The Nathan Phillips thing just gets better and better.
🚨Nathan Phillips, January 3, 2018🚨
"I'm a Vietnam Vet. I served in Marine Corps 72 to 76. I got discharged May 5, 1976. I got honorable discharge and one of the boxes shows peacetime or, what my box says is that I was **in theater**. I don't talk much about my Vietnam times." pic.twitter.com/nIoYxGoPqM
— Phil Kerpen (@kerpen) January 24, 2019
https://twitter.com/DannyCalidonia/status/1051895241664618497
Update: The Cherokee Nation to Elizabeth Warren…
Panderstein’s Monster returns to confront him.
“The original plan was eight people around the table or so, representing all the different regions, bringing forward concerns … and the first section took 45 minutes, and every single person spoke around the table,” Trudeau is heard saying in the video.
“That’s not fair. That’s not fair. That’s not the way … I’m really, really upset with this. It wasn’t for me to interrupt previous speakers, but (FSIN Chief) Bobby (Cameron), there shouldn’t have been every single person speaking for eight minutes.
“That is not the spirit of reconciliation, of the nation-to-nation relationship we’re supposed to have,” Trudeau added, noting that his “absolute time cap” was 9:05 a.m. Around 9:45 a.m. on Wednesday he addressed the party’s caucus meeting.
Ha ha ha ha ha…
We are all Zimbabwe now.
The name of Vancouver’s Stanley Park may be up for debate as the city’s park board confronts its colonial past and pursues reconciliation.
Kamloops-area indigenous activist Kanahus Manuel is from the local Neskonlith First Nation. Over the past couple of years, she has become the figurehead of a Greenpeace-driven activist campaign called Tiny House Warriors. Tiny House Warriors uses extremist language to fan intolerance over “settlers” and the pipeline, gaining publicity as it deploys small structures it calls “tiny houses” on the right of way of the pipeline expansion.
A “suspected Indian status scam”.
When Louis Côté became suspicious of a Toronto-based laboratory that tests people’s DNA to determine their ancestry, he decided to try an experiment by submitting a sample from his girlfriend’s dog for analysis.
According to the results, Côté shares more than a friendship with Snoopy the chihuahua; they share the exact same Indigenous ancestry.
“I thought it was a joke,” Côté said. “The company is fooling people … the tests are no good.”
As opposed to the one run out of Ottawa.
MMIW commissioners slam decision to grant shortened extension
The national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls is getting an additional six months to complete its work. […]
Department officials said they will work with the inquiry to determine the budget. The Liberal government had initially earmarked $53.8 million and two years for the inquiry to complete its work.
They need more money to come to their predetermined conclusions.
“A left-wing lobby group in San Francisco wired $55,000 to the bank account of an Indian chief in Northern Alberta, paying him to oppose the oilsands.”
h/t raid
Even the gods tried to warn them.
(h/t Glenardo)
Louie’s experience is indicative of a widening rift between Indigenous communities and activists over natural resources, particularly in British Columbia, the focal point of major green campaigns generously funded by U.S. interests to thwart oil and gas exports.
The campaigns consistently portray a united Indigenous anti-development front and allies of the green movement, but some Indigenous leaders are becoming alarmed that they could be permanently frozen out of the mainstream economy if resource projects don’t go ahead.
They said in interviews they’ve had enough of activists invading their lands, misleading them about their agendas, recruiting token members to front their causes, sowing mistrust and conflict, and using hard-line tactics against those who don’t agree.
“The best way to describe it is eco-colonialism,” said Ken Brown, a former chief of the Klahoose First Nation in southwestern B.C. “You are seeing a very pervasive awakening among these First Nations leaders about what is going on in the environmental community.”
Lay down with liars, you’re gonna get lied to.
The former Liberal candidate appointed by Indigenous-Crown Relations Minister Carolyn Bennett to conduct consultations on First Nation child welfare issues was given a $437,000 contract to do eight months of work, according to internal documents.
Bennett appointed Cynthia Wesley-Esquimaux, chair of truth and reconciliation at Lakehead University, as her special representative on child welfare in August 2016. The appointment, which ended on March 31, was made following the January 2016 ruling from the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal which found Ottawa discriminated against First Nation children by under-funding child welfare services on-reserve.
