Canada’s first Indigenous citizenship judge uses ‘best job in the world’ to champion Indigenous issues

2022/06/22 Leave a comment

Of interest:

With the Canadian flag, a portrait of the Queen, and a bright orange “Every Child Matters” T-shirt in her Zoom background, Suzanne Carrière, LLB’03, gets emotional when she talks about her work as a citizenship judge with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.

“I still choke up sometimes delivering my speech, no matter if the ceremony is on Zoom or in-person, because you can see in the participants’ faces that the moment is so meaningful for them,” she says. “You can see some of them crying, hugging their children, and you can see that they’re thinking about their journey. It’s so special and a constant reminder of how lucky and privileged we are to be Canadian.”

Suzanne Carrière, LLB’03, is Canada’s first Indigenous citizenship judge.

Since being appointed in 2018 as Canada’s first Indigenous citizenship judge — Carrière is Red River Métis from Manitoba — she has presided over more than 1,300 ceremonies and has sworn in more than 65,000 new Canadians. She also presided the first virtual oath-taking in Canadian history when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down in-person ceremonies, and, in June 2021, Carrière presided over the first ceremony in the country using a revised Oath of Citizenshiprecognizing the rights of First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples, a moment she considers a career highlight.

Growing up, Carrière never had any intention to pursue law. She studied Indigenous issues, criminology and psychology in her undergraduate studies at the University of Manitoba. While completing a field course on alternative justice initiatives in Indigenous communities, her supervisor asked her about her plans for her future. After telling him she was contemplating doing a master’s in criminology, he encouraged her to pursue a law degree.

When she questioned him about it, he said to her, “Anything you can do with a master’s degree, you can do with a law degree. You’re a woman, you’re bilingual and you’re Métis — with a law degree, there’s nothing you can’t do.”

“And that made sense to me,” Carrière says. “And he was right.”

Hearing stories from 200 residential school survivors 

After graduating from UCalgary Law, Carrière worked for a few years on the legal team at WestJet, but ultimately knew corporate law wasn’t what she wanted to do. When she eventually moved back to Manitoba to start her family, a friend told her that the federal Department of Justice (DOJ) was hiring lawyers to do work related to Canada’s residential school system. It was a no-brainer for Carrière as she knew that this work that would be incredibly fascinating, historic and important. She applied and was hired, and, for five years, she was involved in the Independent Assessment Process to resolve claims of abuse suffered at residential schools.

Through that claimant-centred, non-adversarial process, Carrière estimates she heard approximately 200 first-hand accounts from residential school survivors about the abuse they suffered and how it impacted their lives.

You don’t do that kind of work without it changing you and your life.

As for the conflicted feelings she had at times about representing the Government of Canada in that forum, she says she had to remind herself that it’s important to have Indigenous people in all spaces and arenas. “You need people with empathy and compassion doing that work, and it was a real honour for me to be there and to bear witness on behalf of the government,” Carrière says.

After the residential school work ended, she stayed with DOJ’s Aboriginal Legal Services team for another three years. However, she no longer felt fulfilled by the work she was doing. A friend showed her a posting for a citizenship judge and suggested she apply.

Still a champion of Indigenous issues

“I had some hesitation about leaving the Department of Justice to become a citizenship judge because my passion had always Indigenous issues and Indigenous culture. But I knew I was no longer happy at DOJ,” Carrière says. “Thankfully, I got the appointment, and the biggest surprise has been how there is still room within my role as a citizenship judge to champion Indigenous issues in my own small way.”

Each June, Canadians commemorate National Indigenous History Month to recognize the rich history, heritage, resilience and diversity of First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples across Canada.

Indigenous Peoples are the first peoples of this land. They were here since time immemorial, and ultimately, Indigenous history is Canadian history.

“At the same time, it’s not just history. Indigenous People are still here and they’re still contributing to our society. It’s important to celebrate the beauty of Indigenous Peoples, cultures and languages — and the contributions, heritage and the unique stories that we gain from Indigenous people so that we can all move forward together with better understanding, compassion and relationships.

“I have a bit of a platform as a citizenship judge. I can talk about my Métis heritage, reconciliation and how that fits in with newcomers to Canada. I’m talking about these important issues more, meeting more Indigenous people and I feel like I’m making more of a difference now, with a different, and very receptive, audience. It’s been an incredible four years so far, and I truly feel I have the best job in the world!”

Source: Canada’s first Indigenous citizenship judge uses ‘best job in the world’ to champion Indigenous issues

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Coates: Condemning historical figures like Ryerson and John A. Macdonald must not distract us from true reconciliation

2022/06/06 Leave a comment

Condemnation and renaming are easy compared to addressing the substantive issues, where action is more needed, not to mention the regrettable lack of nuance in understanding history and context:

With the decision to rename itself Toronto Metropolitan University, the former Ryerson University — known briefly as “University X” — fumbled the opportunity to use public criticism of Egerton Ryerson as a learning opportunity, instead bowing to the passionate protests of activists who believe that condemning a handful of historical figures is one way to address generations of discrimination and paternalism. 

Attacking the reputation of Ryerson, one of the most effective educational reformers in Canadian history, requires a narrow reading of his career. Regardless, he is now a dead letter in Canadian public life, and efforts to expunge his name from schools, monuments and other public facilities will no doubt continue apace. 

The number one target in the country is now Canada’s first Prime Minister, John A. Macdonald — like Ryerson, singled out for his role in Indigenous residential schools. Across the country, statues in Macdonald’s honour have been removed or doused in red paint, and public bodies are having earnest discussions about removing his name from schools and other facilities. 

There is nothing wrong with calling out or re-examining the public memory of historical figures for their actions. However, reading history reductively, losing sight of context, and misreading personal responsibility do not help us to understand the past. 

