Resisting Pipelines From Standing Rock To Baguaby Manuela Picq, Intercontinental CryOctober 3, 2016

Resistance against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) at Standing Rock has gained unprecedented coverage. At the center of the story is a thousand-plus miles long pipeline that would transport some 500,000 barrels of oil per day from North Dakota to Illinois. The pipeline is backed by Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners. And It faces a huge line of Indigenous nations who’ve come together to say “No” .

The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe opposes the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, because it crosses sacred grounds within the boundaries of the reservation and threatens water sources in the larger region of the Missouri River.

There was no prior consultation or authorization for the pipeline. In fact, the construction of the pipeline is a blatant violation of treaty rights. The territorial and water rights of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe are protected under the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1851) and the Sioux Nation Treaty at Fort Laramie (1868)—as well as subsequent treaties.

Indigenous nations across the USA mobilized to protect Standing Rock. There are thousands of people now standing their grounds, including over a hundred Nations from across the Continent. Tara Houska, from the Ojibwa Nation, says this gathering of tribal nations at Standing Rock is unprecedented since Wounded Knee in 1973.

Though it’s making less headlines now, the ongoing pipeline resistance has faced the same brand of repression that other megaprojects face in Guatemala, Peru and elsewhere around the world: with violence and impunity. Most recently, over 20 water defenders were arrested on charges ranging from disorderly conduct to trespassing. Earlier this month, pipeline guards unleashed attack dogs (biting at least 6 people), punched and pepper-sprayed Native American protesters.

Such attacks rarely make it to the media, and when they do the media often ends up feeling some of the legal pressures used against native nations. Democracy Now released video footage of dogs with blood on their teeth, which went viral. As a result, Amy Goodman was charged for criminal trespass. An arrest warrant was issued under the header “North Dakota versus Amy Goodman.” The defense of Native territory was combined with claims that “journalism is not a crime.”

Waves of support emerged everywhere. A coalition of more than 1,200 archeologists, museum directors, and historians from institutions like the Smithsonian and the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries denounced the deliberate destruction of Standing Rock Sioux ancestral burial sites. In Washington DC, hundreds gathered outside President Obama’s final White House Tribal Nations Conference in a rally opposing the North Dakota Pipeline.

Unprecedented mobilization led to unprecedented politics. On September 10, the US federal government temporarily stopped the project. A statement released by three federal agencies said the case "highlighted the need for a serious discussion" about nationwide reforms "with respect to considering tribes' views on these types of infrastructure projects."

Dave Archambault, Standing Rock Sioux Chairman, took the case to the United Nations. He denounced the destruction of oil companies and the Sioux determination to protect water and land for unborn generations. The UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, responded by calling on the United States to halt the construction of the pipeline saying it poses a significant risk to drinking water and sacred sites.

“I urge the United States Government to undertake a thorough review of its compliance with international standards regarding the obligation to consult with indigenous peoples and obtain their free and informed consent,” the expert said. “The statutory framework should be amended to include provisions to that effect and it is important that the US Environmental Protection Agency and the US Advisory Council on Historic Preservation participate in the review of legislation.”

Many More Standing Against Pipelines

Standing Rock has become emblematic of a much broader battle against predatory development. The invasion of Indigenous territory without prior consultation is unfortunately all too common. The disregard of state treaties and environmental regulations is not an exception, but the norm.

Across the Americas, there are hundreds of nations resisting megaprojects on their lands like Standing Rock. Many of these struggles are taking place now in North America. People know that Native Americans protested the Keystone XL pipeline in Oklahoma. But there are many more pipelines that receive little or no media attention.

In Canada, the Energy East Pipeline would carry 1.1 million barrels of crude per day from Saskatchewan to Ontario and on to Saint John, New Brunswick. The pipeline will secure crude exports to the more profitable markets of Europe, India, China and the U.S. But it threatens the lands of more than 30 First Nations and the drinking water of more than five million Canadians.

There is the Northern Gateway Pipeline, which Canada’s Federal Government conditionally approved in June 2014 without prior consultation. The Yinka Dene Alliance First Nations refused the pipeline permissions to enter its territories. There are eight First Nations, four environmental groups and one union now challenging the pipeline in court. Last June, the Federal Court of Appeal overturned the project.

The Unist'ot'en clan of the Wet’suwet’en Nation are continueing to resist the Pacific Trail natural gas pipeline in British Colombia. Coast Salish Peoples on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian

border are opposing Kinder Morgan’s proposed TransMountain pipeline project. In Minnesota, the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians are fighting against a set of Enbridge pipelines.

There are many other pipeline struggles around the world, including in Peru, where the Wampis are cleaning up oil spills on their own; and Ecuador, where urban youth and ecologists have joined Indigenous communities in defending the Amazon from further oil drilling in the Yasuni.

What is at stake is Indigenous territory coupled with the greater need for healthy land and clean water for posterity. Resisting pipelines is to defend nature from the tentacles of extractive industries that continue to place corporate interests ahead of human rights and needs even as the climate crisis pulls us to the point of no return. Standing Rock is about Indigenous self-determination as much as it is about restoring relations of reciprocity between humans and nature.Without respect to Indigenous nations there will be no reversing of climate change.

The Legal Precedent Of Bagua

Peru may offer inspiration to redefine rights of extraction--Peruvian courts just absolved 52 Indigenous men and women in the well-known case of #Bagua.

Also known as “Baguazo,” the case refers to the 2009 massacre in the Amazon. Hundreds of people from the Awajún and Wampis nations blocked a road in the area called Curva del Diablo (Bagua, Amazonas) to contest oil drilling without prior consultation on their territory. Several weeks of Indigenous resistance led to a powerful standoff with former-Peruvian President Alan Garcia responding with a militarized crackdown. The military opened fire on protesters on the ground and from helicopters in what survivors described as a “rain of bullets.” At least 32 people were killed, including 12 police officers.

The government tried to cover the massacre by claiming that Indigenous protesters had attacked the police, who reacted in self-defense. Yet autopsies showed that the police were killed by gunfire. The Indigenous protesters were only armed with traditional weapons—they had no firearms of any kind. Nonetheless, 52 peoples were charged with homicide and instigating rebellion in what became the largest trial in Peruvian history. Bagua’s indigenous resistance for water and land is told in the award-winning documentary “When Two Worlds Collide.”

Seven years later, the Superior Court of Justice of Amazonas (Peru) absolved the 52 accused on the basis of Indigenous autonomy over territory. The court determined that Indigenous roadblocks were a “reasonable decision- necessary and adequate- as well as proportional” to defend nature and the “physical and biological integrity of their territory which could have been affected by extractive industries without prior consultation.”

The sentence states that it is “evident that the Indigenous Nations Awajún and Wampis have decided to block circulation on the roads (…) in their legitimate right to peaceful expression

based on territorial and organizational autonomy and their jurisdictional authority recognized by the Constitution.”

This marks an important precedent. Peruvian courts showed their autonomy in rejecting fabricated accusations against peaceful Indigenous protesters defending nature. This will hopefully show that the defense of nature, like journalism, is not a crime. Most importantly, the court respected the organizational and territorial autonomy of Indigenous Peoples. Indeed, Indigenous Peoples were right to close the road rather than have their rights violated.

In Bagua as in Standing Rock, Indigenous Peoples have the sovereign authority to block roads to protect territory, water, and the well-being of generations to come. It is time that all courts respect such inalienable rights with the same fervor that Indigenous Peoples defend their territories.

Canada’s prisons are the ‘new residential schools’A months-long investigation reveals that at every step, Canada’s justice system is set against Indigenous peopleNancy Macdonald, Maclean’s MagazineFebruary 18, 2016

Canada’s crime rate just hit a 45-year low. It’s been dropping for years—down by half since peaking in 1991. Bizarrely, the country recently cleared another benchmark, when the number of people incarcerated hit an all-time high. Dig a little further into the data, and an even more disquieting picture emerges.

While admissions of white adults to Canadian prisons declined through the last decade, Indigenous incarceration rates were surging: Up 112 per cent for women. Already, 36 per cent of the women and 25 per cent of men sentenced to provincial and territorial custody in Canada are Indigenous—a group that makes up just four per cent of the national population. Add in federal prisons, and Indigenous inmates account for 22.8 per cent of the total incarcerated population.

In the U.S., the go-to example for the asymmetric jailing of minority populations, black men are six times more likely to be imprisoned than white men. In Canada, the Indigenous incarceration rate is 10 times higher than the non-Indigenous population—higher even than South Africa at the height of apartheid. In Saskatchewan, if you’re Indigenous, you’re 33 times more likely to be incarcerated, according to a 1999 report, the most recent available.

This helps explain why prison guard is among the fastest-growing public sector occupations on the Prairies. And why criminologists have begun quietly referring to Canada’s prisons and jails as the country’s “new residential schools.”

