To Honor Canadian Natives, a Lawmaker Speaks in Mohawk – The New York Times

2017/06/05 Leave a comment

Nice:

Cultural appropriation is a touchy topic in Canada these days, with the recent controversy in Canadian media over whether it is appropriate for nonindigenous writers to take on a native voice for artistic expression. But Marc Miller, a member of Canada’s Parliament, decided he was on solid ground in giving a speech in Kanyen’kéha, the language of the Mohawks, in the House of Commons on Thursday.

“Language is one of those things that, if you apply the appropriation rule, would die faster,” Mr. Miller said in a telephone interview. He said he was inspired to learn the language because the district he represents in Quebec covers traditional Mohawk land.

“I stand here to honor the Mohawk language, and I pay my respects to their people,” Mr. Miller said in Kanyen’kéha to mark the beginning of Canada’s National Aboriginal History Month. He said in the short speech that he hoped to hear the language more often in Parliament, and that more Canadians would “be proud to use it to speak to one another.”

Marc Miller delivers a statement in Kanyen’kéha, the language of the Mohawks. Video by CBC News

Indigenous languages are dying in Canada, as they are in much of the industrialized world, largely as a consequence of past government efforts to stamp out their use and force assimilation into the larger population. In Canada, that was accomplished through residential boarding schools where indigenous students were forbidden to speak their native tongues.

The government has tried to make amends for this history in recent years, after a wrenching Truth and Reconciliation Commission laid bare the amount of abuse some 150,000 indigenous students experienced at the government-financed schools over more than a century. The former prime minister, Stephen Harper, apologized on behalf of the government. His successor, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, followed up with a vow to adopt all 94 recommendations from the commission, known in Canada as calls to action.

The government has promised to spend about $90 million Canadian (in United States currency, about $67 million) over the next three years to support indigenous languages and culture, including $69 million Canadian for such things as classes to keep alive native languages.

It has also committed to work with the indigenous population to codevelop an Indigenous Languages Act that will help ensure the preservation and revitalization of indigenous languages.

Fewer than 600 people in Canada cited Kanyen’kéha as their mother tongue in the country’s 2011 census. All but a few of the 60 indigenous languages that still exist in the country are expected to disappear within the next generation.

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Indigenous culture not protected in Canadian law, lawyers and academics say

2017/06/02 Leave a comment

Interesting article about intellectual property and indigenous culture, from both a domestic and international perspective:

“The problem is that Indigenous heritage is often seen as a public domain, free for the taking,” said George Nicholas, a professor at Simon Fraser University who led an eight-year international research project on cultural appropriation.

“That’s not the case. [For] many First Nations, many Inuit and other Indigenous peoples, their heritage is still vibrant…. When it is threatened, when it is used by others in ways that are inappropriate or unwelcome, this can cause a variety of harms, not just economic but spiritual.”

There are a host of barriers Indigenous groups face when trying to use intellectual-property laws to protect their cultural heritage.

Intellectual-property law began to take form in the 19th century in western Europe to protect individual ideas and creations, mainly for economic reasons.

“It wasn’t really designed for Indigenous innovation, which is marked by collective processes, collective custodianship and a very strong spiritual dimension,” said Wend Wendland, director of the Traditional Knowledge Division at the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva.

“Some refer to it as a square peg in a round hole.”

Ava the shaman

An illustration featured in the book Northern Voices: Inuit Writing in English depicts a traditional design similar to that used by a fashion designer in 2015. (Kieran Oudshoorn/CBC)

The main problem facing Indigenous groups looking to use intellectual-property law is that in order for something like a traditional parka design or carving style to be patented, it has to be unique or original, Wendland said.

But many Indigenous customs and designs have been passed down from generation to generation since time immemorial. They have been replicated hundreds if not thousands of times, often making them unable to be patented.

Wendland also says the current system generally requires some sort of hard copy of what the copyright or patent is supposed to protect. But many forms of Indigenous knowledge or stories are often passed down orally.

Exceptions exist, but model may be fundamentally flawed

Some Canadian Indigenous groups have had success using trademarks. The Cowichan Band Council in British Columbia registered the certification “Genuine Cowichan Approved”. It was created to help differentiate between the traditional Indigenous hand-knitted sweaters crafted by Coast Salish people and non-Indigenous designers selling counterfeits.

bc-091028-cowichan-sweater

Dianne Hinkley shows off a genuine Cowichan Tribes sweater. ((CBC))

There is work being done to help create a broader system to protect Indigenous intellectual property. One hundred and eighty-nine states have joined a special committee within the World Intellectual Property Organization. The organization is working toward an international treaty that would expand intellectual-property laws to protect Indigenous culture. It will meet in Geneva next month to continue negotiations.