Right now, for good reason, the country is focused on a specific policy — residential schools — with the belief that by removing the tributes to the architects of the school movement we can turn a page. This approach is seriously misguided. 

Residential school education was horrific, its multi-generational negative effects still not fully understood. A system purportedly designed to provide personal opportunity to Indigenous students was instead used to attack Indigenous cultures, undermine centuries-old languages, destroy Indigenous families, and assimilate Aboriginal peoples. Dealing with the long-term impact of the residential schools has rightly become a national priority. 

We must, however, remember that the residential school concept was not foisted on an unwilling nation by its government. Virtually all non-Indigenous Canadians of that time, led by the Christian churches and supported by non-Indigenous advocates for Indigenous peoples, favoured residential schools. As late as the 1960s and 1970s, many non-Indigenous Canadians still defended the schools as clearly being a “good thing” and a sign of the benevolent state. 

Most Canadians did not know — or did not want to know — what happened in the schools. They neither expected nor countenanced the violence and brutality, but encouraged teachers and principals to undermine Indigenous language and culture, believing this was in Indigenous people’s best interests.

In today’s efforts to assign accountability for wrongs of the past, the tendency to focus on individuals — whatever their roles in establishing the institutions — simply misses the point. It was racism and a nationwide sense of cultural superiority that backstopped all of Canada’s aggressive actions against Indigenous peoples. If dismantling a statue or renaming a school (or university) serves some, it also deflects attention from where responsibility properly rests: with society at large. 

Criticizing early promoters of residential schools misses the historical mark. 

With Ryerson’s name now removed from a campus, and Macdonald’s image being assailed across Canada, where next? There are thousands of targets, including the political leaders, government and church officials, and public supporters who expanded the residential school system, including its rapid acceleration after the Second World War. 

Let’s consider two potential targets, modern-era political leaders who espoused simple ideas of potentially destructive impact on Indigenous peoples. They wanted to eliminate the Indian Act and Indian status, break up the reserves, abandon treaties, and integrate Indigenous peoples into the Canadian mainstream. Their stated goal sounded honourable to some — producing “real” equality among all Canadians — and there had been consultations, of a sort, with Indigenous groups. 

The 1969 White Paper was one of the most aggressive Indigenous policy initiatives in Canadian history, designed to remove barriers between peoples and overcome decades of discrimination and state paternalism. The response from First Nations was ferocious. Indigenous leaders organized protests and demanded the federal government retract its policy. The government did so, to the dismay of many non-Indigenous Canadians who wanted to remove the “special status” afforded Indigenous peoples. The contemporary Indigenous rights movement in Canada owes a great deal to the reaction to this ill-conceived and assimilationist strategy. 

The Prime Minister was Pierre Elliott Trudeau. His minister of Indian and Northern Affairs was future prime minister Jean Chrétien. They were the architects of the White Paper of 1969. Trudeau believed “no society can be built on historical might-have-beens,” and opposed Indigenous land claim negotiations, modern treaties, and the concept of historical redress. 

The Trudeau government’s much-touted “Just Society” had a blind spot when it came to Indigenous peoples. The government’s preference for state intervention and the inherent paternalism of federal policy in the 1960s and 70s arguably accelerated the decline of Indigenous language and culture, fostering a culture of welfare dependency in Indigenous communities. 

Would it be appropriate for critics of government policy to focus their anger on Trudeau and Chrétien, leading to more monument destruction and renaming? Absolutely not; we can use our time and effort much better. Besides, when faced with sustained Indigenous anger, the Liberal government backed down. Unlike residential schools, which had major effects across generations, the White Paper brought to the surface the core ideas and values of the government of the day.

The past is a complicated place. It should not be reduced to memes and social-media messages. Historical leaders are people, with personal foibles, living in and reflecting their places and times. Democracies hold leaders accountable during their political lives. Historians and the public determine their legacy. Attitudes toward the leaders and their actions change over time, as the debate about John A. Macdonald demonstrates. But these discussions should be handled with caution. 

The piecemeal and reactive redoing of historical nomenclature, however well meaning, produces distortions of history. This said, Canada is desperately overdue for a rethinking of the many people and events we memorialize. 

Names and monuments should not be fixed for all time. New Zealand, now also known as Aotearoa, and Australia have both ventured down this road, with considerable achievement. New Zealanders are increasingly comfortable with both Maori names and cultural references in public affairs; Australia’s newly elected prime minister, Anthony Albanese, was introduced on a stage where the Australian flag shared pride of place with the flags of Aboriginal Peoples and Torres Strait Islanders.

There is so much to recognize and celebrate in Indigenous cultures that Canada should get on with it. Indigenous peoples, cultures and knowledge need to be more prominently recognized across Canada. The same holds for women, minority groups, and events either poorly or inaccurately represented in our historical nomenclature. A cautious renaming process in Canada could actually produce the most thoughtful and comprehensive historical and cultural reuniting in the nation’s history. 

Reconciliation with Indigenous peoples requires thoughtful and engaged reflection. Changing the names of institutions and tearing down monuments might gratify some, but there is a better way. Toronto Metropolitan University will hardly provide a rallying cry for a nation seeking real healing with Indigenous peoples. 

If Canada is to find common ground with First Nations, Métis and Inuit people, the country must reverse the lens, begin to view history from Indigenous perspectives and listen respectfully to elders and knowledge keepers. 

This reckoning will take more than attacks on historical figures. The problem rests not with a few individuals but with the profound sense of racial superiority that animated public policy for generations, underpinning a suite of government initiatives that marginalized and overwhelmed Indigenous peoples. For all of our condemnation of historical decisions that are now seen as egregious and destructive, Canadians remain largely oblivious to the paternalism and discrimination toward Indigenous people that is part of our national reality.

