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Aboriginal and Inuit Non-Mining Issues

Regional chief wants First Nation seats in Canada’s parliament – by Rick Garrick (Wawatay News – September 13, 2012)

Northern Ontario’s First Nations Voice: http://wawataynews.ca/

Ontario Regional Chief Stan Beardy is calling on the Federal Electoral Boundaries Commission to consider guaranteed First Nations seats in Canada’s parliament, like the system in New Zealand.
 
“I see that the Ontario Federal Electoral Boundaries Commission is proposing 15 new ridings in southern Ontario,” Beardy said. “What I’d like to point out is that in some countries, like New Zealand, indigenous nations like the Maori have their own political parties because they are given some semblance of recognition in their country as original peoples. Maybe now would be the appropriate time to make sure that seats are guaranteed within jurisdictions of Ontario and Canada for First Nations people to make sure that the Aboriginal voice is heard.”
 
New Zealand’s 1867 Parliament set up four electorates specifically for Maori people. The Maori seats were increased in 1996 to five when New Zealand changed their election system from a first-past-the-post to a mixed member proportional representation system, and increased to seven seats in 2002.
 
“Maori have claimed that the Maori electoral option, by which Maori can elect to join the Maori electoral roll and vote for candidates in the Maori seats, are one of the few guarantees in (New Zealand)’s constitution that a distinct Maori voice will be heard in politics,” said Andrew Robb, press secretary in the office of Pita R Sharples,minister of Maori Affairs in New Zealand, in an e-mail reply.

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Solving problems takes more than just words [Ring of Fire and First Nations education] – by James Murray (Netnewsledger.com – September 13, 2012)

http://www.netnewsledger.com/

THUNDER BAY – Solving problems takes more than just words. It takes firm action and determination. Words are an important part of moving toward a solution. However often it seems that mere words are all that are produced when it comes to making positive moves forward for Canada’s Aboriginal people.

Speaking in Edmonton on September 11th, Minister of Aboriginal Affairs, John Duncan stated, “senior officials from my department have completed a series of six regional roundtables that brought together senior leaders from Canada’s Aboriginal communities, natural resources industries, and provincial, territorial and federal governments to identify and discuss obstacles to greater Aboriginal participation in major mining, oil and natural gas projects. At these regional roundtables, including one held in Calgary, participants shared best practices and developed solutions to help eliminate barriers to better economic and labour outcomes.

“Together we are making progress in creating the conditions for Aboriginal people to achieve the prosperity they seek and that Canada needs. But our work is not done.

“Together, let’s make sure more Aboriginal teens graduate from high school and move on to higher education and to programs that provide the skills they require for the jobs they need.

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NEWS RELEASE: Greenstone confirmed as Gateway to the Ring of Fire

(Greenstone, Sept. 12, 2012) “More and more it is becoming clear that the Municipality of Greenstone is emerging as the gateway to the Ring of Fire.” These words were used by Greenstone Mayor, Renald Beaulieu, while briefing Councillors on recent developments concerning the Municipality.

The first development is the Noront Resources (NR) announcement that their “base case” is predicated on transporting Ring of Fire ore using the proposed North-South Corridor (with a southern terminus in Greenstone’s Nakina ward. The second is that the Ontario Power Authority (OPA) is now considering an East of Lake Nipigon transmission corridor.

When commenting on NR’s decision to transport ore on the planned north-south road, the Mayor said, “For decades, Nakina was viewed as the end of the road, but increasingly it seems that Nakina, a proud part of Greenstone, will soon be seen as the start of the road.”

Adding greatly to the Mayor’s enthusiasm was the low key, yet pivotal, news that the Northwest Ontario First Nations Transmission Planning Committee (NOFNTPC) has been informed by the OPA that the OPA is now studying an East side of Lake Nipigon transmission line.

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Private property bill has First Nations fearing loss of reserve lands – by Shawn Bell (Wawatay News – August 29, 2012)

 Northern Ontario’s First Nations Voice: http://wawataynews.ca/

First Nations in northern Ontario fear the loss of their already limited reserve lands should new federal legislation allowing private property on reserves pass, says a Nishnawbe Aski Nation (NAN) deputy grand chief.
 
