood of reoffending, as any criminologist will argue. Indigenous communities complain offenders are being returned more hardened, hopeless, violent and angry.

"What we are doing is using our criminal justice system to defend ourselves from the consequence of our own racism," says Toronto criminal lawyer John Struthers, who cut his legal teeth as a Crown attorney in remote, northern communities. "Rather than treat alcoholism, addiction, trauma, we keep the doors closed."

"Once you're in the system, you never get out," says Dwight Monkman. Three of his four brothers have been incarcerated. The 26-year-old Winnipegger, a member of the Lake Manitoba First Nation, spoke to Maclean's late last summer from the Headingley Correctional Institution, where he was incarcerated for a weapons charge and breaching a condition of his release. Since turning 18, the longest stretch Monkman says he's spent on the outside was 15 months. "I'm actually scared to get out," he says, clutching the battered, black phone under his chin. "Because I know I'll end up right back here."

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Canada's prisons are the 'new residential schools'

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Canada's crime rate just hit a 45-year low. It's been dropping for years-down by half since peaking in 1991. Bizarrely, the country recently cleared another benchmark, when the number of people incarcerated hit an all-time high. Dig a little further into the data, and an even more disquieting picture emerges.

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A study suggesting Indigenous children from Saskatchewan and Manitoba were healthy when they were sent to residential schools undercuts government justification for nutritional experiments at the time.

Researchers also say it suggests the schools set the stage for health problems plaguing First Nations today.

Paul Hackett, a researcher at the University of Saskatchewan, said he and two others analyzed the body mass index of more than 1,700 children entering the schools between 1919 and the 1950s. The children's records, which are public, were meticulously kept on microfilm.

They detailed the weight, height and sex of the youngsters sent to a residential school in Brandon, Man., and to two others in Saskatchewan.

The team found 80 per cent of the children were at a healthy weight - better than the average Canadian child today. The findings were published in the International Journal of Circumpolar Health.

"All that suggests they were healthy, on the whole," Hackett said Tuesday. "That was somewhat surprising to me largely because of the thought that the Great Depression would have had some impact on health, that access to food might have been less.

"But they were coming out of their communities quite healthy, indeed much healthier than we see today."

The analysis, published in the International Journal of Circumpolar Health, suggests the residential school experience is directly linked to health problems such as obesity and diabetes, which disproportionately affect Indigenous people today, Hackett said.

Previous work by one of the researchers suggests diabetes was unknown among Indigenous people before 1937.

"There are many, many different factors, but certainly residential schools are certainly right up there as being one of the main factors in that loss of traditional food and loss of health," Hackett said.

"If there is a nutritional problem, it's probably coming out of the residential schools experience."

About 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Métis children were taken from their families and forced to attend government schools. The last school closed outside Regina in 1996.

If there is a nutritional problem, it's probably coming out of the residential schools experience. - Paul Hackett, University of Saskatchewan

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission estimated at least 6,000 children died in the schools. The commission's final report said they were poorly heated, poorly ventilated and "the diet was meagre and of poor quality."

Murray Sinclair, who led the commission, said the schools were so poorly funded that they couldn't afford to properly feed the children.

"We heard stories ... that children were being fed rancid meat, being fed poorly prepared foods and generally unhealthy foods," he said.

It was in stark contrast to their lives before they were taken from their parents, he said.

"Survivors told us they felt loved. They felt well taken care of. They felt well nourished," Sinclair said. "It was at the schools that they began to feel the harshness of starvation."

It left an indelible mark which was passed on through generations, he said.

Some hoarded food, a practice that they carried into adulthood, Sinclair said. Others used food to punish their own children, repeating their own experience as kids.

The federal government knew nutrition was an issue, he said. Experiments with vitamins and enriched flour divided children at one school into two groups - one received vitamin, iron and iodine supplements and the other didn't.

The children who got the supplements saw their health improve, but the government wasn't interested in expanding the benefit to all, Sinclair said.

"It started the cycle of poor nutrition and poor eating practice and poor food purchasing practices very early on," he said.

"It maintained that for many generations and still continues today."

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Indigenous kids were healthy before they were sent to residential schools: study | CBC News

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A study suggesting Indigenous children from Saskatchewan and Manitoba were healthy when they were sent to residential schools undercuts government justification for nutritional experiments at the time. Researchers also say it suggests the schools set the stage for health problems plaguing First Nations today.

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Pope Francis will not apologize to residential school survivors and their families for the role the Roman Catholic Church played in operating the schools or the abuses suffered by their students.

A papal apology was one of the 94 recommendations from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and during a visit to the Vatican last year, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau personally asked the Pope to consider such a gesture.
READ MORE: Pope's apology for residential schools key step for reconciliation, survivor says
The commission recommended an apology similar to that offered by the Pope to Irish victims of sexual abuse in 2010. In 2015, Pope Francis issued an apology in Bolivia to Indigenous peoples in the Americas for the "grave sins" of colonialism.

Bishop Lionel Gendron, president of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, today released a letter to the Indigenous Peoples of Canada saying Pope Francis has not shied away from acknowledging injustices faced by Indigenous peoples around the world, but that he can't personally issue an apology for residential schools.
WATCH: Trudeau has private visit with Pope Francis to discuss reconciliation with Indigenous peoples
"The Catholic Bishops of Canada have been in dialogue with the Pope and the Holy See concerning the legacy of suffering you have experienced," Gendron wrote. "The Holy Father is aware of the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which he takes seriously. As far as call to action #58 is concerned, after carefully considering the request and extensive dialogue with the bishops of Canada, he felt that he could not personally respond."

Gendron says the Pope has not ruled out a visit to Canada and a meeting with Indigenous Peoples, but in the meantime is encouraging Canadian bishops to continue working with Indigenous Peoples on reconciliation issues and projects that help with healing.
WATCH: Scheer says many faiths must apologize for injustices of residential schools
Assembly of First Nations National Chief Perry Bellegarde said in a statement he has written to Pope Frances urging him to come to Canada and meet Indigenous peoples. He is also seeking a direct meeting with the Pope to discuss the issue further.

READ MORE: Justin Trudeau presses Pope for official apology for residential schools

"Hearing an apology directly from Pope Francis would be an important act of healing and reconciliation, much like his apology delivered to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas in 2015," Bellegarde said.

Trudeau's office redirected questions about this latest development to Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Carolyn Bennett, who said Canada won't give up on the idea yet.

"The commissioners recommended this as an important part of healing reconciliation for the survivors," Bennett said in an emailed statement. "We will continue to advocate for this call to action."

For more than a century, the federal government's church-run residential schools operated in an effort to assimilate Indigenous children by forcing them into schools where they were not allowed to speak their languages or engage in Indigenous cultural practices. Almost two-thirds of the 130 schools were run by the Catholic Church.
WATCH: Indigenous leaders hope for an apology regarding residential schools from the Pope
Between the 1880s and the time the last school closed in 1996, more than 150,000 Indigenous children attended, many of whom reported being physically, sexually and psychologically abused at the hands of priests, nuns or other teachers.

Canada apologized for the schools in 2008, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was born out of a negotiated settlement agreement that included compensation for survivors.

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roman catholic church residential school

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No apology for Canada's residential schools, Pope Francis says

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Pope Francis will not apologize to residential school survivors and their families for the role the Roman Catholic Church played in operating the schools or the abuses suffered by their students. A papal apology was one of the 94 recommendations from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and during a visit to the Vatican last year, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau personally asked the Pope to consider such a gesture.

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Among the calls for justice in the final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls are a handful that urge everyone to become allies, to combat racism and to break down barriers.

Included in the report, which was released earlier this week, are these recommendations:

Develop knowledge and read the final report. Listen to the truths shared, and acknowledge the burden of these human and Indigenous rights violations, and how they impact Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA [two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex and asexual] people today.

Using what you have learned and some of the resources suggested, become a strong ally. Being a strong ally involves more than just tolerance; it means actively working to break down barriers and to support others in every relationship and encounter in which you participate.

Confront and speak out against racism, sexism, ignorance, homophobia and transphobia, and teach or encourage others to do the same, wherever it occurs: in your home, in your workplace, or in social settings.

But how? How do you apply those grand statements in a practical way in your daily life?

In all, the report, which concluded that murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls were victims of a wider genocide, lists 231 steps that need to be taken by governments and Canadians in order to make substantive changes.

CBC News asked a number of Indigenous leaders to weigh in on how every person can contribute.

Here are their responses:

Sadie-Phoenix Lavoie
A two-spirit Anishinaabe community advocate from Sagkeeng First Nation. Lavoie uses the non-gender-specific pronoun "they."

"In the daily life, I think one of the major forms of combating racism is having conversations with people within the community and building those relationships with Indigenous Peoples.
Be part of the community
"I think really, there's a hesitation to reach out sometimes, because of this uncertainty of, like, 'what's going to happen?' But we have to have a more healthy engagement with people within the broader community.

"There's a lot of community events that come up that happen ... and I think by showing up and taking the time out of your own personal daily lives to focus on community, and going directly to the community and listening and hearing what their struggles are, is mainly Step 1.

"There's many forms of getting out to the community and listening to people - then you understand the extent of the issue and the ways that it's very multifaceted and how people are impacted.

"We are all threatened by the unknown," so become familiar with the Indigenous community, Lavoie says.

"You can learn a lot from Indigenous Peoples by understanding the life that we lived and the struggles that we have gone through in order to get where we are, and the resilience that we hold and the strength that we hold, and how we stand up for each other and we care for each other.

"We try to help each other out but we're not getting that same response from a lot of Canadians, and I think that's what this call to action is saying - like 'hey, we need to see your hand in order for us to shake it.'"
Read, listen, learn
"I think the relationship that we have as Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples is that there's a lot of missed opportunity for better relationships. I am a firm believer that education brings about that sense of empathy.

"Take time in your own life to do the research and put in that work. If you're saying, 'Hey, I don't really understand this whole issue,' look into it. Reading literature and books from Indigenous authors is a good start.

"Whenever people try to address or combat racism, there's still always this underlying layer of guilt and there's a layer of defensiveness. I think in order to get past that, you really have to establish a relationship with people and to start learning and listening more. A lot of people assume that when we try to alleviate our oppression that it's an automatic attack on white people, or an automatic attack on people that are privileged.

"But really, the basis of equity is around relationship building, it's around education, it's around engaging each other in a positive way and making sure that there is an equality of outcome rather than just an equality of opportunity."
Take responsibility
"Start saying that you have the responsibility to help and that we all have a responsibility to help each other. There is an added responsibility on Canadians because of the genocide that Indigenous peoples have received, not only just historically but presently.

"Our relationship has been severed, and so in order for us to combat that we really need to establish a relationship in a healthy and productive way.

"It can't be on the hands of Indigenous Peoples to do all that work. We Indigenous people shouldn't be the only ones demanding action. The responsibility is on your part as well."

That's a message Lavoie says Indigenous people have been repeating for years, but there's now some progress. Governments are starting to listen and non-Indigenous people are standing alongside the Indigenous community in their fight, Lavoie says.
Become an 'upstander'
It can no longer be acceptable for someone to turn a blind eye when they see or hear something racist, says Lavoie.

"We're dealing with the bystander syndrome and, you know, we need people that are upstanders - people that are standing up and intervening.

"Allyship means you're an intervener of injustice, and so stepping in and putting yourself forward and stopping that from happening and saying, 'hey that's not right, that's not what we need to be doing as a community,' and moving from passive supporters to active supporters. We need people that are actually out there physically helping and supporting.

"That's the only way for us to really change. That's the only way for us to have system change, is when everyone's involved."

Jackie Hogue
A nonprofit consultant who facilitates training sessions on anti-oppression and dismantling racism. For many years she also taught a course on confronting racism in the inner city at the University of Winnipeg.

"Racism exists through ourselves and our society, so I think if we're going to dismantle it and change it, we have to kind of work at multiple levels at the same time," said Hogue.
Look inside
"Individually, I think there's lots of things we can do - first of all, being open to [understanding] how racism works. I think a lot of people think that racism is just those really overt intentional acts that you can pinpoint and name as a hate crime, but what this report and other reports ... have told us is that racism exists in all kinds of ways, including in our own conscious."

Hogue says it's important to be open to the fact that racism is very present in Canada and to reflect on how it shows up in you.

Pay more attention to when your subconscious might be generating racist ideas or bias, "because it happens to all of us, including myself."

"Train yourself to notice or see when they happen" so that you can learn to stop it, she said.
Listen better, channel your courage
"It also involves deeper listening, especially to perspectives and experiences that are not our own. We just have to be better listeners and then believers of those experiences in order to help support and create change."

There are, of course, outward challenges too, especially when you witness racism - but Hogue says jumping into the fray might not always be the best idea.

Think first about the best way to approach the situation, she says - challenging the harm we see can also be done through advocacy, lobbying and offering training programs.

"It does take courage to do that [step up and raise your voice]. If you don't have the courage or the words in that exact moment it doesn't mean your opportunities are over," Hogue said.

"There can be other opportunities, and I think that connects to what we can do in our organizations, or our groups or our workplaces. There's opportunities for training and awareness in our workplaces, but also in the places that we might volunteer or connect with in other ways.

"It's also about listening to what all of these reports have been telling us, not only this report but the [Truth and Reconciliation Commission] and the [Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples] and the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry. What have they been telling us that we need to do, and can you apply those teachings, those directives, into your workplace?"
Learn about history
If you want to make change, learn about our collective history and the history of Indigenous people on this territory we call home, Hogue says.

Then we can better understand how racism and colonization are lived out today and what we can do to change those things, she says.

"You can also lobby for systemic change, whether it's in your organization or in our own government. The basic example is lobbying for the implementation of this [MMIWG inquiry] report as well as other reports before it, like the TRC, and lobbying the government to pass Bill C-262 that is currently being debated in the Senate."

Bill C-262 is an act to ensure that the laws of Canada are in harmony with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

"These are really tangible things that you can speak out to that would create changes in our system."

Hogue believes there is a growing consciousness about the historical and ongoing struggles of Indigenous people, which more people are trying to address.

"I think that Maclean's article [from 2015, about Winnipeg being Canada's most racist city] helped the conversation, the TRC process helped the conversation, but it's deeply entrenched stuff - colonization and systemic racism are deeply entrenched.

"I think we have a long way to go, but racism is socially constructed so we completely have the capacity to deconstruct it. So if we talk about it, become more aware of how it operates and how it's held within us, and how we then hold it in our groups and institutions and government, we can break it down and see even better change."

Niigaan Sinclair
Sinclair, from St. Peter's/Little Peguis First Nation, is Anishinaabe and is an associate professor of Native studies at the University of Manitoba. He is a writer and a regular commentator on Indigenous issues for multiple media outlets, including his regular Winnipeg Free Press column.

Sinclair says everyone needs to be cognizant of the impact colonialism had, and continues to have, on Indigenous people, and how it has led to a "righteous ignorance" among so much of the population.

"Getting to understand your role within that impact is the most critical thing a Manitoban can do - understanding that this issue is your issue and understanding how you can also be the solution within your place of work, or your home or when you vote. You have a role to play in this becoming a problem, but we also have a role in creating a solution."

But that awareness is only a step. "You have to take action to make sure we don't have any more of our sisters or aunties that go missing," Sinclair said.

"To encapsulate that is to take it up in every part of your life, from the taxes that you pay to the place that you work, to the news stories that you spend time reading. All of those things are a part of understanding how you take up a solution."
'Refuse to let the issue be silent'
The best way to combat the tragedies of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls is to "refuse to let the issue be silent," Sinclair says.

"If you're on social media, for example, repost those searches [for anyone missing] and participate in those searches, whether that be going and helping people, or providing income and assistance for those organizations that are helping young women to get off the streets and those families to get out of poverty and ... dangerous circumstances that the state and the country has put them into.

"Go and volunteer for organizations that are doing front-line work to be able to assist people, or spend your time within your workplace assisting in whatever means necessary to ensure that there is safety for young Indigenous women and girls in our communities. If you are in a workplace ... that interacts with Indigenous women and girls, make sure that you have a competent awareness plan within your employee workforce.

"I've heard many ... times of young women who are asking for help, whether that be phoning emergency services or asking police or talking in the social welfare agencies or going to a store and being turned away.

"The most important thing in Manitoba is to become competent on the relationship that we have between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, and a large part of that is the ignorance surrounding Indigenous women and girls."
Listen twice as much
"We have a problem in this country, and in Manitoba, of seeing Indigenous Peoples as human beings and seeing them as people who have been been thrust into circumstances of not their own choosing - in poverty, in dangerous situations and situations involving needing help.

"And we turn ... away from them by saying things like 'oh, why don't you work harder' or 'why don't you just go get a job' or 'why don't you just stop whining and complaining all the time.'

