Category: Chief Big Screen TV

The Broken Record

You could erase the dates in this article and aside from the monetary amounts there would be no way to tell whether it was written today or 5, 10, 20 or 50 years ago. No half-awake thinker need be perpetually stumped as to why an economic system premised on the Soviet model doesn’t suddenly produce great outcomes. Note to Canada’s developers of aboriginal policy: stop banging your head against the wall.

“Time after time, whether in housing, policing, safe drinking water or other critical areas, our audits of federal programs to support Canada’s Indigenous Peoples reveal a distressing and persistent pattern of failure,” Hogan said at a press conference Tuesday.

“The lack of progress clearly demonstrates that the government’s passive, siloed approach is ineffective, and, in fact, contradicts the spirit of true reconciliation.”

It’s the fourth time since 2003 that the auditor general has held the government responsible for unsafe and unsuitable First Nations housing.

The Libranos: Just Another Day In Bananada

Blacklocks (paywalled)MPs yesterday summoned Defence Minister Bill Blair for questioning on how an employee became a millionaire while moonlighting as an Indigenous contractor. Members of the Commons government operations committee gave Blair until month’s end to appear for cross-examination: “It is wrong.”

Related: Video

Kristian Firth of GC Strategies admits in committee to meeting various government officials outside of a work setting – allegations that he previously denied.

Conservative Michael Barrett: That sir, and you can check with your lawyer or with a dictionary, is a lie. It’s perjury.

The Libranos: ArriveScam

@RealAndyLeeShow;

It is right on his LinkedIn that ArriveCAN contractor David Yeo, President of Dalian, works for the Department of National Defence. He has worked for the DND for *37* years – since 1987.

They just figured out he’s a federal employee that also won massive contracts? For real?

To complete the trifecta of corruption, enter Chief Big Screen TV.

The Globe and Mail first reported that the company presents itself as Indigenous-owned and together with another company, Coradix, worked on the ArriveCan app. According to the Globe, the two companies are in receipt of $400 million in government contracts.

Indigenous Services Minister Patty Hajdu yesterday announced a review of how it awards contracts to Indigenous-owned businesses. The government’s policy is that five percent of the total value of government contracts go to Indigenous businesses by 2024.

Missing And Misappropriated Aboriginal Money?

If your reserve was sitting on substantial oil and gas deposits you’d have to have pretty lousy management to lose track of $120 million, but accountability is probably an outdated artifact of the colonial mindset anyway.

Public financial reports for Frog Lake First Nation show the band is short $120 million in net assets over a five-year time period between 2013 and 2018.

The records show the band-owned business called Frog Lake Energy Resources has been losing millions of dollars since 2015.

APTN reached out the current Chief Greg Desjarlais and initially agreed to an interview but later cancelled.

In a virtual meeting with community members he says that an audit is unnecessary.

Grave Error

At the Western Standard;

Having lived at two residential schools when he was a university student in the mid-sixties, Clifton is Canada’s senior statesman about indigenous affairs.

He and Professor Rouillard take us from ground-zero at KIRS two and a half years ago, when the suggestion of burials had some mandarins, journalists and pundits convinced that it was a mass grave containing pupils from the school.

This revelation initiated a spiral of false claims which shook the world and caused moral panic among Canadians the likes of which has not been seen since the last world war.

And yet there is no evidence to substantiate the allegations that otherwise benign people, priests, nuns, teachers and staff at residential schools across Canada had a hand in malfeasance.

In fact, in every chapter, Grave Error puts the boots to false allegations. The handful of exhumations that have taken place — mind you, not at KIRS — have given up not so much as a missing shoelace.

I, Pocohontas

Canadians are so racist people pretend to be Indians.

A Canadian news documentary airing at the end of the week focuses on the Native identity claims of one of the most celebrated performers in entertainment history.

Titled “Making an Icon,” the description for the upcoming episode of The Fifth Estate on CBC News does not mention the name of the subject. But multiple Native people who took part in the documentary process told Indianz.Com that it’s about Buffy Sainte-Marie, whose decades-long career in music, television and education rests on her claim of being Cree from the Piapot Cree Nation, one of the First Nations in the province of Saskatchewan.

“An icon’s claims to Indigenous ancestry are being called into question by family members and an investigation that included genealogical documentation, historical research and personal accounts,” the description for the October 27 episode reads.

