Aboriginal and Inuit Non-Mining Issues

http://nationalpost.com/

It is a common refrain: for heaven’s sake, move on. A few moments’ thought ought
to reveal how simplistic it is. You can’t steal a generation of children from their
parents and expect the effects to wear off in half a century. But what the hell:
in keeping with Canada 150’s allergy to history, let’s focus on the present.

Trudeau’s Liberals talked an awfully big game about getting to work on it. Its
bite has already proven weaker than its bark. Trudeau promised to eliminate
boil-water advisories on First Nations reserves within five years. That won’t
even come close to happening.

The government is spending hundreds of millions of dollars fighting a human
rights tribunal order to fund First Nations child services equitably; in
opposition, the Liberals would have screamed bloody murder about that.

On Wednesday evening, indigenous protesters marched on to Parliament Hill and, after some back and forth with the local constabulary, erected a large white tepee. The group’s leaders told reporters they intended to “reoccupy” “unceded Algonquin territory,” and remind Canadians that “reconciliation” with the people who were here before them lies far down a bumpy road.

If nothing else, it was a welcome moment of coherence: big white tepee, Parliament Hill, three days before Canada Day — no one is going to wonder what that’s about. By contrast, I’m not sure what “Canada 150,” the officially branded and hash-tagged celebration of this country’s existence, is supposed to be.

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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/

A Globe review shows water treatment plants are failing on reserves across Canada. For every system the government fixes, plenty remain in a shambolic state

Several days each week last fall, water trucks left Sudbury and drove 130 kilometres west to the Serpent River First Nation, a reserve on Lake Huron’s north shore. There, they emptied about 18,000 litres into a reservoir to supplement the community’s water treatment plant. John Owl, the plant operator, said it ran 24 hours a day and still could not provide enough water to meet the needs of the reserve’s 350 inhabitants. Not that they could drink it – it is subject to a drinking water advisory.

A snowstorm in December shut the Trans-Canada Highway, blocking the water shipments. A pipe ruptured in the crawlspace of an abandoned home, draining about four truckloads of water. And as temperatures dropped, the plant’s output fell. “As the water gets colder, it gets denser and it’s harder to push through the filters,” Mr. Owl explained.

Serpent River’s woes resemble those of the 90 other Canadian reserves under drinking-water advisories. But there is a cruel twist: This water treatment plant is barely a year old.

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http://news.nationalpost.com/

OTTAWA — Under fire from his political opponents for not doing enough for the welfare of aboriginal children, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was indignant in reply.

“The fact of the matter is that no government has done more to repair the relationship with indigenous Canadians than this one, with $8.4 billion over the next five years in building infrastructure, supporting young people, and supporting indigenous communities,” Trudeau told the House of Commons Tuesday.

And yet, a growing number of indigenous leaders are coming to the conclusion that such lofty rhetoric is sounding increasingly hollow, that it does not match the record of the Trudeau government’s first year in office.

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http://www.nationalnewswatch.com/

OTTAWA — At night, he would arrive in Corey’s room by crawling through the window next to the bunk bed where she slept. She knew from the smell when he was there. By day, she endured different hands, sometimes under the most mundane circumstances — once, she recalls, while in the kitchen eating lunch. He pulled down her underwear and started fondling her. He left money on the table.

They were family members, these two predators — their unwanted touch impossible to escape for a young girl living on a remote First Nation in British Columbia.

That isolation, a fact of life for many Aboriginal Peoples, is a pernicious barrier to the essential goal of exposing the scourge of indigenous sexual abuse and incest, says Perry Bellegarde, the national chief of the Assembly of First Nations.

Bellegarde is pleading with chiefs to confront the problem head-on.

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https://www.thestar.com/

For the past seven days, nearly 230 households in a remote northwestern Ontario community have gone without clean drinking water and proper sewage. There are four ruptures in the main line that delivers water from a treatment facility to houses in North Caribou (Weagamow) Lake First Nation, said Chief Dinah Kanate. North Caribou is a 45-minute flight north from Sioux Lookout.

North Caribou’s water treatment staff have been working around the clock to try to fix the situation. They need to keep water moving through the line for fear of contamination, said Kanate, but she fears the water is unfit for use. Residents are using the water to wash clothes and bathe in. Samples were taken and flown out to health authorities on Sunday.

“If the pressure is lost, the water will become contaminated,” said Kanate. “What we have now is young children and adults have rashes. Eczema is flaring. People are complaining of stomach pains. Some kids were jumping in the showers and they are coming out with sores.”

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http://thestarphoenix.com/

We witnessed the unseemly sight this week of Parliament voting unanimously to force Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada to obey an order by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. It was a low point in the administration of the First Nations file, but it also was very revealing of a federal department that considers it a law unto itself.

On the same day media reported that INAC had lapsed more than $900 million that had been allocated to be spent on First Nations.

The motion, moved by New Democrat MP Charlie Angus, called on the Liberal government to comply with all the orders made by the human rights tribunal, which had ruled that Ottawa was practising racial discrimination by underfunding child welfare programs. The motion also ordered INAC to “immediately invest” $155 million in child welfare and develop a financial plan for future years.

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https://www.thestar.com/

The young generations of Grassy Narrows and another nearby First Nation community have a “surprisingly” high rate of mercury poisoning symptoms, according to leading Japanese researchers.

The research team, which examined dozens of people of all ages in both communities during a 2014 trip, found that nearly all those tested had sensory disturbance — a telltale sign of mercury poisoning that includes a loss of sensation in the hands or feet and around the mouth. That rate is “extremely high,” according to a report released by the researchers Tuesday.

“This is a new finding,” Dr. Masanori Hanada told the Star through a translator. “I think Canadian doctors and Canadian officials should start looking at (this issue).” His team is a world leader in the study of mercury poisoning.

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The following is an edited excerpt of a talk given by John Fraser at an exhibition of Charles Pachter’s paintings at the historic London Charterhouse, the only extant building left in London where Queen Elizabeth I held court, on Aug. 18.

In the beginning, in Canada, there was just the aboriginal population. Then the French came at the start of the 17th century and, in the name of the king of France, set up trading relations with the aboriginal people, who, soon enough, turned into three main groups: the ones we now call First Nations, the Inuit in the Far North and the Metis — or people of mixed race — all along the trading routes.

The French developed a variety of informal treaties, or trading understandings, with the aboriginal population. Then the British came in the name of their king and defeated the French in 1759. That produced some revamped loyalties with the First Nations, as well as a whole new set of trading treaties. This time, however, there were royal proclamations, endorsed and passed by the British Parliament, many of which still stand as law in Canada.

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