Whitehorse lawyer Claire Anderson says using the Canadian legal system is counterintuitive when protecting Indigenous culture.

“If we choose that forum, essentially we would be going to the colonial forum that has taken away Indigenous rights, and we would be asking the non-Indigenous judges to make determinations about Indigenous law,” Anderson said.

Indigenous law has its own remedies

Anderson said groups should look to their own form of Indigenous law to protect their history and knowledge.

“Listening to our First Nation elders or listening to people that understand Indigenous laws and seeking redress through those Indigenous legal forums is a very good starting point because it provides legitimacy to those Indigenous legal forums.”

Anderson says that in Tlingit culture, if someone exploits someone else’s design or steals property, they must apologize in front of the community at a public forum, like a potlatch. She says some sort of compensation is given — whether it’s monetary or the gifting of a song.

Source: Indigenous culture not protected in Canadian law, lawyers and academics say – North – CBC News

 

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‘We’re asking for change’: Emerging indigenous generation flexes muscle over cultural appropriation

2017/05/29 Leave a comment

Thoughtful exploration of cultural appropriation issues with respect to Indigenous peoples.

The graphic is particularly helpful in that it provides greater clarity to what can be considered cultural appropriation and what not, particularly the left and right columns. The middle column is where much of the current debate occurs:

George Nicholas, an archeology professor at Simon Fraser University and director of the Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage research project, argues that borrowing between cultures has shaped societies around the world, and there is nothing wrong with that.

Handout

HandoutOjibwa broadcaster Jesse Wente: “We’re asking now for change, and we’re not going to stop asking.”

But just as trademarks, patents and copyrights protect intellectual property, he said, there should be protection for elements of indigenous heritage. The historical power imbalance between mainstream society and indigenous peoples has meant that little thought was given to the impact of appropriation, whether it is mass-produced gift-shop totem poles or high-end fashion copied from an Inuit parka.

“If I am taking something that is important to someone’s heritage, whether it’s a particular design or a particular set of stories or songs, my using those, my sharing those, my including those in some sort of commercial product, can result in cultural, or spiritual, or economic harm to the people whose heritage it is,” he said.

Kulchyski’s idea of “loving Indians to death” reflects the fact that often appropriation stems from good intentions. But he said it turns heritage into a commodity.

“By simply saying, ‘Oh we love your culture. We’ll have you dance during our Olympic ceremony. We’ll have you say a prayer before our meetings, but we haven’t actually substantively changed the fact that the economy is based on extraction from your lands, and we’re going to continue doing that,’ basically it becomes, at best, a hollow gesture and, at worst … your culture becomes something for sale.”

Keeshig-Tobias has watched the resurgence of the cultural appropriation debate with interest. The abuse she took for her stand in 1990 still stings.

“I was vilified, by just about everybody … big names in the Canadian writing community,” she said in an interview. “The complaint was that I was shackling the imagination.”

Her response then and today: “Your imagination comes right up to my nose, and if it goes any further, then I push back.”

She said it is discouraging to hear the “same old arguments” resurfacing but heartening to see a new generation pushing back.

“Hopefully they’ll listen now. Like I said, we’re in a new era,” she said. “So many things have happened between then and now, and there are so many more wonderfully articulate indigenous people.”

Source: ‘We’re asking for change’: Emerging indigenous generation flexes muscle over cultural appropriation | National Post

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Cultural appropriation: Why can’t we debate it? – Liz Renzetti

2017/05/13 1 Comment

I find this one of the best commentaries I have read yet on the issue of cultural appropriation and writers. Renzetti quotes extensively from the article in question, showing the depth and nuance in Hal Niedzviecki’s article.

More sophisticated than Christie Blatchford: Magazine editor the latest to be silenced for the sin of free speech but with the same underlying message: have the debate and discussion, don’t just try to shut it down and shun:

Yet the great works of literature are great leaps of imagination, sometimes so much so that they seem impossible, from a distance. When it was revealed that Mary Shelley was the author of Frankenstein, long after the novel was published, readers were aghast – how could a woman have conceived something so abominable!