The documentary comes at a defining time for a performer whose life has been filled with groundbreaking moments. On August 3, Sainte-Marie, who turned 82 earlier this year, surprised her followers by declaring her “retirement from live performance. The announcement cited “travel-induced health concerns and performance-inhibiting physical challenges” facing the aging musician. […]

But the Native people who participated in CBC’s documentary process believe Sainte-Marie’s decision to step away from the spotlight is directly connected to the questions about her First Nations identity. According to the sources, work on the hour-long episode began more than a year ago and it grew to include interviews with individuals in the United States, where the performer was raised following claims to have been born in Canada and adopted out of Piapot.

Due to the lengthy production time associated with the CBC project, Sainte-Marie would have been well aware of the nature of the documentary — especially of its potential to unravel a career that began in the 1960s, the people said. The award-winning singer and songwriter has largely remained silent about her retirement decision, with no significant interviews appearing in mainstream media since her announcement more than two months ago.

Truth And Reconciliation

Normally, I oppose the prosecution of decades old “historical” sex offense charges as fundamentally unfair to the accused. But given the current culture of truth and “reconciliation”…

A First Nations leader and reconciliation spokesman in Saskatchewan has been accused of sex crimes dating back two decades.

Theodore (Ted) Quewezance, a residential school survivor and former chief of Keeseekoose First Nation, was scheduled to appear in Kamsack provincial court Tuesday charged with four historical sex offences.

Keeseekoose is a Saulteaux community in southeastern Saskatchewan, located about 20 km north of Kamsack.

Court documents obtained by APTN News show Quewezance is charged with single counts of sexual assault, touching a young person under the age of 16 for a sexual purpose, counselling a person under 16 to touch for a sexual purpose, and being in a position of trust while counselling a person under 16 years to touch for a sexual purpose.

The documents show the alleged offences involve a male victim who was a minor on Keeseekoose First Nation between September 1997 and September 2004.

h/t Kelly, who adds – The person in question also ran as a federal Liberal candidate in Yorkton-Melville

Shovels 1 – Knowledge Keepers 0

Jonathan Kay delivers the grim news.

A group called Mohawk Mothers has been seeking to delay/block McGill U’s “New Vic” project in Montreal—based on claims of secret burials & unmarked Indigenous graves on the site. Today, @mcgillu’s provost reported that no graves were found, including in areas identified by GPR. (no word yet on whether McGill’s leadership team will be indicted on charges of “denialism”)

The determined Mothers aren’t about to let colonialist concepts like “facts” stop them.

Canada’s Hateful Indigenous Blood Libel

Those who think such repugnant myths would never gain traction in a civilized multi-cultural country like Canada should think again because we have our very own version of the Jewish blood libel, supported by numerous Protocols look-alikes such as the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, namely an indigenous blood libel grounded in the belief that the Canadian nation-state, aided and abetted by the Roman Catholic Church, have been trying to exterminate the aboriginal people of our country from early contact in the 16th century to the present day.

The goal of this sentiment is to fuel hatred against the Catholic Church and the country of Canada, paralleling the 2004 US Department of State’s “Report on Global Anti-Semitism” (2004) that “The clear purpose of the [Protocols is] to incite hatred of Jews and of Israel.”

But the indigenous genocide blood libel — that countless children were murdered Nazi-style in Indian Residential Schools as part of a plot to wipe out all aboriginals— did not begin with stories by unnamed and unknown indigenous knowledge keepers, as most people assume.

Although many indigenous actors have been involved in this tangled web of deceit, what was originally a blood libel against Jewish people was re-jigged by a white man, a defrocked United Church of Canada minister named Kevin Arnett. And its strongest promotion since then has been at the hands of an NDP member of the House of Commons…

Read it all, pass it along.

The Libranos: Entitled To Her Entitlements

National Post;

The Governor General’s four-day visit to Iceland last fall racked up over $71,000 in limousine costs, according to receipts from the trip.

Obtained via access to information requests by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, expense reports from Gov. Gen. Mary Simon’s October 2022 working visit to Iceland list five separate line items for Icelimo Luxury Travel, a limousine and transportation firm based outside of Reykjavík. […]

“You know the feds spared no expense when the Governor General could have bought a brand new BMW, drove it around the island and then left it outside the airport with the keys inside and still saved money,” Terrazzano said.

“It seems like Simon and her band of bureaucrats go out of their way to spend as much money as possible.”

The Governor General and her entourage were in Iceland to attend last year’s Arctic Circle Assembly — described by Rideau Hall as a means to “…demonstrate Canadian leadership in the Arctic, and reinforce other priority issues for Canada in the north, including climate change, reconciliation, gender equality and youth engagement.”

According to official programs, also obtained via the access to information request, the entirety of the four-day visit took place within Reykjavik — a city of 130,000 people about a quarter of the size of Calgary.

