An Onkwehonwe in Kanata

“The reason why Aboriginal youth kill themselves at a rate six times higher than the overall population is to stop the pain and hopelessness that result from being subjected to colonization. "You can’t understand Aboriginal suicide without looking at colonization. We, as Indigenous people, must realize that we did not have sky-high suicide rates before the European invasion (contact is too clean a word for what actually happened). "When Canadian society says we’re sick that’s like a psychopathic killer complaining to someone he’s tried to strangle repeatedly that she should do something about the marks on her neck and see a psychiatrist about her recurrent nightmares and low self-esteem.” -- Richard Bull, “Sweetgrass Coaching” I don’t know what else it could be. It’s not like we are all mentally unstable, or that we are taught to yearn for death, or anything in our culture makes us more prone to it. There is a dark current that reaches out from time to time and drags some of ...

On Friday November 12, my beautiful cousin Jewel woke up early, got ready for school as usual, then went to the basement of her mother’s house and hung herself. She was 12 years old. I cannot describe the shock, the shudder of horror, the indescribable heartbreak that reverberated through two families and an entire community when this news spread like wildfire. I found out through a phone call around noon (on a day that I was coincidentally celebrating my birthday) and I thought I was going to pass out, throw up, or do both at the same time. I fell to my knees and sobbed when I got off the phone. Within two hours I was in the car with my shell-shocked kids, on the way back to the reserve to be with my family. I believe that I have cried more tears these past four days than I have in my entire life, and my life has not been without its share of heartbreak. But this, this loss of our talented, lovely, brilliant little Jewel, this has eviscerated me and has somehow ruptured something in m...

An abridged Ganyonhon:yonk -- The Thanksgiving address: Teyethinonhwerá:ton ne Onkwe’shón:’a We give thanks to the people. Teyethinonhwerá:ton ne Yethi’nisténha Ohwéntsya We give thanks to our mother the earth. Teyethinonhwerá:ton ne Kahnekarónnyon We give thanks to the waters. Teyethinonhwerá:ton ne Kentsyonkshón:’a We give thanks to the fish. Teyethinonhwerá:ton ne Ohonte’shón:’a We give thanks to the grass and vegetation. Teyethinonhwerá:ton ne Ononhkwa’shón:’a táhnon Ohtehra’shón:’a We give thanks to the medicines and the roots. Teyethinonhwerá:ton ne Kahikshón:’a We give thanks to the fruits. Teyethinonhwerá:ton ne Tyonnhéhkwen We give thanks to the foods. Teyethinonhwerá:ton ne Otsi’nonwa’shón:’a We give thanks to the insects. Teyethinonhwerá:ton ne Okwire’shón:’a táhnon Karonta’shón:’a We give thanks to the bushes and the trees. Teyethinonhwerá:ton ne Otsi’ten’okón:’a We give thanks to the birds. Teyethinonhwerá:ton ne Teyowerawénrye We give thanks to the winds. Teyethinonhwerá:...

I have been extremely lazy over this past summer, occupied by my little routine of work/home/sleep/fun. But mostly it’s because I have been enjoying the fact that I live in Toronto and have been immersed in how much I love living here. I love this city. I have always felt at home here – in fact, I have been an urban dweller for far longer than I lived on the reserve. I left that home for this one when I was 17 and have remained here, reveling in my life as an urban Indian, since that point. I can’t imagine living anywhere else. I have been blessed over the course of my career to visit other Canadian and American cities and can honestly say that there is no where else I could even think about living in. I love Toronto. This is a beautiful, living organism, a vibrant and exciting place, pulsing with great expectations for the future. The thing that I love best however is when the ghosts of the past brush against me when I ride my bike home at twilight along Front Street. I can feel the v...

TEDxDU - Aaron Huey - 5/13/2010 | Owe Aku International Justice Project | Causes This video encapsulates almost everything I have ever tried to convey to non-indigenous people about what happened to us. And this young man understands it. Please watch.

So I have to apologize for my silence on the blogging front, but I have a damn fine excuse. I was hospitalized for eight days in St Michael’s Hospital here in downtown Toronto about three weeks ago for what ended up being a bleed in my small bowel, brought on by an abscess which was ostensibly caused by some kind of parasite. It was the worst experience of my life. I was scoped, probed, x-rayed, CT-scanned, poked with at least seven different IV sites, and given three different kinds of intravenous antibiotics. It was not up there with my favourite experiences, to say the least. I also learned that I could never be a junkie because I got bored with the amount of morphine they were letting me have. I’m just now getting back to feeling normal. It cut the legs out from under me in a way that I didn’t anticipate, and made me realize just how much I take the normal functioning of my machine, my body, for granted. I will try not to do that again. However, I cannot say enough about the staff ...