Les Louttit, who held the housing and infrastructure portfolio during the last executive council before being reelected, said there is a big risk that First Nations right across Canada would end up losing land should there be private property on reserve.
 
“There are pros and cons to the proposed legislation, but I think we know from experiences elsewhere that there is the risk of expropriation of those private lands into non-Aboriginal ownership,” Louttit said. “It would continue to erode the size of the community proper, the reserve lands,” he said. “There is that danger.”
 
On the positive side, Louttit said that private property would allow community members to use their land as collateral for getting a mortgage, which could help alleviate the huge backlog of homes needed in NAN communities.

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Private property on reserves: 5 myths – by Christopher Alcantara – (Toronto Star – August 19, 2012)

The Toronto Star has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on federal and Ontario politics as well as shaping public opinion.

There is a lot of buzz in the media and online about the federal government’s plan to pass legislation that would create private property rights on Canadian Indian reserves.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, much of this buzz has been negative, with commentators expressing fear and doubt about the merits of the proposal. Much of this apprehension, however, is based on misconceptions about what actually is being proposed.

The following are the top five myths about the proposed First Nations Property Ownership Act:

Myth 1: Indigenous peoples don’t need this legislation. The status quo is fine because doing business on-reserve is the same as doing business off-reserve.

In fact, doing business on-reserve is nothing like doing business off-reserve. The Indian Act imposes significant transaction costs on investors, discouraging them from investing on-reserve.

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Yesno elected NAN grand chief – by Carl Clutchey (Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal – August 16, 2012)

The Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal is the daily newspaper of Northwestern Ontario.

Nishnawbe Aski Nation’s new grand chief is well-versed in economic-development issues and well-known in provincial and aboriginal political circles.

Harvey Yesno squeaked out a victory on the third ballot Wednesday, defeating closest rival Terry Waboose by 22-21 in the secret-ballot vote. The term is for three years.

Yesno maintained a slight lead through the first two ballots over closest challengers Waboose and Mike Metatawabin, both outgoing deputy grand chiefs. Metatawabin was not on the third ballot.

Yesno is one of three new faces joining on the new NAN executive council. Alvin Fiddler of Muskrat Dam and Goyce Kakegamic of Keewaywin were elected as deputy grand chiefs. They’ll join Les Louttit of Fort Albany who was re-elected as a deputy grand chief.

The vote took place during NAN’s annual Keewaywin conference, held this year at Kashechewan First Nation on James Bay. About 300 people were in attendance, including voting delegates. The new executive council was sworn into office immediately. The conference continues today under the direction of the new executive council.

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Looking back 35 years to the creation of NAN’s declaration – by Joyce Hunter (Wawatay News – August 15, 2012)

Northern Ontario’s First Nations Voice: http://wawataynews.ca/

Before the creation of Nishnawbe Aski Nation there was not a lot of funding to go around, save for a few very small programs at the community level, recalled Eabameetong’s Harvey Yesno. “Our focus at the time was bringing basic services like policing, housing and electrification into our communities,” said Yesno.

Yesno had arrived onto the political stage in the late 1970s as a young chief after having served as his community’s economic development officer and band manager. By this time, many family groups had already moved off the land from their traditional trap lines and onto reserves. In those days, the reserves had very little infrastructure or even programs and services. Many communities did not have airports, social programming or reliable access to the outside world.

First Nations had recently been granted the right to vote in Canadian elections, and were only recently able to step off reserve lands to go hunting without permission from the minister of Indian Affairs. Children were still required by law to attend residential schools, and many were being taken from their communities and adopted into white families as per the federal government’s policy of assimilation.

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Private property, better lives [First Nations] – National Post Editorial (August 10, 2012)

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

The concept of fee-simple home ownership is so straightforward that most human beings – outside of North Korea and Cuba, at least – don’t even think of it as a “concept.” Yet it is the bedrock of our society’s wealth and economic stability.

Privately owned homes provide more than mere shelter. They provide a nest egg for retirement, and a source of mortgage credit for temporarily distressed families or seed capital for small business owners.

They also provide families with a bricks-and-mortar stake within a geographical community. This sense of ownership and belonging in turn leads to numerous sociological benefits. Academic studies show that, as compared with renters, homeowners move less frequently, have stronger social ties with their neighbours, participate more in elections, report higher lifesatisfaction, experience less crime, collect less welfare, and raise more stable, well-educated families.