Canada is, by international standards, a remarkably successful country, even if it is built significantly on the displacement and domination of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples. They were sacrificed in the interests of the nation, with most non-Indigenous peoples truly believing that assimilation and cultural domination was the only legitimate path forward. This position, dangerously and tragically wrong, animated the government for a century and a half, to be replaced in our time by a more evolved but still paternalistic approach to Indigenous affairs. 

This country needs to devote a great deal of effort to improving relationships with Indigenous communities. To Canada’s collective good fortune, Indigenous peoples remain open to such discussions and to rebuilding Confederation, despite the painful destruction of the past. 

We can do much more than try to eliminate historical guilt by changing a few names and sloshing paint on some statues. Instead, the country needs to listen closely to First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples and build a policy agenda inspired by Indigenous priorities, a deep understanding of the multi-generational impacts of racism, and a real commitment to lasting reconciliation. 

Ken Coates is a Distinguished Fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and a professor and Canada Research Chair at the University of Saskatchewan.

Source: Condemning historical figures like Ryerson and John A. Macdonald must not distract us from true reconciliation

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Prison service must do more to remove barriers for Indigenous, Black offenders: AG

2022/06/02 Leave a comment

Of note. Another ongoing issue, one not easy to resolve but one would hope to see some ongoing progress:

The federal auditor general says Canada’s prison service has not given offenders timely access to programs to help ease them back into society, including courses specific to women, Indigenous people and visible minorities.

Auditor general Karen Hogan found Black and Indigenous offenders experienced poorer outcomes than any other groups in the federal correctional system and faced greater barriers to a safe and gradual return to the outside world.

Hogan pointed out her office raised similar issues in audits in 2015, 2016 and 2017, yet the correctional service has done little to change the policies, practices, tools and approaches that produce these differing outcomes.

Hogan says disparities were present from the moment offenders entered federal institutions.

The process for selecting security classifications saw Indigenous and Black offenders assigned to maximum-security institutions at twice the rate of other groups of offenders.

They also remained in federal custody longer and at higher levels of security before their release.

The audit found that timely access to correctional programs continued to decline across all groups of offenders. Access to programming, which teaches crucial skills like problem solving and goal setting, worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Of men serving sentences of two to four years who were released from April to December 2021, 94 per cent had not completed the correctional programs they needed before they were first eligible to apply for day parole.

“This is a barrier to serving the remainder of their sentences under supervision in the community,” the report says.

The prison service needs to find a different way to organize programming, because “that timely access is so critical to an offender’s successful path forward,” Hogan said Tuesday at a news conference.

Correctional service efforts to support greater equity, diversity and inclusion in the workplace also fell short, leaving persistent barriers unresolved, the report says.

Close to one-quarter of management and staff had not completed mandatory diversity training a year after the deadline.

In addition, the prison service had not established a plan to build a workforce that reflects the diversity of its offender populations, which has particular relevance for institutions with high numbers of Indigenous and Black offenders, the report says.

Hogan noted the correctional service has acknowledged systemic racism in the system, initiating an anti-racism framework to identify and remove systemic barriers.

The service has agreed to act on the auditor general’s recommendations to remedy the various issues she identified.

Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino stressed efforts toward “rooting out racism in all of its forms” by diversifying the prison service’s workforce, improving our training and collecting data to inform policies. “And we know we’ve got a long way to go.”

Mendicino noted he recently directed the correctional service head to create a new position of deputy commissioner for Indigenous corrections, saying it will ensure the overrepresentation of Indigenous offenders in the system, especially women, is addressed.

Source: Prison service must do more to remove barriers for Indigenous, Black offenders: AG

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USA: Haaland seeks healing for Native American boarding school survivors

2022/05/24 Leave a comment

Of note:

The Interior Department found that the U.S. operated or actively supported more than 400 American Indian boarding schools between 1819 and 1969 – a history that affects the agency’s own leader.

Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American to serve as a Cabinet secretary, tells NPR’s All Things Considered that she had grandparents who were taken from their homes and placed in these schools.

“[Those are] formidable years in a child’s life,” she says. “It’s devastating. It’s important that our country realizes and understands this history because I think it’s important for every single American to know what happened.”

The department’s findings came after an investigation into these schools and the role the federal government played in sustaining them.

Much like in Canada, Native children who attended these schools were forcibly taken from their families to be “assimilated,” as it was described at the time.

Many children reported brutal conditions. Others never returned home.

U.S. officials identified at least 53 schools with marked or unmarked burial sites with the remains of children who died there.

In an effort to confront this history, Haaland says she plans to meet with boarding school survivors across the country in a tour called “The Road to Healing.”

“I always enjoy visiting with people in Indian Country. We’re all relatives,” she says. “Above all, I just need to hear those stories myself.”

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

On why this is the first documentation by the U.S. government on the prevalence of Indian boarding schools:

Perhaps part of it stems from the fact that we haven’t had a lot of Native American leadership in our country. Representation matters. And that’s one of the reasons why I felt it was important for me to raise this issue.

On the lingering effects of these boarding schools on Indigenous communities:

There are current impacts in drug addiction and poverty and the lack of economic development, and health disparities. When people are invisible, you don’t have to pay attention. We should care about every single community in this country. So bringing all of these things to light; it will make us become a better country.

On the idea that bringing up painful history is divisive:

These are real people, and these are their lives. I think it’s important that we heal as a country. Everyone’s experience in the boarding school system, whether they’re a survivor or a descendant, that pain is real. And it’s incumbent on me to ensure that I am paying attention to that and that I am doing all I can to make sure that we can heal and get people past that pain.