Unless it was done by a policeman or an aristocrat --“Know your Rights” by The Clash I’ve given myself enough time to absorb the implications of the fact that Michael Bryant is essentially absolved in the death of Darcy Allen Sheppard, and can speak about it without frothing or feeling like I may explode. I’m not going to dwell at length about the whole sordid affair, in which Bryant doesn’t even have to go to trial because it has been determined that Sheppard was on a homicidal/suicidal rampage that night and was essentially the architect of his own misfortune. However, I have to point out that had that been the other way around – there is no damn way Sheppard would have been absolved. Perhaps at the end of a long, convoluted process – but highly doubtful. Essentially the message is, in the end, that in this country, a white dude can kill a Metis guy and have it be the victim’s fault. Somehow it always is made to be that way when the circumstances are in a white person causing the dea...

I’ve been reading a lot about the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the controversy around Canada’s – and the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand’s -- refusal to sign on and finally got around to reading a copy of the Declaration to check it out for myself. The majority of the document is a nice feel-good declaration – not a law, not an edict, not even a proclamation – but a declaration around the rights of indigenous people to not be the subject of a genocide, that we have the right to preserve our customs, religions, etc., and to address the very real aftermath of colonizatio. Article 28.1 is most likely, in my eyes, the stickler for the Harper Government (because let’s face it, that’s who is in charge right now and who is behind the refusal to be a signatory). It also has problems with Articles 19 and 26, regarding consultation of public policy and the re-opening of historical agreements, but as sure as I’m sitting here, it’s Article 28 that sticks in t...

Stephan Hawking, noted celebrity physicist was quoted the other day as saying that contacting alien life is too risky. "We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet," he says. Any alien species might burn through the resources of its home planet and search for new areas to exploit. "Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach," Hawking says. Far from being a benign visit by benevolent aliens, it might be more like Christopher Columbus' first trip to America, "which didn't turn out every well for the native Americans," he says. Well no duh, huh. And who would want to be oppressed? It sucks. Imagine all those poor white people, chained and broken, forced onto little plots of land to eke out what pitiful survival they could until the galactic masters either got bored with them and finished the job or simply d...

This is completely off-topic, but I have to express my undying love and ecstatic joy for Amanda Palmer. The woman is a freakin’ Goddess, and if you haven’t experienced her, go out and get some of her music RIGHT NOW. I find myself so captivated by her, I want to write her fan mail and grovel at her feet and peel her a grape, that's how much I adore her. That is all. We will return you to your regularly scheduled blogging next week.

I have been appointed lead negotiator for the next round of collective bargaining to renew the agreement at APTN. I am so honoured, and excited, and driven to get the best damn agreement I possibly can get for the membership. I can’t wait to start. I have been thinking about the process of negotiation and why I love it so. I think it’s because it’s psychological, and sportsmanlike, but at the end of the day, fundamentally crucial to formulating the ground rules that a living document can be based on. I love it. I’m really good at it. And I aim to get better. At its heart, negotiating is a diplomatic art, a skill of finesse, persuasion, supple argument and brute force. It’s a metaphorical warrior skill. It’s supremely Iroquoian in nature. Perhaps this is why I adore it so. We Iroquois have had a long history of negotiating, of reaching treaty agreements as exemplified by the Covenant Chain, one of the first treaty arrangements between us and the Dutch settlers, later extended to the Bri...

I swear, every time I come to Winnipeg it just makes me sadder. I love the work I do here, and I especially love the opportunity I get to visit my dear gay husband Dwayne and his band of happy mutant friends, but Winnipeg just makes me sad. I can’t get over the poverty and the despair and the outright racism I see. I am immune to its direct effects on me – nobody messes with a six-foot-tall Iroquoian woman in business attire – but what I see around me saddens and enrages me and makes me feel like a stranger in a strange land. Is it economic privilege that envelops me? Is it the fact that I don’t “look Indian”? Just what is it? Right now I’m tanned from my trip to Mexico and I’m wearing some of my favourite Iroquoian silver jewellery pieces but maybe this isn’t enough to identify me as a member of the same disadvantaged group that I continually see getting ridiculed, told to move on, spurned in the streets, and openly ignored. I just don’t get the same treatment. I often wonder if the ...