"That's the kind of ignorance that lives within racism. It's the kind of righteous ignorance that has hammered Indigenous Peoples into places and then maintains them by those kinds of statements," Sinclair said.

"Indigenous Peoples are in situations not often of their own choosing," he said.

"The Indian Act puts us into those situations, societal attitudes puts us in those situations, the ongoing views that Indigenous Peoples aren't experiencing oppression or now, genocide - and this is an ongoing thing - those kinds of attitudes are what keeps us in that oppression.

"Understanding that we all have a role to play within this violence, and also understanding that we have a role to play in its solution, begins by listening twice as much before you speak, reading and then acting on what you've read and heard."

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MMIWG report calls on Canadians to act: Here's how to make an impact | CBC News

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Among the calls for justice in the final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls are a handful that urge everyone to become allies, to combat racism and to break down barriers. Included in the report, which was released earlier this week, are these recommendations: Develop knowledge and read the final report.

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A team of scientists believe they have found evidence of human activity in North America that dates back 130,000 years - more than 100,000 years earlier than believed.

The evidence comes from an archeological site in San Diego County, Calif. In 1992, a site was uncovered containing mastodon bones, along with stone anvils and hammerstones. Dating the tools proved to be challenging. However, using recent technology, including uranium dating, the team believes they have firm evidence that humans were using tools to break apart the bones and make other tools.

"When you look at the evidence - the material, the nature of the wear pattern on the bones, the actual mapping of the site - the evidence is absolutely incontrovertible," Richard Fullagar, co-author of the paper that appeared in Nature said during a teleconference.

I was skeptical when I first looked at the material myself, but it's definitely an archeological site. - Steve Holen , researcher

The find is controversial, as there has been a consensus among paleontologists and anthropologists that humans made the journey to North America roughly 15,000 years ago.

Supporting evidence

The bones of the mastodon were arranged at the site - known as the Cerutti Mastodon site - in such a way that suggests it wasn't done naturally. It's not believed that the humans killed the animal, however. Instead, it's likely they were breaking up the limb bones, removing parts of the bones and probably making tools with them. They also may have extracted marrow from the bones for nutrition.

The bones also displayed spiral fractures, which suggests that they were broken while fresh and not some years later. Five large hammerstones and anvils also show wear and tear that didn't occur through geological processes, the researchers said.

"What's truly remarkable about this site is that you can actually identify a particular hammer that was smacked on a particular anvil in a bunch of broken bones, and fragments of those hammers and anvils that can be refitted to the stones. It's very rare that you get that whole package together in one site," Fullagar said. "So the evidence at this site is truly remarkable and really does demonstrate human interference."

In order to replicate the types of fractures, the scientists used similar tools on elephant bones, which resulted in the same spirals.

Steve Holen, from the Center for American Paleolithic Research and a co-author, said that the breaking of the bones wasn't done by carnivore chewing or animals trampling on the bones.

"When we eliminate all the other natural processes and we can reproduce this experiment, we have very strong evidence," he said.

Skeptics challenged

The findings challenge current evidence that suggests humans arrived in North America about 15,000 years ago and will most certainly be carefully scrutinized, something the authors are well aware of. During their press conference on Tuesday, they invited other researchers to examine the evidence, some of which will be on display at the San Diego Natural History Museum next week.

I'd say the jury's still out. There's still some information missing. - Ariane Burke, Universite de Montreal

"I know people will be skeptical of this because this is so surprising," Holen said. "I was skeptical when I first looked at the material myself, but it's definitely an archeological site."

Ariane Burke, an anthropology professor at the University of Montreal, said that she'd like to see more analysis of the bones and tools before concluding that humans were indeed here so long ago.

"Normally at an archeological site you find chipped stone tools, irrespective of what they're doing at the site. People are notorious litterbugs, even back then," she told CBC News. "So you kind of expect to see some of that trace of a human presence. I'm not saying they're absolutely wrong and it cannot be a human site, but I'd say the jury's still out. There's still some information missing."

Burke said that she'd specifically like to see a closer examination of the surface damage of the bones. She's particularly puzzled by the lack of cut marks, but says theycould be obscured by the surface damage.

As for whether or not the bones could have been broken by heavy machines or vehicles, the authors are adamant that that's not the case.

The researchers are confident that under careful examination, other scientists will come to the same conclusions.

"If they look carefully at this paper, that's been through rigorous peer review that Nature insists for their publication, if people honestly look at the data ... and have questions they want to pose, we are open for this sort of scholarly assessment of our work," said Thomas Demere, curator of paleontology at the San Diego Natural History Museum.

"And people are welcome to come to the museum to examine these specimens for themselves."

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Study suggests humans were in North America 100,000 years earlier than believed | CBC News

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A team of scientists believe they have found evidence of human activity in North America that dates back 130,000 years - more than 100,000 years earlier than believed. The evidence comes from an archeological site in San Diego County, Calif. In 1992, a site was uncovered containing mastodon bones, along with stone anvils and hammerstones.

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For Dr. Patricia Makokis, walking proved to be an inspiration to produce a film that is fostering conversations among non-Indigenous people about the true meaning of treaty.

Treaty Talk: Sharing the River of Life is a 50-minute teaching tool to help non-Native people understand their collective responsibility to treaty.

Based on the traditional Cree understanding of natural law, the film explores and models how racism and discriminations can be overcome at local and systemic levels, so that Indigenous nations and non-Indigenous peoples can build better relationships and work together.

"I am an avid walker," said Dr. Makokis, who is from Saddle Lake Cree Nation. She is also an author, speaker and educator.

"In 2017, my daughter told me about a walk in Eastern Canada with the Mennonite Church of Canada and the Christian Peacemakers. They were walking from Kitchener to Ottawa, around the TRC Calls to Action and Bill C-262."

Dr. Makokis was one of the only Indigenous people to take part in that walk.

"It was a group of white family members from those two organizations doing an amazing job of helping other family members understand those Calls to Action and Bill C-262. I was so deeply touched to see white people believe in the cause I've worked my whole life on in terms of Indigenous rights and working to help educate others to understand what's happened in this country."

In fact, Dr. Makokis was moved to tears - and action.

"I cried when we did a talking circle because I was witnessing white people who were actively involved in trying to help us, to help their own people understand their own history instead of me as an Indigenous person always having to feel that responsibility to educate them."

Upon returning home, Dr. Makokis connected with the now late Dr. Vincent Steinhauer, who was then president of Blue Quills College. She told him about her experience with the talking circle, and began to plan a "treaty talk" in St. Paul to help improve relations between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities.

From that came the idea to make a film that could be shown to non-Native audiences about treaty and being allies to Indigenous peoples. With a shoestring budget and most of the preparatory work being done over the phone and the Internet, the actual production of the film came together in two weeks.

"The talk itself was unscripted and totally from the heart," said Makokis.

She also emphasizes that the film focuses on treaty, rather than reconciliation.

"Reconciliation is a buzzword. It's a political moment in time right now, and it can die as quickly as the election happens.

"We intentionally focused on educating people about the treaties and what those treaty obligations are when our relatives first met; what was going on when they sat together and they smoked the pipes, what were they agreeing to, and how important that is in our relationship as being people who are related, because in our spiritual and cultural beliefs we believe we are related to all people," she said.

"I want the audience to be educated on what treaties are, what they were, where their ancestors came from, and what was going on when they were leaving their places of origin," said Dr. Makokis.

"Things were happening in Europe that created this need to come to a different land. It's fine to think of this moment in time in terms of capitalism - "I paid for this land" - but there is a bigger, deeper story of us coming together.

"You came to this land, Indigenous people embraced you and helped you to survive - what are your responsibilities? I need to do everything to assure myself that my grandchildren's future is different than what mine or my children's were in terms of dealing with racism and stereotypes."

Treaty Talk will be screened at First Mennonite Church (3650 91 Street) on Friday, April 12 at 7 p.m. Dr. Makokis and friends from Saddle Lake will be in attendance for a discussion following the film.

As well, a "Walk for Common Ground" is currently being planned for May 31 to June 14, 2019, from Edmonton to Calgary. Participants will come from the Indigenous, labour union, and church communities. There will be opportunities to join for part of the walk, including day walks. Information will be posted on the Treaty Talk website when available at https://www.treatytalk.com/

Watch the film on the above link as well.

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Film spells out treaty relationship and obligations to non-Native allies

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For Dr. Patricia Makokis, walking proved to be an inspiration to produce a film that is fostering conversations among non-Indigenous people about the true meaning of treaty. Treaty Talk: Sharing the River of Life is a 50-minute teaching tool to help non-Native people understand their collective responsibility to treaty.

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european slaughter of native americans changed the climate

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European colonizers killed so many Native Americans that it changed the global climate

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University College London researchers estimate that settlers killed 56 million indigenous people, causing farmland to be reforested. That increase in vegetation resulted in a massive decrease in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

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Nation to Nation
In a wide-ranging interview spanning the decades of his life from lawyer to judge and now senator, Murray Sinclair issued a frank warning to Canada.

There will likely be a violent rebellion if society continues mistreating Indigenous people.

"There's a social philosopher by the name of Frantz Fanon who wrote in 1948 that when you have a colonized people, who have been oppressed by one society, first of all, they tend to submit to the colonization, oppression, but then when they start to recognize what they're experiencing they will resist but when that resistance is quashed then they will start to take out their frustrations upon themselves so the high rates of personal abuse grow," Sinclair told Nation to Nation.

Next they take it out on friends, family and their community explained Sinclair.

"But eventually they'll take out their violence on the oppressor, then you'll have a rebellion," he said.

"My view is if we continue to ignore what society is doing to Indigenous people in terms of poverty, the education failure rates and I'm not talking about the individuals who are failing, I'm talking about the education system is failing and the child welfare rates we will likely be creating a population of young Indigenous people who will be prone to thinking about acting out violently against society."

Sinclair also spoke a bit about his childhood and how it led to a loss of culture that he regained with the birth of his son, Niigaanwewidam Sinclair.

"When he was born I realized I didn't really have much to offer him by way of his identity and culture so I decided I would need to do something about that," said Sinclair.

He also talks about how he first went to law school not to be a lawyer, or eventually a judge, but a politician.

"I recognized the need for change was very strong and I saw the political roots as being the route that would probably get us the best and quickest answers to some of the issues that Indigenous people were facing," he said.

But he did become a lawyer and turned down an offer to be a judge, twice, before accepting it the third time.

Before chairing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission he co-led the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry in Manitoba, as well as an inquiry into baby deaths.

He was appointed as a senator in April 2016 and said it's hard to put a finger on what he's been able to change in the Red Chamber.

But he has noticed something during his time there.

"I do have the sense that my mere presence changes the way people think and talk about things," said Sinclair. "I'm not one to shy away from opportunities to remind them when they say and do things that ignore the rights of Indigenous people."
N2N@aptn.ca

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Murray Sinclair warns of violent rebellion if Indigenous rights continue to be oppressed - APTN News

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Nation to Nation In a wide-ranging interview spanning the decades of his life from lawyer to judge and now senator, Murray Sinclair issued a frank warning to Canada. There will likely be a violent rebellion if society continues mistreating Indigenous people.

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Midnight Shine - Heart of Gold (Cover) @midnightshineon

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While the number of murders and abductions of indigenous American women has dramatically increased over the past two decades, there does not seem to be a parallel increase in the desire to find out what is behind this alarming phenomenon.

In order to provide an intimate look at the Native American victims in this crisis, Al Jazeera, a media network owned by the Qatar government, produced "The Search: Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women," as part of its F"ault Lines" series.

They followed the lives of three families, all of whom had lost a daughter or close family member and were left without answers or support from the authorities.

Among them was the family of Henny Scott, a 14-year-old who disappeared while living in the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation in Montana. Her mother, Paula Castro, recalls how casually her plea for help was dismissed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a federal agency.

"The reason I was down there [reaching] out to them, was because I needed help ... And when they told me, you know, 'Did you check her friend's house? Or, maybe she's got a new boyfriend, did you check there?' Yeah, I checked there, that's why I'm here."

No alarm was issued by the police for Henny's search until two weeks after her mother reported her missing. Henny may not have suffered the fate she did if the police had expeditiously pursued the investigation, or issued a timely alarm.

Henny was found covered in snow behind a house. The coroner said she died of hypothermia, but her mother was not convinced: "I don't think she died from hypothermia. I have pictures of her nose being broken, you can just tell her nose was broke and she had bruises. But they told me that there was nothing on her, that there was no foul play, but she was bruised, and she had her nose broke and had bumps on her forehead."

Henny was only one of many indigenous women featured in this video who were allowed to suffer because of fundamental failures by the authorities. This video examines exactly why this specific group continues to suffer murders and abductions without sparking public outrage.

"Native or non-native, [the system in place] teaches folks to undervalue native women, to see us as less than human, to see us as exotic and sexy and easy to use and abuse," explains Annita Luchetti - a doctoral student working on research through the Sovereign Bodies Institute, and a Cheyenne descendent.

Indigenous women fall at the intersection of colonialist and patriarchal values; they struggle against entrenched attitudes of neglect and discrimination to gain the respect and recognition that might prevent these tragedies. For more, watch this video.

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Missing and murdered indigenous women in America

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While the number of murders and abductions of indigenous American women has dramatically increased over the past two decades, there does not seem to be a parallel increase in the desire to find out what is behind this alarming phenomenon.

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OTTAWA - Thousands of Canada's aboriginal children died in residential schools that failed to keep them safe from fires, protected from abusers, and healthy from deadly disease, a commission into the saga has found.

So far, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has determined that more than 4,000 of the school children died.

But that figure is based on partial federal government records, and commission officials expect the number to rise as its researchers get their hands in future months on much more complete files from Library and Archives Canada and elsewhere.

The disturbing discovery has cast a new light on the century-long school system that scarred the country's First Nations peoples.

Evidence has been compiled that shows residential school children faced a grave risk of death.

"Aboriginal kids' lives just didn't seem as worthy as non-aboriginal kids," Kimberly Murray, executive director of the commission, said in an interview.

"The death rate was much higher than non-indigenous kids."

The commission has spent the last several years studying a scandal considered by many to be Canada's greatest historical shame.

Over many decades - from the 1870s to 1996 - 150,000 aboriginal children were taken from their families and sent by the federal government to church-run schools, where many faced physical and sexual abuse.

A lawsuit against the federal government and churches resulted in a settlement that included payments to those affected and the creation in 2008 of the commission. Its job is to hold public hearings so people can tell their stories, collect records and establish a national research centre.

The commission has also established "The Missing Children Project" to assemble the names of children who died, how they died, and where they were buried.

The list of names will be contained in a registry available to the public. Murray said the exact number of deceased children will never be known, but she hopes more information will come from churches and provincial files.

"I think we're just scratching the surface."

Many perished in fires - despite repeated warnings in audits that called for fire escapes and sprinklers but were ignored.

"There was report after report talking about how these schools were firetraps," said Murray.

She said it was well known that schools were "locking kids in their dormitories because they didn't want them to escape. And if a fire were to break out they couldn't get out."

Many schools refused to spend money on fire escapes. Instead, they built poles outside of windows for children to slide down. But the windows were locked, and children were unable to reach the poles.

"It's amazing that they didn't make those corrections in those schools. There are just so many deaths that I think could have been prevented if they had done what they were supposed to do."

Some children died as runaways and were found frozen to death in snowy fields; others who tried to escape their abusers drowned in nearby rivers.

Among the most famous incidents involved the deaths of four boys - Allen Willie, Andrew Paul, Maurice Justin, and Johnny Michael - who fled the Lejac residential school in British Columbia on New Year's Day, 1937.

It was 30 degrees below zero. They were found frozen to death on a lake. An inquiry at the time found one boy, wearing summer clothes, had "no hat and one rubber missing and his foot bare."

Murray said these types of deaths were far from rare.

"There were quite a few examples of children who ran away and died."

Many died from tuberculosis because they were malnourished and were housed in poorly-ventilated buildings.

Some died of suicide, unable to bear the brutality of the schools.

The commission has even heard allegations - unproven by the commission - of manslaughter and murder.

"There are people who have been speaking out who say they've seen a child who was beat so brutally that they died. So there is that unanswered question: Whether the abuse was to the extreme that they were coming to their deaths at the hands of their abusers."

"We have not found any records of confirmed manslaughter or murder but we have had people speak to that. Whether you are going to find that in a document is questionable."

What happened to the thousands of children who died? Schools and the government would not pay to have bodies shipped back to their families.

And so they were placed in coffins and buried near the schools - some in marked graves, some in unmarked graves. Often, their parents in far-away reserves were never told what happened.

Murray said that although many of the deaths occurred up until the 1950s, children were continuing to lose their lives in more recent years.

