INAC (Aboriginal Affairs) is busy patting itself on the back for solving all of Attawapiskat’s problems. To hear them tell it, Jacques Marion was a veritable hero, swooping into Attawapiskat in the nick of time, narrowly averting disaster. INAC is magnanimously withdrawing its Third Party Manager, but shouldn’t hold its breath for any thanks from…
Category: Decolonisation
Language, culture, and Two-Spirit identity.
I am a huge language geek. As in, I’m a little obsessed with language and how it relates to culture, to identity, to understanding the world around you. If you speak another language, or have even tried to learn another language, you realize pretty early on that although you might be using a comparable term…
Ruby’s Story
Today, I’d like to present to you something a little different; an interview of sorts. A while ago, a comment on one of my blog posts really caught my attention. In it, a mother was describing an experience her young daughter had at school, and that brief description had such a powerful impact on me…
We make good scapegoats, eh?
I’d like to talk about popular perceptions about native peoples and our relationship to the environment. Recently the CBC ran a story about the slaughter of 30 caribou in Northern Manitoba. Chief Joe Antsanen of the Northlands Denesuline First Nation and Grand Chief David Harper of the Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak decried the waste, and the…
Check the tag on that “Indian” story.
Stories and sayings attributed to Native Americans have been floating around probably since settlers stopped spending all of their time and energy on not dying. I am not entirely certain why stories that never originated in any indigenous nation are passed around as “Native American Legends”, but listener beware. You’ve probably seen this one at…