• 'Short-sighted' new Kahnawake law excludes Mohawks adopting non-indigenous children

   

   

  How should adopting and raising child as Onkwehón:we be even remotely negative, asks Steve Bonspiel

   

      By Steve Bonspiel, for CBC News  <script>  if (!_sf_async_config){ var _sf_async_config = {}; }  if (!!_sf_async_config.authors){  _sf_async_config.authors += ",Steve Bonspiel";  }else{  _sf_async_config.authors = "Steve Bonspiel";  }  if(!CBC) { var CBC = {}; }  if(!CBC.APP) { CBC.APP = {}; }  if(!CBC.APP.SC) { CBC.APP.SC = {}; }  CBC.APP.SC.authors = "Steve Bonspiel, for CBC News";  </script>    Posted: Mar 24, 2016

• If a Mohawk couple adopts a child who is not indigenous, the adoptive parents have committed an "offence," according to a new law in Kahnawake, Que.

   

  Those same parents, who sacrificed, changed their lives and reached out to make something so delicate as an adoption happen, will pay for that decision dearly, according to a new amendment to the Kahnawake membership law.

   

  The adoptive parents will lose their rights as Kahnawake Mohawks — which include voting here, living here, being buried here.

• How, exactly, is it an offence to have compassion for a human being, let alone one so vulnerable?

   

  How should adopting and then raising that child as an Onkwehón:we – an indigenous person – be even remotely negative?

   

  Why must we explore questions like these, which push us backwards, in 2016?

   

  Sounds crazy, doesn't it?

• But it happened a few weeks ago in a Community Decision-Making Process (CDMP) meeting in Kahnawake, where roughly 30 people decided it was the right thing to do to "protect the bloodline" – a phrase used by many over the years. The CDMP writes the membership laws for Kahnawake.

   

  There's a huge outcry on social media, Facebook especially.

   

  Even many Kahnawake Mohawks who firmly agreed with the unwritten "marry out, get out," decree that resulted in attempted evictions of non-aboriginal residents in 2014 are appalled.

• This is the official wording of the latest version of the membership law, under the adoption section, article 14.7, made public by the Kahnawake Legislative Coordinating Commission:

   

   

  "A child who has no Kanien'keháka (Mohawk) or Onkwehonwe lineage adopted by a Kanien'keháka of Kahnawà:ke parent(s) after the enactment of this law on November 10, 2003 is not eligible to be recognized as a Kanien'keháka of Kahnawà:ke or be an Approved Kahnawà:ke Resident and, therefore, the parent(s) who chose to commit this offense will have their recognition (as a Kanien'keháka of Kahnawà:ke) suspended and not be eligible to reside in the territory of Kahnawà:ke."

• Who has that right to say an offence has been committed through such a selfless act?

   

   

  Adults targeting children simply because they aren't of Mohawk heritage certainly go beyond the path our ancestors chose.

   

   

  This article dishonours their spirit and further distances us from who we once were, as proud indigenous peoples connected to the land, respectful of everything and everyone around us.

• Famous Mohawks with zero Mohawk blood

   

   

  Adoption is what we built our communities on. Our ancestors didn't think about "protecting the blood," because they knew that if you were born Mohawk, you died Mohawk, no matter what anyone said.

   

  And in many cases, even if you weren't born Mohawk, you could become one – further strengthening our might and bolstering our numbers.

   

   

  Some of the proudest Mohawks in our history were people who were adopted as full members of the nation, but who had zero Mohawk blood in them.

• In 1704, during an even more tumultuous time than we face now, seven-year-old Eunice Williams, born English, was captured and adopted into the Mohawk Nation in Kahnawake. She was given the Mohawk name A'ongonte, which means, "She has been planted as a person."

   

  She was quickly accepted and treated as a Mohawk for the rest of her life, and many here are descended directly from her bloodline.

   

   

  Louis Cook is one of the most famous adopted Mohawks. His father was black and his mother Abenaki, and he was accepted into the Mohawk community because he fought beside the Mohawks.  He fought in many wars and worked his way up to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Continental Army during the American Revolution – the highest rank by an indigenous person in the military.

• The Tarbell boys, John and Zechariah, were among the first people to help establish the community of Akwesasne, at the St. Regis Mission.

   

  Captured at 12 and seven, respectively, in 1707, they were considered important parts of the community, especially once they reached adulthood.

   

  Later attempts by their English relatives to welcome them back failed, as they had learned to speak Mohawk fluently, knew the culture, tradition and ways of life and were not interested in going back to the lives they were born into.

• Adoption part of Mohawk identity

   

   

  Adoption, quite frankly, is woven into the fabric of the Mohawk identity.

   

  We are living, breathing examples of what Mohawk people look and act like in the 21st century because of our extensive history of adoption leading up to today.