"I think people can make it OK in their minds when they tell themselves it happened a really long time ago. I think it makes it easier for them to accept. But that's not the reality."

When the commission releases its report - likely by June 2015 - the massive document will chronicle the saga of deceased children.

Murray said the saga has left an "open wound" with First Nations communities.

"We hear from survivors and family members how important it is that they know what happened to their loved ones and to know where their remains are located."

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At least 4,000 aboriginal children died in residential schools, commission finds

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OTTAWA - Thousands of Canada's aboriginal children died in residential schools that failed to keep them safe from fires, protected from abusers, and healthy from deadly disease, a commission into the saga has found. So far, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has determined that more than 4,000 of the school children died.

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Buffy Sainte-Marie & Tanya Tagaq "You Got To Run (Spirit Of The Wind)"

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This article is a part of our series, 'Exploring Identity.' We're taking a closer look at issues surrounding identity in Inuit, First Nations and Métis communities.
Canada's 1982 Constitiution recognizes three distinct Indigenous groups: First Nations, Inuit and Métis.

Who are the Métis and why is this question so complicated? Here's some historical background.

What does 'Métis' mean?

In French, the word métis is an adjective referring to someone of mixed ancestry. Since the 18th century, the word has been used to describe individuals with mixed Indigenous and European ancestry.

But it's generally recognized that being Métis is more than having mixed Indigenous and European heritage. Métis have a distinct collective identity, customs and way of life, unique from Indigenous or European roots.

The 1996 Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples stated "Many Canadians have mixed Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal ancestry, but that does not make them Métis or even Aboriginal. Some of them identify themselves as First Nations persons or Inuit, some as Métis and some as non-Aboriginal. What distinguishes Métis people from everyone else is that they associate themselves with a culture that is distinctly Métis."

Through the late 1970s and early 1980s, Jim Sinclair pushed to have Métis and non-status Indians' rights recognized in the Constitution, helping establish the Native Council of Canada (NCC). When the Constitution was repatriated in 1982, First Nations, Inuit and Métis were recognized as Indigenous Peoples with rights under Canadian law.

In 1983, the Métis Nation split from the NCC to form the Métis National Council, which represents Métis communities from Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia.

The Métis Nation are descendants of fur traders who settled in present-day Manitoba. There's a shared culture, traditions and language among those who trace their family roots back to the Red River colony.

There are others outside of the Métis Nation who do not have connections to the Red River colony who also identify as Métis, particularly in Quebec and the Maritimes. The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples referred to them as "the other Métis" and said they constituted "a minority within a minority within a minority."

Over the last decade, the number of people identifying as Métis in these areas has skyrocketed.

How many Métis are there?

In the 2016 Census, 587,545 people identified as Métis across Canada. That number represents a 51.2 per cent growth since 2006. Over the same period, the First Nations population grew by 39.3 per cent and Inuit by 29.1 per cent.

The highest jumps in Métis population were seen in Nova Scotia, Quebec and New Brunswick, with numbers more than doubling over 10 years. Nova Scotia shows the biggest increase at just over 200 per cent.

This has sparked conversation and controversy around Métis identity.

What are Métis rights?

Section 35 of the 1982 Constitution Act guaranteed Indigenous rights but they were not defined.

In October 1993, Steve and Roddy Powley killed a moose north of Sault Ste. Marie and were charged with unlawfully hunting a moose without a licence contrary to Ontario's Game and Fish Act. They argued that as Métis they had rights under s.35 to hunt for food.

R. v. Powley went to the Supreme Court of Canada and in the court's September 2003 decision, the Powleys were acquitted and the "Powley Test" was established for determining the rights to which Métis are entitled.

The Powley Test

The test considers 10 criteria, encompassing self-identification, ancestral connection and community acceptance, to determine whether someone is entitled to exercise Métis rights. The test was modeled after the Van der Peet Test which determines how First Nations claims to rights are defined.

The 10 criteria are:

Characterization of the right.

Identification of the historic rights-bearing community.

Identification of the contemporary rights-bearing community.

Verification of the claimant's membership in the relevant contemporary community. (One must self-identify as Métis, have an ancestral connection to a historic Métis community and be accepted by the modern Métis community.)

Identification of the relevant time frame. (To determine whether something was integral to the Métis community, the practice must have fallen post-contact but before European laws and customs ruled the land.)

Determination of whether the practice is integral to the claimant's distinctive culture.

Establishment of continuity between the historic practice and the contemporary right asserted.

Determination of whether or not the right was extinguished.

If there is a right, determination of whether there is an infringement.

Determination of whether the infringement is justified.

The Daniels decision

In 2016, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in Daniels v. Canada (Indian Affairs and Northern Development) that Métis and non-status Indians are considered Indians under s. 91(24) of the 1982 Constitution.

The decision established that the federal government must accept responsibility for negotiating programs and services for Métis communities.

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Exploring Identity: Who are the Métis and what are their rights? | CBC News

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This article is a part of our series, 'Exploring Identity.' We're taking a closer look at issues surrounding identity in Inuit, First Nations and Métis communities. Canada's 1982 Constitiution recognizes three distinct Indigenous groups: First Nations, Inuit and Métis. Who are the Métis and why is this question so complicated?

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This article is a part of our series, 'Exploring Identity.' We're taking a closer look at issues surrounding identity in Inuit, First Nations and Métis communities. Interviews have been edited for length and clarity.

What criteria does the MMF use to define its membership?
There's three things. You have to self identify, which is the fairly easy part of it. You have to have a connection to the historic Métis Nation and you have to be accepted by the contemporary Métis Nation.
At what point would an applicant to the MMF get denied membership?
Well if you were unable to prove your connection to a historic Métis Nation, then that would be a reason to deny.
Who do you think should decide who is Métis?
One Métis citizen doesn't decide who's Métis. We haven't talked about the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. There's the clause in there that talks about self-determination. Self-determination is not a right held by an individual either, though. Self-determination is a right held by the people at large, by the nation. Whether it's the Cree nation, whether that's the Navajo Nation, whether it's the Métis Nation. That's who owns that right of self-determination. So that right of self-determination for the Métis Nation - it's up to us to decide who's Métis, who is a Métis Nation citizen. It's not up to an individual.

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Q&A: Who is Métis? Manitoba Métis Federation and Eastern Woodland Métis have quite different answers | CBC News

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This article is a part of our series, 'Exploring Identity.' We're taking a closer look at issues surrounding identity in Inuit, First Nations and Métis communities. Interviews have been edited for length and clarity. What criteria does the MMF use to define its membership? There's three things.

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Re}conciliation promotes artistic collaborations that look to the past & future for new dialogues between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Canada.

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Myrna Pokiak says there should be no debate over whether non-Indigenous artists sell products at Inuvik's market. After having her own words 'stolen,' she says it's disrespectful to make money off someone else's art.

Myrna Pokiak had her own words 'stolen' by a northern author 15 years ago, and she isn't over it

I hope this 'artist' will realize the unspoken gifts she was taught should respectfully not be sold for profit.

Gifts do not give you permission to make a profit.

About the Author

Myrna Pokiak is Inuvialuit from Tuktoyaktuk. She currently lives in Yellowknife with her three beautiful girls and husband Eddie Paul. She is the owner of Alappaa Consulting, where she combines her education, culture and art bringing forward her passion for culture. Her strong work ethic and respect for those before her are the driving forces behind her motivation.

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OPINION | It's disrespectful for non-Indigenous artists to make a profit off our designs | CBC News

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Myrna Pokiak says there should be no debate over whether non-Indigenous artists sell products at Inuvik's market. After having her own words 'stolen,' she says it's disrespectful to make money off someone else's art. I hope this 'artist' will realize the unspoken gifts she was taught should respectfully not be sold for profit.

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An art installation honouring survivors of residential schools is being recognized as a "living entity" in an agreement combining Indigenous teachings and Western law.

The Canadian Museum for Human Rights and First Nations artist Carey Newman are signing an agreement Friday to be joint stewards of the "The Witness Blanket," which is comprised of more than 800 items collected from the sites and survivors of residential schools.

Newman, a Kwagiulth and Coast Salish artist from Vancouver Island, said he has never felt ownership of the 12-metre-long installation, but rather a responsibility to honour the survivors' stories it carries.

In devising a way to share this responsibility with the CMHR, Newman said he and the Crown-owned museum came to an "unprecedented" agreement that would vest legal rights with the artwork itself, rather than treating it like a transfer of property.

"It's a Crown corporation really following through on the idea of being Indigenous-led, of reconciliation," Newman said in an interview as he arrived in Winnipeg on Thursday for the signing.

"By putting the rights with the work, and putting responsibilities with ourselves, we've become collaborators trying to figure out our way forward."

Heather Bidzinski, the CMHR's head of collections, said the museum will care for "The Witness Blanket" working in co-operation with Newman to ensure the artwork's rights are being respected in keeping with Indigenous cultural practices.

The stewardship agreement will be ratified both in written documents and an oral ceremony to be held near Newman's home territory of Kwakwaka'wakw at a traditional feast later this year.

The son of a residential school survivor, Newman said in the process of creating "The Witness Blanket," he feels he has only scratched the surface of understanding reconciliation and decolonization.

But he sees the agreement as an embodiment of what it will take to realize those goals, and said he hopes other institutions will follow the CMHR's example in recognizing land not as something to be owned, but looked after for future generations.

"I started this journey because of my father," he said. "I continue it because of my daughter."

The CMHR said "The Witness Blanket" needs restoration work, but a travelling version will be shown at the Red Deer Museum and Art Gallery in Alberta from May 4 to June 23.

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Artwork honouring residential school survivors vested with legal rights | CBC News

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An art installation honouring survivors of residential schools is being recognized as a "living entity" in an agreement combining Indigenous teachings and Western law. The Canadian Museum for Human Rights and First Nations artist Carey Newman are signing an agreement Friday to be joint stewards of the "The Witness Blanket," which is comprised of more than 800 items collected from the sites and survivors of residential schools.

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Settler Colonial Art History on Strikingly

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We are a group of settler art historians from Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Canada, South Africa and the United States who are working on a methodology for art history that responds to the peculiar and particular dynamics of settler-colonial societies.

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"Creator and spirit don't understand that kind of language and that kind of rhetoric," said Meeches, who is Anishinaabe and is the executive director of the Manito Ahbee festival, which oversees the Indigenous Music Awards held in Winnipeg every year.

In a Wednesday phone interview with Ismaila Alfa, host of CBC Radio's Up To Speed, Meeches said that she applauds the group of Inuit artists, including Tanya Tagaq, Kelly Fraser and PIQSIQ, for having the strength to stand their ground.

At the heart of the issue is Nehiyaw (Cree) singer Connie LeGrande, who performs as Cikwes. She was nominated in the "best folk album" category of the Indigenous Music Awards, but is being accused of appropriating Inuit style throat singing in her music.

"She performed [throat singing] at [APTN's] Aboriginal Day live in Edmonton," Meeches said.

"By her belief, she did receive the proper teachings," she said, though "later on that family, or that individual, said it was wrong to teach her that."

In a 2015 Facebook post which was recently reposted by another user, LeGrande wrote that she was "fascinated with Inuit throat singing" and "I decide[d] to teach myself by listening to Tanya [Tagaq's] music."

LeGrande has not responded to a request for comment.

Cikwes

If people are interested in working or having throat singing in part of their collaboration? Hire us. Hire us. Hire us - Tiffany Ayalik

Cikwes

YellowknifeKayley Mackay,

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Cultural appropriation argument 'brings us back a few steps,' says Indigenous Music Awards head | CBC News

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The woman who runs the Manito Ahbee festival said she doesn't believe cultural appropriation is possible within the Indigenous community, after a group of Inuit artists pulled out of the Indigenous Music Awards earlier this week, citing concerns about what they described as the cultural appropriation of throat singing.

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Life for the Inuit, the natives of Canada's Arctic, has never been easy. They have built up their lives in a frozen part of the world where permafrost keeps most life from growing from under the earth.

Things didn't get any better when they made contact with the outside world. From the moment they first met the Europeans, the Inuit have gone through tragedy after tragedy. They have been taken from their homes. Their culture has been crushed, and countless lives have been ruined-all in ways that still affect them today.

10 First Contact With Europeans Ended In A Kidnapping

Martin Frobisher was one of the first European faces the Inuit saw. Frobisher met and talked with the Inuit-and then kidnapped three of them.

Frobisher dragged a man, his wife, and their infant child into his boat and brought them back to England to show them off. There, they displayed their talents, demonstrating how they made kayaks and hunted animals.

The European didn't think highly of the Inuit. "They were savage people and fed only upon raw flesh," one man wrote. His entry abruptly ends: " They died here within a month."

Unprepared for European diseases, the Inuit man fell ill and died nearly as soon as he arrived. His wife died the next week and their baby shortly after. The family was buried with only a short obituary left behind. "Burials in Anno 1577," it read. "Collichang, a heathen man, buried the 8th of November. Egnock, a heathen woman, buried the 13th of November."

9 They Were Put In Human Zoos

By the 1800s, Europeans had started gathering up all the exotic people they'd met in the New World and showing them off in human zoos. Some were kidnapped, and others were lured into it-but none of it went well.

A man named Johan Adrian Jacobsen lured a group of eight Inuit, who started performing in European zoos on October 15, 1880. They didn't last long. The first, a boy named Nuggasak, got sick and died within two months.

The troupe went on, but 13 days later, Nuggasak's mother died. "The husband is very sad," Jacobsen wrote in his diary, "and expressed his wish to be able to accompany his wife." Jacobsen denied his request. The show went on.

Two days later, the man's daughter died. The heartbroken father fought with Jacobsen to stay with his dying girl, but Jacobsen didn't let him. They had to go to Paris. When they reached France, though, the last five Inuit were sick and had to be rushed to the hospital. By January 8, all five had died.

"Everything went so well in beginning," Jacobsen wrote as he watched the last of the Inuit die. He briefly mused over accepting the tiniest hint of responsibility: "Should I be indirectly responsible for their deaths?"

8 An Entire Tribe Was Wiped Out

At the turn of the 20th century, European whalers met a new tribe. They were called the Sadlermiut and lived on three islands in Hudson Bay.

The Sadlermiut lived in complete isolation from the Inuit. They didn't build igloos. Instead, they lived in stone houses. They had their own religion and their own language. They appeared to have been influenced by Inuit culture, but they were their own people with their own beliefs and their own lifestyle.

Then, within a couple of years, the entire population was wiped out. European diseases spread among them quickly. By 1903, every single one of them had died.

7 The Canadian Government Gave The Inuit Numbers For Names

The first missionaries to the North couldn't pronounce the Inuit's names, and they weren't particularly interested in learning. Instead, the missionaries gave the Inuit new names taken from the Bible, like "Noah" and "Jonah."

The Inuit soon lost their family names, too. The Canadian government labeled each Inuit with an Eskimo Identification number that doubled as their last name. Their numbers were used as their last names on all government documents. The Inuit were also forced to wear their numbers around their necks like dog tags.

By the 1940s, the Inuit went by names like Annie E7-121. They kept those names until disturbingly recently. The Inuit people weren't officially allowed to use their own names (instead of numbers) until 1978.

6 People Were Forcibly Moved Farther North

In the 1950s, the Canadian government decided that it was time to tackle "The Eskimo Problem." They told the Inuit that the government wanted to improve their lives by taking them to a new home with better game to hunt and fish to catch. It was supposed to be an easier life.

Instead, the government relocated the Inuit to places like Grise Fiord and Resolute Bay, where the temperature on a winter night drops to -40 degrees Celsius (-40 °F) and the darkness of night lasts for five months straight. For the first year, people had to live there in tents without enough food or other supplies.

Hunting was also much harder there. Most Inuit wanted to go home immediately, but they weren't permitted to return to their homes for another 35 years. As it turned out, the government didn't want to help the Inuit. The Canadian government just wanted the people living in the North to cement their claim to the Arctic against the USSR.

The Inuit were moved north for " the strategic interests of Canada's great neighbor to the south." That's not a conspiracy theory; that's a quote from a government document.

5 The RCMP Slaughtered Sled Dogs

Before the 1950s, many of the Inuit still lived off the land. When the government tackled the "Eskimo Problem," though, that changed. Every Inuit they could find was moved into new government-created settlements.

The government promised the Inuit that this would lead to a new flood of wealth into their territory, but it didn't really pan out that way. Instead, the Inuit lived in abject poverty in these settlements.

It was worse now, though, because the Inuit couldn't sustain themselves by hunting as they had before. Now they had to follow Canadian government laws that limited how much the Inuit could catch. These laws weren't intended for people who lived off the land.

Many Inuit kept hunting anyway-until the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) slaughtered their sled dogs. Claiming that these dogs were dangerous, the RCMP killed them by the thousands. Without sled dogs, it was impossible for the Inuit to hunt the way they had before. They were left to rely on their work as laborers.