In some Prairie courtrooms, Indigenous defendants now make up 85 per cent of criminal caseloads, defence lawyers say. At Manitoba’s Women’s Correctional Centre in Headingley, as many as nine in 10 women were Indigenous, according to one recent count. At nearby Stony Mountain Institution, Indigenous men make up 65 per cent of the inmate population. Often, they’re there because they failed to comply with a curfew or condition of bail. Or they’re a low-level drug offender, caught up in Canada’s harsh new mandatory-minimum sentences.

That’s one reason for the upsurge. In the past decade, Stephen Harper’s government passed more than 30 new crime laws, hiking punishment for a wide range of crimes, limiting parole opportunities and also broadening the grounds used to send young offenders to jail.

But the problem isn’t just new laws. Although police “carding” in Toronto has put street checks, which disproportionately target minority populations, under the microscope, neither is racial profiling alone to blame. At every step, discriminatory practices and a biased system work against an Indigenous accused, from the moment a person is first identified by police, to their

appearance before a judge, to their hearing before a parole board. The evidence is unambiguous: If you happen to be Indigenous, justice in Canada is not blind.

Chapter 1 – The Street CheckOn Dec. 10, 2014, Simon Ash-Moccasin, a Regina teacher, actor and playwright, was walking to a holiday party for Briarpatch magazine, where he sits as a board member. He says officers began tailing him as he approached Casino Regina in the city’s downtown core. Ash-Moccasin “fit a description,” he was told after asking why he was being stopped. “I know which one that is,” the Cree-Saulteaux 41-year-old later told Maclean’s. “There’s only one.”

Ash-Moccasin has a good understanding of arrest protocol thanks to an acting gig with the Saskatchewan Police College, teaching trainee officers how not to collar a suspect. He plays the bad guy.

In real life, Ash-Moccasin initially refused to give his name. An officer threw him against a wall, he says. One attempted to cuff him without reading him his rights. He says he was shoved, headfirst, into the backseat. He was briefly detained until his record check came back clean. Before being released, officers told Ash-Moccasin – who was wearing a distinctive green camouflage jacket – that they were looking for an Indigenous man dressed all in black, with no front teeth, trying to hawk a TV.

Ash-Moccasin is among several Indigenous men and women in Prairie cities who allege they are being unfairly, and illegally, singled out. In June 2015, Maclean’s (working with Vancouver’s Discourse Media) attempted to figure out whether their experiences are indicative of a larger issue. Eight Freedom of Information (FOI) requests were filed with major Western Canadian police agencies, looking for race-specific data on discretionary police stops for jaywalking and arrests for drug possession. In the end, they didn’t supply any data. The Edmonton Police Service estimated that producing one set of data—for instance, race-specific data on arrests for drug possession—would cost Maclean’s $7,693. In Saskatchewan, municipal police are exempted from Freedom of Information laws, and the Regina Police Service instructed their legal counsel to refuse the request.

To approach the issue from a different perspective, Maclean’s and Discourse Media (with the support of Canadian Journalists for Free Expression) surveyed more than 850 post-secondary students in Regina, Saskatoon and Winnipeg, to see whether there was any difference in the likelihood of being stopped for Indigenous and non-Indigenous students.

Survey results show the odds of an Indigenous student from the sampled population being stopped by police were 1.6 times higher than a non-Indigenous student, holding all other explanatory variables (like gender and age) fixed. Indigenous students will be stopped more frequently, the study indicates; whether or not they were engaged in or close to an illegal activity when stopped by police had little influence in explaining the results. This suggests staying out of trouble does not shield Indigenous student from unwanted police attention.

The survey produced other unsettling data. Indigenous students were more likely to “disagree” or “strongly disagree” that their racial group is viewed positively by police. An Indigenous student had a 69 to 84 per cent chance of “disagreeing” or “strongly disagreeing,” depending on their age; a non-Indigenous student had a 10 to 21 per cent chance of responding the same way. Students were also asked to share three words that they feel describe police officers. The most common words non-Indigenous students associate with police—“helpful,” “authority”—differed dramatically from those chosen by Indigenous students: “racist,” “scary.”

In September, three reporters from Maclean’s and Discourse Media spent two days in downtown and North Central Regina—at the Cornwall Centre mall, at Victoria Park, in churches, and in residents’ homes—speaking with dozens of Indigenous residents about police interactions. Half spoke of unwanted contact with police. Of them, a majority felt they were stopped because of the colour of their skin. Two people alleged they were detained when it was determined they had unpaid fines relating to animal bylaw infractions. Others said they were found to be in breach of a condition of bail or a release program during a random stop.Criminals, meanwhile, have learned to exploit biases. In Saskatchewan, non-Indigenous men and women are recruited to carry drugs and weapons for Indigenous gangs, says Robert Henry, a Saskatoon academic whose Ph.D. research focused on Indigenous street gangs. “They use their whiteness to move around police stop checks.”

With frustration rising, some Indigenous citizens have begun filming what they believe are incidents of racial profiling. In a video recently uploaded to Facebook, Andre Bear, a clean-cut, 20-year-old aspiring teacher, is stopped by police in Saskatoon while returning from baseball practice with his 18-year-old friend. When Bear asks why they were pulled over, an officer tells him: “Shut up, passenger.” “We have a reason,” another says: “Licence and registration.” Eventually, they’re allowed to go. No reason is given for the stop.

Police say complaints of racial profiling are without substance. The Saskatchewan Public Complaints Commission, which investigates complaints against municipal police, says not a single allegation of racism by a civilian against an officer with any municipal police force in the province has ever been substantiated. Police say random street checks are necessary, acting as deterrents, helping solve crime and keeping the public safe.

One Indigenous officer in Western Canada, who spoke on condition that his name not be used, told Maclean’s he was stopped “again and again” growing up; but he argued that proactive policing, focusing on hot spots, helped bring down violent crime across the West—by fully 61 per cent in Winnipeg in the last five years. Indigenous people, who are three times more likely to be victimized, are primary beneficiaries, he added.

There are signs tactics may be changing. The Winnipeg Police Service, under Chief Devon Clunis, who was raised in the city’s troubled North End, is testing a new approach to policing in that neighbourhood. Dubbed the “Block-by-Block” program, it zeroes attention on a 21-block area, and brings families concentrated help from social service and health agencies, community groups and schools to try to tackle problems—like substance abuse or domestic violence—

before police need to be called. “From day one, I said, ‘We are going to dramatically change the way we police in this city,’ ” Clunis told Maclean’s. He calls it “crime prevention through social development.” Results are due in spring.

But for those repeatedly targeted by police attention, the impact can be profound. “It makes you feel like you’re less human, like your life is worth less,” says Bear, who was nine the first time he was first stopped, walking home from school in downtown Saskatoon. He’s stopped every few months, he says: “When I was younger it made me ashamed—of having brown skin, of growing up where I did.”

Peter Daniels, a soft-spoken Cree father of two from Regina, began crying when voicing fears his young sons might soon become targets of police attention, the way he once was. Like him, both boys wear their long, brown hair in braids. His eldest, now 10, was relentlessly teased in school last year because of it, and told his father he’d thought of harming himself. “You wish that police, that people, could look beyond the stereotype, and see you for who you are.”In Regina last month, the SPCC conceded that video and audio recordings did not “contradict” Simon Ash-Moccasin’s account of his unlawful detention; and the ministry of justice determined there was “no lawful justification for the use of force.” But the SPCC refused to say Ash-Moccasin was racially profiled. He was “by unfortunate coincidence,” the “only person observed in the immediate vicinity,” SPCC chair Brent Cotter found. No police will be disciplined.

Chapter 2 – Bail DeniedOn a recent day, some 70 per cent of defendants who parade past a judge via video link from the Winnipeg Remand Centre are Indigenous, many dressed in jail-issue, baggy, grey sweatsuits. It is a grim cattle call: The Indigenous 18-year-old female accused of stealing meat from a Superstore, the 19-year-old man from Shamattawa, Man., given 25 days for missing a parole check-in. He’s been homeless since aging out of foster care, where he was abused and repeatedly left out in the cold. When they pleaded out, their cases often wrapped up in under five minutes, sentencing included. This is bail court, and it is here, at this early stage ahead of trial—with its rigorous standards of due process and proof—that a criminal defendant is most vulnerable. For a majority of Indigenous accused, their case ends here, multiple front-line lawyers told Maclean’s.

Maclean’s spent two days observing the scene. Duty counsel lawyers in Toronto and Winnipeg admit they rarely spend more than 10 minutes with a defendant. Sometimes, it’s as little as five. In Winnipeg, some met them in court: In hushed, hurried phone calls—their hands over their mouths to muffle their words—these lawyers rushed through the deal on offer from the Crown. It was unclear whether some of the accused, with intellectual disabilities and fetal alcohol spectrum disorder were equipped to understand proceedings. Repeated interruptions hammered home the point: “Miss, when can I go home?” a 53-year-old Cree man, who pleaded guilty to public intoxication, asked the judge immediately after his sentence was read out.