   

   

  The few dozen community members present at that meeting on March 8, 2016 made an enormous decision for all of the more than 6,500 registered Kahnawake Mohawks.

• Now we are faced with the cold, hard reality that this horrific example of so-called democracy, of the "people's voice," is now "law" in Kahnawake.

   

   

  At fault here is not only the short-sightedness of people whose decision affects the rights of others without human empathy or consideration of the Mohawk tradition of adoption, but also the CDMP itself.

   

   

  The CDMP was created by the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake as a way to hear from the whole community.

• However, when you regularly get 25 people hashing out what your future will look like, complete with personal bias and an abject failure to consider fully the future of other people, you get something like this so-called law.

   

   

  If "thinning the blood line" is such a concern for the ones who say we can be bred out through intermarriage and "mixing," the people who claim the adoption of a non-indigenous child is an "offence" under the membership law need to examine how thin that line is between humanity and insanity.

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• Donald Trump on Elizabeth Warren: ‘She’s got about as much Indian blood as I have’
• By Nik DeCosta-Klipa @NikDeCostaKlipa 

   

  Boston.com Staff | 03.20.16

• Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has been ratcheting up her calls denouncing Donald Trump. And it seems as though Trump has taken notice.

   

  In a New York Times interview Saturday, columnist Maureen Dowd asked the Republican front-runner about the Massachusetts Democrat’s criticisms.

    

  “I think it’s wonderful because the Indians can now partake in the future of the country,” Trump answered, referring to controversy surrounding Warren’s ancestry, which erupted during the 2012 Senate campaign.

  <!-- adlayer topright: /Boston/Production/BDC/WebPages/homepage.ad-layer.story-asset.dwp -->    

  “She’s got about as much Indian blood as I have,” Trump said. “Her whole life was based on a fraud. She got into Harvard and all that because she said she was a minority.”

• In 2012, Warren’s heritage became an issue, after it was revealed she had in the past claimed minority status as a professor due to Native American ancestry. During the campaign, now-former Sen. Scott Brown, who endorsed Trump last month, said Warren had used her background to get a professional advantage—a claim her campaign rejected.

   

   Polling at the time found that voters were unmoved by the issue.

   

  Warren, who grew up in Oklahoma, never provided substantive evidence regarding her heritage, but said she was told of Native American ancestry by her parents and other family members.

• Warren’s office did not immediately respond Sunday to requests for comment. During an appearance Sunday morning at the South Boston St. Patrick’s Day Breakfast, the senator jabbed both her former and now apparently current Republican rivals.

   

  “Donald Trump is floating Scott Brown as a running mate,” Warren joked. “It would be the perfect reality-show matchup: Celebrity Apprentice and The Biggest Loser.”

   

  But her previous criticisms of Trump took a much more serious tone. In a Facebook post last Monday, Warren said Trump is “a bigger, uglier threat every day that goes by.”

• Warren strongly denounced Trump as a demagogue, drawing historical parallels to other instances in which citizens stayed “quiet for too long, hoping for the best but watching silently as the threat metastasizes.”

   

  “It’s time for decent people everywhere – Republican, Democrat, Independent – to say No More Donald,” she wrote. “There’s no virtue in silence.”

   

  Dowd wrote Saturday that while Trump didn’t like the comparisons to Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and other historical fascists, he was “cool with being called an authoritarian.”

   

  “We need strength in this country,” Trump said.

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• 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 people

   

   

    

     

  Nancy Macdonald

   

    February 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 check

   

  On 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 denied

   

  On 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 – Sentencing

   

  Two 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 – Segregation

   

  In 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.”

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• /   Cory Doctorow /  7:28 am Tue     Jan 26, 2016  

   

   

   

  1907 telegram: "Send arsenic...exterminate aborigines"

• In 1907, Charles Morgan of Broome Station sent this telegram to Henry Prinsep, the Chief Protector of Aborigines for Western Australia, in Perth: "Send cask arsenic exterminate aborigines letter will follow." 

   

   

   

      

   Australia's program of genocide was based on the official doctrine of terra nullius, in whose name the first people of Australia were slaughtered and subjected to humiliations, depredations, and worse. 

• As terrible as the Australian genocide was, its very existence has been widely agreed-upon for quite some time -- in this regard, the Australians are significantly ahead of Canada, which admitted its own genocide less than a year ago.  

