CON control . . .

SETTLER TREATY CARD: a fine concept from the folks at Briarpatch. Click on the link to see a giant-size version, 'cause the fine-print ‘some conditions apply’ is worth reading.

Not good . . .

OUT OF CONTROL: when the RCMP pepper spray unarmed elders. According to Cari-Lee Raven Veilifter, who can be found on Facebook at #‎ElsipogtogStandOff‬:

“the elder the RCMP are pepper spraying is our elder Doris Copage of Elsipogtog (short hair/gray jacket). Doris is one of the kindest and most helpful people I've ever met. She cooks for and looks out for everyone. Of course she was completely unarmed and only had her rosary beads in hand when this happened- so they had no reason to spray her.”

Ya gotta wonder where the Tasers were. PRESS CORE is concerned about all the heavy-duty firepower; it seems that some of it might not be the RCMP, like the dude below. Do check out the site for some interesting pictures.

Another RCMP success story . . .

Eyewitnesses note this woman was punched in the mouth by RCMP.

PUNCHING A WOMAN seems to be RCMP best-practice, when they don't have a Taser handy. Halifax Media Co-op has a report by Miles Howe, "12 more opposed to shale gas arrested as RCMP turn violent on National Aboriginal Day". Apparently the locals don't like exploration for shale gas and are protesting to stop it. Grrrrrrrrr . . .

The nitty and the gritty . . .

If you Facebook, very interesting pictures and information can be found on Blood-Kainai Tribe Politics & News. 

Sisters in Spirit update

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Last week APTN News reported that not only does the Cons new missing persons initiative entirely bypass Sisters In Spirit, the very group which initiated five years of research into the nearly 600 missing and murdered FN women and girls in the first place, but SIS can no longer use the SIS name or continue their research when applying for grants.

Status of Women Minister Rona Ambrose invoked support from the Sisters' parent organization, Native Women's Association of Canada, to blow off criticism in the House :

"Most important, we are working with and have the support of NWAC " ... and

"In fact, we have been working with NWAC for the last couple of years in order to implement these concrete actions."

APTN News : NWAC kept out of the loop on missing women's announcement (italics mine)

Native Women’s Association of Canada president Jeannette Corbiere Lavell said she was only informed by the government the day before Status of Women Minister Rona Ambrose stood in the Vancouver police department to say her government was following through on their $10 million commitment.

Lavell said the Conservative government did not consult with NWAC staff or those involved with the organization’s groundbreaking Sisters in Spirit project in the lead-up to the announcement.

"NWAC was originally led to believe that it would be invited to join in a discussion with the Department of Justice…about the allocation of the $10 million ," said Corbiere Lavell. "This did not occur."

Lavell further notes that the new initiative "reinvents" the work already done by SIS [at a new RCMP centre that will use up half the money], folds their research on murdered FN women into a general pot of violence against all Canadians, and excludes provinces east of Manitoba from access to funding.

She also confirmed Status of Women's embargo on the SIS name and continued research.

So why did Lavell stand with Ambrose on that podium in Vancouver last week and imply NWAC's endorsement?

Because, explains Lavell, they need the money and Aboriginal women have been waiting for it. They have to comply with the new SIS-squashing rules so they can access funds to continue related work.

Nice. Someone better call Ambrose on her bullshit in the House next week. We're watching.
As Cathie from Canada put it : "Trying to make it disappear just like all those women have disappeared."
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And as for Canada's conditional endorsement of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples this week : See Pam Palmater at Non-Status Indians.

Cons blacklist Sisters in Spirit

The Cons will consider further funding for Sisters in Spirit but only if they stop using that name and give up lobbying all levels of government and maintaining their database and research into the nearly 600 missing Aboriginal women. Unbelievable.

It was only last week that Status of Women Minister Rona Ambrose praised Sisters in Spirit when she announced details of a $10 million national strategy to address "the disturbing issue of missing and murdered Aboriginal women" :

"The journey truly began with an initiative called Sisters in Spirit that was led by the Native Women’s Association of Canada. The association has undertaken an incredible amount of research... they have brought to light the shocking extent of these horrendous acts of violence."