That was 200 years ago. Should modern artists try to inhabit the fictional lives of people whose history and cultural experiences are completely different from their own? It’s fraught territory: Academics and writers have grappled with the concept of cultural appropriation, its proper definition, limits and boundaries, for years. It’s a subject discussed at length in books and conferences. It should at least be something we can discuss, without fear of censure.

That doesn’t seem to be the case at the moment. This week, Hal Niedzviecki, editor of Write Magazine (the publication of the Writers’ Union of Canada) resigned from his post after his short essay about Indigenous writing prompted heated criticism.

“I don’t believe in cultural appropriation,” Mr. Niedzviecki wrote. “In my opinion, anyone, anywhere, should be encouraged to imagine other peoples, other cultures, other identities. I’d go so far as to say that there should even be an award for doing so — the Appropriation Prize for best book by an author who writes about people who aren’t even remotely like her or him.”

He goes on to counter the old teaching chestnut “write what you know”: “Write what you don’t know. Get outside your own head. Relentlessly explore the lives of people who aren’t like you, who you didn’t grow up with, who don’t share your background, bank balance and expectations. Set your sights on the big goal: Win the Appropriation Prize.”

Some people found this an ill-conceived way to preface an issue dedicated to Indigenous writing, and Mr. Niedzviecki acknowledges in his subsequent apology that he wrote “glibly.” But do glibness and even insensitivity require that he lose his job? Would it not be better if he stayed at the helm of the magazine and commissioned pieces that provided robust counter-arguments?

Mr. Niedzviecki’s essay goes on to say: “Indigenous writing is the most vital and compelling force in writing and publishing in Canada today. And this is because, in large part, Indigenous writers, buffeted by history and circumstance, so often must write from what they don’t know. What at first seems like a disadvantage also pushes many Indigenous writers into the spotlight. They are on the vanguard, taking risks, bravely forging ahead into the unknown, seeking just the right formula to reclaim the other as their own.”

The entire spring issue of the magazine is worth reading for its exploration of Indigenous writing and publishing, from shaping queer narratives to questioning the limits of fictional empathy. Mr. Niedzviecki’s interview with publisher Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm of Kegedonce Press illuminates the challenges facing writers who have traditionally not been seated at the CanLit table: “We still see many beautifully written books by Indigenous writers struggling to fully achieve the sales and wide acceptance that they deserve.” Maybe this issue of Write will cause people to think about how widely they cast their nets when they choose what to read.

Instead of the focus falling on the important content of the magazine, it is now all on one essay written by Mr. Niedzviecki, who has long been a supporter of independent voices in Canadian publishing (he also runs Broken Pencil magazine.) The Writers’ Union of Canada, which you would think would be interested in the free and frank exchange of opinions about the content and quality of writing in this country, has failed to support him.

Even if you think Mr. Niedzviecki is wrong, and his opinions misguided and hurtful – and many people do, and have argued this case strongly – it’s alarming to say that he shouldn’t hold them. Ideas that incite violence or hatred deserve condemnation. But what about ideas that are uncomfortable or provocative or even (to some readers) ignorant? We have lost the appetite for confronting those ideas, for sharpening different, resonant arguments to counter them.

In a statement, the Equity Task Force of the Writers’ Union argues that there are “racist systemic barriers faced by indigenous writers and other racialized writers.” I think this is largely true. The task force writes that Mr. Niedzviecki “dismisses” those barriers. I don’t think that is true, based on the content of his essay. It also calls for the retraction of the essay, among other demands. That would be a mistake: to ask for an unpopular idea to be dismissed from the record is a dangerous precedent.

What I’ve written here is likely to be contentious, which is fine. There will be other arguments (different, more resonant), and I hope we’ll listen to them all. Those are the benefits of writing, and reading.

Source: Cultural appropriation: Why can’t we debate it? – The Globe and Mail

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Ontario school board tosses Shakespeare for indigenous writers

2017/05/13 Leave a comment

The headline is written for attention, the story captures the thoughtful considerations behind the change and how it fits in with the curriculum in other grades, where they do have exposure to Shakespeare and others:

When parents in Ontario’s Lambton Kent District School Board learned the mandatory Grade 11 English course was being replaced with an indigenous literature course, their responses often invoked that 500-year-old icon whose shadow still falls over all English writing.

“So my kid doesn’t have to study Shakespeare?” was the common reply, said superintendent of education Mark Sherman.