   

    COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA
   POSTMASTER-GENERAL'S DEPARTMENT, WESTERN AUSTRALIA 

   20 JUL 07 

   TELEGRAM from Broome Station
   Addressed to H. Princep Esq, prot. of aborigines 

   Send cask arsenic exterminate aborigines letter will follow 

   Chas Morgan  

    

   Send cask arsenic exterminate aborigines [Letters of Note] 

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• Send cask arsenic exterminate aborigines 

   

   

   

   This 1907 telegram was sent by a Charles Morgan to Henry Prinsep, a man seemingly based 2200km away in Perth who at the time was, surprisingly, Chief Protector of Aborigines for Western Australia. Following the arrival of British settlers in the 18th century, Australia's indigenous population were slowly faced with disease, loss of land, stolen generations and general violence. Sadly, the introduction of arsenic to their water and flour supplies wasn't uncommon.
   
   Transcript follows. Many thanks to Vivienne.
• Transcript
   

   COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA
   POSTMASTER-GENERAL'S DEPARTMENT, WESTERN AUSTRALIA
   
   20 JUL 07
   
   TELEGRAM from Broome Station
   Addressed to H. Princep Esq, prot. of aborigines
   
   Send cask arsenic exterminate aborigines letter will follow
   
   Chas Morgan

• January 15, 2016 

  Australia’s Intervention (Against What, Exactly?)

   