"I never understood why they were shot," an Inuit man named Thomas Kublu later related. "I thought, was it because my hunting was getting in the way of my time as a laborer?"

4 Children Were Separated From Their Parents

Once in the settlements, the children were sent to schools. Most of these towns, though, didn't have schools of their own yet. So the kids were taken from their parents and sent to other provinces.

Many parents believed that they would lose any financial support from the government if they didn't send their kids off. These families were newly impoverished and unable to hunt as they had before, and so the parents let their kids go.

In their new schools, the children were forced to speak English. Some have related that they were beaten if they spoke their own language, Inuktitut. They were taught a curriculum based on Southern values and languages.

By the time they were sent back to their parents, they barely remembered their own culture. "I thought I was a Southerner," one man related. "I didn't want to come back. I didn't like the tundra and the house."

3 Children Were Abused

The children were sent to residential schools that were horrible. This is seen as one of the low marks in Canadian history, and it really was. At least 3,200 natives died in these schools, many from abuse and neglect.

They were physically abused. If they spoke Inuktitut, one student recalled, they "had to put their hands on the desk and got 20 slaps." If they didn't stand during the nation anthem, they were beaten.

Worse still, they were sexually abused. According to one student, a group of Catholic priests at one school made students "touch their penis for candy." Another has said that she "was thrown into a cold shower every night, sometimes after being raped."

People reported the sexual abuse, but an active government campaign worked to block all investigations. Their staff was mostly volunteers, missionaries who were barely paid a dime. They were hard to replace-and so the government turned a blind eye to the abuse.

2 Substance Abuse

The Indian Act made it illegal for the Inuit to buy alcohol. In 1959, though, immediately after pulling the Inuit out of the lives they knew, the government decided to make an exception and let them drink.

It wasn't the best time to do it. The Inuit were going through an incredibly hard time and adjusting to a new sort of life. They didn't quite know what to do with themselves in their homes and with their new lifestyles. They spent most of their time bored. So when liquor was introduced, they drank it.

"Back then, the whole town would be drunk for a whole week," one man recalled. "Everyone was hurting inside, not living as they should. People growing up with a lot of pain. I don't want my grandchildren to grow up with that kind of pain and end up like us."

1 The New Cost Of Living Is Unbelievably Expensive

Since then, things have improved. The Nunavut Land Claims Agreement has given the Inuit some autonomy, and the Canadian government has issued apologies for the past. Life in the North, however, is still far from ideal. The Inuit territory of Nunavut is the poorest in the country, and 60 percent of the people there can't afford to feed their families.

The average Inuit makes one-third the wage of the average Canadian, and the Inuit cost of living is significantly higher. Much of the Arctic is covered in permafrost, meaning that most food has to be imported from the South. That leads to some incredibly high prices.

The people of Nunavut started taking pictures of the prices at their grocery stores, and they're absurd. A cabbage can cost $28.54. A slice of watermelon goes for $13.09, 18 pieces of fried chicken fetch $61.99, and a 24-pack of bottled water goes for $104.99.

Worse, though, is the lingering impact of everything that's happened. Among the Inuit, the suicide rate for teenage boys is 40 times higher than it is in the rest of the country-a symptom of a culture that has been systematically destroyed.

Mark Oliver is a regular contributor to Listverse. His writing also appears on a number of other sites, including The Onion's StarWipe and Cracked.com. His website is regularly updated with everything he writes.

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10 Tragedies That Destroyed The Canadian Inuit Way Of Life

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Life for the Inuit, the natives of Canada's Arctic, has never been easy. They have built up their lives in a frozen part of the world where permafrost keeps most life from growing from under the earth. Things didn't get any better when they made contact with the outside world.

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David Serkoak couldn't believe what he was witnessing. An apology. It was 2005 and the premier of Newfoundland and Labrador at the time, Danny Williams, was saying sorry to Inuit who had been relocated in the 1950s from two northern communities, Nutak and Hebron, triumphantly calling the day a "symbol of reconciliation." Serkoak isn't a member of either community-he was there to perform as a ceremonial drum dancer. But the occasion brought him to tears, and he came away with a sense of determination. "I was watching a leader apologize to Inuit in person," he says.

When he arrived home in Iqaluit, he told himself: "I'm going to see a day like that"-the Ahiarmiut people in Nunavut, his people, would one day receive an apology from the federal government. It was the renewed sense of mission he needed. In 1988, Serkoak had founded an organization called the Ahiarmiut Relocation Society that sought an apology, a financial settlement and a plaque acknowledging the near extermination of his people resulting from repeated relocations across what is now southwest Nunavut. But his group was running low on money. He feared he might have to call off his quest.

Still, Serkoak pressed on, and last summer Ottawa agreed to a $5-million settlement (including $100,000 for each of the 21 survivors of the relocations and $3,000 each for the 164 children of the relocated). And in late January, Carolyn Bennett, minister of Crown-Indigenous relations, delivered a long-awaited apology in Arviat, Nunavut. It was a moment of healing and reconciliation-one Canadians could use more of when it comes to their history with Indigenous people. "I only regret that so many Ahiarmiut will not be around to see the conclusion of this struggle," Serkoak said during the ceremony. "We forgive but we will not forget. The country needs to know about-and learn from-past mistakes."

READ MORE: Justin Trudeau exonerates Tsilhqot'in chiefs: Watch the PM's full apology

Up until the 1940s, the Ahiarmiut were a group of inland Inuit, some of whom inhabited an area near Ennadai Lake, about 150 km north of Manitoba's northern boundary and near the current eastern limit of the Northwest Territories. Their culture depended on the caribou herds that travelled the land; before the relocations, they faced occasional periods of starvation because of the Arctic's tough conditions and the caribou's varying migration patterns.

After the construction of a military radio station near their homeland in 1949, the Ahiarmiut and the federal employees who manned the tower began to trade with each other. Ottawa took notice, raising concern that the Ahiarmiut were starving and increasingly reliant on the station's resources. "The people at the station were saying, 'Leave them alone, this is part of their life cycle,' " says Steve Cooper, the Ahiarmiut's lawyer.

The federal officials of the day believed they could help, and in the summer of 1950-without notice, explanation or consent-ordered roughly 67 Ahiarmiut, representing about eight families, to be relocated by plane to Nueltin Lake, about 100 km from their home. The intention, Cooper says, was to turn the group into commercial fishermen "for the benefit of a fishing company that never got off the ground." Before their abrupt departure, an order was given to bulldoze and bury their homes and belongings; they took little more with them than the clothes on their backs.

At Nueltin Lake, members of the group became so hungry that they resorted to eating their clothes and bark from trees, sucking on leather hides for traces of long-gone nutrients. "They were trying to breastfeed babies and blood was coming out of the nipple rather than milk because there just wasn't anything available," Cooper says, citing documented accounts from the time. Many of them didn't make it. "The most powerful man in our group was the first to die," says Serkoak.

Survivors, including Serkoak's mother, who was pregnant with him at the time, walked back to their home in Ennadai after the lake froze. But the Ahiarmiut would be relocated four more times over the next 10 years: to Henik Lake, about 200 km away, in 1957; to Arviat in 1958; to Rankin Inlet in 1959 and to Whale Cove on Hudson Bay in 1960. By the following decade, most of the group had settled in Arviat for good.

Government records say Serkoak was born on Jan. 5, 1952, at Nueltin Lake. Now retired from a career as a school principal, he recalls from his home in Ottawa how his mother would tell him that wasn't the day or place she gave birth to him-that he was born on an island somewhere near their homeland shortly after they made their way back. "You were born in the fall, when frost covered the surface," she would say, likely in October.

RELATED: Canada's MPs call for a residential-school apology-exposing a Church in crisis

The whole saga, says Serkoak, was like a horrific dream. Memories of chewing on meatless bones overshadow happier recollections of holding his mother's hand or being carried on her back on long walks. When he began his work with the Ahiarmiut Relocation Society, compiling recollections and creating "a paper trail," as he puts it, he inherited the bad dreams of his elders. One took place a year after the Ahiarmiut were moved to Henik Lake, where Ottawa gave them "starvation boxes" containing barely enough food to survive. Many left the area, but a few stayed.

A man named Ootek went mad. He shot Hallauk, a hunter, in the back of the head while he was jigging for fish at a nearby lake. Then he went after Hallauk's wife, Kikkik, who was also Ootek's half-sister. Kikkik somehow fought him off and killed Ootek by stabbing him with a knife. With her five children, the traumatized Kikkik set out on a three-day trek to a Hudson's Bay Company post in Padlei. But with her youngest daughter on her back and two more on a sled behind her (her two eldest children were on foot), she soon judged that she wouldn't make it to Padlei alive. In desperation, she wrapped the two girls from the sled in caribou hide and buried them in the snow for insulation. She and her other three kids reached the post, and the RCMP found the snowbound girls a day later: only one had survived. Kikkik was charged with the murder of Ootek, as well as causing the death of one daughter and neglecting the other. A headline from the time of the murder in the Globe and Mail read: "Violence brings move for band of Eskimos." But later that year, Kikkik was acquitted of all charges. Elisapee Karetak, now 62 and a documentary filmmaker, and her sister Margaret-the one who was found alive in the snow-were at the apology. Karetak was about 15 months old when she was on Kikkik's back that day. Her mother didn't like to talk about what happened; Karetak didn't learn about her people's history until she was a teenager. But, she says, "I remember my mother's love."

These days, it is commonplace to call Canada's treatment of Indigenous people cultural genocide. But some believe the case of the Ahiarmiut represents something worse. "The UN convention on genocide doesn't require it to be a big group," observes Rhoda Howard-Hassmann, a professor emeritus at Wilfrid Laurier University. "It just struck me that this was really an actual, physical genocide." The relocations could be considered "genocide by attrition," she adds, a term coined by U.S. sociologist Helen Fein, which doesn't mean "rounding people up and murdering them directly, but deporting them, letting them starve and die of disease."

READ MORE: Opinion: You can't drink an apology

Howard-Hassmann knows that proving intent on Ottawa's part would be difficult. Still, she points to large-scale "deportations" like the ones involving minorities in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and '40s, which scholars now recognize as genocide: "If you deport people and massive numbers of them starve to death, that is more than cultural genocide."

In 2007, Cooper received a call from Serkoak asking for help. He knew of the Ahiarmiut from the works of author Farley Mowat-books like People of the Deer and The Desperate People. (Mowat would later be accused of exaggerating his involvement with the Ahiarmiut.) Cooper agreed to help and told Serkoak not to worry about the money for now: "Sometimes you take things on because it's just a moral claim that needs to be pursued."

A year later, the Ahiarmiut filed their litigation. The Conservative government under Stephen Harper resolutely fought the case, Cooper says, but three months after the Liberals formed government in 2015, Ottawa agreed to settle. The apology was held in a community hall in Arviat. Survivors and their families filled the room, many of them in tears when Bennett said: "We are sorry. Mamiapugut." Mary Anowtalik, the oldest of the 21 remaining survivors, was among them. At 17, she had appeared on the cover of a 1956 issue of Life magazine. She now lives in Arviat, where she rides an ATV and speaks on a smartphone. She was, says Serkoak, delighted by the apology.

As was he. Serkoak's mother died in the early 2000s, and he retired early so he could teach his grandchildren how to hunt, dance and drum. Over the course of the litigation, he quit drinking. He finally had vindication for his years-long quest-and a chance to put his own nightmarish memories behind him. "To hear those words from the minister," he says, "was almost like waking up."

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Was Ottawa's forced relocation of the Ahiarmiut people more than cultural genocide? - Macleans.ca

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David Serkoak couldn't believe what he was witnessing. An apology. It was 2005 and the premier of Newfoundland and Labrador at the time, Danny Williams, was saying sorry to Inuit who had been relocated in the 1950s from two northern communities, Nutak and Hebron, triumphantly calling the day a "symbol of reconciliation."

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Last week, a pair of artifacts was identified on the site of a planned work camp related to the construction of the Coastal Gas Link pipeline in Unist'ot'en, a sub-unit of traditional Wet'suwet'en territory.

The inland northwest LNG project has been in the news lately as authorities struggle with how to address the different jurisdictions of traditional hereditary governance and Indian Act band administration.

The unearthing of the artifacts, believed to date to at least 2,400 years ago, would not come as a surprise to most archeologists or Indigenous people - 15,000 years of land use with technology dominated by stone tools guarantees an abundance of such evidence.

Yet discussions in mainstream and social media have been full of accusations that Indigenous land defenders "planted" the artifacts and that they may not have actually originated in that place.

Why have these artifacts stirred up this kind of debate and what does it mean about how we see ourselves and our history?

The answer to this lies in the four-century-old idea of terra nullius, a key tenet of the Doctrine of Discovery, the philosophy endorsed by the Catholic Church that kicked off the age of exploration and led to the colonization of the global south.

Terra nullius, known as the "empty lands doctrine," essentially stated that lands not occupied by Christians were to be considered open and free for the taking, and that colonization of such lands (and religious conversion of their Indigenous occupants) was fulfilling God's will.

Far from being history, terra nullius remains foundational to Canada's national historical narrative.

We tend to see ourselves as pioneers, taming an empty wilderness, earning our place on this land by improving it, making it more productive, more profitable, in a way that past Indigenous owners did (or could) not.

Our origin story doesn't have room for 500 generations of Indigenous people. It doesn't acknowledge the depth, intensity and continuity of Indigenous relationship with this land.

And it can't grasp that more than 15-millennia of use has virtually carpeted the continent with archeological sites, the marks of all the ancestors. Admitting Indigenous precedence here is admitting that we took what wasn't ours and that, to this day, we live on stolen land.

So we don't.

About those artifacts in Unist'ot'en territory, two beautifully made stone tools, knapped and used by an ancestor more than 2,000 years ago?

Those are the incontrovertible marks of the Indigenous past.

So, too, are the names of the places they were found: in Unist'ot'en, at the confluence of Wedzin Kwah (Morice River) and Talbits Kwah (Gosnell Creek).

Those artifacts and those names represent an undeniable underlying title to this land that we have yet to come to terms with as a nation.

The archeology of Indigenous peoples will be seen as an inconvenience, even a ruse, until Canada makes peace with its past.

A couple of stone tools appearing where a pipeline was planned represent, in microcosm, the challenge of reconciling our occupation of unceded land.

We can build on it, we can buy and sell it, we can profit from its resources, but we can't wipe it clean and make it ours.

We cannot erase the past.

Joanne Hammond is a Kamloops archeologist. Interested in more? Go online to republicof archaeology.ca. Dig It is KTW's regularly published column on the history beneath our feet in the Kamloops region. A group of nine professional archeologists living and working in the area contribute columns to this page and online at kamloopsthisweek.com.

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Dig It: The inconvenient truth of Indigenous archeology

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Last week, a pair of artifacts was identified on the site of a planned work camp related to the construction of the Coastal Gas Link pipeline in Unist'ot'en, a sub-unit of traditional Wet'suwet'en territory. The inland northwest LNG project has been in the news lately as authorities struggle with how to address the different jurisdictions of traditional hereditary governance and Indian Act band administration.

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Hayden King is Anishinaabe from Beausoleil First Nation on Gchi'mnissing in Huronia, Ontario. He is the Executive Director of Yellowhead Institute, based in the Faculty of Arts at Ryerson University.
Jody Wilson-Raybould once invoked a tree metaphor to describe the relationship between Indigenous peoples and Canada. A tree with roots so neglected over the years they died, yet, we keep watering them expecting new growth.

On Wednesday, Ms. Wilson-Raybould set that tree on fire.

She brought light and heat to the SNC-Lavalin scandal and may end up bringing down the most senior political operatives and bureaucrats in the country and influencing a federal election. But there in her comments, too, was an image of our collective relationship.

At the end of her meticulous recounting of what she called "inappropriate" pressure her colleagues applied in an effort to defer SNC-Lavalin's prosecution, Ms. Wilson-Raybould linked these two threads: "my understanding of the rule of law has been shaped by my experience as an Indigenous person and leader. The history of Crown-Indigenous relations in this country includes a history of the rule of law not being respected ... And I have seen the negative impacts for freedom, equality and a just society this can have firsthand."

Knowing these dynamics better than most, and despite any of her efforts, Ms. Wilson-Raybould has been a part of a government responsible for perpetuating lack of respect for the rule of law, in this case in relation to Indigenous issues. How can all of this be reconciled?

Earlier this year, in response to widespread outrage, "rule of law" was official government messaging when the RCMP served a pipeline company's injunction in Unist'ot'en territory, on lands the clan has not agreed to share in a treaty (what the Supreme Court calls "title" lands). From Oka, Que., through Ipperwash, Ont., Caledonia, Ont., Elsipogtog First Nation and two dozen other examples of conflict over land, the rule of law is a prime-ministerial invocation that twists the law.