As of this September, for those in Grade 11 at least, the answer is no. Instead, they will be reading and studying novels such as Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese, Medicine River by Thomas King, My Name is Seepeetza by Shirley Sterling, or As Long as the Rivers Flow by former Ontario Lieutenant-Governor James Bartleman.

This indigenous turn of a high school curriculum is an abrupt departure from the Canadian high school standard of mainly studying literature from the two great cultures against which Canadian-ness is traditionally triangulated — Britain and America.

“Hey, I love Lord of the Flies. I love Shakespeare,” Sherman said. “But really, we’re talking about 15th century Veronese landlords (Romeo and Juliet) or something like that. Does that resonate with Canadian kids? Or the British schoolboy class structure?”

Modern plays in the high school rotation are likewise dominated by New York playwrights like Arthur Miller, to the exclusion of indigenous Canadians like Tomson Highway.

Students will still have the chance to study The Catcher in the Rye and King Lear, for example, in the other four compulsory English courses over their time in high school. “This is just taking a part of it and trying to make it more relevant to the modern Canadian student,” Sherman said.

Until now, the board has offered optional native studies courses in Grade 11, focused on history and culture more than literature. Some schools have also occasionally run native-focused Grade 11 literature courses, including several pilot programs designed to test this new curriculum shift. When it comes into effect in September, it will make an indigenous literature course a constant part of every student’s education.

“It has all the same curriculum expectations as any senior English course would have,” Sherman said. It involves writing, reading, presentation, dialogue, construction of arguments, topic choice, all set up in a way that recognizes and respects the sophistication of the curious teenage mind.

He pointed out two current failings of the traditional Shakespeare and Salinger approach in his board, which serves four First Nations communities as well as the regions of Sarnia and Chatham-Kent. Not only do indigenous students not see their culture reflected in their curriculum, and become disengaged as a result, but non-indigenous students are not made to engage scholastically with First Nations until late in the educational game. As a result, they can lack an important Canadian perspective.

“We should start building perspective earlier,” Sherman said. “In a senior level English course, they have a very high level of moral reasoning and dialogue.”

There is also a financial incentive, in that the board gets more funding for offering courses on indigenous topics, money that Sherman said has been used for professional development for teachers, many of whom are not indigenous themselves, and to hire a special projects teacher for indigenous studies.

As he describes it, parents and students could not be happier.

“It’s really taken off,” Sherman said. “Normally with any big change you expect some discontent. There has been negligible negative feedback. I think today’s students, they see things in the media, they want to know more about it, so now it’s just part of the natural course to say ‘Hey, we have some brilliant indigenous writers out there. This was created in Canada. This wasn’t written 100 years ago in Leeds.’”

Source: Ontario school board tosses Shakespeare for indigenous writers | National Post

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Were Humans Really in America 100,000 Years Before We Thought?

2017/05/01 Leave a comment

Interesting commentary on the politics regarding the origin of the first “settlers” of North America:

In the United States, the lightning rod in this conversation has been the racial identity of those people who are supposed to have pre-dated Native Americans. In Across Atlantic Ice: The Origin of America’s Clovis Culture, Smithsonian archaeologists Dennis J. Stanford and Bruce A. Bradley argued that almost 15,000 years before native Americans arrived in the Americas from Siberia (approximately 13,000-14,000 years ago), the North West was populated by early Europeans.

Their argument is based on the similarities between American Clovis stone points and French Solutrean points. The similarities between the two were first noted in the 1970s, but scholars could not account for the chronological distance between the evidence, the lack of evidence for maritime activity during this period, and the absence of non-technological cultural transfer from France to the Americas.

The lack of evidence did not prevent Kyle Bristow, a lawyer and former Michigan State University student known for inviting white supremacists to speak at his college chapter of Young Americans for Freedom, to use the Solutrean hypothesis to author the novel White Apocalypse. The conceit of the book is that Solutrean culture was mercilessly wiped out by invading Beringians (the ancestors of modern Native Americans). The genocide of the ancient Europeans, we learn through the rogue anthropologist protagonist, has been concealed from us in a giant conspiracy. Bristow’s purpose is to deny status to the First Nations, and he found his audience with reviewers like Billy Roper of White Resistance and Kevin Alfred Strom, the founder of National Vanguard. Bristow is now a lawyer who represents, among others, Matthew Heimbach, the head of the white nationalist traditionalist Youth Network, being sued for allegedly shoving a woman of color and calling her a “c**t” and a “n****r” at a Trump rally in 2016.