    by Julie Wark
• Review of Rosie Scott and Anita Heiss (eds.), 2015, The Intervention, ‘concerned Australians’, 272 pp.
• “Intervention” derives from the Late Latin interventionem, literally meaning “a coming between” or “interruption”. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the word was a commonplace in international relations and is now frequently used to denote interpersonal intrusion to correct a life heading in the wrong direction. Official Australia perpetuates the coming between meaning of the word by celebrating “Australia Day” on 26 January to mark the anniversary of the arrival of the First Fleet of British ships at Port Jackson, New South Wales in 1788. The Aboriginal people understand that the planting of the British flag in their soil was indeed an intervention, the one that came between them and their land, a massive intrusion in the name of correcting their culture. They call it “Invasion Day” or “Survival Day” because it was much more than just an invasion. This is an intervention of more than two hundred years of systematic dispossession of just about everything. “So complete was the first intervention that the very names were driven underground,” says Arnold Zable (p. 220). For the First People of Australia, Survival Day commemorates deep loss, of their sovereign rights, of family members, of land, of language and of the right to practise their culture.
• The recent policy, called the “Northern Territory Intervention” and costing $587 million is, then, an intervention within an intervention. In legal form and implying the sense of civilised intrusion correcting a life heading in the wrong direction, it became the “Northern Territory Emergency Response Act”. This legislation followed the tabling in June 2007 of the “Little Children Are Sacred” report, which acknowledged that, “… there is a significant problem in Northern Territory communities in relation to sexual abuse of children” and made almost a hundred recommendations for basic social measures to address the problem. But, for its own reasons, the Act doesn’t actually mention children and totally ignores the report’s recommendations and the desire of many members of Aboriginal communities to work with the authorities.
• Many abusers of Aboriginal children were, in fact, non-Aboriginal but that was also glossed over (p. 67). Moreover, nation-wide, one in four girls and one in seven boys have been victims of some form of sexual abuse (p. 120). No soldiers ever stormed into churches, suburban homes, state institutions and asylum seeker detention camps to protect children who are prey to priestly or respectable-citizen paedophiles. Only Aboriginal men were singled out as child molesters, wife beaters, and hopeless drunks in a shame job, orchestrated at the highest levels of government, aiming to hurt and humiliate even more.
• In a country that imprisons asylum seekers, including children, in remote Pacific island concentration camps where suicides and madness are rife, it didn’t matter that the Intervention was “presumed to be illegitimate” in the words of the Special Rapporteur on human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous peoples, not to mention the fact of its contravening the Racial Discrimination Act. “The Intervention’s provisions were so blatantly discriminatory that the then all white zone of the federal parliament simply by-passed this important law aimed at preventing racism” (p. 122). Since there was no consultation of, or prior consent from the affected communities, the government also breached its international legal obligation to respect the rights of the First People. Instead, it continued the colonial policy of disempowering them and locking them into a system of utterly humiliating institutional dependency. As Djiniyini Gondarra, a Milingimbi lawman, writes (p. 78), “The name ‘Intervention’ and ‘Emergency Response’ must be removed from any future initiative. [… The] prejudice and racial discrimination that is embedded in the Intervention … has created deep emotional pain and shame amongst Aboriginal people.”
• When there are so many legal and ethical reasons for condemning the Intervention in a country that is unwilling to recognise the pervasive racism that still allows it to blithely celebrate “Australia [what Australia?] Day”, it’s sad but unsurprising that there were no takers in the publishing world for this inspiring, essential (for anyone who wants to understand Australia) book in which some of Australia’s best writers and thinkers have analysed what the Intervention is really about. The crux of the matter is that this book lays bare the very touchy question of national identity. Ergo, it had to be crowdfunded.
• In an article announcing their intention to publish The Intervention, the editors cited the activist Olga Havnen, descendent of the Western Arrernte people, who described the after-effects of soldiers invading Aboriginal communities and dismantling their social and political organisations. “In the contest of societies with dominant and minority cultures, such as Australia, the widespread and persistent suppression of minority cultural practices causes severe disruption, making our communities susceptible to trauma, collective helplessness and endemic maladaptive coping practices.” So, when the Intervention euphemised into the “Stronger Futures” legislation passed by the next Labour government, the results were all too predictable: rising suicide rates, aggravated child health problems and more unemployment. Deni Langman, a traditional owner of Uluru, laments some of the direr consequences: “I am so upset … my heart aches for all those who have never known freedom in their lives and the deaths of children who saw nothing but despair in their future lives and ended it with a rope or other form of suicide …” (p. 212).
• The way in which officialdom intervened and the results raise the question of exactly what the government was intervening against. In this book, the response of the First People isn’t about being victims but about their fear of losing a culture they have every reason to be proud of, and from which the rest of the world could learn a great deal. It’s not as if this Indigenous Weltanschauung is difficult to discover. For example, anyone who cares to follow the Twitter account @IndigenousXLtd will find a much more profound, beautiful and vibrant Australia than the mindless consumerist one that most of its white inhabitants live in, or the one that tourists sprint around, from Uluru to the Barrier Reef, without the faintest idea of whose land or what land they are visiting.
• Bruce Pascoe, a Yuin man, points out (p. 148), “It is within our intellectual and moral power to acquire better knowledge, not in slavish worship of the noble savage, but through inquisitive review of the early European records.” And what do they show? Well, to start with, things that white Australian children are never told at school. Aborigines were making bread about 30,000 years ago, 13,000 years before they did in the Middle East (p. 144). The early (white) explorers found houses, towns, ovens, food preservation and storage silos for more than a ton of grain, clothes, cakes and marvellous art. At Brewarrina, New South Wales, they came upon intricate fish traps, which scientists think may be the oldest human construction on earth and so big they can be seen from space. At Hutt River in Western Australia, they reported that the Indigenous people had cultivated irrigated yam gardens so extensively that they couldn’t see from one side to the other. Pascoe concludes, “The Intervention was implemented from the assumption that the clients were feeble mendicants and that assumption prevails because Australia does not know the history of the country.” The “Australia” he refers to is a political entity with a very short history.
• It’s not only engineering feats but also “spiritual governance” that “Australia” has chosen to ignore. In 2015, one of the contributors to this book, Melissa Lucashenko, of European and Murri heritage, wrote an article arguing that democracy didn’t begin with the Greek polis but in the land now called Australia. She makes no bones about it. “People in Australia had many millennia to finesse systems of political power-sharing before Cleisthenes came on the scene. It’s time, reader, for a very deep breath: Aborigines invented democracy.” In ancient Australian societies there were male elders and also matriarchal systems of authority. They were “a lot more democratic (especially for Aboriginal purposes) than any Australian government operating today.” What early anthropologists described as a stable polity was founded on ethics, homeostasis, autonomy, balance, compassion, stewardship and land-related identity. Land? Now there’s the rub.
• Many contributors in this book consider that the social engineering of the Intervention masks a crude land grab. The first step was to instil fear. “We were told to gather … and all of a sudden we became aware around us of public servants, the police … and also the army. Some of these people were armed [or] they had batons … The shock – you could almost taste it … and we didn’t quite know whether we were going to be shot or put into paddy wagons or whatever. And then the directives came like shots from these rifles anyway and we were told there was a new way that Aboriginal Affairs is going to be handled” (p. 19). Then shame was piled onto fear. There were accusations of paedophilia and something called pornography, which “is not a practice that they had heard about amongst Aboriginal communities within the vicinity of Utopia” (p. 20). The Alywarre Indigenous health advocate Pat Anderson, one of the two authors of the “Little Children Are Sacred” report (2007) says, “We believe this Government is using child sexual abuse as the Trojan horse to resume total control of our land.” And the lawyer, Larissa Behrendt, a Eualeyai/Kamillaroi woman, cogently asks (p. 66), “Why were issues related to Indigenous control of their land being tied to the issue of child sexual abuse?” The Utopia elder Rosalie Kunoth-Monks answers, “They want to use this scare over our children to break us as human beings, to starve us off our homelands, to herd us into the towns … the Government refuses our own attempts to be sustainable. It’s our land that they want to control. But they don’t understand that it is the land that holds us” (p. 116).
• The Intervention is just part of a long history of racism, poverty, neglect, injustice, human rights abuse and systematic undermining of human dignity in the Northern Territory and Australia in general. This is the necessary context for explaining why some Aboriginal children are neglected and abused. Other statistics are shocking and unquestionably related. For instance, when Aborigines represent only 2.3% of the total population, they make up a quarter of the prison population and, in the Northern Territory, 85%. And between 1980 and 2007 Indigenous people accounted for almost 18% of deaths in “custody” (viz.: deaths resulting from police violence).
• There’s so much to be said about the Intervention and the Australia’s officially sanctioned racism. In their arrogant ignorance, governments (Liberal and Labour) probably thought they could get away with a frightening military-style attack on remote communities, deliberately evoking the terrible times not so long ago when the Stolen Generations of children were forcibly removed from their families. But they don’t understand the first thing about the strength of Indigenous identity. Or about real values, for that matter. As Patrick Dodson, a Yawuru man, reminded the former soldier Mal Brough, Minister for Indigenous Affairs and mastermind of the brutality of the intervention, “Minister, it is not fundamentally about policy. It is about how you value Aboriginal people as human beings” (p. 117).

