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 ...

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...

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 ...