But I digress.

Scientists today almost exclusively reject the Solutrean hypothesis, but twenty years ago a variant on this hypothesis was used to argue that Kennewick Man was not Native American. The prehistoric remains of Kennewick Man, as he was known, were discovered along the banks of the Columbia River region in Kennewick, Washington in 1996. To the dismay of the anthropological community, he was initially racialized as a European and, against the objections of the local Umatilla people, his remains were removed for further study.

The archaeologists who initially worked on the bones, James Chatters and Douglas Owsley, argued quite forcefully that the remains were not Native American and thus unrelated to the Umatilla people. Chatters argued that the skull was “Caucasoid” and literally resembled Patrick Stewart. Owsley argued for Polynesian origins.

Kennewick Man was the focal point of a nine-year court case in which Native American tribes fought to gain ownership of the Kennewick Man (whom they referred to as ‘the Ancient One’). In 2004 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that because a cultural link could not be established between the remains and any of the Native American tribes, the scientific community could continue to study them.

It was only in 2015, when geneticists at the University of Copenhagen demonstrated that, among living peoples, the Kennewick Man is most closely related to the Native American tribes, including the Umatilla, that the question was settled. He has since been repatriated under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, but for nearly a decade scholarly claims about his racial identity were used to strip Native Americans of their cultural heritage.

It is not the case that the scientists performing the latest study, or any study on human origins, are racist themselves. Rather, it’s that this whole question is racially and politically loaded. Anytime a person makes the claim that there were people on a particular continent that predate the indigenous peoples encountered by later Westerners, they are making the kind of claim that, historically speaking, has been used to justify the subjugation of those people.

If there were people here before the Native Americans, that’s historically and anthropologically important information, but it has to be strongly supported. As Marks said, “This isn’t fruit-fly science…[It’s] a strong bio-political statement, and needs to have a firmer basis.”

 Source: Were Humans Really in America 100,000 Years Before We Thought?

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Senator Murray Sinclair responds to Lynn Beyak’s defence of residential schools

2017/03/31 Leave a comment

Eloquently stated, broad application:

“I spent all day telling people no comment,” Sinclair said, referring to reporters’ attempts earlier that day to elicit comment from the former judge on his fellow senator’s latest remarks. But offered an explanation to Tremonti as to how he responds to people who ask why Indigenous people don’t “get over” the residential school experience.

“My answer has always been: Why can’t you always remember this? Because this is about memorializing those people who have been the victims of a great wrong. Why don’t you tell the United States to ‘get over’ 9/11? Why don’t you tell this country to ‘get over’ all the veterans who died in the Second World War, instead of honouring them once a year?” he said.

“We should never forget, even once they have learned from it, because it’s part of who we are. It’s not just a part of who we are as survivors and children of survivors and relatives of survivors, it’s part of who we are as a nation. And this nation must never forget what it once did to its most vulnerable people.”

Source: Senator Murray Sinclair responds to Lynn Beyak’s defence of residential schools – Politics – CBC News

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How Indigenous people are rebranding Canada 150

2017/03/16 Leave a comment

Not particularly surprising that Vancouver is taking the lead here. Remember the 2010 Olympics Opening Ceremony which started with Indigenous dances and drums:

Believe it or not, Indigenous people are responsible for salvaging Vancouver’s sesquicentennial bash. For a time, the city considered boycotting Canada 150. Two years ago, when Ottawa put the squeeze on the city to sign on to the grand jubilee, city staff registered serious discomfort. Exalting Canada’s colonial past two years after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission delivered its calls to action seemed regressive, and potentially harmful to the city’s new relationship with local First Nations. Vancouver had recently designated itself a “City of Reconciliation,” 70,000 had marched in support of rapprochement and Deputy Mayor Andrea Reimer was learning Squamish. Staff came to her proposing the opt-out.

Reimer wasn’t opposed, but wanted input from the city’s Urban Aboriginal Peoples Advisory Committee first, she says. The nine-member panel, which advises city council on how to better include Indigenous people and perspectives in city life, came back with a different idea—one council unanimously approved: Why not celebrate the city’s Indigenous history and culture instead?