Source: Haaland seeks healing for Native American boarding school survivors

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ICYMI – Nicolas: Des langues et des choix

2022/05/20 Leave a comment

Reality intrudes. Harder to dismiss Indigenous concerns:

Tout le monde en parlait, cet hiver. Fin février, le rappeur anichinabé Samian s’est retrouvé exclu du Festival international de la chanson de Granby, parce que sa performance se serait déroulée majoritairement en anichinabémowin. Le festival, qui promeut la chanson francophone depuis plus de 50 ans, a refusé de faire une exception et de permettre un spectacle en langue autochtone.

Le festival avait indiqué être « sincèrement désolé de la tournure des événements », mais le mal était fait. À Tout le monde en parle, Samian avait dénoncé une mentalité « colonialiste », qui considère les langues autochtones comme une menace pour le français. Les messages de soutien avaient alors fusé d’un peu partout au Québec. Oui, il faut protéger le français, disait-on. Mais pas en nuisant aux langues autochtones ni à l’autodétermination des peuples. En matière de relations publiques, le Festival de Granby avait de toute évidence perdu la manche.

En me rappelant comment le message de Samian avait été entendu, il y a à peine quelques mois, je me dis qu’une bonne partie de la population serait aussi prête à écouter les critiques que de nombreux leaders autochtones font du projet de loi 96 depuis son dépôt par le gouvernement du Québec.

Mardi, à l’Assemblée nationale, plusieurs chefs ont réitéré leur inquiétude face à cette nouvelle politique linguistique, qui aurait de nombreuses implications pour les Premières Nations et les Inuits au Québec. Ghislain Picard, chef de l’Assemblée des Premières Nations Québec-Labrador (APNQL), a dit craindre que l’adoption du projet loi 96 force « l’exode de nos étudiants vers d’autres avenues, d’autres écoles à l’extérieur du Québec ». Il a ajouté qu’il trouvait « d’une ironie renversante que, finalement, les premiers occupants du territoire au Québec soient forcés d’aller étudier à l’extérieur de leur territoire ».

M. Picard fait ici référence aux nouvelles exigences de cours de français au niveau collégial incluses dans le projet de loi. Ses mots sont forts, donc il est important d’expliquer leur contexte. Avec le travail des missionnaires, puis avec les pensionnats, et enfin avec le système scolaire contemporain, cela fait déjà plusieurs générations que les peuples autochtones au Québec et ailleurs au Canada se font imposer une éducation dans une ou deux langues coloniales. Les premières langues du territoire en sont donc aujourd’hui fortement menacées — certaines plus que d’autres —, et la transmission culturelle et l’existence même des peuples autochtones en tant que groupes distincts sont menacées avec elles.

Les Inuits et certaines Premières Nations, comme les Micmacs et les Mohawks, se sont surtout fait imposer l’anglais, historiquement. Le gouvernement québécois, dans sa volonté d’affirmation nationale, travaille pour asseoir le français comme langue officielle et langue commune sur son territoire. Avec le projet de loi 96, on vient donc exiger de certains étudiants autochtones la maîtrise d’une deuxième langue « étrangère » dans un système d’éducation qui refuse de faire une place sérieuse à leurs langues et à leurs cultures.

Nos écoles sont déjà perçues comme des milieux de vie aliénants par une partie de la jeunesse autochtone, ce qui contribue aux taux de réussite scolaire plus faibles de plusieurs communautés. Par conséquent, on craint d’aggraver les risques de décrochage ou d’encourager le départ de certains élèves vers les provinces limitrophes si les étudiants autochtones étaient soumis à la loi 96.

J’utilise le verbe « soumis » avec une conscience aiguë du poids de ce mot. Car c’est bien de cela qu’il est question ici : de soumission. Plusieurs journalistes et élus se demandent pourquoi on ferait tout un plat pour trois cours de français supplémentaires au collégial — ou encore pourquoi on semble vouloir défendre l’éducation en anglais, une autre langue coloniale et certainement pas autochtone. La réponse formulée par plusieurs des intervenants lors de la conférence de presse de mardi se situe ailleurs.

On refuse simplement que le gouvernement du Québec dicte la langue d’apprentissage des jeunes autochtones. On ne veut pas se faire imposer le français, ni l’anglais d’ailleurs ; on veut être libre de choisir pour soi-même. Un principe élémentaire qui va de pair avec la Déclaration des Nations unies sur les droits des peuples autochtones que le Canada s’est engagé à respecter dans toutes ses lois. Un principe qu’avait aussi défendu Samian, à sa manière, quand il avait dénoncé la « mentalité colonialiste » d’un festival qui cherchait à lui imposer une langue. Principe que bien des Québécois avaient alors compris.

Il est toutefois important de dire une chose : l’autodétermination des peuples autochtones et la liberté de choisir sa langue demeurent théoriques à moins que de véritables options soient offertes. Si les programmes d’étude de niveau postsecondaires en langues autochtones n’existent à peu près pas au Québec, est-ce que le jeune micmac ou mohawk fait vraiment le « choix » de l’anglais au cégep ou à l’université ? Est-ce qu’une ado huronne ou abénaquise, dont la langue ancestrale est particulièrement menacée, fait le « choix » d’une éducation en français dès le primaire ?

Bien sûr que non. Pour que les jeunes autochtones soient véritablement libres d’apprendre leur propre langue, en plus du français, de l’anglais ou de toute autre langue, il faut une revitalisation des langues autochtones, dont les défis et les avancées varient largement d’une communauté à l’autre. Et cette revitalisation ne peut pas non plus être imposée par un gouvernement qui voudrait unilatéralement « sauver » les premières langues du territoire. L’autonomie et le respect mutuel sont ici les clés du succès.

Pour avancer et se comprendre, le dialogue et l’écoute sont nécessaires. Si le projet de loi 96 est adopté comme tel, alors que les amendements de l’APNQL ont été balayés du revers de la main par le gouvernement, il sera désormais encore plus difficile de s’entendre, malheureusement.