Evading the obvious

As anyone who has watched the TV series The Curse of Oak Island knows, ground penetrating radar isn’t quite the equivalent of Superman’s X-Ray vision. But according to journalists at APTN, the problem does not lie with the limitations of the technology, but rather with some dastardly people seizing on these limitations to disrupt a narrative.

Indigenous communities searching for unmarked graves with ground-penetrating radar have encountered a rising number of individuals questioning, or outright denying, that children disappeared or died in residential schools, says a new report from an independent special interlocutor.

… First Nations that have detected possible unmarked graves are exploring the possible options. Many communities are hoping to avoid disturbing the sites even more.

Upon discovery of a possible crime scene, wouldn’t the first priority be to have forensic investigators exhume and examine the remains? Apparently not, since that would “undermine” things. Far better to obscure the issue with a rambling discussion about actual versus potential:

“It’s also really dangerous because we do know how to distinguish a rock from a potential grave. But sometimes when denialists get a hold of some of these narratives, they use that to undermine.”

Turf wars

When I first saw the headline, I made a pretty good guess as to where this was going: someone sees a need to stifle the competition. In this case, the competition’s approach to gambling is alleged to be bad because it doesn’t take as much physical effort as ours. That’s quite a feat to apply the Marxist labor theory of value to gaming.

The Mississaugas of Scugog Island First Nation own the Great Blue Heron Casino.

When asked why she feels so strongly against online gambling advertisements considering the casino, LaRocca said, “You have to make an effort to get up and visit a land based (casino) facility.

Big Chief Spending Money

National Post;

After a statue of Queen Elizabeth was defaced, one would hope that at least the Crown’s representative in Canada would denounce the vandalism.

Such hopes were dashed when Governor General Mary Simon addressed the issue this week and seemed to actively encourage such criminality.

She not only refused to condemn the act, “I can’t say whether it’s right or wrong,” but condoned it, “I think it’s really important for Indigenous people to express themselves in whichever form they want.”

As the first Indigenous person to hold the title of governor general, Simon obviously knows she has a role to play in reconciliation. And, indeed, as an Indigenous person and the Crown’s representative, she has a foot in both camps and is ideally suited as a mediator.

But to endorse the vandalism of a statue of Queen Elizabeth will not put us any further along the path to reconciliation. If she wishes to be an outspoken advocate for Indigenous people, she might want to reconsider the job she’s in.

She’s not indecisive about the Queen’s currency.

We Are All Treaty People

With work-from-home laptops and fat federal pensions;

In 2015, the Public Accounts showed that the department of Indian Affairs and the department of Health Services for First Nations and Inuit together cost $10.3 billion.

In 2017, the federal government reorganized these services and created two new departments, Crown-Indigenous Relations and Indigenous Services. The total spending on these two departments last year amounted to $23.3 billion. […]

Conservative MP Gary Vidal (Desnethé-Missinippi, SK) calculated the number of federal employees working on indigenous matters grew from 4,500 to “about 9,200 for the coming fiscal year” with little evidence that federal services were twice as effective.

No one knows why conditions aren’t improving.

Some of the benefits of working here are the cultural supports that are provided by places like the Kumik Elders Lodge where we get to have traditional knowledge brought back into here. It’s a place I can kind of go and decompress. It’s also the benefit of being able to contribute my voice to things like the Indigenous Advisory Circle that I sit on for the Communications Branch, so there are opportunities to bring traditional knowledge from myself and my own voice too, into the department. There’s never the same day twice, and I get to spread my wings on lots of different kinds of projects. Like this.

Burying evidence

As Rodney Clifton points out, the residential school grave controversy has morphed from an investigation of the actual extent of an alleged crime into a well-funded exercise in browbeating “colonial” society in perpetuity.

The realists began questioning the official narrative when “215 children’s bodies were discovered” by ground penetrating radar (GPR) in the Kamloops Indian Residential School yard. One of the realists examined the historical records and discovered that in the mid-1920s, clay pipes for a septic field were buried in the surveyed area.

As a result, the realists wondered if the GPR had re-discovered the clay pipes and not the graves of IRS students. To date, Tkʼemlúps te Secwépemc (formerly the Kamloops Indian Band) has not released the GPR report, and it has not allowed excavations to see what the GPR had picked up.

Surprisingly, none of the 94 calls to action demand that school yards should be searched for the bodies of murdered and buried IRS children. This is important because the commission worked for six years, spent over $60 million, and did not report credible evidence that children had been murdered and buried in residential school yards.

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