It started last week. To be honest, in my everyday busyness, I almost didn’t notice. I heard there was a discovery of sorts. A grave using the latest ground scanning technology. In a country where I had been treated to residential school myself, read about the reality of Pamala George being written off as “just a prostitute”, learned about Neil Stonechild and the Starlight Tours, the Oka Crisis, missing and murdered Indigenous women, Tina.
HALIFAX There was a collective sense of grief and sadness Monday around the Maritimes as people paid tribute to the young lives lost at a former residential school in British Columbia. The tragic discovery of the mass grave containing the remains of 215 Indigenous children has stirred up painful memories for residential school survivors in our region. Tiny shoes were placed on the steps of St. Mary s Basilica to honour the 215 lives cut short and draw attention to their unmarked burial site, which was discovered at a former Kamloops residential school. I feel for my family that went there now that have to be reawakened to the news of, what will they uncover here when they start looking? said Thunderbird Swooping Down Woman, a Mi kmaw elder.
St Paul, Alberta, Canada – Scattered across a rolling prairie landscape in northeastern Alberta are small towns, hamlets and First Nations reserves, most within just a few minutes’ drive of each other.
But the neighbours here are living worlds apart. In one world are members of the white-majority settler community, whose local heritage is traceable to an average of five generations. In the other are the Indigenous people whose ancestors have lived here for millennia.
They are old foes whose suspicion of one another dates back more than a hundred years.
Sacred, spiritual pacts
During the mid- to late-1800s, Canada saw a boom in European immigration. The Dominion Lands Act of 1872 offered free and fertile homesteads for the eager, new settlers.
Winnipeg Free Press
Thomas Berger a visionary who advanced Indigenous rights By: Niigaan Sinclair | Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Friday, Apr. 30, 2021
Thomas Berger gave Indigenous people a voice.
In 1974, when Canada held an inquiry into the construction of a gas pipeline through the Mackenzie River Valley in the Yukon and Northwest Territories through Dene, Inuit, and Métis land commissioner Berger did something unheard of.
He went to the people.
In what became known as the Berger Inquiry, he held hearings in all 35 communities. Most had a majority of Indigenous populations or were First Nations.
Instead of continuing the practice of government inquiries at the time (and frankly still is), Berger didn’t host meetings in expensive and intimidating city hotels. He held them in community halls and other places Indigenous people lived and worked.