So Vancouver, whose Indigenous population of 53,000 ranks third-highest among Canadian metropolises—after Winnipeg (78,000) and Edmonton (62,000)— [note: in percentage terms much less] is doing just that, with a $7-million event it’s calling Canada 150+. The plus symbol—another Advisory Committee suggestion—was added partly to counter the enduring myth that Canada prior to contact was empty and in need of civilization.

So, far from being another hurrah for Canada, the event is deliberately challenging our collective amnesia. And it’s receiving federal funding to do so (costs are being split between the municipal and federal governments, as in other cities). Canada 150+ launches in English Bay on July 19 with a traditional canoe welcome, followed by a nine-day arts festival in Vancouver’s downtown. Nightly headliners include acts like Cree icon Buffy Sainte-Marie, but the focus is the history and culture of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh, the three Coast Salish nations on whose unceded territories Vancouver is built. They have been here longer than the English have been in England. Their culture was thriving when Dublin belonged to the Vikings and Sicily was ruled by Muslims.

“We are taking a huge risk—we don’t know how the public is going to react,” says Ginger Gosnell-Myers, the city’s first manager of Aboriginal relations. She is Nisga’a and Kwakwaka’wakw, a cousin of another Kwakwaka’wakw powerhouse, Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould. Reimer, for her part, doesn’t seem to much care whether the event sparks controversy. Whether or not you have the compassion-based belief that Canada has a moral responsibility to change, she says, it’s clear the traumas of the past are crippling the present, financially and otherwise. “We need to start doing things differently.” And after all, Gosnell-Myers adds: “None of us is going anywhere. We have to learn to live together—in a respectful way, and in a truthful way.”

Underlying the work of the most expensive reconciliation project the city has ever undertaken is a multi-year attempt to re-root Vancouver in the culture of its earliest inhabitants. The next step, a process that could see key place names replaced with Indigenous ones, is potentially more controversial. “Bridges, streets and buildings” are all open to consideration, Reimer says. Emotions will run high, but many believe it’s time.

Vancouver sits near the heart of Canada’s pre-contact capital. By the 18th century, twice as many lived in thriving, well-fortified villages of fishers, tanners, potters and toy-makers surrounding the Georgia Strait as in the rest of Canada combined (more, even, than in New York). But while some 200 B.C. place names commemorate the voyages of Captains Cook and Vancouver, who arrived toward the end of that century, there isn’t even a plaque to commemorate a smallpox plague that wiped out all but 10 per cent of B.C.’s Indigenous inhabitants—arguably the most significant event in the province’s history.

No surprise, then, that Canada 150 is spurring a creative outpouring among Indigenous artists to shine light on some of these painful chapters. “Remember, Resist, Redraw,” a cross-country poster project led by the Graphic History Collective, is putting an Indigenous lens on key events in Canadian history. #Resist150, a multimedia project led by Metis artist Christi Belcourt, features poems, shared histories and other “acts of resistance,” like the 150 traditional tattoos Belcourt is aiming to ink over the coming year. And the year’s most talked-about art exhibit, Kent Monkman’s Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience, which opened last month in Toronto, uses the sesquicentennial to ridicule and expand Canada’s rigid, national narrative.

Monkman, a Winnipeg-raised Cree artist, reimagines the grand chronicle, sometimes by inserting his flamboyant, drag queen alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. You’ll find Miss Chief, lover of Louis Vuitton and pink heels, in, for example, a cheeky send-up of Robert Harris’s famed portrait of the Fathers of Confederation. She’s nude, seated facing them, her legs akimbo. The men look on in horror, and in lust. He called it The Daddies.

It’s not all fun and transgression, though. In The Scream, a visceral comment on residential schools, Mounties and Grey Nuns tear Indigenous children from their mothers’ arms. Five spectacularly large oil portraits depict all the ways Winnipeg’s colonial history is infecting its future—the racism, violence, alcohol, despair. To Monkman, apparently, the sesquicentennial is synonymous with all that has been lost.

But his art—gratifyingly—is no longer truly subversive. A truer, less simplistic Canadian narrative is finally starting to emerge. It rejects the idea of 1867 as a starting point, acknowledges the country’s many sins and returns the Indigenous perspective to where it belongs: front and centre, as the best and most enduring part of the Canadian story—a tale that stretches back not 150 years, but 12,000. That’s the version Vancouver is hoping to tell.