If there is a community that cries out for all of these benefits, it is Canada’s native population, especially those living on poor, isolated reserves. Yet, perversely, these are the only communities in Canada where one is legally forbidden from owning a house and the land under it.

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First Nations want property rights, but on our own terms – by Jody Wilson-Raybould (Globe and Mail – August 10, 2012)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

Jody Wilson-Raybould is the Assembly of First Nations’ Regional Chief of British Columbia.

First Nations are in a period of nation-building or rebuilding, taking back control of our lives after years of colonial rule and being governed as wards of the state by Canada under the Indian Act. Our nations are considering how they govern themselves (their core institutions of government) and what they govern (their jurisdictions). Central to this discussion is determining an appropriate system of land tenure that reflects a particular nation’s culture and traditions while also supporting the development of an economy.

This necessarily includes a conversation about what types of legal interests in land can be created, who can hold them and how they are recorded. Every nation that has gone through the process of moving beyond the Indian Act has undertaken this work – work required to translate hard-fought-for aboriginal rights into practical and real change on the ground in each of our communities.

As a result of our nations’ governance-rebuilding work, there are already many different types of land-tenure systems on First Nation lands; systems that support property rights and, to use the language of economist Hernando de Soto, “unlock the capital” of First Nation lands.

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Feather dust-up highlights Enbridge’s culture clash with first nations – by Nathan Vanderklippe (Globe and Mail – August 8, 2012)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

CALGARY — The official with Enbridge Inc.’s Northern Gateway pipeline walked into the Island Gospel Fellowship Church in Burns Lake, B.C., and got a face full of tiny feathers.

It was, the company understood, an act of hostility by the local Wet’suwet’en nation – perhaps even a death threat on a day of federal review hearings into the $6-billion twin-pipeline proposal. “These feathers covered the hair and clothing of the Northern Gateway representative targeted by this feathering incident,” Enbridge reported in a document filed with the National Energy Board. A member of the Wet’suwet’en then explained that local traditional laws against trespassers were “strictly enforced” and “punishable by death,” Enbridge wrote.

There is, according to the Wet’suwet’en, one problem with the account of that January day: The eagle down blown by an elder over both Enbridge and members of the federal joint review panel wasn’t a declaration of hostility. It was a declaration of peace – and the misunderstanding, they say, is the latest sign of the gulf that separates Enbridge from the first nations whose support it is seeking for Gateway, which would carry Alberta crude to the Pacific.

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Ontario Minister Kathleen Wynne visits Grassy Narrows – by Rick Garrick (Wawatay News – July 31, 2012)

Northern Ontario’s First Nations Voice: http://wawataynews.ca/

In response to last month’s 2,000 kilometre walk by Grassy Narrows youth, Aboriginal Affairs Minister Kathleen Wynne is visiting Grassy Narrows to hear the community’s concerns over mercury poisoning.
 
“Because of the River Run rally, she made a promise to the youth that she would come to visit Grassy Narrows,” said Grassy Narrows Chief Simon Fobister. “And she has lived up to that promise.” Wynne, along with representatives of Ontario’s ministry of health and ministry of environment, arrived in Grassy Narrows on July 31.
 
She will be involved in a community meeting and a meeting with the community’s leadership during the day. A group of Grassy Narrows youth held the River Run March and Rally on June 8 in Toronto after walking about 2,000 kilometres from their Treaty #3 community in northwestern Ontario.
 
The youth held their walk and River Run to raise awareness of the chemical dumping and mercury poisoning that has affected their community as well as neighbouring Treaty #3 communities of Wabaseemoong (Whitedog) and Wabauskang. The Dryden paper mill dumped about 10 tonnes of mercury into the Wabigoon River about 50 years ago, resulting in long-term impacts to the environment and the health of community members.

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Aboriginal students graduating from post-secondary schools in record numbers – by Michael V’Inkin Lee and Christopher Reynolds (Vancouver Sun – July 15, 2012)

The Vancouver Sun, a broadsheet daily paper first published in 1912, has the largest circulation in the province of British Columbia.

