An Onkwehonwe in Kanata

I took my daughter to see the second instalment in that ridiculousTwilight series, “New Moon”... while I think that the main premise of the book is an obvious celibacy metaphor, I always find cultural phenomena to be interesting and so endeavour to check them out. I’m actually responsible for turning my daughter onto the whole thing because I gave her the first book 3 Christmases ago, before it was a cultural phenomena – so sue me, I had read the back of the book and figured my-then 11 year old voracious reader would appreciate it. When she went absolute apeshit for the books I figured I’d read them just to get an idea... Kind of sorry I did, the author is obviously an amateur and they weren’t the best-written books in the universe, but there’s no denying the attraction of the whole series for teenage girls. Which brings me to the second movie instalment... It’s one thing to read about all the hype around pretty little Taylor Lautner and his posse of Quiluete boys, but the lovely indi...

I just spent the better part of last week in Winnipeg, dealing with that lovely and burgeoning example of the best of aboriginal promise, APTN. I had a lot of fun – their membership is bright, brave and willing to do a lot of things, and they shine with the brilliance of promise and the novelty of speaking in our voices in a way the majority of Canadians have never seen before. I salute them and their youthful courage, their ambition and drive. They made me feel proud. But you know what... I have to say I found Winnipeg incredibly depressing. I shouldn’t because it’s probably the one place in Canada where the indigenous reality of this country is reflected in the population, but damn, the in-your-face clarity of our post-colonial reality was too intense, too heartbreaking, too concrete for me to celebrate what should be a success story. The evidence of our degradation and colonization was everywhere, in the methed-out skinny teenagers with scabs all over their faces, in the rail-thin e...

Charter for Compassion This is important and everyone should sign on. It may be a defining moment in the history of our species.

CBC News - New Brunswick - Dental records confirm body is missing N.B. teen This makes me so sad, and desolate. Another indigenous flower, cut down before she could finish blooming. I can't help but fear for the safety of my own child. She's 13, a newly minted teenager, bright, bold and beautiful, another in a long line of strong Haudenosaunee women, a rock'n'roll rebel girl who dresses in black and likes loud guitar rock. She's already evincing that serious Mohawk badass attitude. And the thought that her ancestry makes it four times more likely that she will be victimized somehow makes me shudder in fear. Intellectually I know that it's the same odds as a plane falling out of the sky on top of her, but emotionally I can't help this fear. And this fear is shared by indigenous mothers everywhere. Our daughters, our precious flowers, the rich resource of our people, are four more times likely than white girls to be raped, to be beaten, to be abducted and murd...

I have been ruminating on my friend Audra’s main focus of study for a couple of days now. She is currently a professor at Columbia University where her main focus has been on re-shaping the notions of sovereignty for indigenous people. She always makes me think about what it means to be a sovereign people, and what that does for your sense of identity. I often think of sovereignty in Mohawk terms – we understand that our Confederacy formed alliances, political and military, with the other sovereign powers at the time of Contact and our political understanding of how we deal with foreign nations stems from that. However, colonization seems to have shifted the settlers’ idea of how they perceived us. Suddenly we were no longer allies; we were a nation that had to be subdued, conquered, or failing that, remade into a lesser version of the whites who had suborned our economic, military and political systems. Suddenly there is no talk of allies but talk of subduing, of remaking, of eliminat...

Everytime I see that figure, my vision blurs and my throat tightens and burns with tears, and I feel my heart begin to pound. Five hundred and twenty one missing or murdered indigenous women in this country. If this was proportional to the rest of the population the figure would be 18,000. What would happen if there were 18,000 missing or murdered white women in this country? There would be screaming and gnashing of teeth and police forces pressed into action with task forces and resources dedicated to finding these women or solving their murders. The media would be on the story night and day, we would be inundated with their pictures and their stories and everyone would be saying, we have to do something, we have to stop this atrocity. But because it’s indigenous women there is only silence. Because these victims and their families are powerless, because it’s just another Indian – there is only silence. No outrage, no questioning, no resources put behind finding the perpetrators and b...