Source: Des langues et des choix

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Indigenous leaders say Quebec’s language bill colonial, paternalistic

2022/05/12 Leave a comment

Of interest and a reminder that Indigenous rights can collide with Quebec linguistic and other policies:

Indigenous leaders in Quebec say the government’s French-language bill is destructive, paternalistic and could put the survival of First Nations languages at risk.

Bill 96 would push Indigenous students to pursue higher education outside the province, Ghislain Picard, chief of the Assembly of First Nations Quebec-Labrador, told reporters Tuesday in Quebec City.

“It’s a staggering irony, that the first inhabitants of the land in Quebec are being forced to study outside their territory; that’s something we find unacceptable,” Picard said at the legislature.

Bill 96 makes several amendments to Quebec’s signature language law, known as Bill 101. If passed, it would reinforce rules about the use of French in workplaces, the civil service and the justice system. The bill would also require students at the province’s English-language junior colleges to take three additional classes in French.

John Martin, chief of the Mi’kmaq council of Gesgapegiag, on the Gaspé peninsula, said many Indigenous communities were historically forced to speak English and that requiring young people to master a third language — French — would make it more difficult for them to succeed.

“If our communities are going to be able to flourish, education is a key component, but remember also that education has been used as one of the key factors in the assimilation of our people and the destruction of our cultures and the destruction of our languages, and that is why this government needs to sit down and listen to us,” Martin said.

“It is a destructive bill. It is a continuation of the kind of colonialism, paternalist and extinguishment activities that governments successively have conducted since their establishment on these territories.”

Kahsennenhawe Sky-Deer, grand chief of the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake, located near Montreal, said the bill could also impact access to justice.

“We do not want to see this bill move forward without any kind of exemption or consideration of Indigenous people, our languages, our cultures that have been here since time immemorial,” she said. “The way that this government is conducting itself is very dismissive and it disregards us and our long history and our presence on these lands.”

Sky-Deer said the Indigenous leaders want a meeting with Justice Minister Simon Jolin-Barrette, the minister responsible for the legislation. She said if the minister doesn’t meet with Indigenous leaders, community members will have to resort to taking other actions.

The Indigenous leaders were invited to the Quebec legislature by the opposition Liberals and Québec solidaire. While the Liberals have said they plan to vote against the bill, Québec solidaire co-spokesperson Manon Massé said her party plans to vote for it.

Source: Indigenous leaders say Quebec’s language bill colonial, paternalistic

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Helping A.I. to Learn About Indigenous Cultures

2022/03/23 Leave a comment

Interesting:

In September 2021, Native American technology students in high school and college gathered at a conference in Phoenix and were asked to create photo tags — word associations, essentially — for a series of images.

One image showed ceremonial sage in a seashell; another, a black-and-white photograph circa 1884, showed hundreds of Native American children lined up in uniform outside the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, one of the most prominent boarding schools run by the American government during the 19th and 20th centuries.

For the ceremonial sage, the students chose the words “sweetgrass,” “sage,” “sacred,” “medicine,” “protection” and “prayers.” They gave the photo of the boarding school tags with a different tone: “genocide,” “tragedy,” “cultural elimination,” “resiliency” and “Native children.”

The exercise was for the workshop Teaching Heritage to Artificial Intelligence Through Storytelling at the annual conference for the American Indian Science and Engineering Society. The students were creating metadata that could train a photo recognition algorithm to understand the cultural meaning of an image.

The workshop presenters — Chamisa Edmo, a technologist and citizen of the Navajo Nation, who is also Blackfeet and Shoshone-Bannock; Tracy Monteith, a senior Microsoft engineer and member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians; and the journalist Davar Ardalan — then compared these answers with those produced by a major image recognition app.

For the ceremonial sage, the app’s top tag was “plant,” but other tags included “ice cream” and “dessert.” The app tagged the school image with “human,” “crowd,” “audience” and “smile” — the last a particularly odd descriptor, given that few of the children are smiling.

The image recognition app botched its task, Mr. Monteith said, because it didn’t have proper training data. Ms. Edmo explained that tagging results are often “outlandish” and “offensive,” recalling how one app identified a Native American person wearing regalia as a bird. And yet similar image recognition apps have identified with ease a St. Patrick’s Day celebration, Ms. Ardalan noted as an example, because of the abundance of data on the topic.

As Mr. Monteith put it, A.I. is only as good as the data it is fed. And data on cultures that have long been marginalized, like Native ones, are simply not at the levels they need to be. “Clearly, there’s a bias represented,” he said.

The workshop was the initiative of Intelligent Voices of Wisdom, or IVOW, a tech start-up that Ms. Ardalan, an executive producer of audio at National Geographic, founded to preserve culture through A.I. and to counter those biases.

“The internet is not representative of the entire population, and when people are represented, it may not be accurate because of stereotypes and hate speech,” said Percy Liang, an associate professor of computer science at Stanford University and director of the school’s Center for Research on Foundation Models.

To counter this tendency, Ms. Ardalan, who is an Iranian American of Bakhtiari and Kurdish descent, wants IVOW to develop tools to create “cultural engines” for underrepresented groups so they can generate, and take ownership of, their data. “The cultural engine cannot be a data scientist in Philadelphia trying to create data sets for a tribe in Arizona,” she said.

More representative, accurate data is beneficial not only to the groups it represents, but also to A.I. systems at large, said W. Victor H. Yarlott, an A.I. researcher at Florida International University, a member of the Crow Tribe of Montana and an IVOW collaborator.

“Lacking this knowledge just makes your system worse,” he said. “You’re not really representing human intelligence or human knowledge unless your system can handle it from a broad range of cultures.”