• In December 1938, shortly after Kristallnacht, a Yorta Yorta elder, William Cooper, led a group of people to the German Consulate in Melbourne to condemn the persecution of Jewish people, the only such protest anywhere in the world. A man who was denied citizenship in his own land raised his voice for distant human beings because he believed in the common good. This is why, in a world that’s being destroyed by the private “good”, it was decreed that Australia’s First People need intervening against. Because the common good is, and always has been, the basic principle of their culture. And it is why this book by Rosie Scott, Anita Heiss and more than thirty other eloquent contributors, all of them imbued with a William Cooper spirit, couldn’t find a mainstream publisher.

   

   

   

   

   

   

    More articles by:Julie Wark

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• There wasn’t anybody here then when they came

• Louis Riel: Canadians and Indigenous Peoples continue to pay respect, 130 years later

   

   

  Riel fought for values 'Canadians hold dear — equality, pluralism, and social justice,' minister says

   

      By Tiar Wilson, CBC News    Posted: Nov 16, 2015

• One hundred and thirty years after Louis Riel was hanged for treason, Canadians and indigenous people alike continue to commemorate his death at events and on social media.

   

  Riel is known to be one of Canada's most controversial figures. While the Métis have always viewed him as a hero, many felt he was a traitor because he led the North West Rebellion.

   

  Riel was hanged for treason on Nov. 16, 1885, in Regina.
• The Manitoba Métis Federation (MMF) led a memorial service for Riel at his tombstone in Winnipeg's St. Boniface area on Monday morning.

• "We go there every year to show our gratitude and appreciation on the sacrifices that Riel actually gave," said MMF president David Chartrand.

   

  To a crowd of nearly 100 people, Chartrand spoke of how Riel's leadership inspires his own.

   

  "I'm very religious in my own ways. I'm one to pray to God, of course, to the Virgin Mary, and I also pray to Riel … for him to give me guidance in all my decisions, my actions, and where I am taking his little Métis nation," he said.

   

  It wasn't until 1992 that Ottawa finally recognized Riel as a founder of Manitoba. Then in 2007, Manitoba declared a holiday in February that is named after him.

   

  This year, many are remembering him at different events across the country and on social media.

• Indigenous Affairs Minister Carolyn Bennett was among those who paid tribute to Riel.

   

  "Louis Riel fought for the very values that Canadians hold dear — equality, pluralism, and social justice. His many sacrifices have secured him an enduring place in our shared history as a champion of the Métis people, a founder of Manitoba, and a key contributor to Canadian Confederation," Bennett said in a statement.

   

  "I am looking forward to working with Métis people, communities, and organizations in order to ensure a renewed, Nation-to-Nation relationship between Canada and the Métis Nation."