On criminal justice, the Supreme Court has demanded that the over-incarceration of Indigenous peoples be addressed with unique sentencing protocols known as the Gladue Principle. The directive is overwhelmingly ignored by lower courts, provincial and federal officials, and incarceration rates continue to rise.

Law after law dating back to the Gradual Civilization Act in the late-1850s have discriminated against Indigenous women. Canada has argued in court that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms doesn't apply to First Nation women. Indeed, there is still gender discrimination in the Indian Act.

Indigenous children are somehow invisible to the rule of law, too. Last week, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal issued its seventh non-compliance order against Canada for failing to fully and completely end discriminatory policies.

In these cases, legal principles, legislation, tribunal rulings and the constitution affirm the rights of Indigenous peoples. As such, we should expect fair and equitable application of the law. Instead, the rule of law is evacuated. Or, put another way by Cree writer Billy-Ray Belcourt, "the rule of law is a death wish against NDNs."

While Ms. Wilson-Raybould didn't go quite so far, her testimony did sketch the process by which governing institutions subvert the rule of law.

In the case of SNC-Lavalin, the Clerk of the Privy Council, the Prime Minister's Office, Ministry of Finance staff allegedly pressed Ms. Wilson-Raybould to intervene in the federal corruption case against the company to achieve a political objective. It is not hard to believe that in cases of Indigenous rights claims threatening business interests, a similar circumvention is common. That's why it's so difficult, in part, for Indigenous people to accept that change can be made from within the very same structures that were designed to dispossess.

Late last year, in a speech to First Nation leaders in B.C., and on the eve of her demotion to Veterans Affairs, Ms. Wilson-Raybould called out those among us who have little faith in Canadian institutions and laws. These individuals, she said, "in the name of upholding Indigenous rights, critically oppose almost any effort to change [within the Canadian constitutional framework]." This is an apt characterization, although to be fair, the heretics have ample evidence of corrupt institutions on their side.

Here is the inescapable paradox: Ms. Wilson-Raybould understands well and has illuminated this alleged abuse of power. And yet, she is a champion of Canadian institutions all the same, perhaps a manifestation of the best of them. An Indigenous woman and member of Parliament just held still-colonial Canada accountable like few others have done, teaching us all a lesson in the process, whether we are Liberals, civil servants or Indigenous critics.

If we do plant new roots, I believe ashes make the best fertilizer.
Opinion: The impossible position: Canada's attorney-general cannot be our justice minister Wilson-Raybould on SNC-Lavalin and Trudeau: What you missed from her bombshell testimony, and what it means Opinion: Jody Wilson-Raybould and the paradox of reconciliation in Canada

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Jody Wilson-Raybould and the paradox of reconciliation in Canada

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Hayden King is Anishinaabe from Beausoleil First Nation on Gchi'mnissing in Huronia, Ontario. He is the Executive Director of Yellowhead Institute, based in the Faculty of Arts at Ryerson University. Jody Wilson-Raybould once invoked a tree metaphor to describe the relationship between Indigenous peoples and Canada.

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'Beggars in our own land': Canada's First Nation housing crisis

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In January, an isolated reserve declared a state of emergency over dangerously poor housing conditions. A resident has now died - what will it take for meaningful change?

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APTN InFocus
The phenomenon of hoarding skeletal remains and cultural artifacts flies in the face of reconciliation, Indigenous leaders say.

Many items are stolen from graves and sacred sites; others are found when land is disturbed during development.

Ry Moran, director of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, thinks it's a problem that stems from attitude.

"The idea that it was empty land and that people could just come in and collect whatever they saw fit," Moran told InFocus Host Melissa Ridgen.

"That kind of legitimized or allowed these collectors to come and feel like they had a right, which of course they never have had, to disturb sacred or ceremonial sites."

But, he adds, that while wrong, there's a silver lining to certain public and private entities preserving these artifacts.

"We turn to archives all the time to prove our rights were eroded or eliminated on a systematic basis," he added.

"The best way to win a legal argument is to use the government's own words against it. And those archives provide a very important record of that - that we continue to turn to, to understand that longstanding abrogation."

APTN News reporter Martha Troian has covered the practice of collecting and keeping artifacts by non-Indigenous organizations and private collectors.

In 2017, she surveyed 12 universities across Canada.

"What I learned was that they are housing (everything from) full skeletons to bone fragments of Indigenous human remains," she told Ridgen.

"The University of Toronto had the highest number at 550 and then next was Memorial University, they had the second highest with approximately 200. But not all universities wanted to give their information to me. I did sense some resistance."

Troian said "there are some institutions that have repatriation policies and some universities that don't have any at all. and if these institutions want to give back Indigenous human remains to communities, the cost is going to fall on the communities."

Moran said that's part of the problem.

In a time when many want to do what's right - in the spirit of reconciliation - there's a lack of infrastructure to return the items.

And there's a lack of ability in communities to preserve artifacts or return burial items to their resting place, he said.

Troian has been following the story of an American man who collected thousands of artifacts and bones from Indigenous communities across the U.S and the world.

And she has written about efforts to repatriate two Beothuk skulls to Newfoundland from a Scottish museum.

"We have to recognize that, in accordance with the United Nations Declaration of Rights of Indigenous People - and with just good relationships -, unilateral ownership by the state is not acceptable any more," said Moran.

"And we have to move, in the very least, into a process of co-ownership and a process of returning them to communities."

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Returning Indigenous artifacts part of reconciliation but still a struggle - APTN News

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APTN InFocus The phenomenon of hoarding skeletal remains and cultural artifacts flies in the face of reconciliation, Indigenous leaders say. Many items are stolen from graves and sacred sites; others are found when land is disturbed during development. Ry Moran, director of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, thinks it's a problem that stems from attitude.

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manuel arturo abreu
Here's a hot take: Social practice is antisocial-not all of it, but a large-enough segment to prompt questions about the use of people's lives (social, economic, and otherwise) as raw material. Through this assessment, I do not pretend to engineer a new argument, but instead revive an old critical discourse that social practice is effectively institutional. At their worst, contemporary social practices reinforce the idea that aesthetics trump all else: art, even unconsciously, acts within the market. ¹ Art historian Claire Bishop extends this argument and points out that social practice dovetails nicely with the neoliberal gutting of social services to replace experienced staffers with naive volunteers and rapacious, so-called "creative" entrepreneurial solutions. ²

The premise of many early Modernist movements was the transformative power of art in the face of a repressive society. The idea of social-practice art embodies this form of engagement in the contemporary context. The New York Times defines social practice as follows:

[Its] practitioners freely blur the lines among object making, performance, political activism, community organizing, environmentalism and investigative journalism, creating a deeply participatory art that often flourishes outside the gallery and museum system. And in so doing, they push an old question-"Why is it art?"-as close to the breaking point as contemporary art ever has.

The term was adopted institutionally in 2005 with the creation of the Social Practice MFA concentration at the California College of the Arts, to denote this subset of participatory art that focused on the sociopolitical context as material and content. The school's website states: "Learn to refine and sustain a critical art practice that's interdisciplinary and socially engaged." ³

Process-oriented and ephemeral aspects of a work, unfortunately, can't always escape the commercial market. Since the rise of conceptualism in the late 1950s, process-based components have become new kinds of commodities. All art and all media are already social.

Meaning is created socially, in a network of contemplation and action. Focalizing art's social component is at best redundant and at worst exploitative of the marginalized communities from which it so often draws. ⁴ Its foundational structure as a terminology and presumably contemporary praxis is steeped in whiteness: in many Black and Brown cultures, the idea of social engagement having aesthetic dimensions is very old (just as abstraction, the aniconic, tropical color palettes, automatism, spirit possession, and other art techniques are very old and nonwhite in origin and were refashioned as new by modernism ⁵).

Suzanne Lacy. Between the Door and the Street, 2013. Photo: Patti Friday.

Social engagement doesn't need to be framed as art. Why not engage actual society instead, without the vague glint in one's eye of the possibility of grants and institutional access? An example may be instructive: Consider Suzanne Lacy's Between the Door and the Street, staged in 2013 by Creative Time and the Brooklyn Museum. ⁶ In this performance, four hundred participants, mostly women, were said to have "activated" a Brooklyn block by discussing issues of gender, race, and class with pedestrians while wearing yellow scarves. A question for critics and the institutions that would leverage this gesture is: By what criteria can we measure the aesthetic success of social-practice art? By the work's intent, its social impact, its aesthetic qualities, or the buzz it generates? Lacy herself wrote in 1995, in a book she edited on the critical issues of "new genre public art" (as she called it then): "Critics must inevitably enter the discussion personally and philosophically when approaching work that intends toward social meaning." ⁷ The critique of the work of necessity becomes a shibboleth for the critic's subjective politics; any attempt to get at the work itself becomes a discussion about surrounding issues, since the aesthetic content of the work lies precisely in these social issues and presumed engagement with them, allowing a kind of do-gooder paper tiger to arise against criticality.

Partly as a result of the echo chamber this dynamic creates, socially engaged art wants the art world to be a veritable one-stop shop for all manner of social gesture and commentary. Further, it wants sociality to be valuated on the terms of capitalism and popular media. The social is what is being shopped. Writing in the context of the Defend Boyle Heights movement in Los Angeles-a community-catalyzed movement against art-gallery gentrification-a pseudonymous writer, Asmodeus, wrote that many artists "want their participation in the art world to function as a complete package. In other words, you can get your aesthetics, your ethics, and your politics in the same place, by doing the same stuff. Your art is your resistance, or your academic research is your resistance, or whatever." ⁸

Consider another example: In 2013, the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn constructed Gramsci Monument at the Forest Houses public-housing towers in the Bronx. Drawing on Beuysian social sculpture, the work was said to have "activated" the community over the course of a summer with a glut of discursive and multimedia engagements. Much of the legwork was done by the Forest Houses community. Hirschhorn states in an Art21 video about the project, "I don't do something for the community; I do something, I hope, for art." ⁹ Are we to presume that the hundreds of hours of the community's labor were appropriately acknowledged and compensated within the guise of art as well? How are we to digest community-powered work that presumably is not done for the community? Further, the renowned artist Glenn Ligon, a former resident of Forest Houses, wrote in Artforum in November 2013, "What if instead of building the Gramsci Monument, Hirschhorn had proposed building the Gramsci Charter School?...Far-fetched, I know, but one of the many possible projects that might have resulted in a deeper collaboration between Hirschhorn and the residents of the Forest Houses."

Thomas Hirschhorn. Gramsci Monument, 2013. Forest Houses housing projects, Bronx, NY. Photo courtesy of Ángel Franco for the New York Times.

Yasmil Raymond, who curated the Gramsci Monument project for the Dia Art Foundation, responded that Hirschhorn "wanted to create a monument that didn't burden anyone with the fascism of permanence." What Ligon is proposing is that other options were available, where the community and the artist would receive equal benefit. Instead, once the project ended, the housing projects went back to their previous struggles, with nothing to show for the work of co-establishing the project. The idea that a lasting, equitable benefit between a socially engaged artist and the community would be described as a "fascism of permanence" is exactly the kind of antisocial attitude that deserves greater scrutiny by those who would otherwise herald contemporary social practice as art with real-world implications beyond gallery walls.

What kind of aesthetic structures can we come up with, to interchange a "fascism of permanence" with the foundations of something that is permanently useful? In reality, the art world isn't set up to make this kind of lasting positive impact on communities, given that many institutions hoard their colonially gained resources ¹⁰ and lend an artwashing framework to gentrification. ¹¹ As reductive as it sounds, a reasonable strategy would entail undertaking this work as an engaged citizen rather than as an artist and avoiding the market entirely, given that any attempt to broach sociopolitical issues through the market will center the generation of value.

Further, it is difficult to imagine collective and socially engaged projects that see every collaborator compensated fairly, precisely because the art world has some of the worst labor practices of any market. ¹² Even with a project like Mierle Laderman Ukeles' decades-long unpaid artist residence at the New York City Sanitation Department, few would argue that the sanitation workers have benefited as much as Ukeles. It's a start, though: forgoing a salary is a gesture toward acknowledging the value of the community with which the socially engaged artist works. It's just never enough. For example, all the positive impact of Rick Lowe's Project Row Houses seemed to cause property values to rise in Houston's Third Ward neighborhood, prompting Lowe's organization to found the separate Row House Community Development Corporation in 2003, with a mission to keep the area mixed-income. ¹³

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, the NYC Sanitation Department's official artist in residence, chats with a sanitation worker, circa 1979-80. Photo: Robin Holland. Courtesy of Ronald Feldman Fine Arts.

So the scales can tip toward harm fairly quickly, and it's easy to see how social practice falls into the paradigm of what George Lipsitz calls the "white spatial imaginary," where white intervention continues to present itself as an ethical act rather than as a facet of Black and Brown oppression. ¹⁴ Were the veil of art to be taken away in Hirschhorn's project, residents might see their collective activity as unpaid labor rather than as the creativity of the social made manifest. People on the street, being approached to talk about race, might see it as harassment from a stranger rather than as art. Consider one of the worst examples: In an attempt to address racism, Joe Scanlan invented a Black woman artist, rather than materially support Black women and organizations for and by Black women. Scanlan's Donelle Woolford project is one of the most ethically contentious artworks of the past ten years. ¹⁵

More than anything, social practice reveals the strong desire for a malleable public: one that is open to be changed, that wants to participate or contribute labor, that accepts the terms of engagement, and that believes in the transformative power of Western art. The idea of a public is so fractured in this hyper-corporate, digital era that one can see where this yearning comes from, as well as the more general yearning for what people describe as "art that makes a difference." But if one is simply instrumentalizing people as raw material for one's art, the art world and the capitalist powers that guide it have equal responsibility to critically and ethically evaluate the longer-term stakes. Otherwise, the do-gooder veneer falls away to reveal the same quarterly, value-focused framework we see in other sectors of capitalist markets.

Social-practice artworks with a commitment to sociopolitical change have the inexplicable potential to be valued as morally good works, regardless of the impact of the project as measured by the community's criteria. They allow sociopolitical issues to be subsumed into aesthetic issues, such that a work can fail a community but still be considered good art. An external evaluation by a subset of persons with niche concerns just seems like replicating art-market dynamics at a smaller, more interpersonal scale. These harmful dynamics hope to activate some long-lost concept of polis while securing some social-justice clout on the side. This is no argument for authenticity or unmediated access to marginal communities; rather, if access to such communities is predicated on one's ability to procure white-cube resources from the encounter, maybe one's priorities are off.

Perhaps the takeaway is: The limited attention span for art is not enough. Do the work, and do it whether it's in the context of art or not. Don't pretend that doing good as part of a creative practice is better than just doing good. And definitely don't pretend that good intentions make inherently good acts.

[Editor's Note: Art Practical' s publisher is the California College of the Arts. Art Practical retains its core mission, editorial vision, and autonomy in all areas, including content, staffing, and programming.]

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We Need to Talk About Social Practice | Art Practical

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manuel arturo abreu Here's a hot take: Social practice is antisocial-not all of it, but a large-enough segment to prompt questions about the use of people's lives (social, economic, and otherwise) as raw material. Through this assessment, I do not pretend to engineer a new argument, but instead revive an old critical discourse that social practice is effectively institutional.

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francois schnell / Flickr

"Persistence is one of the great characteristics of a pitbull, and I guess owners take after their dogs," says Annetta Cheek, the co-founder of the D.C.-based nonprofit Center for Plain Language. Cheek, an anthropologist by training who left academia in the early 1980s to work for the Federal Aviation Commission, is responsible for something few people realize exists: the 2010 Plain Writing Act. In fact, Cheek was among the first government employees to champion the use of clear, concise language. Once she retired in 2007 from the FAA and gained the freedom to lobby, she leveraged her hatred for gobbledygook to create an actual law. Take a look at recent information put out by many government agencies such as the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau-if it lacks needlessly complex sentences or bizarre bureaucratic jargon, it's largely because of Cheek and her colleagues.

The idea that writing should be clear, concise, and low-jargon isn't a new one-and it isn't limited to government agencies, of course. The problem of needlessly complex writing-sometimes referred to as an "opaque writing style "-has been explored in fields ranging from law to science. Yet in academia, unwieldy writing has become something of a protected tradition. Take this example:

The work of the text is to literalize the signifiers of the first encounter, dismantling the ideal as an idol. In this literalization, the idolatrous deception of the first moment becomes readable. The ideal will reveal itself to be an idol. Step by step, the ideal is pursued by a devouring doppelganger, tearing apart all transcendence. This de-idealization follows the path of reification, or, to invoke Augustine, the path of carnalization of the spiritual. Rhetorically, this is effected through literalization. A Sentimental Education does little more than elaborate the progressive literalization of the Annunciation.

