June 2019 – Page 2 – Planet Laurel

The white paper 2.0 needs to be stopped say Indigenous leaders – APTN News

The white paper 2.0 needs to be stopped say Indigenous leaders - APTN News:

Amber Bernard
APTN News
Indigenous leaders and allies gathered on Parliament Hill Monday to express concerns over Indigenous legislation that is making its way through the House of Commons, and the Senate.
It’s being called the national day of action against Canada’s termination agenda.
At the heart of the protest are pieces of legislation dealing with Indigenous child welfare, and Indigenous languages. Bills C-91 and C-92 are anticipated to receive royal assent next month.
Chief Lee Crowchild of the T’suut’ina First Nation says he wants people to educate themselves on the proposed legislation.
“I think this day of action, this reality that’s taking place across Canada is a wakeup call for the generations that we can’t just sit idly by,” said Crowchild.
One of the issues with the proposed legislation is funding.
The Indigenous Child welfare act is supposed to help Indigenous communities gain jurisdiction over child welfare, but money will still be funneled through the provinces.
Indigenous leaders say their people should be creating their own child welfare laws.
“We as first nations are in the process of our own. Developing our own law, and this law on childcare is pending. So in essence we know what the problem is, and we will know how to fix,” said Chief Lewis of Onion Lake Cree Nation.
(Onion Lake Chief Henry Lewis addresses the crowd on Parliament Hill Monday. Photo: Amber Bernard/APTN)
The recognition and implementation of Indigenous rights framework, developed by the Liberal government, but killed late in 2018, is also under scrutiny.
It is being compared to the 1969 White Paper that was released by current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s father Pierre Elliott Trudeau.
It aimed to dissolve the Indian act and assimilate status Indians into Canadian society.
The framework promises to support indigenous communities working towards self-governing nations but critics say it looks all too familiar.
“It is steeped in what everyone is referring to as the White Paper 2.0,” Crowchild said.
More rallies like this are planned throughout the summer by Indigenous leaders and grassroots organisations, leading up to the fall federal election.

abernard@aptn.ca

@AbernardNews

Why can’t we use the word genocide? | The Star

Why can’t we use the word genocide? | The Star:

By Tanya Talaga
Indigenous Issues Columnist
Mon., June 3, 2019
GATINEAU—Almost four years to the day after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission said Canada committed a cultural genocide against Indigenous people, the national inquiry into our murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls took it a step further.
They said the death of our women, by the thousands, was simply a genocide.
The echo is not coincidental.
The genocidal process was the same.
In the words of the four-person commission, the epidemic of deaths and disappearances is the direct result of a “persistent and deliberate pattern of systemic racial and gendered … rights violations and abuses, perpetuated historically and maintained today by the Canadian state, designed to displace Indigenous people from their lands, social structures and governments, and to eradicate their existence as nations, communities, families and individuals.”
As expected, the protests quickly emerged. This is no “genocide,” the critics said. The coast-to-coast-to-coast commission, which interviewed over 2,000 families, survivors and knowledge keepers, exaggerated or got it wrong. Former aboriginal affairs minister Bernard Valcourt, who served under Stephen Harper, started off the bashing with a bang:
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“What has been the cost to Canadians for this propagandist report?” he tweeted.
For his part, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau refused to say the word “genocide” as he addressed the assembled families, survivors and commissioners.
But those of us who have been on the wrong side of the “persistent and deliberate pattern” know that “genocide” is the right word.
As the ceremony began, it was Chief Commissioner Marion Buller who said the hard truth is that “we live in a country whose laws and institutions perpetuate violations of fundamental rights, amounting to a genocide.”
Buller, the first appointed First Nations female judge in British Columbia, took a lot of heat when the inquiry began. Members of her team were quitting, families weren’t being properly notified or compensated. Many said her mandate was overly narrow. Yet she weathered it all and fulfilled her highest purpose. She gave voice to the victims.
The inescapable conclusion of all their harrowing and beautiful testimony is that “genocide” is the only word for the state-enabled deaths of thousands of sisters, aunties, grandmothers, cousins and friends.
So why won’t our prime minister say it? What’s he afraid of?
Perhaps he understands that calling the genocide a genocide would acknowledge that his government — and others — are morally culpable for the losses of the thousands of our women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA people. Or maybe it was the legal culpability that worried him; lawyers no doubt advised Trudeau not to say it. The pollsters, too, were probably against it, as we edge towards an election. It isn’t as easy to take a principled stand when votes are potentially at stake.
Whatever his reasons, his omission was telling. But it hardly dampened the power of the day.
“We don’t need to hear the word genocide come out of the prime minister’s mouth because families have told us their truth,” Buller said during the press conference.
The families of the taken, not forgotten women, agree. They don’t need to hear arguments over what constitutes genocide. They know it to be true because they live it.
As the ceremony drew to a close on Monday, Thunder Bay’s Maddy Murray stopped me and asked me to remember Alinda Lahteenmaki, who died in Winnipeg on Jan. 30, 2009 after plunging 11 storeys. She was 23 years old and her boyfriend pleaded guilty to manslaughter.
“There is no closure,” she said to me as the drums began to beat the warrior song.
But there can be an end to the violence.
The murders and rapes, the violence against Indigenous women and girls will continue until Canada confronts the genocide and the long-promised new relationship is finally delivered.
This requires that Canada confront the historical disadvantages, intergenerational trauma, and discrimination experienced by Indigenous people, the report explained. And that begins with making significant strides toward substantive equality through changes to our justice system, to policing, to social and health services, to education, to everything Canada prides itself on and holds dear.
To many, these institutions are a symbol of what makes Canada great. But the report makes clear that they are far from perfect. That they are rigged against Canada’s first peoples. That they are tools of colonial violence, of genocide.
That is the conclusion of Buller and her team of commissioners.
It is disappointing that many of our politicians refuse to say the word. It would be far worse — a terrible tragedy — if they continued to be complicit in the act.
Tanya Talaga is a Toronto-based columnist covering Indigenous issues. Follow her on Twitter: @tanyatalaga