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• <tr style="background:#eee;"><td colspan="2" style="font-size: medium; padding: 5px;color: #000; font-weight: bold; text-align: center;">SANTA CRUZ: MAY 4 AS A PANACEA</td><br/> </tr><br/> <tr style="background:#eee;"><br/> <td><div class="s_key"><a rel="nofollow" oldtitle="Date" alt="The date the document was created." data-hasqtip="true" title="" class="i">Date:</a></div><div title=" 2008 April 2, 15:58 (Wednesday)" class="s_val">2008 April 2, 15:58 (Wednesday)</div></td><br/> <td><div class="s_key"><a rel="nofollow" oldtitle="Canonical ID" alt="Unique document identification number.<br /><br /><i>We have created a canonical ID by taking the original document ID and adding a '_' at the end and then WikiLeaks' annotation for different datasets: Cablegate = a, the Kissinger Cables = b, etc. If document IDs are duplicated in the original datasets we number each duplicate, eg 1976WARSAW05657_b2 is the second document with that ID in the Kissinger Cables.</i>" data-hasqtip="true" title="" class="i">Canonical ID:</a></div><div title=" 08LAPAZ717_a" class="s_val">08LAPAZ717_a</div></td><br/> </tr><br/> <tr><br/> <td><div class="s_key"><a rel="nofollow" oldtitle="Original Classification" alt="Classification the document was originally given when produced.<br /><br /><a rel="nofollow" href=&quot;/plusd/about-oc/&quot; class=&quot;j&quot;>Citations for acronyms used are available here.</a>" data-hasqtip="true" title="" class="i">Original Classification:</a></div><div title=" UNCLASSIFIED,FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY" class="s_val">UNCLASSIFIED,FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY</div></td><br/> <td><div class="s_key"><a rel="nofollow" oldtitle="Current Classification" alt="Classification the document currently holds.<br /><br /><a rel="nofollow" href=&quot;/plusd/about-cc/&quot; class=&quot;j&quot;>Citations for acronyms used are available here.</a>" data-hasqtip="true" title="" class="i">Current Classification:</a></div><div title=" UNCLASSIFIED,FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY" class="s_val">UNCLASSIFIED,FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY</div></td><br/> </tr><br/><br/> <tr><br/> <td><br/><div class="s_key"><a rel="nofollow" oldtitle="Handling Restrictions" alt="All handling restrictions governing the document distribution that have been used to date.<br /><br /><i>In the metadata of the Kissinger Cables this field is called 'Previous Handling Restrictions'.<br /><br />Cablegate does not originally have this field. 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We have given it the entry 'TEXT ONLINE'.</i>" data-hasqtip="true" title="" class="i">Locator:</a></div><div title=" TEXT ONLINE (1885254 documents)" class="s_val">TEXT ONLINE</div></td><br/> </tr><br/><br/> <tr><br/> <td><div class="s_key"><a rel="nofollow" oldtitle="TAGS" alt="Traffic Analysis by Geography and Subject (TAGS)<br /><br />There are geographic, organization and subject &quot;TAGS&quot; - the classification system implemented by the Department of State for its central files in 1973.<br /><br /><a rel="nofollow" href=&quot;/plusd/about-ta/&quot; class=&quot;j&quot;>A list of TAGS, with citations for any acronyms used, is available here.</a>" data-hasqtip="true" title="" class="i">TAGS:</a></div><div title=" BL - Bolivia | ECON - Economic Affairs--Economic Conditions, Trends and Potential | KPAO - Public Affairs Office | PGOV - Political Affairs--Government; Internal Governmental Affairs" class="s_val"><a rel="nofollow" href="/plusd/?q=&amp;qftags=BL#result" target="_blank" title="BL Bolivia (11944 documents)" style="color: #216B7C;">BL<span style="color: #216B7C;"> - Bolivia</span></a> <span color:="" style="">|</span> <a rel="nofollow" href="/plusd/?q=&amp;qftags=ECON#result" target="_blank" title="ECON Economic Affairs: Economic Conditions, Trends and Potential (75832 documents)" style="color: #216B7C;">ECON<span style="color: #216B7C;"> - Economic Affairs--Economic Conditions, Trends and Potential</span></a> <span color:="" style="">|</span> <a rel="nofollow" href="/plusd/?q=&amp;qftags=KPAO#result" target="_blank" title="KPAO Public Affairs Office (16420 documents)" style="color: #216B7C;">KPAO<span style="color: #216B7C;"> - Public Affairs Office</span></a> <span color:="" style="">|</span> <a rel="nofollow" href="/plusd/?q=&amp;qftags=PGOV#result" target="_blank" title="PGOV Political Affairs: Government; Internal Governmental Affairs (180409 documents)" style="color: #216B7C;">PGOV<span style="color: #216B7C;"> - Political Affairs--Government; Internal Governmental Affairs</span></a></div></td><br/> <td><div class="s_key"><a rel="nofollow" oldtitle="Concepts" alt="Keywords of subjects dealt with in the document.<br /><br /><i>Cablegate does not originally have this field. We have given it the entry 'Not Assigned' for this field.</i>" data-hasqtip="true" title="" class="i">Concepts:</a></div><div title=" -- Not Assigned --" class="s_val"><a rel="nofollow" href="/plusd/?q=&amp;qfconcept=--+Not+Assigned+--#result" target="_blank" title="-- Not Assigned -- (251287 documents)" style="color: #216B7C; ">-- Not Assigned --</a></div></td><br/> </tr><br/><br/> <tr><br/> <td><div class="s_key"><a rel="nofollow" oldtitle="Enclosure" alt="Attachments or other items sent with the original document. These are not necessarily currently held in this library.<br /><br /><i class=&quot;b&quot;>Cablegate does not originally have this field. 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It is taken from subsets the documents were released in after State Department review.