Yet in Rona's Status of Women government webpage announcing the new strategy makes no mention of Sisters in Spirit at all and now the APTN News reports that Sisters have been excluded from receiving any of that $10M.
Instead they must apply to Status of Women for less money under new rules which will prohibit them from their use of the name Sisters in Spirit, or maintaining and extending their research database of nearly 600 missing Aboriginal women, or lobbying government.

Con MP Shelly Glover, Parliamentary Secretary for Indian and Northern Affairs :

"That project was finished. Don’t mix apples and oranges. That project was finished, now we’re working with them to pursue other projects."

Other projects? Bullshit.
Sisters in Spirit is their database and their advocacy work and their vigils. That's who they are.

So where's that $10M going? A good chunk to the RCMP.

Details in a very good 2 minute news vid from APTN. Go.

Then write an effing letter :
Rona Ambrose : Ambror@parl.gc.ca Phone : (613) 996-9778
Shelly Glover : Glover.S@parl.gc.ca Phone : (613) 995-0579
SWC NDP Irene Mathyssen : Mathyssen.I@parl.gc.ca Phone : (519) 685-4745
SWC Lib Anita Neville : Neville.A@parl.gc.ca Phone : (204) 983-1355
SWC Bloc Nicole Demers : Demers.N@parl.gc.ca Phone : (450) 686-2562).

A different kind of cutback at Thunder Bay school

Criminal charges in Canada are laid at the discretion of the Crown Attorney, generally on the recommendation of, or in consultation with the police. If the Crown refuses to lay charges, a victim's options for seeking justice are severely limited. However, the Crown's main consideration in laying charges is the public interest. A criminal charge, trial and conviction is intended to serve not only to punish someone for breaking the law but also to provide an example that will deter others from breaking the law. On the simple grounds of deterrence alone I can see no reason at all not to charge this person with assault.

In April, the seven-year-old was picked up, put on a chair “and when he resisted, the scissors were placed against his forehead and he was told not to move,” said Falconer, who said 10 centimetres of hair was cut from the front.
According to other information obtained by The Chronicle-Journal that outlines the incident, the boy was in a computer lab reading when a teaching assistant saw him having difficulty seeing due to the length of his bangs.
The teaching assistant took the boy into the hall and trimmed his bangs with scissors, the information said, and when the employee admitted she had cut the student‘s bangs, she was suspended from her job.

You can be sure that if a teacher or some other student had snipped the ponytail off some blonde cheerleader, there would be seven kinds of hell to pay. I don't care if it was a case of not understanding the rules or having the best of intentions, school staff are not allowed to give the students involuntary haircuts.

Some might argue that "ruining" the teaching assistant's life by charging them with assault is unfair and would end their career and that the person in question doesn't deserve to go to jail for trimming a seven-year-old's bangs. I would argue that this person very much deserves to go to jail since this is someone who has been placed in a position of trust and authority over that child and has used that authority to violate their person, terrorize and traumatize a seven-year-old. They either know they had no right to interfere with this young boy the way they did and willingly broke the law or they are so completely ignorant of the rules that govern their profession that they should not be allowed within a mile of a classroom full of seven-year-olds.

If the child's parents were to drop by the teaching assistant's home with a pair of clippers and shave her head "to help her see better" I think it's safe to say they'd be in jail faster than you could knock "shave and a haircut".

I'm not sure whether the family's accusations of anti-Native discrimination are well founded or not - they may just be the racist icing on the layer cake of stupid - and frankly I don't think the discrimination angle even matters. For a teacher or any member of the school staff to take a pair of scissors to a seven-year-old's hair against the child's will is an incredible violation of trust.

And the first person to make a "scalping" joke is really going to wish they hadn't.

crossposted from the Woodshed, where the uke-fight has only just begun!

14-year-old mentally challenged girl in jail cell TASER™ed

for peeling paint off the wall.
Her father is suing the Ontario Provincial Police on her behalf.

"Ontario's provincial advocate for children and youth, Irwin Elman, who has reviewed a videotape of the incident and the OPP's internal investigation, said he can't understand why police needed to stun the girl, who was lying on a cot when the two officers entered her cell and allegedly zapped her."

"I can tell you from what I saw there was no harm to herself or to any other person. It's not proportional to use a Taser... . It's a 14-year-old child in a cell, not harming herself or anybody else," said Elman, Ontario's independent children's advocate."

"The lawsuit, filed Jan. 23 at the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in Kenora, says the officers entered the cell without warning, "violently" pulled the girl to the ground and applied the Taser to her right upper thigh for three to five seconds."