The participation of Indigenous people in the project was critical. Mr. Monteith, who led the effort to enter the Cherokee writing system into Microsoft Office, said he’s been working on building trust for technology, and more recently A.I., in his Native communities for decades. “I knew without me doing this that we would be in a worse spot in terms of literacy, and our culture,” he said.

The team at IVOW, along with a group of volunteer collaborators and advisers, has been developing proofs of concept for these cultural engines — smart data sets that can feed more inclusive A.I. tools, including chatbots and image recognition apps.

One such tool is IVOW’s Indigenous Knowledge Graph, or IKG, a cultural engine in early development that is focused on storytelling about Indigenous recipes and culinary practices. After meeting the IVOW team in 2018, Mr. Yarlott pitched the IKG, a sort of visualization of a data set, to capture Indigenous knowledge.

“You know in dramas, you see the person trying to unravel a mystery and they have the corkboard and the little notes and the string between them?” Mr. Yarlott said. “That’s basically what the IKG is, but for cultural knowledge.”

The first step was to gather the data. The team chose a culinary focus because it is a part of life that all people share. They collected recipes and related stories from both the public domain and team members.

Mr. Monteith chose to enter the story of the Three Sisters stew, a recipe created from symbiotic crops (corn, beans and squash) that he said is known among Indigenous peoples wherever those ingredients grow. The story of the Three Sisters, he said, is not only a recipe but a way to teach sustainability practices, such as the preservation of water. “It’s just a great metaphor for what we need to do as a society and as a people across the world,” Mr. Monteith said.

Using Neo4J, a graph database management system, the recipes were broken down into components (title, ingredients, instructions and related stories) and tagged with information, like the tribe of origin or whether the recipe was contemporary or historical, or had roots in folklore. This data set was then entered into Dialogflow, a natural language processing platform, so it could be fed into a chatbot — in this case, Sina Storyteller, the Siri-like conversational agent designed by IVOW. Currently, anyone can interact with the early version through Google Assistant.

The tools and techniques to create the IKG were designed to be basic enough that anyone, not just those with a background in computer science, could use them. And IKG uses only information that is widely available or that the team had permission to use from their own tribes, bands and nations.

There are challenges, though. The process is labor intensive and expensive; IVOW is a self-funded enterprise, and the work of the collaborators is voluntary.

“It’s a little bit of a chicken and an egg problem because you need the data to really build a big system that demonstrates value,” Mr. Yarlott said. “But to get all the data, you need money, which only really starts to come when people realize that there’s substantial value here.”

Mr. Liang said that while this kind of “artisanal” data is important, it is difficult to scale, and that more emphasis should be placed on improving foundation knowledge — models that are trained on large-scale data sets.

For years, computer scientists have warned Ms. Ardalan that cultivating this sort of data is a tedious process. She doesn’t disagree, which is why she says the time to start is now.

“The future is going to be these cultural engines that communities create that are relevant to their heritage,” she said, adding that the notion that A.I. will be all-encompassing is wrong. “Machines cannot replace humans. They can only be there with us around the campfire and inform us.”

Source: Helping A.I. to Learn About Indigenous Cultures

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Woman outraged CIBC job application suggests traditional regalia for video cover letter

2022/03/22 Leave a comment

Interesting case. CIBC engaged an Indigenous consultant, who in turn consulted other Indigenous community leaders and experts, in order to encourage Indigenous recruitment and recognize Indigenous identities.

So clear intent to be inclusive but can understand why the “regalia” reference in particular provoked Paquette’s response.

Would have been interesting, of course, to know the reactions of other applicants:

Christine Paquette was scrolling through an online job site when she came across a posting looking to recruit Indigenous people for customer service jobs at CIBC.

The 21-year-old Ojibway and Métis woman works as a part-time receptionist at an esthetics salon and was hoping to find a second job, one that could lead to a possible career.

“It seemed kind of like a good way to get my foot in the door,” Paquette said in an interview with Go Public from her home in Winnipeg.

Her fluent French and work experience made Paquette think that a banking job could be a good fit for her — until she started going through the questions in the online application.

“It said along the lines, ‘Please explain, like, your favourite tradition or your favourite story,'” Paquette said. “I was like, ‘Huh, that’s a little odd thing to be asking.’ … How is a traditional story going to help me excel in, like, the role of a bank teller?”

Paquette continued with the application, even though that question didn’t sit well with her. But she didn’t get very far after that.

“That was, like, the appetizer,” she explained.

The questions continued: “How would you describe your communication skills? TIP: Why don’t you show us instead?” the application read.

It went on to encourage Indigenous applicants to let their personality shine in a video cover letter and “to write a song, poem, dress in traditional regalia or bring in back-up dancers!” as part of the video submission.

“I was like, OK, that’s enough, that’s all I need to see,” Paquette said.

“I want you to prove to me how Indigenous you are,” she said. “That’s how I took it.”

Like many businesses across Canada, CIBC told Go Public that it is committed to taking steps to ensure its workforce reflects the communities where its employees live and work. But experts in the field of Indigenous recruitment strategy say the bank’s job application — and Christine’s experience — is a good opportunity for companies to learn better practices when pursuing diverse workplaces.

The sacredness of regalia

Paquette says that the question asking her to share her “favourite Indigenous tradition/story” brought up a wide range of emotions.

She says her grandmother went to a residential day school and was made to be ashamed of her heritage, so she didn’t pass down any traditions to her daughter, Christine’s mother — who in turn couldn’t teach Christine.

“How are you going to go on and ask me to share my favourite story or tradition when … settlers and, like, residential schools taught us that it’s not OK?” Paquette said. “To be asking Indigenous people to share their favourite story or their favourite part of their culture that they don’t even have access to anymore is really insensitive.”

Paquette also thought it wasn’t appropriate for CIBC to suggest that she dress in traditional clothing as part of the application.