<br /><br />Cablegate does not originally have this field. We have given it the entry 'Not Assigned'.</i>" data-hasqtip="true" title="" class="i">Archive Status:</a></div><div title=" -- Not Assigned -- (251288 documents)" class="s_val">-- Not Assigned --</div></td><br/> </tr><br/><br/> <tr><br/> <td class="sc"><div class="s_key"><a rel="nofollow" oldtitle="From" alt="Who/where sent the document.<br /><br /><a rel="nofollow" class=&quot;j&quot; href=&quot;/plusd/about-fr/&quot;>A list of origins, with citations for any acronyms used, is available here.</a>" data-hasqtip="true" title="" class="i">From:</a></div><div title=" Bolivia La Paz (9737 documents)" class="s_val"><a rel="nofollow" href="/plusd/?q=&amp;qforigin=Bolivia%23%23La+Paz#result" title="Bolivia La Paz (9737 documents)" style="color: #216B7C; ">Bolivia La Paz</a></div></td><br/> <td><div class="s_key"><a rel="nofollow" oldtitle="Markings" alt="Markings of declassification/release review of the document.<br /><br /><i class=&quot;b&quot;>Cablegate does not originally have this field. 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• 1. (SBU) Summary: During a March 26-28 visit to Santa Cruz, American  Presence Post officer found the city surprisingly calm and  optimistic, although individual Santa Cruz citizens are outraged.  They cite an increasingly long list of grievances and complaints  against the central government, and they are putting all their  energy and hopes into the May 4 referendum on the draft autonomy  statute. Expectations among the population are high, and civic  leaders recognize that hand-in-hand with the get-out-the-vote  campaign they must dampen expectations for what will happen on May  5. Nonetheless, they hope a resounding "yes" vote will mark the  beginning of a new negotiation (difficult though it will be) with  the Morales administration which will result in restructuring the  system of government in Bolivia. End summary.
• Hitting Where it Hurts  ----------------------    2. (SBU) Santa Cruz citizens have reached the boiling point after a  series of recent moves by the central government designed to hit  where it hurts most: their wallets. The March 19 decree forbidding  exports of cooking oil, an industry central to Santa Cruz's economy  (reftels), were seen as a direct attack not only on the business  owners, but on small producers, transportation workers, and factory  employees; in all 16 sectors of the economy. Since the decree  violates both market principles and common sense (hurting Bolivia's  economy and trade balance as a whole), Crucenos are convinced it is  merely a punishment for resistance to the government's socialist  vision. The only escape valve on this pressure cooker is the May 4  vote on Santa Cruz's autonomy statute.
• 3. (U) As the government imported Argentine rice to resell at  subsidized prices, Santa Cruz rice producers asked why the  government didn't buy the product directly from them. Now that the  rains have stopped and the roads are again navigable, local rice  prices have dropped below those of the government's Argentine rice,  which sits in warehouses.    4. (U) Strikes to protest the government ban on agricultural exports  have been peaceful and controlled. Prefect (Governor) Ruben Costas  called March 31 for the strikes to be lifted. He expressed his  intention to participate fully in the dialogue of reconciliation led  by the Catholic Church (after May 4), but at the same time called  for a huge pro-autonomy rally and march on April 2 to demonstrate  the unity of purpose in Santa Cruz.
• Will the Real Indigenous Leaders Please Stand Up?  --------------------------------------------- ----    5. (SBU) APP met with indigenous leaders representing the five  communities native to Santa Cruz. The Prefecture has designated ten  percent of income from the mining, forestry and hydrocarbons sectors  exclusively for development in indigenous communities, and created  an office to administer the funds under the leadership of a  Chiquitano. With USAID assistance, these indigenous leaders and  their communities have drafted prioritized development plans, and  they also serve as non-voting representatives in the regional  council. Under the autonomy statute, which they had a hand in  drafting, each indigenous community will have its own representative  (with voting rights) in the regional council, in addition to  representatives elected per district. This will result in double  representation for indigenous citizens.
• 6. (SBU) These leaders are opposed to Evo Morales' vision for  indigenous communities. One pointed to the difference between  "indigenism," which he defined as reciting poetry and telling  legends about noble races suffering for 500 years, and "indianism"  which meant fighting for your rights and your interests. He said  the government seemed obsessed with the former, while Santa Cruz  indigenous leaders were working on the latter.    7. (SBU) They are particularly worried that their communal lands  will be divided or taken away if the government's draft constitution  is passed. They are even more worried that the land will then be  given to "colonizers" from the altiplano who they believe live less  in harmony with the land. (Note: These migrants are usually  indigenous Aymara or Quechua.) They point for example to the  environmental destruction caused by coca cultivation and the  resulting natural disasters. As coca has never been an important  element in Eastern indigenous cultures, they are completely opposed  to the incursion of coca in their protected areas and communal  lands.