That little doozy appears in Barbara Vinken's Flaubert Postsecular: Modernity Crossed Out, published by Stanford University Press, and was recently posted to a listserv used by clear-language zealots-many of whom are highly qualified academics who are willing to call their colleagues out for being habitual offenders of opaque writing. Yet the battle to make clear and elegant prose the new status quo is far from won.

Last year, Harvard's Steven Pinker (who's also written about his grammar peeves for The Atlantic) authored an article for The Chronicle of Higher Education in which he used adjectives like "turgid, soggy, wooden, bloated, clumsy, obscure, unpleasant to read, and impossible to understand" to describe academic writing. In an email, Pinker told me that the reaction to his article "has been completely positive, which is not the typical reaction to articles I write, and particularly surprising given my deliberately impolite tone." (He didn't, however, read all of the 360-plus comments, many of which were anything but warm and fuzzy.) A couple of weeks later, The Chronicle had a little fun with with a follow-up to Pinker's article, inviting researchers to tweet an explanation of their research using only emoji:

I 🔬new 🐰acting and 🐢acting 💉 for diabetes. They are tested on 🐭🐷🐶 and 👨👩 to make them 🎯 and ✅ before we ship 🌍 to help🙍be 🙆.

I used 💎ography to 🔍 at the molecular 🔪🔫💣 of a 🌱 pathogen, which destroys 💷💵💶 of 🍟 and 🍅 around the 🌍.

In 2006, Daniel Oppenheimer, then a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University, published research arguing that the use of clear, simple words over needlessly complex ones can actually make authors appear more intelligent. The research garnered him the Ig Nobel Prize in literature-a parody of the Nobel Prize that, according to a Slate article by the awards' creator, Marc Abrahams, and several academics I consulted, is always given to improbable research and sometimes serves as a de facto criticism or satire in the academic world. (Oppenheimer for his part believes he got the award because of the paper's title: "Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly." The title made readers laugh, he told me-and then think.) Ultimately, Oppenheimer says the attention the Ig Nobel brought to his research means it's now being used to improve the work of students in academic writing centers around the country.

A disconnect between researchers and their audiences fuels the problem, according to Deborah S. Bosley, a clear-writing consultant and former University of North Carolina English professor. "Academics, in general, don't think about the public; they don't think about the average person, and they don't even think about their students when they write," she says. "Their intended audience is always their peers. That's who they have to impress to get tenure." But Bosley, who has a doctorate in rhetoric and writing, says that academic prose is often so riddled with professional jargon and needlessly complex syntax that even someone with a Ph.D. can't understand a fellow Ph.D.'s work unless he or she comes from the very same discipline.

A nonacademic might think the campaign against opaque writing is a no-brainer; of course, researchers should want to maximize comprehension of their work. Cynics charge, however, that academics play an elitist game with their words: They want to exclude interlopers. Others say that academics have traditionally been forced to write in an opaque style to be taken seriously by the gatekeepers-academic journal editors, for example. The main reason, though, may not be as sinister or calculated. Pinker, a cognitive scientist, says it boils down to "brain training": the years of deep study required of academics to become specialists in their chosen fields actually work against them being able to unpack their complicated ideas in a coherent, concrete manner suitable for average folks. Translation: Experts find it really hard to be simple and straightforward when writing about their expertise. He calls this the "curse of knowledge" and says academics aren't aware they're doing it or properly trained to identify their blindspots-when they know too much and struggle to ascertain what others don't know. In other words, sometimes it's simply more intellectually challenging to write clearly. "It's easy to be complex, it's harder to be simple," Bosley said. "It would make academics better researchers and better writers, though, if they had to translate their thinking into plain language." It would probably also mean more people, including colleagues, would read their work.

Some research funders, such as National Institutes of Health and The Wellcome Trust, have mandated in recent years that studies they finance be published in open-access journals, but they've given little attention to ensuring those studies include accessible writing. "NIH has no policies for grantees that dictate the style of writing they use in their research publications," a spokesperson told me in an emailed statement. "We do advise applicants about the importance of using plain language in sections of the application that, if funded, will become public on the RePORT website."

Bosley is ever so slightly optimistic for a future of clear academic writing, though. "Professors hate rules for themselves," she says. "They become academics because it's almost like being an entrepreneur. So academia isn't like government or private business where laws or mandates work. But if we get more people like Pinker taking a stand on this, the culture could change."

Indeed, there are an increasing number of academics taking it upon themselves to blog, tweet or try other means to convey their research to wider audiences. The news site TheConversation.com, for example, sources authors and stories from the academic and research communities. Academics get the byline but are edited by journalists adept at making complex research clear and writing palatable, according to the outlet's managing editor, Maria Balinska. "We see a real interest among academics across the board in what we're doing," Balinska says. "Our editing process is rigorous, but they still want to learn how to communicate their research and reach more people." She says The Conversation, which is being piloted in the U.S. and currently features articles by 1,500 academics from 300 institutions, is already getting hundreds of thousands of unique visitors each month mostly through word of mouth and social media.

Will this kind of interest in communicating about research by some academics help change status-quo academic writing? "Believe it or not," when compared to their peers in other parts of the world, "U.S. academics are probably the most open to the idea of accessible language," says Bosley. "I gave a presentation in France and academics there flat out told me that academics shouldn't write to express, they should write to impress." Bosley says bucking tradition and championing the clear-writing cause would be to an academic's advantage, to a university's advantage, and certainly to the public's advantage. "Here in the U.S. at least we're seeing some academics acknowledge this reality."

But don't look for the clear-writing pitbull Cheek to solve this problem. She's working on one more bil l that calls for government regulations-not just info put out by agencies-to be written in clear language. Another try at getting that legislation passed and she's truly retiring."I think the government is easier to change than academics," says Cheek. "I'm not going to get into a battle with academia."

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Why Is Academic Writing So Needlessly Complex?

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"Persistence is one of the great characteristics of a pitbull, and I guess owners take after their dogs," says Annetta Cheek, the co-founder of the D.C.-based nonprofit Center for Plain Language. Cheek, an anthropologist by training who left academia in the early 1980s to work for the Federal Aviation Commission, is responsible for something few people realize exists: the 2010 Plain Writing Act.

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A POLICE CHIEF CALLS FOR HELP

It is a frigid Wednesday night in January and Thunder Bay's city council has gathered for what promises to be a marathon session that will include debate, negotiation and an ardent appeal.

As the temperature outside dips to minus 30, the 13 councillors inside will have to decide how they are going to divvy up the city's annual budget of $360-million.

But before they can turn to approving or rejecting such prosaic expenses as pool maintenance and sidewalk construction, there is a "deferred item" of business that demands to be faced. Police Chief Sylvie Hauth has returned to council chambers, for the second time this month, to repeat her request for an additional $1.1-million in funding for her force of about 220 sworn officers.

In some ways, hers is the kind of overture made to countless councils across the country every year: A police chief arrives on bended knee, asking for dispensation, and a skeptical council and mayor ask tough questions in return.

But in this sprawling frontier community perched at the northernmost tip of Lake Superior, the plea for additional cash has both an unusual provenance and a purpose that, in some quarters here, is not an easy sell.

Chief Hauth has found herself before council in the wake of a series of external investigations, including a 2015 Ontario coroner's inquest into the deaths of seven young First Nations people in the city; an Ontario independent police review, released last December, which found the Thunder Bay police force to be racist at an "institutional level"; and a report, released two days after that, by Senator Murray Sinclair, in which he pilloried the city's police board for failing Indigenous people who are the targets of hate crime.

Tonight, in this chamber on whose walls hang Indigenous art and a portrait of the Queen, Mayor Bill Mauro appears unmoved by Ms. Hauth's request. Just two weeks earlier, in this same setting, he had told her that he was not inclined to throw his weight behind green-lighting the additional money, and he asked her to scour her existing budget for the cash. Perhaps, he offered, she could pare back the ranks of her civilian staff.

Mayor Mauro opens the debate over Chief Hauth's renewed appeal by telling her that he had been "very surprised" when, only a day after her previous entreaty to council, she had written to say she would be budging not a single penny from her original request.

Ms. Hauth, a 25-year member of the Thunder Bay Police Service, is prepared for the volley. Any possible cuts, she says calmly, were made months ago; any efficiencies have been found. She needs money to put cameras on officers and their vehicles, in order to provide video records of interactions with the public. She needs to put name tags on officers so they can be identified by citizens. She needs to create a peer-review process to ensure that cases are investigated properly. And she desperately needs to add five officers to her criminal-investigations branch, which is understaffed and undertrained.

It is not only external investigations that have laid bare the challenges she faces. So have the numbers.

For two years running, Thunder Bay has had the highest murder rate in the country, far outpacing major centres such as Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. In 2017, seven people were murdered in this city of more than 100,000; six of the victims were Indigenous. In 2018, the number of homicides climbed to eight, their races not yet revealed by Statistics Canada.

Almost three of every 10 hate crimes committed against Indigenous people in Canada happen here in Thunder Bay, where Indigenous people account for 13 per cent of the population.

But this city is not the only place in Canada where Indigenous people are at risk of violence. Across the country, to take the most extreme example of violent crime, about a quarter of all homicide victims are Indigenous, even though less than 5 per cent are First Nations, Inuit or Métis.

There is, in these council chambers, a particular urgency to the conversation about systemic racism against Indigenous people in Canada - the extent to which it exists and how it can best be faced and surmounted. What happens at city hall tonight, and in the months to come, has implications not only for Thunder Bay but also for the country. How the city's leaders and its residents respond could help shape the future of reconciliation in Canada.

BROKEN TRUST, SHATTERED LIVES

Thunder Bay City Hall, a concrete-block structure with a gleaming glass façade, looks out onto a carved-stone war memorial on which stands a statue of a mournful soldier looking downward. It opened in 1966 to serve the city of Fort William and, when that city merged with Port Arthur four years later into what is now Thunder Bay, the building became the headquarters for the amalgamated municipality.

Today it sits at the very heart of Thunder Bay's South Core neighbourhood, one of the most downtrodden parts of the city. Not a block away, the windows of a tall white apartment tower are mostly covered in makeshift cuttings of cardboard or tin foil; in the next building several windows are shattered.

Although officially united, the former cities of Fort William and Port Arthur remain divided by the Neebing-McIntyre Floodway - and, just as palpably, by a wide socioeconomic expanse.

Port Arthur boasts Lakehead University, with its striking modern campus and faculties of education, medicine and law. Its downtown is home to restored heritage buildings, running and cycling trails, live theatre and hopping bars that serve local craft beer. Port Arthur's shoreline affords a sweeping view of the Sleeping Giant, a mass of ancient rock that stretches into Lake Superior and that the Ojibwa call Nanabijou, the Spirit of the Deep Sea Water.

Fort William, although not without handsome older residential districts and streets of tidy wartime homes, is a tougher, poorer place to live. In the roughest section, it is not uncommon to catch sight of people huddled in the boarded-up doorways of long-vacant stores, holding liquor bottles in paper bags.

On one long Fort William street of shops and garages sits the workaday Salsbury Grill. Known colloquially as the Sal, it is crowded and noisy with the clatter of plates, boisterous conversation and music blaring from a speaker on the wall.

As she sits talking with a reporter, no one in the Sal turns to notice when the tears begin to well in Joyce Hunter's eyes. Ms. Hunter, who is Omushkego (Cree), is recounting the story of the final night in the life of her late cousin, 25-year-old Marlan Chookomolin. She is remembering what it was like to watch the carotid artery in his neck, still beating, strong and stubborn, when she first arrived at the hospital where he had been taken.

Marlan had been found unconscious on a walkway behind a local hotel shortly after midnight on June 25, 2017 - close to the place where a woman was found dead earlier this week. Doctors kept him breathing long enough for his mother and a group of other family members to arrive from the fly-in community of Peawanuck, so they could be with him as he died.

Ms. Hunter remembers the nurses coming into the hospital room to remove the equipment that was keeping him alive. She remembers watching Marlan's pulse grow weaker, and then watching it finally disappear.

Today, his mother is still so shaken that she must take medication to calm her nerves just to set foot in Thunder Bay, Ms. Hunter says. "For her, this city represents fear and pain and everything that is wrong and evil."

She thinks her cousin may have been killed during a tragic escalation of a simple bike theft; Marlan's bicycle was missing from the scene and he had no other possessions worth taking.

But as deep as her grief is over his death, her frustration at the police department's failure to resolve the case is also profound. "His killers are still here walking around," she says through her tears, "and nobody knows who they are." There was little indication over the past two years, Ms. Hunter says, that the police followed up on tips offered by his mother. But, just recently, she says a detective contacted her at the request of Chief Hauth after Ms. Hunter bumped into Celina Reitberger, the new head of the police board. She'd told Ms. Reitberger that leads in Marlan's case had been ignored.

The death of Marlan Chookomolin, a young man who had come to Thunder Bay from Peawanuck with ambitions of going to film school, and the mystery that surrounds its investigation, is far from an outlier.

A full two years before Marlan's death, Dr. David Eden, a regional supervising coroner, began an inquest into the deaths of seven young people who had left their homes on First Nation reserves. Five of the seven, who ranged in age from 15 to 18, were found in the McIntyre or the Kaministiquia waterways. Most of them had been living with host families billeting them in this city far from their own communities, which had no high schools of their own.

The inquest's jurors heard about the isolation the students felt. They heard tales of the drug and alcohol abuse that dogged some of them as they sought to cope with the loneliness and dislocation. After eight months and 146 witnesses, the inquest deemed three of the deaths accidental; the cause of the remaining four were ruled "undetermined." Parents whose teens fell into the second category were left with little more understanding than they'd had before the inquiry began.

Shortly after Dr. Eden's inquest closed, another investigation was launched - this one aimed squarely at the city's police force, and conducted by Gerry McNeilly, the Independent Police Review Director for the Province of Ontario, whose office goes by the acronym OIPRD.

In his final report, Mr. McNeilly described the backdrop to that investigation, begun in November, 2015, in stark terms. Indigenous leaders and community members, he said, had told him that the Thunder Bay Police Service's "investigations of Indigenous deaths and other interactions with police devalued Indigenous lives, reflected differential treatment, and were based on racist attitudes and stereotypical preconceptions about Indigenous people."

Along with the seven student deaths reviewed by Dr. Eden's inquest, Mr. McNeilly and his office examined 37 police investigations of sudden deaths in the city going back to 2009, conducting interviews with current and former officers and holding more than 80 meetings with Indigenous leaders.

His report, released this past December, was scathing. Its title alone spoke volumes: Broken Trust - Indigenous People and the Thunder Bay Police Service.

It determined, among other things, that officers had repeatedly relied on generalized notions about how Indigenous people likely came to their deaths, and that they then acted, or refrained from acting, based on those biases. Repeatedly, it found, officers failed to learn the results of autopsies that might have provided crucial clues to identifying perpetrators, and they failed to share what might have been vital information with other forces.

The "failure to conduct adequate investigations and the premature conclusions drawn in these cases is, at least in part, attributable to racist attitudes and racial stereotyping ..." Mr. McNeilly concluded in his report, before adding an even starker coda: "Overall, I find systemic racism exists in [the Thunder Bay Police Service] at an institutional level."

In the end, Mr. McNeilly said that nine of the 37 Thunder Bay police investigations he examined were so flawed that they should be reopened. They included four of the high-school students whose deaths had been examined by Dr. Eden during the coroner's inquest:

Jethro Anderson, 15, from Kasabonika Lake First Nation, and who had spoken only Oji-Cree until Grade 7, disappeared on Oct. 28, 2000. Although there was bruising on his body and reports that he had been beaten, the police quickly issued a statement saying no foul play was suspected. The coroner found his cause of death to be undetermined.

Curran Strang, 18, from Pikangikum First Nation, was reported missing on Sept. 22, 2005. When his body was found four days later, face down in the McIntyre River, he had no shirt or socks on, and, although his pants were up, they were undone. An autopsy revealed a high blood-alcohol level and red marks on his shins. After a limited investigation, the police declared there to have been no foul play. His death was ruled an accident by the coroner's jury.

Kyle Morrisseau, 17, from Keewaywin First Nation, and a grandson of Ojibwa painter Norval Morrisseau, was last seen alive on Oct. 31, 2009. There were suggestions he had been killed over a drug debt. When his body was pulled from the McIntyre Floodway on Nov. 10 of the same year, there was an abrasion on the left side of his nose, and his face appeared swollen. In his report, Mr. McNeilly found that the police had ignored many of the tips they were given about his case. The coroner ruled his death to be an accident.