Go Public showed the CIBC application to experts in Indigenous recruitment work.

Patricia Baxter is a member of Sheguiandah First Nation and a board member with Indigenous Works, a non-profit organization that promotes inclusion and engagement of Indigenous people in Canadian workplaces. The group consults with a wide variety of companies across the country, including McDonald’s, Bell Canada and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Baxter says that for a professional position within a financial institution, she doesn’t see the purpose of the question.

“What many Canadians don’t realize is that regalia isn’t just traditional clothing,” she said. “It’s a right to wear that clothing, and it’s a responsibility on how you use that clothing…. It’s very sacred and it’s attached to ceremony. So it’s not something you just put on.”

CIBC consults Indigenous group

Paquette says she was so upset by the questions that she decided to post her concerns to CIBC on Twitter.

She says she was surprised by the response. The bank said it has been working with a not-for-profit Indigenous organization, Our Children’s Medicine (OCM), and that the questions that offended Paquette had actually been designed in consultation with Indigenous community leaders and elders.

“The purpose of these questions is to help remove barriers that may exist as part of a traditional job application process by showcasing transferrable skills and potential, while giving Indigenous candidates the opportunity to share stories that are important to them,” CIBC said in a Twitter response to Paquette.

“We encourage candidates to simply say ‘prefer not to answer’ if they … don’t feel comfortable with any specific questions.”

After Paquette shared her thoughts on social media, the regalia reference was removed from the CIBC application.

Go Public contacted the bank to ask more about the thought process behind the questions.

“At CIBC we are committed to taking steps to ensure our workforce reflects the communities where we live and work and to removing barriers that may exist through traditional job application processes,” Trish Tervit, CIBC’S director of public affairs, wrote in an emailed statement.

Tervit said CIBC’s relationship with OCM has been instrumental in creating relationships with First Nations, Métis and Inuit job-seekers and that the bank has hired more than 70 Indigenous people through its Indigenous recruitment program.

What CIBC didn’t say is that OCM wrote the questions on the application.

Go Public contacted OCM. In a statement, the organization confirmed that the questions were created “in consultation with Indigenous elders, knowledge keepers and other members of the community.”

The statement, sent to Go Public from one of the group’s managers, Kelly Hashemi, said that OCM’s application process “is crafted to allow hiring managers to identify lived, cultural and transferable skills which get lost during a traditional ‘corporate’ application and interview process.”

OCM said it’s a registered charity in Toronto that works with employers to “implement our hiring process at their companies and create action plans to learn from, engage with and attract talent from the Indigenous community.”

‘A learning experience’

An expert who spoke to Go Public says the situation is an opportunity for all businesses in Canada — not just non-Indigenous groups — to learn something and to recognize that any organization can make a mistake.

“Just because you’re an Indigenous person, Indigenous organization or Indigenous company doesn’t mean you’ve got some magical perspective on everything,” said Kelly Lendsay, who is Cree and Métis, and president and CEO of Indigenous Works, based in Saskatoon.

Lendsay says recruiters should ask open-ended questions, such as, “Tell me something you’re proud of,” and then leave it up to applicants to bring up stories about their culture or experience if they choose.

“Someone might say, you know, ‘I’m really proud of the fact that I chair the food bank,'” Lendsay said. “Another person says, ‘I’m really proud of the fact that I’ve reconnected with my culture to learn powwow dancing. I’m a fancy dancer.'”

While he commends the efforts of CIBC and OCM to help Indigenous people enter the banking sector, Lendsay says there’s room to grow.

“They’re obviously making good efforts here. But we have to listen to this, to Christine, and take that feedback and make the changes,” Lendsay said. “We don’t want employers to be turned off by … these stories. Let’s use it as a learning experience.”

Strategy in action

More than a decade ago, Calgary-based organization ECO Canada consulted with Indigenous Works — then called the Aboriginal Human Resource Council — to create a concrete strategy to break down barriers faced by Indigenous people looking to enter the workforce, particularly in the environmental sector.

The organization launched a weeks-long program called BEAHR, available to Indigenous community members looking to learn new skills in order to boost their chances of finding employment in that field. More than 4,000 participants from over 250 Indigenous communities across Canada have graduated from the program since its inception, and it’s caught the attention of employers across the country looking to develop their own recruitment policies.

“It’s a very complex issue, and it’s an issue where cultural sensitivity is very important,” said Yogendra Chaudhry, ECO Canada’s vice-president of professional services. When it comes to job applications, Chaudhry says, the process should have a consistent set of questions for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups.

“If you design two separate sets of questions … then you’re not looking at the inclusion part,” he said. “You’re still working with two separate systems and then trying to integrate the workers.”

Chaudhry says his organization is focused on creating meaningful and long-term employment, rather than looking at plans to create a diverse workplace as one-off opportunities or PR strategies.

As for Paquette, she says she supports the idea of companies, like CIBC, investing in diversifying their workforce. But she says the only questions related to an applicant’s Indigeneity should be whether the person identifies as First Nations, Métis or Inuit. The rest, she says, should be left out of the hiring equation.

“I think it’s great to encourage Indigenous people to show off their culture and be who they are,” Paquette said.  “But to … ask them to do it just for you to land an interview, I don’t think that was appropriate at all.”

Source: Woman outraged CIBC job application suggests traditional regalia for video cover letter

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Watt: Elections Canada failed to guarantee access for Indigenous voters during the 2021 federal election

2022/03/15 Leave a comment

Not good:

You likely didn’t hear about it, as the issue hardly made a splash in the news: during our September federal election, 205,000 mail-in ballots were uncounted. This issue is especially troubling for its outsize impact on Indigenous communities, and stacks on other, similar failures.

There are 274 First Nations communities in Canada that lack access to an on-reserve polling station. This adds to the importance of accessible mail-in ballots. However, the relatively short writ period, combined with the pressing demands of a pandemic election, created a flurry of issues on this front.