I was going to have a whole bunch of pithy observations on a whole pile of things – the amendments to the Indian Act that are going to restore status to a whole pile of people – and going forward, allowing my children to have their kids claim status – the changes being talked about in funding post-secondary education for indigenous students, the alarming rise in racist remarks that show an incredible amount of ignorance regarding the history and status of indigenous people in this country....but dammit I’m in Mexico. So I’m not in a headspace to give any of these things serious consideration. I’m concerned with hanging out by the pool, how much sunscreen I need to apply, or what drink I should have now. I should be all concerned with privilege and how the burden of north American greed crushes these polite, friendly people here all working for pennies to keep the drinks flowing and the pool clean and the tile free from sand and the sagauro cactus from overrunning the carefully-landscap...

-- if I have to read another bunch of bullshit racist crap from the so-called good citizens of this nation as spewed out in the comments sections of the Globe and Mail or the CBC any longer, I may go postal. I really don't understand why these sorts of things are allowed. What is the point, what is the purpose? What is this kind of vitriol contributing to? Overall debate, policy setting -- what??? It's just dangerous, ugly poison spewing out over the web and does nothing but create negativity. It's ugly. It's essentially the equivalent of all that hateful propaganda put out by totalitarian regimes throughout history, except that average people are espousing this shit and that's what makes it worse. I don't need to see it any more. I think they should be shut down. This is my rant of the day.

Humanity likes its tribes. We try to pretend we’re beyond that, so modern, so technologically and emotionally advanced, but the Olympics are really just a giant display of tribalism writ large. It was never more apparent to me than watching the hockey game yesterday. I found it extremely interesting that all of my onkwehonwe friends could put aside our unease and our unrest at having to be indigenous people in this colonial construct, and for a couple of hours unite with everyone else across this northern part of Turtle Island. There we were, wearing our hearts on our sleeves right beside our settler neighbours watching the beauty of that fast, skillful game played between two political and cultural entities, those players being the true avatars of our national prowess and passion. And what a glorious victory that was, in overtime against the giant eagle to the south who played with military precision, roughshod menace, and with the heart of that rebellious spark that gave rise to thei...

And in this case, wishing it wasn’t doesn’t change the fact that it is. I was initially going to avoid the entire issue of the Douglas Creek Estates land claim in Caledonia, bordering the territory of the Six Nations of the Grand River that’s currently the subject of so much media coverage and resistance/anger/misunderstanding/utter governmental bullshit that’s been happening for the last five years, but I simply can’t. How can I? It is an undeniable fact that this land was stolen, despite our protests, despite our formal complaints and attempts to forestall the process, practically from underneath us. And in this world, where so much of our lives as aboriginal people is dictated by the statues of the Indian Act, what is left to us but an act of defiance, of resistance, of the outright fuck-you to the white culture that stole it in the first place? Seriously. Sorry for your luck you fucktard developers and you oh-so-politely racist denizens of Squatterdonia, but it’s ours. Hate to di...

For the millions of people around the world watching the opening ceremonies of the Olympics broadcast from Vancouver last night, it must look like Canada is a vibrant, diverse place rich in the storied shared history of hundreds of aboriginal nations with all those intrepid European pioneers and later the arrival of displaced people from around the globe. What a beautiful, wealthy nation they have created together, rich in culture that borrows from those shared stories and the reverence with which this history is celebrated. Um... NOT. It is said that symbols are everything, with the national myth of a country being the most symbolic of all. I found it very interesting last night that all those indigenous people come out in their traditional finery, speak the surviving languages into the universe to welcome in everyone from the globe, and then dance happily about the stadium in what looks like a lovely display of formalized greeting. But what was very interesting to me was as the indig...

I was overcome with an unaccountable melancholy when I woke up this morning and soon came to realize it was because of the weather. This kind of weather always reminds me of that March day so long ago when my mother called me to tell me that my friend, Karl, had been murdered when his car broke down and he gone to a house to ask for help. He was shot in the head because he asked for help. It was March 21, 1983. Karl and I first met each other in Grade 7 and went on to be very tight friends by the time we were in Grade 13. We at first had competed against each other for grades, especially in English – which I find really ironic for two Mohawk kids to be excelling at. My competitive nature didn't want to be friends but he won me over -- he was slyly funny and whip-smart. We both loved fiction and wrote reams of poetry and used to try and outdo each other with our short stories and poems, competing for prizes and then later collaborating on work together because we admired each other’...