First nations students are attending — and graduating from — post-secondary schools and professional programs like law and medicine in record numbers

Mary Brearly had no idea as a little girl that she would grow up to be an underground miner. “I didn’t know that I could do that, I guess. Nobody had told me,” said the first nations Thompson Rivers University graduate, who earned her processing operations qualifications through the B.C. Aboriginal Mine Training Association in Kamloops last year.
 
Brearly, 27, is part of what the B.C. Ministry of Advanced Education says has been a 25-per-cent surge in post-secondary enrolment among aboriginal youth over the last four years. Statistics from some colleges and universities in B.C. also show that more aboriginal students are completing certificate and degree programs in a broader range of fields.
 
“Ensuring that aboriginal learners have access to post-secondary education and training is essential to fulfilling our labour needs,” said Naomi Yamamoto, the minister of advanced education.

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Support for Ring of Fire Moratorium – AFN Annual General Assembly – Draft Resolution #16/2012

(L to R: Angus Toulouse, former AFN Regional Chief for Ontario; Sonny Gagnon, Chief of Aroland First Nation; Peter Moonias, Chief of Neskantaga First Nation (Lansdowne House); Shawn Atleo, Chief of the Assembly of First Nations (November 2011/Photo supplied by Matawa First Nations Tribal Council)

AFN Annual General Assembly, July 17 – 19, 2012, Toronto, Ontario/ Draft Resolution #16/2012

TITLE: Support for Ring of Fire Moratorium

SUBJECT: Free, Prior and Informed Consent; Treaty

MOVED BY: Chief Peter Moonias, Neskantaga First Nation, ON

SECONDED BY: Chief Sonny Gagnon Aroland First Nation, ON

WHEREAS:

A. Article 32 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples states that “1. Indigenous peoples have the right to determine and develop priorities and strategies for the development or use of their lands or territories and other resources; 2. States shall consult and cooperate in good faith with the indigenous peoples concerned through their own representative institutions in order to obtain their free and informed consent prior to the approval of any project affecting their lands or territories and other resources, particularly in connection with the development, utilization or exploitation of mineral, water or other resources; 3. States shall provide effective mechanisms for just and fair redress for any such activities, and appropriate measures shall be taken to mitigate adverse environmental, economic, social, cultural or spiritual impact”.

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Atleo to press private sector on respect for aboriginal treaty rights – by Tamara Baluja (Globe and Mail – July 20, 2012)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

 Following the lead of many chiefs who demanded the AFN take a more assertive role,
the AFN passed a resolution calling for the eviction of mining companies in Northern
Ontario’s Ring of Fire.”We’re being bullied by a giant mining company and a
desperate province,” Chris Moonias, a band councillor from the Neskantaga First
Nation, told the assembled chiefs.

With natives feeling ignored on key treaty rights, Shawn Atleo, the newly re-elected Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, says the advocacy organization will take the conversation directly to businesses on resource development. At the same time, he didn’t rule out delaying key projects like the Northern Gateway pipeline.

“The chiefs are standing together and saying if you do not deal with the recognition of our title rights, it will not result in more efficient development,” he said the day after he was re-elected to a three-year term as national chief of Canada’s largest aboriginal organization.

With billions of dollars at stake in projects like the Northern Gateway pipeline and mines in Northern Ontario, Canadian business leaders have urged politicians to give aboriginal communities a larger role in the development of Canada’s energy industry.

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Atleo must use mandate [resource development] – Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal Editorial (July 20, 2012)

The Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal is the daily newspaper of Northwestern Ontario.

IT turns out that claims of a close race putting Shawn Atleo in danger of defeat were off the mark. But while the incumbent is back in charge of the Assembly of First Nations with a comfortable majority and a renewed mandate, his challenge is greater than ever. Challenges, really, for there are two.

First, he must quell those voices among First Nations who claim Atleo is too tight with Ottawa. Healthy consultation will achieve more than still more confrontation which now wearies many Canadians.

Atleo’s second obstacle is cobbling together something resembling a united front among an assembly of traditionally but notoriously independent members in order to convince them and the other levels of government to build a model of success around a new natural resources boom.

For the first time ever there exists a path for First Nations to lift themselves out of the poverty and dependence that for most is the norm. The exceptions have been those whose leaders used opportunity to their advantage. Whether it was building a local economy around business or the proximity of forests, oil, gas or minerals, there are a relative few First Nations who got out of the old traps and built a new life for their people.

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