An Onkwehonwe in Kanata

Joseph Boyden writes with a searing, painful honesty about this scourge. And while he focuses on northern and Cree reserves, never forget that this problem haunts every community in indigenous North America. Why don't our children want to become adults? Because it's hard to be the survivors of a genocide. The hurting - Canada - Macleans.ca

...and the indignity of having to buy your own land back. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the idea of owning property. My husband and I are actually thinking of taking the plunge and becoming first time homebuyers here in Tkaronto. Relatively speaking, the costs of buying a property go beyond the actual purchase. I know it makes good sense, but in my heart of hearts, I can’t help but think about the weirdness of having to buy a piece of land that your ancestors once roamed freely over, and in an area where once we hunted, fished, farmed, and had settlements (and yeah, I know everybody thinks this was Mississauga territory, but it wasn’t. The British bought some land from them because they happened to have moved in while we were a little occupied in the south of Lake Ontario fighting something called the American Revolution. Our ancient settlements and burial grounds haunt the GTA). I can’t help but think… is this settler mentality? The idea that you can “own” property… it’s so fr...

I finally got around to seeing Shelley Niro’s feature film, “Kissed By Lightning.” It was actually on the The Movie Network’s OnDemand service, which pleased me to no end. I was hoping it would be visually stunning and provocative, the way all Shelley’s art is, but this – I have to say, I am feeling teary-eyed and awed after seeing it. The images haunted my dreams all last night and I woke up thinking about the film, which gave me the impetus to write this blog. I think everyone who ever wanted to know about Iroquoian philosophy and our values should watch this film. It was gentle and almost whisperingly quiet, the way Shelley’s art is, but it crept up on me and infused me with its lushly filmed, stunning visuals and the serene poetry of the story. Ostensibly the story of a woman’s journey through grief, it is actually the story of The Peacemaker and Hyenwatha, the two founding figures of our political and spiritual lives. The League of the Haudenosaunee could not exist without this...

Just wanted to take some time out and pitch the Toronto Roller Derby League and the 2011 season opener, which is being played at The Hangar at Downsview Park on Saturday, February 5 starting at 7:00 pm. I have become a roller derby fanatic since my daughter Carole joined the junior league in May of last year (Feral Carole #13 Baby). I love the speed of it, the hits, the skills, the tattoos and the fishnets, the raw punk power of these chicks. They rock and more importantly, they roll. If I was 10 years younger, I'd be in, but my knees have seen too much damage for me to get up on roller skates. I'm gonna be there -- and if you get a chance, patronize the roller derby league in your city. There's bound to be one. You'll be damn glad you did.

The thing about grief is that you never know when it’s going to sneak up behind you, whirl you around, and kick you in the teeth. It can be during the most mundane moment, or in the middle of a task that you really need to concentrate on. It can be first thing in the morning or in the darkest hours of the night. It’s fast or it’s slow, it can creep up on little cat feet or stomp into your awareness in heavy combat boots. And then you find yourself helplessly weeping over the things that were lost, the might-have-beens, the should-have-dones. Leaving you bereft, and sad, and having to feel everything all over again. When we were home for Christmas, my daughter got an article of clothing that was Jewel’s. In keeping with Haudenosaunee custom, we give away a deceased person’s belongings, so that everyone has something to remember them by but also so that the person’s spirit will not be tied to the earth by their possessions and are free to continue their journey. Carole got a cool, neo...

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Christie Blatchford is writing a whole series on the issue of aboriginal suicide… “Lifting the Veil on Native (there’s that N word again!) suicide” is the name of today’s atrocity I mean column. That she has the audacity to do this is amazing to me. It is so loaded with her smug, white privilege and consequently that hand-wringing – “Oh look, those poor NATIVES are so despondent, the white people have to rescue them” thing, which is pretty much the tenor of this article. It centers around some benevolent white policemen – her favourite fucking subject – who are trying to work in suicide prevention in the Nishnabe Aski Nation. More power to them if they can make a difference, but we have been working on this terrible issue ourselves and need to develop more of our own culturally-relevant ways, thank you very much. But since this new series comes in the wake of her so-called “expose” of the poor white folks’ problems in Caledonia, I’m feeling a tad s...

“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 ...