No province except P.E.I. denies bail more frequently than Manitoba: Just three of 10 inmates in the province’s overcrowded jails have been sentenced to a crime; the rest are in remand custody, awaiting trial.

Though Canada’s bail laws were reformed four decades ago, grounded in the notion that someone accused of a crime should be released on bail to await trial unless they are a threat, spooked judges are making it increasingly hard to obtain bail, especially for Indigenous defendants, criminal lawyers say. The number of Indigenous people denied bail jumped 92 per cent in the 15 years leading up to 2009, according to federal data.

In Winnipeg, many were appearing at bail court because they’d missed a court appearance or curfew. Some were homeless, and told the court they’d missed a summons as a result. Some had trouble remembering the many conditions of their release, which can now number as many as 34.

Charges for violating conditions like these are soaring. In B.C., fully 40 per cent of criminal court matters are now “administration of justice” offences, which include breaching conditions of bail or probation, according to a recent study. Alberta found that 52 per cent of Indigenous prisoners had been incarcerated for a breach, almost twice the rate for non-Indigenous prisoners, according to a 2011 report by the province’s justice branch.

Two years ago, 19-year-old Jonathan Champagne (his name was changed because he was a minor at the time of his arrest) was granted bail after an arrest on a charge of sexual assault. He claims it never happened. A few months later, while walking down Portage Avenue in a favourite red T-shirt, police stopped him on suspicion he was wearing gang colours. Champagne has never been in a gang. He doesn’t use drugs. Police searched him, finding a paring knife in his shorts pocket. He was arrested for carrying a concealed weapon. This time, the judge refused to let him out on bail. The 17-year-old, who was shuttled between 10 homes in four cities growing up, was devastated: A few months earlier, he’d been placed in a tough, but loving home with a corrections officer. He’s come to trust the family, a first. But the nine-month wait to trial meant losing that placement.

His lawyer, Billy Marks, appealed the judge’s decision. His foster parents were so convinced of Champagne’s innocence they agreed to foot the $500 monthly cost of an ankle monitoring system to strengthen his case. But the judge refused to budge.

Behind bars, Champagne was vilified and targeted. After admitting to wanting to end his life, he was placed in segregation. He spent 23 hours a day in a tiny cell, fed through the door and released to “the cage,” a tiny, enclosed exercise yard for an hour. He’d walk in circles until his time was up. “It got to the point where I didn’t want to be alive anymore,” he says.These were his options: Spend nine months in jail and fight the charges, or plead out. The Crown had approached Marks to say they would agree to jointly recommend time served if his client pleaded guilty to sexual assault. The guilty plea broke Marks’s heart. “But at the same time, I could see what was happening to him.”

He is hardly alone. Many plead out, even when they’re innocent, because they can’t make bail, putting them at risk of losing jobs, housing, and custody of their children, defence lawyers told Maclean’s. The simple act of having an Indigenous lawyer, meanwhile, can almost double the number of “not guilty” pleas at first appearance to 49 per cent, according to one federal study.Eddy Cobiness, a 49-year-old member of the Buffalo Point First Nation in Manitoba, told Maclean’s he pleads guilty every time he’s charged, even when he didn’t commit the crime he is accused of: “I just say: ‘Okay, yeah’—just to get out. Every day away from your kids is another day of making memories you lose.”

Denied bail and faced with the prospect of a lengthy stay in an overcrowded jail, more and more are pushed into perverse choices in this era of mandatory minimums. “What would you do?” says Winnipeg criminal lawyer Greg Brodsky. “Do you want to lose your kids? Your job? Or do you [take the plea, and] just go home?” Increasingly, he says, justice resembles a “rush to resolve cases by the best bargain you can make.”

Chapter 3 – SentencingTwo years ago, Jim Scott, a soft-spoken Saskatoon defence lawyer, grew so troubled by the harsh sentences he was seeing handed out to Indigenous offenders that he set out to study all publicly available, online criminal decisions in Saskatchewan, starting in 1996; there, 81 per cent of adults sentenced to provincial custody are Indigenous, more than anywhere else in the country. 1996 was the year the Criminal Code was amended to push judges to consider conditional and restorative sentences, particularly when sentencing Indigenous offenders.

Three years later, in R. v. Gladue, the Supreme Court was even more explicit: Sentencing judges must recognize an Indigenous offender’s history of dislocation, disadvantage, addiction and abuse.

Still, Scott felt that judges in the province mostly “tuned out” whenever he presented a Gladue submission. This wasn’t just frustrating; the resulting sentences were “unlawful” in his mind: “The Supreme Court wasn’t making a suggestion, the law requires it.”

So he analyzed sentences for all crimes in Saskatchewan; Gladue reforms, his data showed, have failed miserably. Indigenous offenders were sentenced to more than twice as much jail time as those where there was no indication the offender was Indigenous. It was three times higher for hazardous driving and 10 times higher for assault with a weapon. The problem is, on the Prairies, where Gladue is most “desperately needed,” it’s been “virtually ignored,” says Jonathan Rudin, with Aboriginal Legal Services of Toronto.

The Saskatchewan Court of Appeal (SKCA) has been called out by legal scholars, including the University of Toronto’s Kent Roach, who in 2010 wrote that the SKCA has made clear “in a number of cases,” that Gladue will “make little, if any, difference in the sentencing of Aboriginal offenders in serious cases.” In 2012, the Supreme Court was forced to reiterate its stance in R.

v. Ipeelee, calling out lower courts by noting that Gladue applies in all contexts, and that failing to apply the principle is sufficient grounds on its own for appeal.

Like Scott, retired B.C. judge Cunliffe Barnett was perturbed by rulings he saw emerging from the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal. Two years ago, he reviewed all the court’s publicly available criminal cases involving Indigenous offenders in Saskatchewan, from 1999 on. His data showed an eight per cent application rate for Gladue in cases with an Indigenous defendant. In some cases, Barnett felt the Conservative-appointed appeals court was “actively avoiding stating the person was Indigenous at all.”

“Too many judges will say: ‘I understand Aboriginal people,’ but they don’t have a clue,” says Barnett, who sat on the bench for 38 years, first in B.C.’s Interior, then in the territorial courts in the Yukon and Northwest Territories. “They’ve made judgments on Aboriginal people for years. But they’ve never set foot on a reserve. They’ve never talked with ordinary, Indigenous people.”

Scorching judicial criticism like this is almost unprecedented. The SKCA, bound by principles of judicial restraint, could not issue a response; but one came via retired SKCA Justice W.J. Vancise, who vigorously disputed Barnett’s findings. The SKCA has “written extensively on this subject,” he wrote in the Saskatoon StarPhoenix.

One of the most troubling examples of disparity in the courts—and a reason for the sentencing imbalances Scott found in Saskatchewan—is the country’s increasing use of the dangerous offender designation. It was designed for irredeemable monsters like serial rapist and murderer Paul Bernardo. More than 80 per cent have convictions for sex offences. Some call it Canada’s death penalty. Just 3.7 per cent of “DOs” ever leave prison, according to the latest corrections’ data.

But a growing number of Indigenous offenders are being jailed for life this way. The number of annual dangerous-offender designations has doubled in the last decade, to an average of 40 per year. The proportion of Indigenous designations recently hit 29 per cent, up from 23 per cent in 2007. In Saskatchewan, which has the highest number of dangerous offenders per capita in the country, 80 per cent are Indigenous, according to Scott’s data. Some are there for “really ludicrous offences,” says a doctor who acts across Canada as a witness in such cases. “There is a good reason they call Saskatchewan ‘Alabama north,’ ” the doctor adds. Scott’s data shows the provincial Crown’s office logging a 98 per cent success rate in these cases. Only two of the 98 dangerous and long-term offender applications Scott reviewed were dismissed.

In one 2014 dismissal, a judge ruled against the Crown’s application for a mentally ill Indigenous woman who had spent the previous five years tied to a bed and could no longer stand or walk.In 2005, Andy Peekeekoot, a 25-year-old man from central Saskatchewan’s Ahtahkakoop Cree Nation, was charged for his role in a bar fight with two Caucasian men in Shell Lake, Sask. No one was seriously hurt; one of the men involved ordered another beer when the 90-second fight ended. But Peekeekoot waved a knife with a four-inch blade he said he’d found at a

nearby lake. That incident would lead to his dangerous-offender designation, even though he’d never even served serious time—a penitentiary term of two years or more.

