US paid for border training in Israel for US and Canada

Mohawk Nation News today reports on Canada’s training in Israel for border security. This follows the news that the University of Arizona has been co-opted by Homeland Security for dollars, placing Homeland Security agents on campus and designing lasers shot at migrants’ arteries. The University of Arizona earlier violated the rights of Apache and other Native Americans who struggled to protect sacred Mount Graham from the desecration of telescopes, which was carried out by the university with backing from the Pope.

Recently, US Homeland Security paid for border security training in Israel, for both Canada and the United States. With Israel’s history of Apartheid, the human rights travesties inflicted by Israel on Palestinians, and Israel’s Apartheid border wall, this should alarm everyone in the world. The Mohawks, and others battling for true sovereignty and human rights, are among the first to be targeted.

Canada to examine disappeared children at residential schools

The commission examining Indian residential schools is launching a massive new research project to find out who is buried on school grounds and what happened to the young aboriginal boys and girls who left for boarding schools and never returned home.

Kimberly Phillips, a spokesperson for Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, said the expanded research has been approved by Claudette Dumont-Smith, one of the commissioners.

The “Missing Children Research Project,” as it has been named, will include “an examination of the number and cause of deaths, illnesses and disappearances of children at the residential schools as well as the location of burial sites,” Ms. Phillips said.

Ms. Phillips said researchers will go through all relevant church and federal government records to find information that will help families looking for lost children. They will also prepare a questionnaire, and encourage former students and people who worked at the schools to come forward with their stories.
According to a commission document obtained by The Globe and Mail, one option involves “visiting residential school sites where graves of Missing Children are located or the cemeteries near the schools where Missing Children have been buried.”

Tuberculosis was the most common reason cited for deaths at schools across the country, however, survivors have said that rumours have circulated over the years that some of the forgotten children died of neglect, abuse or even murder.

Canada and the Criminalization of Indigenous Rights

As you have probably heard me mention on more than a few occasions now, in 2007 the United Nations passed a document known as the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Of the states of the world, only the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand voted against the non-binding resolution. Not all that surprising given that all four states are historically colonial-settler states that were established by white European colonists on Indigenous land. All four are also currently involved in long-standing disputes with the Indigenous peoples over land and sovereignty.

In all four of these states, including Canada, the history is one of colonial states that were built on the theft and occupation of Indigenous lands and the extermination of the peoples populating them, by disease, warfare and cultural domination. To this day the Canadian state continues to benefit from its unjustly acquired assets. In order to defend itself and its unjust state oppression, the Canadian government has equipped with an ultra-security state apparatus. Canada has more often than not used these repressive and suppressive anti-terrorist and security measures to strike hardest, and most often, against those people who the most to gain by assaulting Canada’s ingrained injustice and state terror, namely aboriginal nations and their legitimate struggle for their ancestral lands, and for their dignity.

Though the Canadian state has been essentially at war with the Indigenous peoples of the land since the first colonists arrived, the Oka Rebellion of 1990 reignited much of the militancy of the Indian movement that had been lost in the wake of the collapse of the Red Power movement in the 1960s and 1970s. When the Mohawks of Quebec stood with arms against further encroachment onto their sacred and ancestral lands (to build a golf-course of all things) it fulfilled the saying by Mao that “a single spark can start a prairie fire” as it ignited an upswing in radial militancy by the Indian nations of Canada. This can be seen in the recent cases of Indigenous protests in Ontario in opposition to state authorized resource extraction on Indian lands. The Indians of the Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug First Nation, despite having legitimate demands for sovereignty and decision-making power over their own traditional lands, their warriors and protesters have seen incarceration by the state, most notably Robert Lovelace and the KI-6 , all of whom have received harsh fines and 6 months in jail for peacefully protesting against mineral exploration on the lands of KI and Ardoch Algonquin First Nation (AAFN). We also cannot forget the ongoing Caledonia land dispute that is happening in Southwest Ontario (about an hour from Waterloo, where I am located) between the Indians of the Six Nations Haudenosaunee Confederacy and the developers of the Douglas Creek Estates, which is part of a larger land dispute over the entire Grand River Valley.

Canada: Indigenous Femicide on the Spotlight

Through Women Make Movies we were made aware about a Canadian documentary which is bringing to public attention the disappearances and murders of more than 500 aboriginal women in Canada in the past 30 years. The film is called Finding Dawn by Christine Welsh. The movie is named after Dawn Crey, who was the 23rd victim whose DNA was recognized in the largest serial murder investigation in Canada back in 2002-2004. The film focuses on this story and others, as well as the reports and complaints regarding the authorities’ inaction regarding the murders and disappearances of these native Canadian women and the struggles the families of these women face on their road to find justice.

First Nations Strategic Bulletin August 2008

After a bit of a break, the First Nations Strategic Policy Counsel has resumed its monthly publication, the First Nations Strategic Bulletin.

Issues in this month’s bulletin include: an analysis of “Canada’s War to terminate First Nations” (Harper’s apology in context), the OPP & Mohawks (w/ a transcript of the phone conversation between Shawn Brant & Julian Fantino — something you probably haven’t yet), “the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the 2010 Olympics,” and “Canada’s Tibetans: Barriere Lake & Other First Nations.”

You can download the bulletin by heading over to the Library and Archives Canada website. Back issues are available there as well.

Here’s a few excerpts from “Canada’s War to terminate First Nations,” by Russel Diabo:

My belief–which is based upon my policy experience and observations over the past three decades of First Nations-Canada relations–is that the federal government (with provincial and municipal support) is attempting to empty out (limit & restrict) the meaning (scope & content) of Aboriginal and Treaty Rights in section 35 of Canada’s constitution until it is empty or “spent”.

Instead of being recognized and affirmed as a ‘distinct order of government’ in Canada, under the current federal policy approach First Nations will eventually become ‘ethnic municipalities’.

An Open Letter to Canada and All First Nation Leaders

It’s well known that Canada perpetuates discrimination against indigenous people at every level of government, but what does it mean when that discrimination causes the death of innocent people? Death that is enshrouded in bureaucracy, covered up by the government, and ignored by the so-called leaders?

Shelley Brant, from the Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory in southern Ontario, reaches for an answer in this open letter:
An Open Letter to Canada and All First Nation Leaders

Wednesday August 6th, 2008

The recent questionable killing of yet another First Nations man, Craig McDougall 26 by police in Winnipeg has led me to write this letter:

How many more inquiries and bodies is it going to take???? How many more unimplemented recommendations???? How many more police lies and cover-ups supported by the governments in this so called great country before people wake up to the truth????? How many more planted weapons in the media and on our own people?????

Discover Lessons From Canada on Storing Spent Nuclear Fuel & High-Level Radioactive Waste in a Comprehensive Comparative Report

The United States has spent more than $6 billion on the Yucca Mountain repository, and debate still rages over when — or whether — it will open. In contrast, Canada is close to settling on a course for burying its nuclear waste that promises none of the divisiveness that the Yucca Mountain project has spawned.