Jordan Wabasse, 15, from Webequie First Nation, and a star hockey player, was reported missing on Feb. 8, 2011. His body was not found until the following May 10. There were multiple witnesses who said he had been the victim of mistaken identity on the part of those who killed him, and that he had been thrown off a bridge by members of the Native Syndicate street gang, who wanted another man for drug debts. The police did suspect foul play at the time, but leads were not checked, the OIPRD found. The coroner ruled the cause of death as undetermined.

The very week that Mr. McNeilly delivered his findings, yet another report was released, this one by Senator Murray Sinclair, the respected First Nations jurist who had presided over the Truth and Reconciliation Commission into the legacy of Canada's system of state- and church-run Indian residential schools.

Chief among his conclusions: The Indigenous people of Thunder Bay had lost confidence in the ability of the city's police; and, in the face of "unmistakable racism," there had been an absence of leadership from the Thunder Bay Police Service Board.

Mr. Sinclair recommended that the police board be disbanded and put under the control of an outside administrator on an emergency basis; this was, in fact, done on the day his report was released.

As sobering as are the findings of each of those inquests and investigations, it is the stories of the victims and their families that resonate most deeply.

One of the 37 cases investigated by Mr. McNeilly was that of Christine Gliddy, a 28-year-old mother from Wunnumin Lake First Nation, an Oji-Cree community 360 kilometres northeast of Sioux Lookout. Ms. Gliddy was found unconscious and near death in March, 2016, in the gravel and snow at the south end of a railroad bridge that crossed the McIntyre River. She was wearing a T-shirt and socks, but her pajama pants had been pulled partway down her legs, and her boots and other belongings were scattered nearby. She died a short time later. Her autopsy report listed many injuries.

Despite the condition of her body, Mr. McNeilly says the police did not treat Ms. Gliddy's death as suspicious and they conducted no meaningful investigation; hers is one of the nine cases the OIPRD wants reopened.

Ms. Gliddy's sister, Daliliah Ostamus, recalls the shock she felt when she learned that Mr. McNeilly recommended that Christine's death get a second look - she had always questioned how Christine could have died "accidentally."

Some people have suggested that reopening the nine cases could cause further emotional trauma for the victims' families. But Ms. Ostamus says she welcomes a reinvestigation. Christine's mother, Victoria Gliddy, has not been doing well since the death, she says. And, with or without the investigation, "we have to continue on our healing journey."

But although the various investigations and reports have put a fire under local law enforcement, Indigenous people say they have learned not to expect much of the police. "The mandate is to serve and protect," says Sandi Boucher, an Ojibwa woman who is an Indigenous advocate and inspirational speaker. "The problem is, with Thunder Bay's police service, they believe 'to serve and protect' is to protect people from the Indigenous people."

Ms. Boucher says there are good cops out there. "On the other hand," she notes, "even Senator Sinclair said it is way more than a couple bad apples. It's a culture."

Ms. Hunter, the cousin of Marlan Chookomolin, says the acknowledgment by Mr. McNeilly and Mr. Sinclair of the racism in Thunder Bay will not, by itself, bring about reconciliation - there must also be a shift in power to level the playing field between Indigenous people and the rest of the city.

It's like a marriage, says Ms. Hunter, in which "one partner held more power than the other, and there was lots of abuse - sexual, physical and all this stuff." Now, she says, the abuse has been acknowledged, "and right now the abusive husband is saying, 'I will do things differently, but I will still hold all the power and I will still call all the shots.'

"What I am proposing is that you have to go outside this structure and find a new way to restore balance to the relationship."

THE PEOPLE IN CHARGE

On the night of the late-January council meeting, neither the police chief nor the mayor had officially held their jobs for more than a few months. Each arrived at this juncture with a long history in this city.

Now 63, Mr. Mauro grew up in Thunder Bay, studied education at Lakehead and worked at both blue-collar jobs and as a teacher before joining city council in 1997. Six years after that, he was elected to sit as a Liberal MPP and held cabinet posts including that of minister of municipal affairs and housing. Four months after losing his seat in last June's election, he was elected mayor of Thunder Bay.

He arrived at city hall at a tumultuous time. "We have really taken a hit in the last number of years," Mr. Mauro said in an interview in his office last month.

Former mayor Keith Hobbs - who is also a 34-year veteran of the Thunder Bay police force - did not run for re-election after being charged, in 2017, with extortion. Mr. Hobbs's wife, Marisa, and a woman named Mary Voss have also been charged. The three are accused of threatening a former Thunder Bay attorney in an effort to force him to purchase a house for Ms. Voss. Their trial is scheduled for November.

Chief Hauth's office has also seen its share of controversy: She landed in her position after her predecessor, J.P. Levesque, was charged and then found not guilty of obstruction and breach of trust. He had been accused of inappropriately tipping off Mr. Hobbs in December, 2016, that he was being investigated for extortion. Chief Hauth, 52, who assumed her current job in November after serving two stints as acting chief, was born and raised in Iroquois Falls, Ont. Although she once planned to become a lawyer, she could not "make the square peg fit in the round hole." And so she got a master's degree in criminology, and then took a job in the provincial correctional facility in Thunder Bay. After being hired as a cadet on the city police force in 1993, she worked her way up, through the ranks of detective and inspector, to become the city's first female police chief.

Although there was some criticism of the police board's decision to hire internally despite all the controversy swirling around the force, board chair Jackie Dojak said at the time that Ms. Hauth had promised to work with city partners to resolve the "complicated" issues. "We know that the police alone cannot solve these issues. We know that we need partnerships," said Ms. Dojack, whose term was not renewed - she was succeeded by Ms. Reitberger, a First Nations lawyer who was sworn in just before the release of the McNeilly and Sinclair reports.

It is to the idea of partnerships that Chief Hauth points when describing to a Globe reporter how she views the role of a police officer. "We deal with people when they are in their crisis, you see people at their worst," she says. "You can be there to make a difference and say, 'Let's take a pause and get through this together.' "

At the council meeting, all the councillors who speak appear to favour giving Chief Hauth the money she has requested - though one openly worries about costs. So does Mayor Mauro.

In an interview in the mayor's office two weeks later, Mr. Mauro says that his reluctance to give the police an extra $1.1-million, in addition to the $41-million police budget, should not be construed as opposition to the OIPRD recommendations. He maintains his frustration is directed at "the ability of the agencies of the Crown" to pass judgment on the city without providing funding to fix the problems.

"I realize that there are some municipalities, maybe Toronto, for whom $1.1-million is tip money. But for us, it is a relatively big component," he says.

Though, for all that, the sum is not nearly enough to follow through on Mr. McNeilly's full list of recommendations. The most expensive item on that list - the call for all officers and employees to be trained in Indigenous culture - has been put on hold. Chief Hauth says she is unable to put a price tag on the training, but she told city councillors that she has written to the province and the federal government asking for help to pay for it.

She explains in her interview with The Globe that she has not decided which type of training will work best for her department. There is a range of options, she says, and she does not want to pick one just to say the box has been ticked.

As for the rest of Mr. McNeilly's OIPRD list - beefing up the number of officers who have the professional competence to investigate serious crimes - Chief Hauth notes that her force has long been asked to do too much with too little. She says the size of her criminal-investigations branch is small compared, for example, with Sudbury or Barrie, Ontario cities that have far fewer murders and attempted murders than Thunder Bay.

So far this year, three murders have occurred in Thunder Bay, two of them this week alone. A woman was found dead Tuesday morning on a local bike path; the next day, a man was beaten to death with a bat. Police have made arrests in these two cases.

To many observers, though, that focus on numbers is a distraction. Thunder Bay, they point out, has the fourth-highest per-capita rate of police officers of any city in the country. There may not be many detectives here, but there are plenty of police on the streets.

For her part, Chief Hauth says that she has the number of officers that she "contractually" needs on the streets; and she points, as well, to the city's high rate of violent crime. She also mentions the large number of transient people in Thunder Bay who are not counted when determining the ratio of officers to residents.

But Indigenous people say the police are simultaneously overpolicing and underserving them.

Kathleen Sawdo, an Indigenous human-resources expert, was born and raised in Thunder Bay. She learned from childhood onward, she says, that it is unsafe for First Nations kids to walk the city's streets alone, so hostile is their treatment at the hands of some of their fellow citizens. Even now, at the age of 45, says Ms. Sawdo, who is Ojibwa, "I don't go out after dark, there's no way."

And when she is in a situation where non-Indigenous people are in the majority, she adds, "you know you don't cause a problem. If they ask you to leave, you just leave, because, when it comes down to it - the cops get called or whatever - you are the one that gets arrested. Not the other person."

'I DIDN'T WANT TO RUN AWAY'

Every day at Thunder Bay International Airport, 20 or so Fairchild Metroliners, Cessnas, Beeches and Dash 8s drop hundreds of passengers from such far-flung First Nation communities as Marten Falls, Fort Hope, and Webequie, and such regional hubs as Sioux Lookout and Red Lake.

Students come here to attend high school. Children and teens who have been traumatized at home, sometimes by the suicide of a loved one or through abuse by a community member, are sent here for counselling. People with cancer, heart disease and other major ailments travel for treatment.

About 121,000 people live in Thunder Bay and the surrounding region, roughly 15,000 of whom are Indigenous; about 800 people live on Fort William First Nation, which abuts the city at its southern end.

Thunder Bay's Italian population is about the same size as the Indigenous population. The Finns came here to log in the 1870s. Thunder Bay is home to the biggest Finnish community outside of Finland.

The region's roots, of course, run much deeper. Thunder Bay began as a fur-trading outpost on Ojibwa territory in the 17th century. Over centuries, Indigenous people and settlers came to inhabit the same land, the Ojibwa eventually relegated to reserves, where many remain to this day.

In a letter to councillors written two weeks before the council meeting, Chief Hauth made her case for more money in part by pointing out that population data on Thunder Bay do not include the "large number of visitors who come to the city for our services."

Hers is a common observation here - although it is often made with a darker spin. Alongside the costs that taxpayers themselves incur, say some citizens, they are being asked to pay for the policing of people who don't share the economic burden of providing those services. Although there is some perfunctory griping that such outsiders include Lakehead University's 7,800 students, the resentment is overwhelmingly directed at people visiting from First Nation communities.

In even murkier corners of the population, there is also outright skepticism that Indigenous victims found dead in local waterways have, in fact, been the victims of crime. Some non-Indigenous people have told The Globe that First Nations kids simply get drunk and then roll into the water.

Echoing the sentiments of Ms. Sawdo, some Indigenous people say there are two cities here. And they say that city hall - despite its Aboriginal-liaison unit, established to create relationships with Indigenous residents; and its public-relations campaigns aimed at educating non-First Nations people about the Indigenous reality - is part of white Thunder Bay.

The other Thunder Bay, they say, is out there on the streets and in the malls, at the hospital and in the high schools. It is where drugstores reward employees for following Indigenous customers until they have paid for their purchases, and where security guards slam Indigenous youth to the floor when they resist arrest for suspicious activity.

It is where unidentified commenters told Mr. McNeilly that calls to 9-1-1 are often answered with a version of the question: "Is it a Native or a Caucasian?" And a follow-up question, too: "Are they intoxicated?"

"If you are a non-Indigenous person in Thunder Bay, you love cross-country skiing and you love the Sleeping Giant and it's absolutely beautiful," says Ms. Boucher, a First Nations advocate and inspirational speaker. "And if you're an Indigenous person in Thunder Bay, you worry about your kids surviving high school and not ending up in the river, and you deal with eye rolls from store clerks because we use our status cards, and just these constant stereotypes. Racial slurs and jokes are still considered funny in Thunder Bay."

It is in that Thunder Bay that Barbara Kentner, an Ojibwa woman out walking with her sister in January, 2017, was hit with a trailer hitch thrown from a passing car as someone in the vehicle yelled, "Yeah, I got one of them." Ms. Kentner died six months later, and her alleged killer has been ordered to stand trial.

Sharon Johnson's little sister, Sandra, was 18 when she left Ms. Johnson's apartment for a late-night walk in February, 1992, to see a cousin on the other side of town. Her naked body was found the next day on the frozen surface of the Neebing-McIntyre Floodway.

"She was vulnerable, she was young," recalls Ms. Johnson, a soft-spoken and reflective woman.

It took Ms. Johnson more than a decade to join a group of activists who had been complaining for years about unsolved crimes. These days, she organizes walks to bring comfort to the families of the victims - to let them know they are not alone.

"I remember a friend of mine telling me one time, after he started to read about the memorial walks in the paper or on the news, 'I don't know how you can live in Thunder Bay after what happened to your sister,' " says Ms. Johnson, who is Ojibwa. "And, when I thought about, it I told him, 'I chose to stay here because I didn't want to run away from that. I wanted to speak out about it. I wanted to speak out about what happened to her.' "

'WE'RE DEALING WITH A GENERATIONAL SITUATION'

When the time comes for the vote in the chambers at city hall that late-January night, the city politicians take a stand of their own: When the vote is called, all 12 regular councillors agree to give Ms. Hauth the money she has requested. It is a near-unanimous decision of city council - but for a single holdout.

Amid their talk of the need to reduce crime and to improve their city's reputation, Mayor Mauro quietly leaves his seat and disappears from the room. He does not return for the vote.

During the interview in his office two weeks later, he frames his reluctance to give the police the additional $1.1-million as being rooted in his dismay that outside forces are effectively dictating how his city's municipal budget must be spent.

"When you have a reputation, when you are trying to build a community, when you are trying to attract professionals to your city, when you are trying to attract doctors and engineers," he adds, negative talk, "doesn't make that job any easier."

Yes, he concedes, there are legitimate First Nations issues highlighted by the recent investigations into his city and its police force. But work on addressing those issues began long before those reports were released, he says, and those problems left Thunder Bay "probably far ahead of where a number of other communities were right across the country."

It is "nonsense," he adds, to suggest he does not see the racism in his city. But he is quick to note that he does not see the problem as one that is exceptional to Thunder Bay, nor as one that can be solved overnight. "We're dealing with a generational situation. The country is dealing with it," he says. "Through the [Truth and Reconciliation Commission] and other processes, we have pulled back the curtain on a major stain on the history of the country."

And although the city must begin scrubbing one corner of that stain, Mayor Mauro clearly feels the effort to effect change in the relationship with Indigenous people is not one of his priorities at city hall.

"I only had two heroes in my life and one of them was Martin Luther King Jr.," he says, "And, if he couldn't fix it, I hope you're not expecting me to."

In her interview with The Globe, Chief Hauth twice dodges questions about how she feels about the mayor's decision to leave the room when her request was being put to a vote. Finally, she says, "You would have to ask him why."

She is moving ahead with the OIPRD recommendations, and she says that her force has been making changes - including increasing the size of her investigations branch by three officers - ever since Mr. McNeilly announced that he was conducting a review.

Since city hall approved the increase to her budget, she adds, she has arranged for additional spaces at the provincial police college, which will ultimately give her the room to move five more people from front-line positions and into her investigations branch.

The process for purchasing cameras is also under way, and there is a conversation taking place about how to better share information with other forces. The police clothing committee, meanwhile, is pricing name tags.

Finally, she adds, the city's police, the coroners and pathologists have been meeting to determine which investigations will be reopened.

'Indigenous people in this city are finding their voice'

If there is going to be a change in Thunder Bay, if the elusive concept of reconciliation between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations is going to take place, it will start with the persistent actions of a few common people doing uncommon things.

At an earlier city-council meeting this year, on another cold January night, councillors were greeted by a rally of about 100 people who had arrived at City Hall to express support for the Indigenous community.

The gathering was organized by Scott Hobbs, who is the estranged son of the former mayor. Several years ago, Mr. Hobbs posted an entry on his blog titled, "I used to be a racist."

When a Globe reporter met Mr. Hobbs in a Port Arthur coffee shop that was once a Baptist church, he says of the rally: "Even though racism is such an ugly, negative thing, there was such a feeling of positivity."

His understanding of the Indigenous experience did not come overnight, he says; it arrived slowly, over time. He remembers, for instance, walking home one night as a young man after having too much to drink.

"This police officer pulled over next to me and asked how I was doing. And I said, 'I am pretty loaded right now.' And his demeanour was pretty much, 'Are you okay? Are you going to be able to get home all right? Do you need a lift?' And I said, 'No, it's okay, I am eight blocks from home. I will be good.' And so he was like, 'Okay, good, see you later.' "

When Mr. Hobbs subsequently recounted the story to an Indigenous friend, he says, "He was like, 'Yeah, I would be in jail.' And I thought about it, and I thought, 'Oh my God, yeah, it's probably true.' "

Thunder Bay, Mr. Hobbs says, must come to terms with the fact that it has been a racist city "for a long, long time."

Alvin Fiddler, the Grand Chief of Nishnawbe Aski Nation, a political organization representing 49 First Nation communities in Northern Ontario, is happy that the racism he and others have been calling out for decades has been publicly and officially exposed in the clear language of multiple reports.