As a young man, Peekeekoot racked up a list of offences, many for fighting or spitting at guards in jail; on all but one occasion, lawyers pleaded him out. He was, undeniably, violent. His most serious conviction was for stomping a man in a brawl when he was 22, causing the victim brain damage.

In court, Peekeekoot didn’t help himself. During his dangerous-offender hearing, he fired one lawyer; another quit at the most critical phase for the defence, concluding his client had lost confidence in him. The judge ordered Peekeekoot, with a Grade 6 education, to continue. He was barred from making copies of court documents, barred from bringing court documents to his cell to study. In any event, he couldn’t “make heads or tails of [them],” as he told Judge Lloyd Deshaye.

He’d been forced to appear in a heavy, anti-suicide smock, after an undisclosed incident, and was naked underneath. His hands were cuffed. He was being held in segregation.

At one point, a concerned Indigenous court worker stood: “Do you know about his childhood?” Eric Ahenakew asked the court. He urged the judge to consider the systems that had failed to protect Peekeekoot as a boy, to consider why he was lashing out, to “get a view of this man as an Aboriginal person.” He “wasn’t born to be violent,” Ahenakew told the court.

Before he turned two, Peekeekoot was made a ward of the state, after being found starving and neglected. Both parents were violent alcoholics and drug users, among many who serially abused him throughout his youth. When he was nine, his mom, who once attempted to stab him, convinced a group of male friends to beat him so badly he was hospitalized. By 10 he was drinking. He was 12 the first time he attempted suicide, after being sexually abused. When he was 13, his father made him watch as he raped a child. He was 14 when he did his first stint in juvenile detention. From then on, he was in and out of jail.

“I can’t do this by myself,” Peekeekoot kept telling Judge Deshaye. “I’ve not the means nor the education to do so. There’s no way I can continue.” The judge concluded Peekeekoot would not be calling any evidence in his defence: “If people cannot or will not work with you I don’t have a magic wand that can cure that situation,” the judge said.

Barnett, who served 38 years on the bench, believes the judge was “flat-out wrong”: He could have appointed counsel. A Gladue report to be used in sentencing could have been ordered. “A judge has a duty to make very certain the information Peekeekoot wanted before the court gets there. It is unconscionable that a court in Canada can think it acceptable that a person be declared a dangerous offender and locked up—almost certainly for the rest of his life—when he has not been heard, and his story has not been told,” Barnett says. Peekeekoot understood so little that on Jan. 15, 2010, the day Deshaye was delivering his ruling, he thought court had convened so he could begin the process of finding a new lawyer.

He appealed, but Saskatchewan’s high court ruled that it was “not clear the sentencing judge failed to consider so-called Gladue factors.” The judge “didn’t even describe Andy as Aboriginal,” says Bob Hrycan, Peekeekoot’s lawyer on appeal. “There was no meaningful analysis of background factors. And in the end, he had no lawyer. That was enough?”

For Peekeekoot, it was also the end of the line. Last May, the Supreme Court declined his application for leave to appeal (the high court approves roughly five per cent of applications, Barnett notes). Hrycan believes Peekeekoot is a changed man. He’s 36 now, married, and hasn’t had a charge for violence in nine years. Peekeekoot, who is currently housed in a federal prison in Alberta, says he’s been clean of drugs and alcohol for 11 years. As a young man he was almost mute. These days, he’ll spend hours on the phone, opening up about the darkest chapters of his life, or the tiny fox he watches out in the prison yard. He’s come to see that in the warped environment of youth, the men around him earned respect through anger and hostility. In response, he always tried to be “twice as tough.”

None of this, Hrycan says, will do him any good: “He’ll never get out. We’ve put someone in jail for the rest of his life for waving a four-inch knife.”

Chapter 4 – SegregationIn prison, Indigenous offenders serve much harder time than anyone else. Indigenous inmates are placed in minimum-security institutions at just half the rate of their non-Indigenous counterparts. They are more likely to be placed in segregation, accounting for 31 per cent of cases; and, once in isolation, they’ll spend 16 per cent more time there. They account for 45 per cent of all self-harm incidents. Nine in 10 are held to the expiry of their sentence, versus two-thirds of the non-Indigenous inmate population. They are more likely to be restrained in prison, to be involved in use-of-force incidents, to receive institutional charges, to die there.

Many of these disparities are known because Howard Sapers, the correctional investigator of Canada, made a point of tracking race-specific corrections data. Two years ago, troubled by the surging growth of the Indigenous inmate population, he issued a special report on it in Parliament, blaming systemic racism and cultural bias. It was one of only two the office has ever issued, to “signal this was a very important matter requiring urgent action.” It received “anything but,” Sapers says now, bitterly. Last year, the federal government announced he was being replaced (a process interrupted by the election, which left him on the job).

An Indigenous offender’s problems begin with intake, Sapers says, where their risk level is often consistently over-classified by the Custody Rating Scale; it determines whether they belong in minimum, medium or maximum security (and almost everything else about their time behind bars). For years, the federal government has been ignoring repeated demands to reform these and other assessment tools used on the Indigenous inmate population. The latest, in September, came in a blistering Federal Court ruling. Justice Michael Phelan ordered Correctional Service Canada (CSC) to stop using them on Indigenous offenders, arguing they are “susceptible to cultural bias,” and can produce “junk” data.

“This is not an issue the CSC missed inadvertently,” Justice Phelan wrote, noting the U.K., Australia and the U.S. have all studied such assessments to ensure they are reliable for cultural minorities. “It has been a live issue since 2000, on the CSC’s ‘radar screen,’ and the subject of past court decisions. It is time for the matter to be resolved.” CSC immediately appealed.Part of the problem is that the marginalization experienced by some Indigenous peoples gets turned into “risk”: intergenerational trauma, alcoholism, a history of abuse, a lack of education, employment, a bank account or even hobbies make it more likely an inmate will be housed in maximum, and classed “high risk.”

Cruelties are built into the system. The main reason Indigenous women—who account for 78 per cent of all self-harm incidents in prison—are moved to higher security levels is due to self-harm, including suicide attempts, according to a 2008 report by the Ontario Women’s Justice Network.

Kinew James, who died months before the end of a 15-year sentence while incarcerated in Saskatchewan, is frequently compared to Ashley Smith, who strangled herself to death at Grand Valley Institution for Women in 2007 as guards watched. Both were incarcerated as teens. They struggled with mental illness and self-harm, were frequently moved, and spent long stretches in segregation in a system that didn’t know how to deal with them. But James had a resilient streak. She believed she was stronger: “I’m not Ashley Smith,” she said at a Kitchener court appearance in 2011, when a judge noted the likeness. “I have a lot more strength. I got my Grade 12. I want out of jail,” she told him. “I know I will get out.”

She never did. The 35-year-old Anishinaabe Native, a member of the Roseau River First Nation in Manitoba, died Jan. 20, 2013, while incarcerated at Saskatoon’s Regional Psychiatric Centre. All day, she’d been complaining of being unwell. By night, she was moaning and crying, pressing the distress button in her cell. According to one media report, corrections officers responded by muting or shutting it off. Other inmates reportedly began calling for help. When it did come, just before midnight, James was unresponsive.

James was then transferred to hospital where she was declared dead, apparently from heart failure.

She was then a few months shy of being released. She’d been incarcerated at 18, initially sentenced to six years, for manslaughter; but inside, her mental health spiralled downward, she lashed out, and her sentence doubled. She was known to take blame for others, and had been charged with assaulting guards, sometimes when they tried to stop her from harming herself. She cut herself, and self-strangled. Her Ojibwe name, Keshebawnodinnuke Kinew, means “eagle in the whirlwind.”

The data on Indigenous female offenders are grim: 91 per cent admit to having been sexually or physically abused; and nine in 10 report using drugs or alcohol the day they offended, according to the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies. Many enter the prison system with a host

of mental health needs requiring services and programming. Some instead end up in segregation.

Despite a host of severe mental health diagnoses, including borderline personality disorder, paranoid schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder, manic type, fully six of James’s 15 years in prison were spent in isolation. Sometimes she was held in barren cells so small she could touch opposite walls at once. She was there 23 hours a day, “let out for a half-hour in the yard,” says her sister, Cheryl Smith, of Winnipeg. At one point she spent almost two years straight in segregation. She was then under “management protocol,” a super maximum designation allowing inmates to be held indefinitely in segregation; when it was quietly ended in 2011, 100 per cent of inmates so designated were Indigenous. James was sometimes so starved for human contact she would lie against her cell floor, her face pressed against the crack beneath the door, to hear voices.

After prolonged stays in segregation James would sometimes “see things, hear things,” and get lost in fantasies, says Kim Pate, executive director of the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies, who knew James well. In 2013, Colorado barred inmates with serious mental health issues from being held in segregation. “There is ample evidence Kinew’s death was preventable,” says Pate. “It screams out the need for oversight and accountability for corrections.”