United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect

United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect:

Elements of the crime

The Genocide Convention establishes in Article I that the crime of genocide may take place in the context of an armed conflict, international or non-international, but also in the context of a peaceful situation. The latter is less common but still possible. The same article establishes the obligation of the contracting parties to prevent and to punish the crime of genocide.

The popular understanding of what constitutes genocide tends to be broader than the content of the norm under international law. Article II of the Genocide Convention contains a narrow definition of the crime of genocide, which includes two main elements:

A mental element: the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”; and
A physical element, which includes the following five acts, enumerated exhaustively:

Killing members of the group
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

New report on Tina Fontaine’s death outlines problems we keep failing to address

New report on Tina Fontaine's death outlines problems we keep failing to address:

Five years ago, an Indigenous girl named Tina Fontaine left a downtown Winnipeg hotel and never returned. She had been placed in the hotel—alone—by the Government of Manitoba’s Child and Family Services agency as a ward of the state.
Nine days later, her ravaged body—wrapped in a duvet and weighted down by 25 pounds of rocks—was dragged out of the city’s enigmatic Red River.
She was 15 years old.
No one has ever been convicted of the murder.
Child advocate report released
This week, the Manitoba Advocate for Children and Youth released her report on the agency’s investigation into Tina’s life and brutal death.
The report lists a litany of systemic failures while the young girl repeatedly confronted treacherous circumstances. Her life story reads like a screenplay that culminates in tragic predictability.
A broken home. Her father violently murdered. Suicidal behaviour. Substance abuse. Sexual exploitation.
Throughout all of this, she encountered institutions incapable—unwilling perhaps?—of mounting a response to a child clearly in crisis.
Her last days horribly encapsulate this failure. In the 12 hours before she was last seen, she was in contact with the police, the health care system, and the child welfare system.
In the end, none of these encounters prevented her from meeting the fate that far too many Indigenous women and girls have endured in this country.
A failed system
Naturally, none of this is new. Or unusual.
In a 2013 statement, the RCMP tallied 1,181 cases of missing or murdered Indigenous women and girls. There are more now.
More broadly, report after report has fastidiously laid out the deficiencies and outright delinquencies the Canadian state has overseen and perpetrated in its dealings with Indigenous peoples.
The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, penned a quarter century ago, called for sweeping changes.
And yet, nothing.
In seeming anticipation of the apparently inevitable, Manitoba’s child advocate and author of this week’s report, Daphne Penrose, stated that “children are going to die” if changes are not made.
She’s right, of course. In the five years since Tina’s death, they have died. And they will continue to do so.
This is an awful point to make. But it is undeniable.
And it should be a reckoning. A blight on our community—our country—that cannot be overstated.
A profoundly distorted society
There are a constellation of factors which tear at the social fabric, ultimately leading to women and girls of this land ending up in shallow graves.
It is the logical and predictable evolution of the colonization process and its pernicious effects. Which results in a profoundly distorted society.
The examples abound. For instance, Indigenous people—both men and women—are between six and seven times more likely to be murdered in their lifetime in Canada.
On over 80 per cent of reserves the median income falls below the poverty line, with 25 per cent securing income that does not approximate half of the poverty line cut-off. Six in 10 Indigenous children live in poverty.
And then there is the legacy of residential schools and the attempt to systematically destroy Indigeneity. The lasting impacts are as pervasive as they are devastating.

All Canadians have a role to play in ending MMIW ‘genocide,’ report says

All Canadians have a role to play in ending MMIW 'genocide,' report says:

Today the Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women And Girls report was released.

The inquiry’s final report, released publicly this morning with more than 200 recommendations to the federal government, calls violence against First Nations, Metis and Inuit women and girls a form of “genocide” and a crisis that has been “centuries in the making.”

“As the evidence demonstrates, human rights and Indigenous rights abuses and violations committed and condoned by the Canadian state represent genocide against Indigenous women, girls, and (LGBTQ and two-spirit) people,” it concludes.

And Canadian racists are arguing that it isn’t genocide.