Wesley-Esquimaux, who ran for the Liberals in 2011, was required to conduct consultations on child welfare, act as a mediator and conduct media interviews and produce a report on the issue, according to the contract obtained by NDP MP Charlie Angus.
Emphasis mine.
The First Nations Financial Transparency Act is simple: It requires First Nations to publish salaries and expenses for chief and council as well as basic financial documents online — the kind of information the rest of us can get with a Google search. The overwhelming majority of First Nations follow the law, but Onion Lake is one of six bands that have never complied. The previous Conservative government withheld non-essential funding from those bands, but the new Liberal government suspended all enforcement.
Charmaine’s victory enforces the legislation and for her it’s a very personal victory. The stay-at-home mom went on a 13-day hunger strike to demand accountability from her leaders during the summer of 2014. They told her she’d never get anywhere. She now has judicial validation.
The most fascinating parts of this ruling are the arguments Onion Lake left out. Rather than contesting matters of fact, Onion Lake asked the court to stay Charmaine’s application until other court proceedings conclude. Justice B.A. Barrington-Foote rejected the stay application.
Where every culture is equal, except your own;
Indigenous advocates from around the world are calling on a UN committee to make appropriating Indigenous cultures illegal — and to do it quickly.
Delegates from 189 countries, including Canada, are in Geneva this week as part of a specialized international committee within the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a United Nations agency.
Since it began in 2001, the committee has been working on creating and finishing three pieces of international law that would expand intellectual-property regulations to protect things like Indigenous designs, dances, words and traditional medicines.
h/t A Deplorable Sewer Rat
Who among us doesn't have a $14000 TV ? pic.twitter.com/BxSmIs4BU3
— Norman Spector (@nspector4) March 25, 2017
h/t Dan T.
Saskatchewan First Nations shocked by municipalities’ self-defence resolution.
A man who was removed as chief of The Key First Nation following a six-month conditional sentence for drug trafficking is back in jail awaiting a bail hearing on new charges.
Clarence Papequash, 64, is now a band councillor. Prior to his political career, he worked as a drug councillor.
But in 2014 he was convicted in a sting in which RCMP were cracking down on dealers who fueled a wide-spread opiate problem in the Kamsack, SK area, as revealed by APTN Investigates
Papequash sold a morphine pill to an undercover officer.
Five months later his community voted him back onto council.
Wait, it gets better.
Health Canada has pulled the plug on a methadone doctor who APTN Investigates exposed last year.
Dr. Murray Davies ran the methadone program in Kamsack, Saskatchewan, located on the SK/MB border, 80 kilometres north of Yorkton. In April 2013, APTN Investigates’ episode Questionable Pharma featured Aboriginal patients who claimed they were over-prescribed opiates and once hooked, were shuttled into the same doctor’s methadone program.
Great investigative work by APTN. (Via John Gormley Live)
De Beers is shelving immediate plans to study an expansion project at a remote northern Ontario diamond mine after failing to get support from a neighbouring aboriginal community, a “disappointing” setback for the world’s top diamond producer, the mine’s manager said.
While most First Nations continue to comply with Stephen Harper’s controversial financial transparency law, a National Post analysis has found the compliance rate sharply dropped after Justin Trudeau’s government dropped a key enforcement mechanism.
As a result of the Trudeau government’s rule change, some bureaucrats are worried they won’t be able to properly account for and administer the billions of dollars transferred each year to the country’s First Nations.
Moreover, the Post has learned that the drop in the compliance rate to 85 per cent this year from 92 per cent in Harper’s last year may be the fault of the federal government itself which, in some instances at least, may have failed to live up to its obligations under the First Nations Financial Transparency Act (FNFTA).
What's that thing following behind the Indigenous youth walker? Please, @CBCSask — check into this and report back. https://t.co/lnpLgvHZCa
— Katewerk (@katewerk) December 28, 2016
When you surround a vehicle, you’re not peaceful — Dakota Access Pipeline worker truck surrounded by protesters, pulls gun and starts driving (h/t Josh)
(This is related, in its own special way.)