"A doctor who examined the girl in the hours after the incident reportedly observed twin burn marks on her thigh."

"OPP spokesman Insp. Dave Ross said yesterday the force was not contesting that the girl had been Tasered, but that the OPP's professional standards bureau completed an investigation in December 2008 and cleared officers of any wrongdoing.

You're shocked and surprised at the results of the OPP professional standards bureau investigation I'm sure.
Did I mention she is First Nations?

Cross-posted at Creekside

Fiscally conservative at $3.9-million an hour

"From June 2nd to September 4th, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) tracked 293 pre-election spending announcements totaling $8.8-billion made by Stephen Harper’s Conservative government. That is roughly $94-million a day or about $3.9-million every hour."

The CTF, formerly Steve's very good friends, have been pissed with him for some time now and have published this handy chart of spending gems from which to more accurately get your hate on. While $4B was earmarked for Quebec infrastructure just yesterday, my personal fave has to be the admittedly rather smallish grant to create a festival in Shag Harbour, N.S., to commemorate a 1967 UFO sighting. According to their website, someone will be onsite painting aliens on rocks.

Meanwhile, amidst all this electoral largesse, the Attawapiskat kids in northern Ontario are expected to wait another eight years before they can have a school. Maybe they should start looking around for some UFOs.

h/t Challenging the Commonplace
Cross-posted at Creekside

A First Nation apology to Japan

In 1942, Minister of Munitions and Supply C.D. Howe re-opened a uranium mine at Great Bear Lake to supply uranium for the World War II atomic bomb program. Although the dangers of working with uranium were known at the time, no one in the government saw fit to inform the Dene First Nation of Sahtu, the Sahtugot'ine, who were hired to work the mine in Port Radium. After 20 years of unknowingly polluting their freshwater resource and irradiating themselves, the Sahtugot'ine workers started to die from lung, colon, and kidney cancers. They lost a generation :

"Deline is practically a village of widows, most of the men who worked as laborers have died of some form of cancer. The widows, who are traditional women, were left to raise their families with no breadwinners, supporters. They were left to depend on welfare and other young men for their traditional food source.
This village of young men are the first generation of men in the history of Dene on this lake to grow up without guidance from their grandfathers, fathers and uncles. This cultural, economic, spiritual, emotional deprivation impact on the community is a threat to the survival of the one and only tribe on Great Bear Lake."

As this Dominion article states :

"The Sahtugot'ine were sacrificed for an effort that ultimately slaughtered hundreds of thousands.
On 6 August 1945, B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped Fat Man on Hiroshima, a city of 343,000, killing 100,000 people immediately and leveling the city.
In 1998, six members of the Sahtugot'ine went to Japan to commemorate the victims of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an atrocity that some Sahtugot'ine unwittingly had a hand in, a role they now regret."

Six Sahtogot'ine, survivor victims of the same atomic program that levelled Hiroshima, went to Japan to commemorate their complicity in an atrocity they had unknowingly contributed to. That's what grown-ups do when confronted with an unintended consequence of their actions. Perhaps those currently weaselling against the PM's apology to the First Nations on our behalf - I didn't do it! It was a long time ago! - would like to consider how their argument stacks up compared to the First Nation apology to Japanese victims.

With thanks to Waterbaby for the Dominion article.
Cross-posted at Creekside

Let's make this the biggest bestest Surveillance Games evah!

NattyPost : "Canadian security agencies are planning to use planes, tanks, ships and thousands of military and police personnel to secure the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games and will consider their job a success if the public hardly notices their presence.

"It must be understood that the V2010 Games are a sporting event, not a security one," wrote Chief of Defence Staff General Rick Hillier.
Military planners say it will be the largest security operation in Canadian history and, if they do it right, Canadians will hardly notice."

Meanwhile CSIS is keeping its ever watchful eye on Olympic protesters.
A March 2007 document entitled CSIS Threat Assessment names the Native Youth Movement and "a Vancouver-based special interest group comprised of members of the groups No One is Illegal, the Anti-Poverty Coalition, and the Downtown Eastside Residents Association" as being of particular concern.

Why, no, this isn't the picture that accompanied the original Natty Post article. Why do you ask?

Cross-posted at Creekside