"Based on what's happened here over the last 15 or 20 years, there's obviously a lot of work that needs to be done to rebuild that trust, and that's going to take a lot of effort on everyone's part, and hopefully we've started that process," Mr. Fiddler says. "I am hopeful that we will begin to rebuild that relationship."

Ms. Sawdo, the human-resources expert born and raised in Thunder Bay, was one of three Indigenous people on an eight-person committee struck last April to help the police address the issues that would later be spelled out in the report of the Office of the Independent Police Review Director. Five of the committee members worked for the police force.

"They had this idea that they had to accommodate the Indigenous people, but they didn't really understand why," recalls Ms. Sawdo. "So there was a little bit of anger, a lack of understanding."

The committee met for months without bridging the divisions between members.

Then, in August, as she was preparing to walk away from the whole thing, Ms. Sawdo says she stood up and told her fellow committee members that, even if it was sometimes difficult being a police officer in Thunder Bay, they got to go home and take off their uniforms at the end of the day. "We don't ever get to turn off the Indian. We are always Indians in this city."

Things started to sink in.

The committee members also watched a video of an Australian Aboriginal woman talking about racism in her society and who said that Indigenous people have, for too long, stood on the sidelines as non-Indigenous legislators made decisions about their lives.

"The woman on the video said, 'You need to shut up and let us speak on our own behalf,' " Ms. Sawdo recalls.

Then the committee took part in a sweat lodge, the ceremonial safe place of prayer in which fire, water, medicines and other elements are used for healing.

Slowly, Ms. Sawdo says, attitudes began to change.

Several members of the committee acknowledged to her that, despite their good intentions, they had not realized they had been controlling the conversation rather than allowing Indigenous people the space to decide how things should move forward.

If members of that committee can be made to understand the issues, Ms. Sawdo says, so can the people of Thunder Bay.

"We are on a steep learning curve," she says. "People talk about reconciliation. This is what it is. Indigenous people in this city are finding their voice. And that's never happened before. No one's ever listened to us."

Editor's note: March 27, 2019: An earlier version of this article incorrectly suggested Kathleen Wynne was Premier when Bill Mauro was elected Liberal MPP. This version has been corrected.

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Hate and hope in Thunder Bay: A city grapples with racism against Indigenous people

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It is a frigid Wednesday night in January and Thunder Bay's city council has gathered for what promises to be a marathon session that will include debate, negotiation and an ardent appeal. As the temperature outside dips to minus 30, the 13 councillors inside will have to decide how they are going to divvy up the city's annual budget of $360-million.

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Did you live near a residential school? Explore our interactive map to find out.

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The residential school system separated 150,000 Indigenous children from their families - and the last one closed in 1996.

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Brandi Morin
APTN National News
The Grand Chief of Treaty 8 in Alberta says he was "horrified" to find out Alberta has a policy allowing for the harvesting of organs from children who die in the care of the province.

Treaty 8 Grand Chief Steve Courtoreille said he is upset that First Nations were not made aware of the practice until now.

"Having just learned of this policy, I am horrified, appalled and, quite frankly, mad as hell that this is happening and that it has been working quietly in the background for so long," said Courtoreille in a statement.

With an already high number of Aboriginal children in care, a 2013 investigation conducted by the Edmonton Journal and Calgary Herald revealed a startling trend in the deaths of children in care in Alberta. The investigation uncovered that while only nine per cent of Alberta children are Indigenous they accounted for 78 per cent of children who have died in foster care since 1999.

"We have children in care that are dying, and now, we find out that they may be harvesting their organs?" said Courtorielle. "It is disgusting, they are dying under provincial care, in a provincial system. Last year, we had 20 Aboriginal children die in care, does this policy mean all these kids had their organs removed? What is going on in this province?"

Treaty 8 officials are demanding that First Nations be consulted on the organ donation policy and that it be amended.

Courtoreille said that removing dead children's organs shouldn't be a decision for the province to make. He said the practice needs to stop immediately.

"Part of our culture is that a body must be whole when it goes back to the Creator, not dissected as the government sees fit," said Courtoreille. "The problem is that we are not a part of these conversations, instead, the Province just did it. In the 8 years this policy has been in place how many of our children have been sent back missing parts? Honestly, if people aren't shocked by this, then they just aren't listening."

Courtoreille said he is also concerned First Nations organizations don't have access to records to find out information about the Aboriginal children who have died in care and if their organs were removed.

Treaty 8 is aware of at least one past instance of the province harvesting a dead child's organs without consent from the family.

In an email to APTN, the Ministry of Health said they are more than willing to sit down and discuss concerns about the policy with First Nation representatives. They also said it is extremely rare for medical authorities to ask for organ and tissue donations.

"Among the general population, only 1 to 2 per cent of people are considered suitable for donation when they die," said Mike Berezowsky, assistant director, communications, Alberta Human Services.

"In fact, there have only been two occurrences involving children in care in recent years. One involved a child who was not Aboriginal, and in that matter the father - when located - was supportive of the decision. In the other, consent was provided based on the direction and wishes from the youth, who was Aboriginal. The family supported the decision."

He went on to reference the cultural sensitivity's surrounding the policy,

"When making a decision about organ and tissue donations for children in care, cultural and religious beliefs and practices are essential considerations, as well as the preferences of the child (where appropriate) and the child's family."

The organ donation policy was first created in 2006, and applied to children in care under the status of a Permanent Guardianship Order (PGO).

At the time, the ministry met with 18 First Nation agencies and 12 CEO's of Child and Family agencies to announce the policy and its implementation. Then, in 2014, the policy expanded to include children in care under a Temporary Guardianship Order (TGO).
Here's a link to the policy itself.
bmorin@aptn.ca

@Songstress28

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Grand Chief 'horrified' Alberta quietly allows organ harvesting from children who die in provincial care - APTN News

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Brandi Morin APTN National News The Grand Chief of Treaty 8 in Alberta says he was "horrified" to find out Alberta has a policy allowing for the harvesting of organs from children who die in the care of the province.

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An application for a judicial review of the sale of Mill River Resort by the Mi'kmaq Confederacy of P.E.I. has been dismissed in court.

The province announced the transfer of the Mill River resort, golf course, fun park and campground to businessman Don McDougall in January 2017.

The properties were sold in an attempt to rejuvenate tourism to Western P.E.I.

However, Lennox Island and Abegweit First Nations soon began a legal battle seeking a judicial review of the land transfer, claiming they weren't properly consulted on the disposal of the Crown land as required under constitutional rights.

[Government] met, and exceeded, their duty to engage in meaningful consultations and to act in good faith. - Judge Gordon Campbell

On Monday, P.E.I. Supreme Court Judge Gordon Campbell dismissed the Mi'kmaq Confederacy application.

'Reasonable efforts to inform'

In his ruling, Campbell detailed correspondence between the province and the Mi'kmaq chiefs over the properties, going back to July 2012.

While "the consultations were not perfect," he said, they were hampered by the chiefs' "misapprehension that, in effect, they had a veto" over any sale.

Campbell said that belief was based on the Mi'kmaq's asserted claim to the lands in question.

However, he said for government to require consent from the Mi'kmaq to dispose of the land that title claim would have to have been proven - and the onus was on the Mi'kmaq to do that.

"I am satisfied that [government] met, and exceeded, their duty to engage in meaningful consultations and to act in good faith toward the Aboriginal people and interests which might be impacted by their contemplated land transfer," Campbell wrote in his decision.

"The government made reasonable efforts to inform and consult."

'Lengthy' legal process may lie ahead

The Mi'kmaq Confederacy said in a news release it is "obviously disappointed with the result," and will review all elements of the decision before deciding what it will do next.

"We need time to digest the decision and to meet with our legal counsel but we are aware that this may very well be the first step in a lengthy legal process," Chief Brian Francis of the Abegweit First Nation said in the release.

The Government of P.E.I. also issued a news release, saying it welcomed the Supreme Court's decision.

"The province will continue to work together in a spirit of partnership and reconciliation with the Mi'kmaq people and leadership of Prince Edward Island," said Premier Wade MacLauchlan in the release.

Could have made a 'respectful gesture'

Campbell said the two sides were not required to reach agreement over the sale of the land. However he also said government could have made a "respectful gesture" and proceeded in a way "less offensive to the Mi'kmaq leadership" had cabinet informed Mi'kmaq leaders of the impending sale at a meeting between the two sides on Jan. 10, 2017.

That was the day cabinet authorized the sale of the land. Cabinet also met with the two band councils that day, but made no mention of the sale, a move the chiefs described as a "betrayal" in a letter to the premier.

"Providing an indication during their face-to-face meeting ... would have reduced some of the negative feelings resulting from that decision," Campbell wrote.

"The reconciliation process is best served by courteous and thoughtful interactions at all times."

More P.E.I. news

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Mi'kmaq challenge of Mill River Resort sale dismissed in court | CBC News

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An application for a judicial review of the sale of Mill River Resort by the Mi'kmaq Confederacy of P.E.I. has been dismissed in court. The province announced the transfer of the Mill River resort, golf course, fun park and campground to businessman Don McDougall in January 2017.

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Improving the quality and availability of food could help reduce mental health issues among Indigenous populations in Canada, say researchers who analyzed survey responses from 14,000 Indigenous adults.

Suicide is a major cause of death among First Nations, Métis and Inuit people. Collectively, suicide rates among Indigenous peoples are two to three times higher than among non-Indigenous Canadians, according to previous responses.

Now, researchers have looked at how income-related inequalities relate to psychological distress and suicidal behaviours among Indigenous peoples living off-reserve in Canada.

The survey responses were originally filed with Statistics Canada in 2012, but the numbers had never been crunched this way until they were analyzed and published in Monday's issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

For the study, researchers looked at which financial factors affect psychological distress, suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts among Indigenous peoples living off-reserve.

Food insecurity - the uncertainty over having a regular, affordable source of nutritious food - seemed to be a major factor explaining the higher rates of mental health problems among low-income Indigenous peoples.

It's hoped the finding will help shape government policy, said Mohammad Hajizadeh, one of the authors of the study. He's with the School of Health Administration at Dalhousie University in Halifax.

"Let's say if you hypothetically cannot have a policy that affects income, but at least you have to have a policy that tries to address the food insecurity itself," Hajizadeh said.

The study's authors said a complex combination of biological, social and cultural factors contribute to mental health problems. Of these, food insecurity is considered a major contributor, with 28 per cent of off-reserve Indigenous households reporting some form of it in the 2012 Canadian Community Health Survey.

"Based on our results, addressing food insecurity among low-income Indigenous peoples living off-reserve may potentially reduce a substantial proportion of the observed income-related inequalities in mental health outcomes," the study's authors wrote.

The idea of food insecurity being linked with psychological distress and mental health conditions makes a lot of sense, said Dr. Lisa Richardson, a strategic advisor in Indigenous health in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto and an Indigenous physician.

"In this era of reconciliation, what are specific, concrete measures that one can take? This paper has given us an opportunity to do it, because we need to address food security. People need access to healthy meals," Richardson said.

The data could draw more attention to the problem of food insecurity in Indigenous communities, she said.

"What was really powerful for me was to show that specific, explicit link."

Richardson said in her work, she hears that modern scientific methodology doesn't necessarily capture the resilience and protective buffer from Indigenous culture, language and community connections. But those don't matter if someone is hungry, she added.

The survey findings represent 600,750 Indigenous adults living off-reserve in Canada, the researchers said.

One of the limitations of the research was the survey doesn't collect information from individuals living in institutions such as prisons and hospitals, shelters and groups, where a disproportionate number of Indigenous people reside, the study's authors acknowledged.

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'People need access to healthy meals:' Inequality among Indigenous peoples may explain psychological distress | CBC News

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Improving the quality and availability of food could help reduce mental health issues among Indigenous populations in Canada, say researchers who analyzed survey responses from 14,000 Indigenous adults. Suicide is a major cause of death among First Nations, Métis and Inuit people.

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@What traditional territory is your city on?

Are you on unceded xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) territory? The territory of the Huron-Wendat and Petun First Nations, the Seneca and Mississaugas of the Credit River? Or unceded Abenaki/Abénaquis, Kanien'kehá:ka, Haudenosauneega (St Lawrence Iroquois), and Huron-Wendat territory?

If you don't know, a website called Native Land can help answer the question for you.

The crowd-sourced, interactive website mapping traditional territories of Indigenous people, treaties and language has grown to become so much more, and has just become a Canadian not-for-profit.

Victor Temprano launched Native Land almost five years ago, while working on a pipeline-related website. He was researching resource development projects in British Columbia, and wanted to know which Indigenous territories these projects were taking place on.

His company, Mapster is his full-time job, and Native Land became more of a side passion project, which is one of the reasons crowdsourcing the information is so important to him.

"I can't put in the time I would if it was a full-time job," said Temperano. "Canada has so many nations, and we're expanding all over the world, that it's a lot of research to do."

Native Land's territory boundaries started with Canada, but now cover other parts of the world: Australia, New Zealand, parts of South America, Central America, the Caribbean.

"If you're not familiar with certain parts of the world, you might totally misunderstand what Indigeneity is in different parts of the world, so it's impossible to tackle this as one person," said Temperano.

Temperano is also a settler, which is why, as Native Land becomes a non-profit, it's been important for him to have the board be entirely Indigenous.
'I really believe in the tool'
"There's a lot of difficulties in putting myself as the kind of arbiter of this information and putting myself in the position of having to decide who gets to be on the map and who doesn't," he said.

And that's kind of how Leena Minifie got involved. She's Tsimshian, and noticed that the map wasn't portraying her home territory correctly on either side of the Canadian and Alaskan borders. So, she sent in an email correction. Her work with Native Land grew from there.

While working on Indian Horse's digital campaign, Minifie was part of a team that made use of Native Land's API to do the first challenge, " On Whose Land," where people's IP addresses were used to locate what traditional territory they're on. Now, she's a member of Native Land's formal all-Indigenous board.

"I really believe in the tool, and I use it when I do conferences, or when I talk to people, as a way to open people's minds about territory," Minifie said, "it helps plant a seed that there's people here before you, these are the lands that they're on, and they're still here."

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While the original intent of the site was directed towards non-Indigenous people as a tool to learn more about Indigenous people in their own country, Minifie thinks it's important for everyone.

"As a Gitxaala woman, and Tsimshian woman, I really think that it's crucial to have these tools even for us," she said. "It's also for our allies, for refugees, newcomers or immigrants, Black, Indigenous, people of colour - everyone can be involved in learning more."

Minifie has played a role in helping Native Land expand. She spearheaded an initiative to honour not only documented history, but oral history's part in reshaping boundaries on the map.

"Each of our presently listed territories need to be backed up by two sources; one of those can be an expert in the area, or like a tribal member, or Chief, as well as something written or oral history," she said. "I feel like our work is cracking open the world and saying there's a lot of Indigenous lands everywhere."

Native Land has been a really great tool because I can explain to my students about their own nation and lands, as well as other territories, it's nice to not have to ask them to imagine what the territory looks like, but to be able to show them. Kirsten Dobler

Native Land is frequently used in a classroom setting, there's even a dedicated section for teachers to make sure the map is used critically. They're also in the process of developing some lesson plans.

Kirsten Dobler, Kwakwa̱ka̱'wakw from the We Wai Kai Nation, teaches Grade 2 and 3 at Lach Klan School in the Gitxaala Nation. She uses Native Land to teach her students about Canada through social studies and language arts.

"Native Land has been a really great tool because I can explain to my students about their own nation and lands, as well as other territories," she said. "It's nice to not have to ask them to imagine what the territory looks like, but to be able to show them."

Dobler said it's very important for her students to learn that Indigenous people aren't homogeneous.

She said she's also careful and tells her students that the map isn't perfect, that it's impossible to perfectly capture the "legal boundaries" of any nation because that's not something Indigenous people traditionally acknowledged.

Hearing how Dobler uses the map is something Temprano welcomes, because he's always worried about, teachers using it in a non-critical way or as an archival resource.

Through Native Land, Temprano wants to bring people into the history on a basic level.

"It helps show people that these histories are actually all around them, they'll start to see it," he said. "And hopefully they actually start to recognize that Indigenous people still live and still have this land."
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This Map Helps You Recognize Which Indigenous Territory You Live On

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@What traditional territory is your city on? Are you on unceded xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) territory? The territory of the Huron-Wendat and Petun First Nations, the Seneca and Mississaugas of the Credit River? Or unceded Abenaki/Abénaquis, Kanien'kehá:ka, Haudenosauneega (St Lawrence Iroquois), and Huron-Wendat territory?

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The Halluci Nation Ft. Black Bear - Stadium Pow Wow (Official Video)