James was told she’d never reach Grade 4, but managed to earn her high school equivalency certificate behind bars. She was fully shackled and carrying a body chain at her graduation. No one was permitted to attend. These were among privileges James had to earn, to work her way out of segregation and management protocol, says Pate. At times, she was barred from keeping photos of her family, from having crayons. An overheard swear word was evidence of non-conforming behaviour, a higher standard than anything demanded of male inmates, says Pate.Before she died, she’d begun post-secondary coursework for Athabasca University. She wrote poetry. “Six months later, she would have been home,” says Cecil, her brother, a band counsellor at Roseau River. Her death will be the subject of a public inquiry in Saskatchewan in April. Last week, a judge denied a request to seal a report into her death.

“There is a group in Canada that keeps mysteriously dying,’” says University of Toronto sociology professor Sherene Razack. “We have convinced ourselves that we are improving. The reality is systems are in place to keep reproducing this.”

Since no data on the race of those dying in prison in Canada exists, Razack undertook a study of in-custody deaths in Saskatchewan; her study found that Indigenous men account for roughly 50 per cent of all male deaths, many from suicide, head-injury or fatal encounters with police. Many of these deaths occur because officials “will not touch, examine, or closely monitor Indigenous people in their care,” Razack says. “This indifference kills.”

Chapter 5 — A New Start“Courtroom’s open,” Judge Marion Buller-Bennett says with a wide smile, ushering everyone waiting in the corridor into the second-floor courtroom at the New Westminster Provincial Courthouse. As the gallery fills, Buller-Bennett, a member of the Mistawasis First Nation in Saskatchewan, leaves the judge’s dais, pulls up a plastic chair, and asks everyone to introduce themselves. Several she greets with a few words in their language, thus opening B.C.’s First Nations Courts, which operates unlike any other courtroom in the country.

Legal jargon is barred. Formalities are not observed. There is no prisoner’s dock, no microphones. Babies, noisy kids, coffee, laughter—all are welcome. Elsewhere, a judge might threaten sanction after an interruption or outburst. Buller-Bennett encourages them.

During a hearing for a 28-year-old Cree man who pleaded guilty to a drug offence, a recovering crystal meth addict stood up to commend his progress. Someone else suggested he consider Warriors Against Violence, an anger management program geared to Indigenous men. Another piped up with the number of a bus that will take him directly to it. Before he left, the Sandy Lake First Nation man, choking back tears, thanked the judge for acknowledging him—a “first,” he said. As he was leaving, someone grabbed him in a bear hug. “You’re doing great man,” he said. “Stick with it.”

Indigenous offenders can only appear before B.C.’s First Nations Court if they are entering guilty pleas (and their charges must be minor, and without a mandatory minimum sentence). They then work with the judge and two courtroom elders to come up with a “healing plan,” a 12-month suspended sentence, which generally includes a stay in a residential treatment facility, anger management and parenting classes, addictions and cultural programming.Most appearing before Buller-Bennett on that day were intergenerational survivors of residential schools. Their stories rarely deviated from a grim narrative: harrowing childhood, substance abuse, incarceration—almost always for crimes fuelled by or to feed their addictions.

“Rather than apply another Band-Aid,” Buller-Bennett explained to the court, the point is to “help deal with what’s causing the problem, often addiction.” To monitor progress, the offender is required to return every two months. A missed appearance triggers a bench warrant, as in regular court.

At the completion of sentences, Buller-Bennett holds “graduation ceremonies.” Two elders blanket graduates in red and black fleece, among the highest honours in Coastal First Nations culture. Not one got through it dry-eyed.

Buller-Bennett has said recidivism rates in the eight-year-old court, based on Cree teachings, beliefs and values, are low. Similar courts in Australia have more than halved recidivism rates. As in the Australian courts, elders tend to say things a judge might not. “It’s like being publicly scolded by your grandma,” Rose Falla, an Indigenous magistrate who helped establish Koori Courts in Australia’s Victoria state told Maclean’s.

But Jonathan Rudin sums up the problem: Where these innovations are most needed—Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta—is exactly where you see the “most intransigence, the fewest innovations.”

These same critiques could also be levelled at Ottawa, which, for a decade, has been ignoring calls to reform biased correctional admissions tests, bail and other laws disproportionately impacting Indigenous offenders. Instead, it appears to be incarcerating as many Indigenous people as possible, for as long as legally possible, with far-reaching consequences for Indigenous families. “[Indigenous people] are not there because of a crime spree,” says Sapers. “They’re there because of the impact of social factors, government policy and mandatory minimum sentences.”

This situation does not help increase public safety: incarceration has almost no effect on bringing down crime, and it increases the likelihood of reoffending, as any criminologist will argue. Indigenous communities complain offenders are being returned more hardened, hopeless, violent and angry.

“What we are doing is using our criminal justice system to defend ourselves from the consequence of our own racism,” says Toronto criminal lawyer John Struthers, who cut his legal teeth as a Crown attorney in remote, northern communities. “Rather than treat alcoholism, addiction, trauma, we keep the doors closed.”

“Once you’re in the system, you never get out,” says Dwight Monkman. Three of his four brothers have been incarcerated. The 26-year-old Winnipegger, a member of the Lake Manitoba First Nation, spoke to Maclean’s late last summer from the Headingley Correctional Institution, where he was incarcerated for a weapons charge and breaching a condition of his release. Since turning 18, the longest stretch Monkman says he’s spent on the outside was 15 months. “I’m actually scared to get out,” he says, clutching the battered, black phone under his chin. “Because I know I’ll end up right back here.”

Forging an indigenous intelligentsiaIan Anderson, September 7, 2016The Australian

We need more indigenous academics in Australian universities. Indigenous academics are role models and provide positive leadership for younger students. They also have the capacity to address difficult questions with rigour and cultural sensitivity.

To build a robust society and economy, we need programs to support the growth of an indigenous intellectual elite. This intellectual elite will help governments and other agencies to develop evidence-based policies on issues such as violence, including family violence, alcohol and substance abuse, suicide, unemployment and community development. We need evidence about what works so we can implement sustainable solutions.

Indigenous students need targeted support to enable them to enrol in postgraduate degrees and complete these degrees. Currently indigenous students comprise less than 1.4 per cent of the total higher degree research enrolments in Australia and only 0.55 per cent of the completions.

The poor completion rate points to the need for universities to improve their game. New Zealand has had greater success with Maori PhD graduates. One reason is that it has invested in the development of collaborative programs where several universities work together to provide Maori students with appropriate support, recognising this cohort of students face unique barriers before and during their doctoral research.

The first hurdle all PhD students face is obtaining financial support. Each university has only a limited number of scholarships, so PhD scholarships are fiercely competitive. Unlike non-indigenous students who may undertake their PhD with or without a scholarship, most indigenous students cannot start a PhD without a scholarship.

Indigenous students who undertake postgraduate studies are typically mature age, many with family obligations. A scholarship is an essential requirement for them to undertake a PhD. Without financial support, indigenous students must abandon their dream of becoming a leader in their chosen academic field.

Most universities provide PhD scholarships that are based purely on merit. Under this system, many indigenous students miss out, some by only a few points. A merit-based approach fails to address the un-level playing field in access to education.

Indigenous students are disadvantaged when competing for PhD scholarships because of their prior educational opportunities. Those who went to school in rural and remote areas do not have access to the same opportunities as those who attended high schools in capital cities.

The inequity in educational opportunities results in many indigenous students playing educa-tional catch-up during their tertiary studies. To address this inequity, universities need to provide PhD scholarships that recognise both merit and prior educational opportunity.

Indigenous students who are successful in getting a scholarship are then faced with barriers when they begin their PhDs, the most common being social isolation, lack of prior research training and inadequate PhD supervision.

At any university, the cohort of indigenous students is relatively small and often spread across the whole institution.

Many students have left their community, often travelling large distances. They may be the only person from their community to be studying at university. Without knowing any other students, or having friends living in the city, they may have difficulty building a social network.

If universities are to build better programs, they will need to bring together students from a range of disciplines. An indigenous student undertaking a PhD in mathematics, for example, needs opportunities to meet other indigenous students studying anthropology, philosophy and medicine. Although their research interests are different, their family and cultural obligations are often similar.

Universities need to provide spaces in which indigenous students can discuss issues and share ideas about what it means for them to be indigenous and part of an intellectual elite.

Many indigenous students do not receive adequate research training during their undergraduate degrees. Rather than provide catch-up research training in an ad hoc manner, it is more efficient to deliver the required training to groups of PhD students.

The University of Melbourne’s graduate certificate in indigenous research leadership runs in parallel with PhD studies. It brings together indigenous PhD students to develop social connections and provide research training. It also provides training for non-indigenous supervisors, recognising that specific skills and knowledge is required to provide adequate supervision for an indigenous student. For example, supervisors require specific expertise when indigenous students undertake fieldwork and use indigenous methodologies.