I’ve always been extremely interested in power. The trappings of it, the scramble for it, what is power, why do we want it, how can I get it, is it just primate dynamics played out in a human forum… et cetera ad nauseum. I like power. I like how it feels, how it looks, what it means. I like it when I get to exercise it in whatever little sphere of influence I have, I hate it when I have none. It’s an interesting thing. My people have always been interested in power. We even have a word for it – orenda, or the “soul of all things” – which I am given to understand is kind of a bad translation, as this is one of those purely Haudenosaunee concepts that really doesn’t have an equivalent in English. It is the philosophy that every human being is invested with his or her own power, a life-force that is equal parts aura, destiny, force of will, strength of character, and personal charisma. Probably the closest comparison is karma, but even that kind of falls short. Men and women equally are ...

One of the things about being the staff representative for a union is that you end up being equal parts paralegal, confidante, shit disturber, therapist, cheerleader, and career counselor. Lately I’ve been doing a large amount of the latter. I was thinking about that the other day, and came to the realization that career counselling needs to be more prominent, especially in indigenous communities. We need to have role models about how to have a career. The vast majority of us come out of homes where, if you were lucky, Dad was an ironworker or a factory worker, Mom was in healthcare but more likely stayed at home and occasionally went strawberry-picking or picking tobacco (if you lived on Six, that’s what your mom did). You might have had a relative who was in the DIAND bureaucracy, or aunties that were teachers, but what about other professions? Where are all the lawyers, the bankers and economists, the designers, the professors, the doctors, the journalists, the IT and telecommunicat...

I really have to stop reading them, I really do. Those comments sections in the Globe and Mail and the CBC – the sites I look at the most – make me stark-raving, tear-my-hair-out-by the roots insane. I don’t know why I feel compelled to look at them, but I do. It must be the same natural inclination that causes us to look at disasters, at train wrecks, at all manner of calamity with the voyeur’s fetishistic appreciation – I’m starting to question why they are there, what is the purpose of them (other than to make this indigenous woman freak out)? What is this fad, this desire to comment on every story, like average citizen Joe Blow from Bumfuck Idunnoknow is a qualified expert on every little thing that happens in the world? There’s got to be more accountability, too. I bet if people were forced to leave an email address there’d be less of this bullshit. Like in pre-Internet days when you sent a letter to the editor of a newspaper they would publish your full name and city where you l...

Yesterday I was waiting in line at Shoppers Drug Mart and an elderly Caribbean lady, perhaps in her mid-70’s, was at the lone cashier and fumbling a little with her bag and her purse and her wallet – basically taking some time to get through the check-out process. The woman behind her, a white woman maybe a few years older than me, marched up to the cashier, put all her purchases on the counter and basically stood there tapping her foot and frowning and muttering at the elderly lady and the cashier, who was also a young black woman. She essentially pushed the older black woman aside and was acting extremely put-upon that the other woman was taking a bit of time to finish her transaction. The older woman looked at the white woman with this expression of – damn, it was heartbreaking. Resignation and a touch of humiliation and sadness. Defeat even. The guy behind me was a young black man and I turned to him and muttered, “White privilege in action.” He looked at me with the same kind of l...

On the weekend I had the pleasure of hanging out with my family for my niece Lilly’s 9th birthday party. I saw several of my cousins on my mom’s side of the family that I haven’t seen in a while, got to exclaim over several of the new generation and how big they are getting, and to dandle one of our newest family members in my lap for awhile (who coincidentally turns one on the same day as my sister – look out!). I also got to see one of my aunts, my mom’s middle sister, and of course shoot the shit with my brother, my sister-in-law, my sister and her husband and assorted other family members. Looking around the room the family resemblance is obvious – my mother’s family are very stockily built with wide, round faces, skin with an obvious yellow tint, wide, mobile mouths and loud, happy laughs. My father’s family are very tall – none of the men are under 6 feet – which is where my height is factored in but I look mostly like my mother’s side of the family. I have lived off the reserve ...