Ridings in northern Ontario were especially problematic. In Kenora, election day arrived during multiple First Nations’ traditional hunting season, meaning a wide swath of those communities would be absent. To accommodate this, Elections Canada provided advance polling for fly-in communities to ensure access. But when election day arrived, there were no polling stations provided — and what’s more, multiple voters were issued voting cards with incorrect information.

It is straightforward enough to chalk this up to a failure of communication, but the entire episode speaks to systemic issues in the way Indigenous communities are engaged. First Nations, Métis and Inuit represent priority communities for Elections Canada’s work — and this failure to guarantee the most fundamental of civil rights is a direct affront to the spirit and process of reconciliation.

In the last year, Indigenous peoples have had to contend with the painful discovery of unmarked burials at former residential schools, a lengthy court dispute over Canada’s discriminatory child-welfare system, and persistent challenges accessing the necessary infrastructure so that drinking water advisories can be lifted.

Given our unambiguous failings in these areas, it’s worth pausing to consider the stakes of this past election, and the particular importance for every Canadian voter, including Indigenous people, to have their voices heard.

When Justin Trudeau’s government came to power in 2015, the new prime minister ensured that each incoming minister received notice in their mandate letters that “no relationship is more important to me and to Canada than the one with Indigenous peoples.”

But the Elections Canada failure demonstrates an important reality that Indigenous people contend with every day: political will and good intentions alone cannot uproot the problematic systems that define Canada’s relationship with Indigenous people.

We are lucky to live in a country where elections are managed independently — but given the widespread nature of oppression elsewhere in Canada, is it any surprise that independent bodies are marked by the same?

And while Parliament has no role in the day-to-day operations of Elections Canada, our political leadership bears accountability.

In October 2020, Stéphane Perrault, Canada’s chief electoral officer, provided a series of recommendations to Parliament that would strengthen Elections Canada’s ability to execute a fair, safe election. While these changes were considered in Bill C-19, it was abandoned before passage. Ultimately, calling the election was given higher priority than ensuring its fairness.

This issue is not a partisan one, nor is it a unique flaw of this current government. This case is emblematic of systemic racism and the failure to listen to Indigenous voices — from our political leadership, our bureaucracy, and yes, from Elections Canada.

No doubt, the political will for Indigenous reconciliation is strong, even if it may not always translate into effective action. But what needs to change at an equal pace is the way our machinery of government accounts for and engages with Indigenous people.

Elections Canada has vowed to conduct a review, but the problem is clear and has been known for some time. A 1991 Royal Commission explained that Indigenous communities cannot be engaged only once the writ has dropped. Rather, they need to be consulted on an ongoing basis.

Enfranchisement is the most fundamental of civil rights, and work needs to happen now to make certain that it is shared equally by all Canadians at the next election. For those championing reconciliation, this would be a good place to start.

Source: Elections Canada failed to guarantee access for Indigenous voters during the 2021 federal election

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Exploring the hidden history of Indigenous relations with Ukrainian settlers

2022/03/12 Leave a comment

Of interest:

Leah Hrycun has been wrestling with a mystery for much of her academic career. Hrycun’s Ukrainian grandmother used to tell her there were no Indigenous people in the part of Alberta where she grew up.

But Hrycun wondered why there were stories of First Nations and Métis families with grandfathers knowing some Ukrainian, and grandmothers passing down recipes for poppy seed cake.

To find the answer she devoted her research to uncovering these relationships and kinship connections — a hidden history often forgotten and sometimes erased.

“There’s a lot of stories about Indigenous folks reaching out to Ukrainian settlers to help them through their first winters, to guide them through the new lands,” said Hrycun, a researcher and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Alberta.

“On the other hand, I’ve also heard really heartbreaking stories about First Nations and Métis people who were shunned by their Ukrainian families.”

Over the last few weeks, Indigenous people have shown solidarity with Ukraine during the ongoing Russian invasion — which began with a full-on assault on Feb. 24 — by wearing “kookum scarves” and posting pictures online.

The scarves have come to symbolize the commonalities and cultural exchanges between the groups. Ukrainian settlers began flooding the Prairies in the late 19th century, not long after the numbered treaties were concluded.

These were the early days of the Indian Act when the racist law was at its most restrictive, assimilative and oppressive.

Ukrainian settlers
Ukrainian women cutting logs near Athabasca, Alta., in 1930. Photo: Library and Archives Canada

Hrycun told Nation to Nation Ukrainians also faced discrimination from the predominantly Anglo-Saxon community when they arrived.

“In the early days, they really sympathized with Indigenous folks because they shared a lot of the same struggles,” she said.

But as time went on — and particularly in the 1960s and 1970s during the growth of ideas about multiculturalism — the Ukrainian-Canadian population started to find its place among the country’s larger, white settler society.

“It was around that time that they really started to adopt the same mindset as the rest of settler Canada. They were part of that large group now of white settlers,” Hrycun explained.

“They often then reverted to othering Indigenous peoples, just as mainstream Canada had done.”

This adoption of the dominant colonial mentality eventually combined with a form of settler mythmaking common not just to Ukrainians but settlers across the globe. The result is displaced people displacing others.

That’s why her grandmother came to believe there were no Indigenous people in the region of Alberta where they lived — not because it was true, but because the truth had been manipulated over time.

“They created these myths and sort of benched the truth. Over the generations it got easier and easier to bend the truth,” said Hyrcun. “It was necessary for them to think that these lands were empty, to think that they were the first peoples on these lands, because otherwise you have to start considering that you are displacing people.

“And that concept, I think, for a lot of people is a very tough one to grapple with.”

Source: Exploring the hidden history of Indigenous relations with Ukrainian settlers

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