Reform of the research training system should focus on increasing the number of indigenous students undertaking PhDs and supporting them to complete their degrees. This requires increased access to scholarships, improved research training and skilled supervision.

Wake up. The threat to our Indigenous women is Canada’s problem.Nancy MacDonald, Maclean’s Magazine, June 2 2015

What happened in residential schools was nothing short of “cultural genocide,” said Justice Murray Sinclair, chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as he released the commission’s 94 recommendations in Ottawa this week: “Survivors were stripped of the love of their families. They were stripped of their self-respect and they were stripped of their identity.” Generations on, this practice continues to directly affect Indigenous Canadians, Sinclair said.

That much became clear to Maclean’s in the months that reporter Nancy Macdonald spent researching this week’s cover package: stories of 13 extraordinary Indigenous women. Each has survived horrific violence. Each came within a breath of joining the missing and murdered. Almost all can trace the abuse and sexual violence that have overwhelmed their families to those federally funded schools through whose doors 150,000 Indigenous children passed for more than a century.

More than one of these women told of four generations of women in their families who were raped. Yet what emerges most clearly from their stories is a tremendous capacity for resilience and forgiveness. Make no mistake: While the subject matter may be dark, these remarkable stories are not. They are triumphant, without exception. They are profiles in courage.

“In speaking out, I am saying: No more,” Kim Jonathan, interim chief of the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations, told Maclean’s. Jonathan is the country’s most senior female Indigenous leader, and the inspiration for this project. She is speaking publicly, for the first time, of her childhood sexual assault, the abuse she endured as a young girl, and the sexual harassment she continues to face as a national leader.

“Having lived through all that I have, I am choosing to say: I am not going to be next,” Jonathan says. “And I am speaking up for our sisters, the missing and murdered, whose voices have been stolen.”

Now is the time to listen to these voices. The full six-volume report from Sinclair’s commission won’t be released until later this year, but already the report contains a sweeping agenda for change, including: removal of the Criminal Code provision permitting corporal punishment; enhanced teaching of Aboriginal languages in colleges and universities; clear goals and strategies for reducing the gap between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal health outcomes; and a public inquiry into missing and murdered Aboriginal women. If the scars left behind by the residential school system are almost unimaginable, the agenda Sinclair sketched includes a series of concrete steps to achieve measurable outcomes. All that remains is for governments, beginning with the one in Ottawa, to respond.

Indigenous women make up just two per cent of the country’s population, but more than one in four female homicide victims in the last five years, a share that continues to rise. The United Nations and Amnesty International have called repeatedly on Ottawa to take real action.

Instead, this spring, the federal government chose to release data on the perpetrators of these crimes, to point the finger back at the community. “Obviously, there’s a lack of respect for women and girls on reserves,” Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt told the Ottawa Citizen. The minister is looking in the wrong place. This is overwhelmingly an urban phenomenon: Just seven per cent of missing cases and 13 per cent of murder cases among Indigenous women occur on-reserve.

Let us be clear: This is not an Indigenous problem. This is a Canadian problem. Canada did not suddenly wake up to 1,181 murdered and missing Indigenous women.

But, robbed of context, we tend to blame the missing and murdered themselves. We see them as drug addicts, lost—party, even—to their own victimization. That is why it is so important to hear from survivors; they help us understand how we got here. They humanize the fallen. And they lend their formidable strength to the women who continue to suffer.

“I have been there, too. I walk with you,” said Jonathan, addressing those women directly. Jonathan, who faces an election in four months, knows she could be harmed politically by doing so. She did it anyway.

The courage these women have shown in speaking out, and their resilience, are extraordinary. From the ashes of those horrific schools, somehow, women like this have emerged. Their example should serve as a call for a national soul-searching. That Indigenous women in one of the world’s richest, most developed countries continue to be subjected to sexual violence to a degree not seen outside the most violent corners of the developing world cannot be allowed to endure.

Indigenous nurse leaders share success storiesBy Laura Eggertson, Canadian Nurse, April 2016

When Sherri Di Lallo first met the young parents from Little Red River Cree Nation at Edmonton’s Stollery Children’s Hospital, she could see their fear and anxiety.

The couple had travelled almost 1,000 kilometres from their fly-in community of 1,800 people in northern Alberta to learn how to change their eight-month-old’s feeding tube. The baby, who had survived meningitis, needed ongoing care back on the reserve, where there were few resources or supports. But the size of the hospital alone was overwhelming for the shy young couple; the number of staff was nearly three times the population of their community.

Until they met Di Lallo, a Métis RN and the hospital’s first Aboriginal child health nurse coordinator, no one had taken the time to explain to the parents, in terms they could understand, the importance of keeping the area around their son’s feeding tube clean and free of infection.

Di Lallo will be speaking about her role at the hospital on a panel of Indigenous nurse leaders at CNA’s biennial convention in Saint John, N.B.

In the case of these young parents, Di Lallo’s help was critical. First, she sat with them and asked how they were doing, with the help of a Cree-speaking social worker. Then, Di Lallo and a home nutrition nurse took them through the steps they needed to learn. They practised, and she reassured them that their parenting skills were up to the task.

“By us helping them, they were able to hear us,” says Di Lallo. “They became more relaxed. They were talkative — friendly — the stress went away.” Most importantly, the baby’s care improved.

In this new position, Di Lallo will be liaising and advocating for children and their families while they are at the hospital and then coordinating better followup care in First Nations and Métis communities when the families go home.

The hospital created the role following concerns from families and staff that patients were falling through the cracks when they returned to their communities. Discharge planning had not been completed. For example, nurses in many of the communities can’t access electronic patient records, so they didn’t know what services to provide returning patients. Hospital staff were not aware of the limited resources in the communities.

Now, Di Lallo telephones the nurses to discuss home care before children are discharged and she is educating staff at the hospital. The result is better communication, continuity of care and improved service for patients, she says.

The Aboriginal child health nurse coordinator role is an example of community-driven innovation emerging in Indigenous communities across the country, supported by Indigenous nurses whose own experiences inform their leadership. Those developments are the reason Dawn Tisdale, who will chair the panel at the convention, believes it’s important that the panellists share their stories.

“We’re the fastest growing population in Canada, and the health disparities that Indigenous people face are not acceptable,” says Tisdale, who is past president of the Canadian Nursing Students’ Association and a fourth-year nursing student at North Island College on Vancouver Island. “It’s time for nurses to advocate for the health of Indigenous people.”

An important aspect of that advocacy is to showcase the positive changes Indigenous nurses and communities are developing together, rather than focusing only on the challenges, she says. “These communities are a tremendous source of strength and wisdom, and they have Indigenous knowledge that should be cherished, respected and supported.”

Tisdale, who is of Mi’kmaq ancestry, hopes the practices the panellists describe will help non-Indigenous nurses increase their understanding and compassion and cultural sensitivity to the impact that historical trauma and the residential school experience has had on the health of Indigenous people.

Awareness of the impact of historical trauma is a critical component of Shelley Francis’s role as a diabetes community consultant serving 12 First Nations communities in New Brunswick. Francis, a Maliseet woman originally from the Tobique First Nation, will describe her work with the national Aboriginal Diabetes Initiative when she joins Di Lallo and Cheyenne Mary on the panel. One of the critical realizations Francis has made in her role of helping First Nations people manage their diabetes is that success rests on addressing their concurrent health concerns, including mental health and addiction.

She explains that in community diabetes clinics, she sees people whose illness is out of control at the same time as their mental health is unstable, often as a result of trauma. “While my primary objective would be to help them manage their blood glucose, they are much more likely to respond to my help if I try to understand any other personal struggles and focus on what they need.”

Lack of transportation and lack of cultural competence in non-Indigenous health-care professionals — and a fear of being judged by them — are just a few of the factors that discourage First Nations people from attending diabetes clinics off reserve. Working with three other diabetes educators in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, and with the help of a Mi’kmaq elder, she developed the Diabetes Self-Management Journey. This program brings together 30-40 people from First Nations communities to learn culturally safe diabetes management techniques (such as building relationships, understanding what food is readily available and focusing on individuals’ strengths and abilities), to support traditional practices and to build a network of people who are struggling to manage the disease.

Taking the lead from communities about their health priorities governs how she works, Francis says. People tell her what kind of care they need, and she works alongside them to deliver it. That’s an approach more nurses should follow, she believes. She hopes her presentation will help convention attendees begin to understand why many aspects of the health-care system fail to provide culturally safe and competent care for Indigenous peoples in Canada.