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The Order of Canada and diversity

2017/03/11 Leave a comment

My latest, in Policy Options:

In Budget 2015, the then Conservative government announced additional funding of $13.4 million over five years and $2.8 million in ongoing funding for the Canadian Honours System. This aimed to “bring [honours] closer to all Canadians” by increasing the number of Order of Canada nominations from “under-represented sectors” (e.g. business) and regions (i.e. the West).

This was prompted by an Ottawa Citizen analysis that showed only 26 percent of recipients since the Order’s creation in 1967 came from the West, compared to the region’s 31 percent share of the population. In contrast, Atlantic Canada had 11 percent of recipients, about twice its share of the population. Moreover, the study showed an increasing percentage of awards had gone to those active in the arts while the share going to business people had declined.

Source: The Order of Canada and diversity (for complete article)

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Families divided after Ottawa tells thousands they’re not indigenous | Toronto Star

2017/03/06 1 Comment

I have a lot of sympathy for the people who have had to develop and implementation the criteria used, as well as the people interviewed below whose applications have been denied. Identity is as much if not more subjective and yet needed to be “objectified” for the purpose of status cards:

Belonging. Identity. Who do you think you are? Who do they say you are? For thousands of indigenous Canadians, it’s complicated. Records have been obscured or obliterated through hundreds of years of assimilation. The federal government — from bureaucrats to Indian agents — made these decisions based on the political mandates of the day. First Nations have made their decisions. So have individuals. In this occasional series, The Status Card, Tanya Talaga, the Star’s indigenous affairs reporter, will look at the complexities and who is making these decisions and how.

CORNER BROOK, N.L.—Retired master corporal Matthew Connolly has spread his prized spiritual possessions on his dining room table.

He carefully touches each as he explains its significance. He starts with a beautifully carved drumstick made from the wood of an old sweat lodge. Then he unrolls the red leather case that holds his eagle feather, given for service to the community. He moves to a hand-held drum, then a smudge kit, then a satchel of tobacco.

From his wallet, he retrieves a small, laminated white card to show the words “Teluisi Kelusit Paqtism” — Speaking Wolf, Connolly’s Mi’kmaq name. He grew up proud knowing he is a direct descendant of Mattie Mitchell, the revered trader and explorer who is recognized as a founding father of the Mi’kmaq in western Newfoundland, likely arriving here in the 1700s from Cape Breton.

Connolly, 57, may believe he is indigenous but the government of Canada does not. Connolly was one of 82,630 people who received a letter dated Jan. 31, 2017, from Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada, denying his application for membership in the Qalipu Mi’kmaq First Nation, a landless band headquartered in Corner Brook, Newfoundland.

His rejection came at the end of an unprecedented enrolment drive that saw 101,000 claiming Mi’kmaq ancestry and applying to join the Qalipu, a band made up of nearly a dozen Newfoundland indigenous communities. Applicants were judged on a points system developed by six government representatives and six from the Federation of Newfoundland Indians (FNI) to assess how Mi’kmaq someone is.

Thirteen points grants membership. Points were given to those who live in one of Newfoundland’s 66 Mi’kmaq communities, and to those who could prove they were culturally involved with the Mi’kmaq before June 2008, when the federal government officially recognized the Qalipu. Points were also given if applicants could produce affidavits that they had engaged in activities such as hunting and powwows, and if they had airline receipts to show frequent visits to Mi’kmaq areas.

But how and why points were given to some but not others has caused endless confusion and can border on the absurd. In many families, some siblings were accepted and others rejected. In the case of twin toddlers, one gained membership and the other did not. The first president of the Federation of Newfoundland Indians was rejected and so was a recent Indspire Awards recipient. Indspire Awards are handed out only to indigenous people.

The 100,000 applicants came from across Canada and beyond — from Hong Kong, California and Australia — all claiming Mi’kmaq ancestry. But Ottawa and the Qalipu band council agreed “it was neither reasonable nor credible” to expect that all of them would become members of the First Nation, “particularly given that approximately two-thirds of the applicants did not reside in any of the Mi’kmaq communities targeted for recognition in this initiative,” Qalipu’s website states.

Connolly’s rejection was blunt: “You did not meet the requirements for acceptance by the Mi’kmaq group of Indians of Newfoundland.”

He only received three points. This stunned Connolly, who has a home in Corner Brook, has participated in cultural events and powwows and has worked for the Qalipu band. He believes multiple mistakes were made when his application was assessed and is “emotionally devastated.”

Source: Families divided after Ottawa tells thousands they’re not indigenous | Toronto Star

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