Cheyenne Mary is another New Brunswicker who promotes overall good health in First Nations communities. In addition to teaching community health in the University of New Brunswick’s faculty of nursing, she is the Canadian Feed The Children program advisor in the province. In this role, she helps communities increase food security, supporting breakfast and lunch programs and gardens at local schools as well as Good Food box programs that supply produce to participants at wholesale prices.

All the children at schools on the Eel Ground, Tobique and Elsipogtog First Nations receive free breakfasts and lunches through universal school feeding programs that are models for a growing movement in Canada. At a November 2015 conference to promote national school food programs, a representative from Elsipogtog described its program, which feeds 300 children and incorporates traditional foods, including moose meat, fish, fiddleheads and luskinikn — a Mi’kmaq bread.

“Here we have an initiative that’s looking to First Nations communities as a path forward. What a great message for them,” says Mary.

Because so many people in these communities rely on social assistance, the school programs are critical to ensure children get healthy meals that set them up for successful learning and celebrate their culture, she says. “Our elders would say that food is medicine; so when we’re eating the food that’s local to us and is what our bodies were built to digest, we will be healthier and happier for it.”

One of the legacies of residential schools was the eradication of knowledge concerning food harvesting and preparation. Today, elders are teaching young parents and children how to dress and cook game and prepare other traditional food. Mary is another resource to call on, providing guidance on planting gardens and on setting up collective kitchens and passing on recipes and basic cooking tips on her website, Mi’kmaq Mama.

“In teaching someone how to fish or hunt or prepare the moose meat, you are passing on our culture. Many of our social and health-related issues come from losing our cultural identity, so bringing it back is part of the solution. That, in and of itself, is healing.”

These nurses hope the healing they are a part of will spread to help non-Indigenous nurses be better prepared to deliver safe, culturally appropriate care to the First Nations, Métis and Inuit patients they serve.

How Indigenous artists are taking back what the fashion industry stoleFrom the gallery to the mall? Imagine seeing an art show about cultural appropriation at Urban OutfittersLeah Collins · CBC Arts, June 17, 2016

If Sage Paul and Erika Iserhoff get their wish, the next place you'll see their latest art show will be at the mall.

Urban Outfitters, specifically — international purveyor of faux-vintage record players and dorm-room décor, and a retailer that's been in a legal battle with the Navajo Nation since they started using their name to describe everything from printed flasks to underpants.

"Cultural appropriation is always in the news," laments Paul with a laugh, and she says that with more authority than most. The Toronto artist jokes, half-seriously, that she's become a go-to talking head when the CBC's running a story about, say, DSquared being chosen to design the Canadian Olympic uniforms, or controversy over a collectible cat figurine branded "Chief Runs With Paws."

"It's always about asking if something's making me angry or not," says Paul — when the artist is making a career based on taking action.

Along with Iserhoff, Paul is the co-founder of the Setsuné Fashion Incubator. Based in Toronto, the non-profit supports Indigenous women in fashion and the arts while connecting them with a community of people skilled in traditional techniques.

The vision, they say, is to build a reality where First Nations artists and designers, skilled with an understanding of their cultural practices, are players in the fashion industry. If artists like those coming out of Setsuné are involved in the actual making of the fashion culture, "I think it really takes away the opportunity for cultural appropriation to happen," says Paul. It's the difference, they say, between Valentino consulting and collaborating with Métis artist Christi Belcourt on every colour and flower before a garment hits the runway vs. DSquared saying a collection, named after a racial slur, was inspired by "the enchantment of Canadian Indian tribes."

In the meantime, though, the conversation is still in progress — and that's where the duo's new exhibition of wearable art, Indian Giver, comes in. It's a loaded title, but as Iserhoff explains, it's bang on what they're hoping to express.

"The derogatory term 'Indian giver,' it sort of means taking back what was given, and in this show we're doing that," Iserhoff tells CBC Arts. "We're taking back our story, telling how we want to tell it. Taking back our voice."

Featuring eight contributors, Paul (Dene) and Iserhoff (James Bay Cree) included, the artists hail from First Nations communities throughout the Western Hemisphere.

Iserhoff's "Lack of…" is a bolt of gauzy silk organza that hangs from the ceiling, printed with the surreal repeating pattern of rotting wisdom teeth — a reference to traditional Lakota dresses adorned with elk teeth, but also a statement on the painful lack of cultural wisdom at play when a designer uses traditions that do not belong to them. "The Weaved, The Lasered, The Medallion," by Lido Pimienta (Wayuu) incorporates weaving, embroidery and crocheting — all ancient techniques — but also laser-cut medallions, over-sized and modern acrylic objects meant to be worn as jewellery.

There's no such thing as a singular aesthetic here, and that's the point. Every item is unique, though in its own way contemporary or speculative of an alternate reality. Showing that diversity was crucial to the show and how it aims to detonate the whole problem of cultural appropriation, says Paul.

"I'm expected to be a certain way, even sometimes within my own community — and just in the public generally — to be a specific kind of designer, and I think that comes from the idea of cultural appropriation because we really are expected to be Indigenous or have a specific look," says Paul.

"Indigenous fashion is just fashion made by Indigenous people in whatever form that might be," says Iserhoff.

"This exhibition really allowed us to look at our own ancestry and our own traditions and the work is really diverse. It's modern and some of it is very ancient. We're able to really look back at how we can present ourselves," says Paul.

So why not present that vision to as many people as possible? The garments inside Indian Giver are on display at Toronto's Gallery 1313 to June 19, and though you wouldn't mistake the pieces for anything on sale at the vintage shops and boutiques down the street on West Queen West, Paul and Iserhoff envision the collection someday moving to the mall. "Or a music festival!" suggests Paul. "I think the possibilities are huge."

"For me, having [Indian Giver] in the artistic space is really important but there's always this problem of speaking with people are automatically on the same side, for lack of a better word. How do we access a larger audience — people who are just more about fashion, and those people who hide behind their computers and the comments section. How do we reach those people?" she asks.

"I think it's crazy that we're still having this conversation," says Iserhoff. "It's just weird to me to think that someone can go in and use our stuff and think it's 'inspiration' when it's just theft."

Reindeer herders, an app and the fight to save a languageAfter decades of prejudice in Sweden, Ume Sami is spoken by fewer than 50 people. Today the last speakers have turned to technology to revive the indigenous languageBy Holly Young, The Guardian, Dec 2014

The gates open and the herders take us into a 300ft-wide circular pen. Away at the other end, 200 reindeers are running in a tightly-packed circle. Amid the silence of the forest, all you can hear is the strange, dull “clck clck” noise of the tendons in their feet.

It’s December and I’m deep in the snow-covered forests in Lapland, north Sweden with a group of Sami herders – the indigenous people of this region – and their reindeers. While it feels as if I’ve been dropped into an animated Christmas card, it’s the herders not the reindeers that I’m here to meet and the conversation is not exactly festive.

The herders are among the last speakers of Ume Sami, one of at least five Sami languages spoken in Sweden. Today, it is spoken by fewer than 50 people.

Understanding why the language has become endangered is impossible without unpicking the complicated past and present of being a Sami in Sweden. “There is a deep wound in Sami culture and it is still bleeding,” says Oscar Sedholm, our guide from the NGO Såhkie Umeå Sami Association.

Prejudice, tourism and wounds that are still bleeding

The herders identify themselves as Sami, a recognised indigenous population from Sapmi - a region that stretches across the national borders of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. Samis are one of the five national minorities of Sweden and there are an estimated 20,000 in Sweden today. Reindeer herding has been a traditional Sami livelihood for centuries, but fewer than 2,500 people are still actively involved in this type of work.

To be a Sami in Sweden has not been in easy in the past and is not without its complications today, but you would be forgiven for remaining blissfully unaware of this as a tourist. They, alongside the snowmobiles, northern lights and the sights of Stockholm, are a central tenet of the Swedish tourism brand. You can pay to visit Goahti - their traditional housing. You can buy models and postcards of them in their colourful traditional clothing - or Gákti as they are called - in gift shops. A Sami doing a traditional Yoik won Sweden’s Got Talent this year. The Sami culture has been embraced and boldly put forward as a central part of the programme of the Swedish city Umea festivities as European Cultural Capital of 2014.

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But the kitsch, celebrated version of Sami culture neatly packaged for tourist consumption is at best incomplete, and at worst misleading. The speakers of Ume Sami tell a different story: one of an institute set up in the 1920s for racial profiling, community fragmentation, name changing

and today particularly high suicidal behaviour among Sami women and reindeer herders. Like so many indigenous people around the world, Samis have found themselves, their rights, and their livelihoods intertwined with conflicts over land rights and natural resources. In 2011, the UN special rapporteur strongly criticised Sweden for its failure to tackle some of the most pressing issues for Sami people and to date it has yet to ratify the ILO convention 169 designed specifically to protect indigenous rights.

While, generally speaking, social attitudes have improved in Sweden, prejudice remains: some of it subtle, some explicit. My hotel is in the centre of the northern city of Umea, and it doesn’t take long for glimpses of prejudice to start chipping away at the smiling tourist veneer: in snide remarks at hotel bars; overhearing the use of “Lappish” to pejoratively describe Samis; or when a Sami friend wearing the same traditional Gákti that you see on tourism posters is heckled outright in the street.

At the more extreme end of the spectrum is Björn Söder. Although he has claimed he was quoted out of context, and his views were widely criticised, in an interview last week the Swedish Democrat said that it would be problematic if there were too many people “who belong to other nations” and had non-Swedish identities. He singled out Samis alongside Jews and Kurds in Sweden.

A lost mother tongue

The irony is that for many Samis this assimilation into Swedish culture and the shedding of Sami identities has already been great, and the costs have been dear. One of the biggest casualties of this process has been their language.

Ume Sami, along with the many other Sami languages, stems from the Uralic linguistic family and is rich in words to describe the natural environment with unusual precision. It has at least 100 words to describe snow, how it behaves, and how it may behave tomorrow. There are words specific to reindeer herding that can’t be directly translated into Swedish or English. The herders tell us that one example of this is the name given to the intricate and individually unique markings made on a reindeer’s ear to indicate whom it belongs to. Today, this language features on the Unesco endangered languages list under the category of “critically endangered”.

Katarina Burruk, a young Sami speaker and passionate advocate for access to language education, says the current state of the language can only be understood with reference to its history: “We are living with the consequences of the past … before you weren’t allowed to speak Sami in schools; it was ugly, you were ashamed to do it. People refused to speak or to pass it on.”

Susanne Stenberg, a Sami teacher in the northern town of Arvidsjaur, spoke about the ways in which she still carries around the legacy of her family’s experiences. While her grandparents

were native speakers, her mother was forbidden to speak Ume Sami and as a young child Susanne was asked to leave the room if her grandparents were going to use the language.

Anders Ruth, one of the reindeer herders I met on my first day, spoke passionately about how the societal shame of the language was mirrored in his family home: “To protect me, my grandmother refused to teach me Sami.”

Fortunately, the place of Sami languages has improved in the Swedish education system. In 1998, the Swedish government apologised to the Sami people for the country’s oppression of the Sami. The refusal to let them speak and learn the language was, along with forcible displacement, cited as an example of such oppression. In 1999, the Swedish Riksdag approved the ratification of the Council of Europe’s Framework Convention for the protection of national minorities and the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In 2009, the government introduced a new minority policy that outlined a responsibility for protecting and promoting the languages of the country’s national minorities.

While generally welcomed as signs of progress, these remain largely rights in theory than in reality. Access to education can differ from place to place, but Susanne describes how in fact children receive next to nothing of Sami language education. In Arvidsjaur, where she works (a town with a strong Sami heritage), the tuition is patchy and inconsistent. “After New Year, we don’t have anyone to teach. Not for the small children, not for those in schools, and not for my daughter.”

“We do have rights. By law we have the right to read Sami in school in Sweden, but it is never that simple or easy. You always have to argue,” says Katarina who, as a native speaker of Ume Sami has been left exasperated by her experience of the Swedish education system. “We [Katarina and her brother] have been fighting our whole lives to just get one lesson a week in Sami.”

Estrangement from the language has left many with complex feelings about their Sami identity. Henrik Burruk, Katarina’s father and an academic working on the orthography of the language, said: “If you are Sami then you feel if you can’t speak it, or express yourself in the language ... You are in pain.” Susanne, who is learning the language as an adult, describes the feeling as “a part of you missing and you don’t know what it is.”

Young Samis healing old wounds

It would be natural to presume that Ume Sami, with fewer than 50 speakers, to be just one of the many stories of “dying” languages: quaint historical relics in the tragic but inevitable slope to extinction.

The Ume Sami speakers I met were undoubtedly mourning the mother tongue they felt they haven’t had the opportunity to voice. But the other half of the story is one of growing pride in Sami identity and a passionate push to revitalise the language.

The fight to preserve and reinvigorate the language has had a strong injection of enthusiasm from young Samis. Hugo Lundgren, 17, who is currently working alongside his father to learn the skills of herding, is extremely shy until we get onto the subject of his Sami identity, where he seems to forget any social inhibitions and becomes animated and forthright. “Our generation has realised there is nothing shameful about being a Sami. It is instead a strength.” Despite knowing only one other young Ume Sami speaker, Hugo is taking lessons in his spare time on top of his school studies.

Katarina describes how this strength is being channelled into a “cultural explosion” in Sami art, music and film. She is currently recording her first album using Ume Sami lyrics and influences from the traditional Sami Yoik.

Amanda Kernell is a young Sami filmmaker whose latest short Stoerre Vaerie (Northern Great Mountain) has been shortlisted for 2015 Sundance Film Festival. The film uses Sami actors, sections of Sami dialogue, and is the first-ever Sami film to compete at the festival. This is a significant moment for the Sami community; “Sami people are not represented at all in mainstream Scandinavian film,” says Kernell.

The main character in the film is an elderly lady who was born into a Sami family and grew up speaking the language but has grown bitterly prejudiced against Sami people. It is a personal tale deeply familiar to many Sami families, says Kernell. “Everyone knows someone who left [their Sami community] and really cut off all bonds.”Many of the Sami extras in the film said they already knew this exact story.

Amanda says it has been easier for her generation to address “wounds” in Sami culture that were often too painful for her grandparents’ generation who grew up with the racial profiling of the 1920s and 1930s, and what she describes as an apartheid-style education system.

The story feels like an elegy to those who left their Sami identity behind and reincarnated as Swedish. Yet the film is also about atonement, symbolised by the use of language. The death of the main character’s sister forces her to confront a heritage that by “becoming Swedish” she has long denied. In one moving scene at the wake, the woman whispers, “I’m sorry” in Sami into her ear of her dead sister.

Language revitalisation

Young Samis are lifting the lid on the painful experiences of previous generations and increasingly ready to speak their mother tongue without shame. But with few speakers, fewer teachers and levels of funding that Susanne describes as “absolutely ridiculous”, there are still huge practical difficulties before many can tell their own stories in their own words.

When I meet the community of speakers, I find they are placing their hopes in an app. The Memrise learning app is a platform that allows users to input words or phrases and create their

own language course. The Ume Sami community began to use the app without the company’s knowledge and are now experimenting with using video clips to capture correct pronunciation and inject character into the online documentation of the language. “When you haven’t heard the language for one generation, it is very hard to bring it back. To have it orally is very important,” said Henrik. It is now being used by other endangered Sami languages such as Pite Sami.

Using the app as a learning tool has distinct advantages. Firstly, it connects the speakers to each other. While still joined by family links, most of the speakers are scattered across the region. Where Ume Sami learning and conversation is taking place, it is in small, informal groups and very dependent on voluntary community efforts. The app has the potential to bring together these individual efforts into a collective, tangible resource. Secondly, it could potentially plug glaring gaps in formal teaching and access to learning resources in the Swedish education system.

Yet the process of digital documentation is seeing its share of teething problems. The fact that the language is not yet formalised is one of the larger obstacles. Other than a 17th century bible written in Ume Sami there are few written examples of the language and it does not yet have an official dictionary.

Surviving in isolated small pockets and individual homes, it has evolved with differences in spelling and even word meaning from speaker to speaker. This has resulted in internal frictions over how the language should be preserved. Fluidity and variation are common to most languages, but in the case of Ume Sami, it may not have time for internal stalemates.

Nevertheless, most speakers are stubbornly optimistic about the future of the language. “I would have been working for something else if I felt for one moment that it wasn’t possible to revive the language,” said Henrik, who is working on the first official Ume Sami dictionary.

How far an app can go in saving an endangered language remains to be seen. As does the question of whether the speakers can balance the desire for authenticity in the formalisation of the language against the ticking clock.

What is clear is the strength of emotion binding these speakers to the project. For some, the language is the phantom mother tongue they feel an urge to make the sounds of but don’t have the teachers to tell them how. For others, it is a language they can speak but no longer have anyone to listen.

For a great many, it is the language they tried to forget but couldn’t fully exorcise. The husband of a lady who works in the old people’s home tells me that many of the residents who grew up in the generation that was forbidden to speak Ume Sami, return to their mother tongue when they get dementia.

Meeting the speakers of Ume Sami was a moving insight into something, particularly as a native English speaker, I had found difficult to fully comprehend: what stands to be lost when a language dies. Without this recognition, it’s easy to remain ignorant of how far the language you identify as your own shapes how you see the world and who you think you are.

When the last speakers tried to explain in interviews, it was not only the sounds and phrases that stood to be lost, or the hundreds of years worth of knowledge that they carry, but – as they resorted to hand movements – something beyond words.