• 8. (SBU) The indigenous leaders working with the prefecture resent  the image of Morales as the indigenous face of Bolivia. However,  they admit that there are many Morales supporters in their  communities, and MAS party activists are campaigning hard against  the autonomy statute and in favor of the draft constitution. (Media  reports April 1 said that a different group of indigenous leaders  had declared their respective communities autonomous in line with  the vision of the draft MAS constitution.) Nonetheless, they are  convinced that the majority of Santa Cruz indigenous community  members favor departmental autonomy.    9. (SBU) The indigenous leaders said their most immediate need is  for financial resources to travel to their communities and campaign  for the statute. They feel used and abused by leaders of the Civic  Committee (a group of civic associations at the forefront of the  autonomy movement), saying the Civic Committee is quick to parade  them as pro-autonomy indigenous representatives, but does not give  them the resources needed to do the job that is expected of them  (campaign in their communities).
• Decentralization: It's Catching On  ----------------------------------    10. (SBU) APP met with the local branch of the citizen watchdog  "Social Control Mechanism" (ref C), the Association of  Municipalities of Santa Cruz (AMDECRUZ), and several private  citizens and civic leaders. All are waiting anxiously for May 4, to  express at the ballot box their frustration with the increasing  centralism not only of the Morales government, but of other  institutions. Martha Lazo Suarez, who used to form part of the  national civic watchdog group "Social Control Mechanism" explained  that she had returned to Santa Cruz because she wanted to be at the  vanguard, shaping the model for the future political system in  Bolivia. She said the prefecture has been completely open and  cooperative with her office's requests and demands, and that after  May 4 the hope was to further decentralize and train citizens at the  municipal level to serve the anti-corruption whistle-blower  function. Only then could corruption be reduced and citizens have  more faith in their local officials.
• 11. (SBU) Likewise, AMDECRUZ leaders explained that municipal  associations had been created first in each of Bolivia's nine  Departments. Those nine organizations, in order to share  information and lobby for their interests, had formed an association  at the national level. However, the umbrella group had become a  centralized beast that did not distribute resources fairly. Another  of AMDECRUZ's complaints was that the government was distributing  hydrocarbons taxes (IDH) based on the average price of oil and gas  in 2006, not the real prices in 2007, and therefore owed hundreds of  thousands of dollars to the municipalities and prefects.    Other APP Outreach Activities
• 12. (SBU) To date, APP has met with the largest five of Santa Cruz's  14 universities:    --Gabriel Rene Moreno Autonomous University, the public university  --Private University of Santa Cruz (UPSA), an institution founded by  the Santa Cruz Chamber of Commerce with an emphasis on business and  technical fields  --Private Technological University (UTEPSA)  --Catholic University  --Nur University, based on Bahai principles    All are eager for increased relations with the United States,  including speaking engagements by APP and other embassy officers,  both in the capital city and in provincial branches. Though we are  maintaining a low profile through May 4, we are setting the stage to  meet the APP goal of increased outreach to the Embassy's target  audiences -- indigenous and youth.
• Comment:  -------    13. (SBU) "We just have to make it to May 4," is the common refrain  which follows complaints from Santa Cruz citizens. Local leaders  are wary that the government has a surprise up its sleeve to try to  stop the referendum, but they are determined it will take place no  matter what, and confident that Santa Cruz citizens will approve the  autonomy statute with a resounding "SI!" However, leaders are also  aware that May 4 is the beginning of a process, not the end. So far  the government's public stance has been one of denial: to declare  the referendum illegal and ignore the phenomenon that is taking  place.
• 14. (SBU) Leaders are aware there will be no immediate solutions  starting May 5, and the situation may indeed get worse before it  gets better. They realize that along with the "yes" campaign, they  must dampen expectations and convince citizens to be patient while  the autonomy process moves forward. Leaders are also pleased that  the government agreed to mediation by the Catholic Church, although  they do not expect any dialogue to produce results until after May  4. While they are determined that the new "dialogue" will not  derail the autonomy vote, they know that negotiating with the  government is the only way to shape Bolivia afterwards.

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  Preventing Ethnic Fraud

      

   

         

    September 22, 2015

      

   

     

  By

       

    Colleen Flaherty

      

   

         

   

  Rachel Dolezal, the former head of the NAACP in Spokane, Wash., and adjunct instructor of Africana Studies at Eastern Washington University, made headlines this summer for claiming to be black even as her parents publicly insisted she was white. The case brought to light something that academe has dealt with for decades: faculty applicants claiming an ethnic affiliation they don’t actually possess, either to gain some kind of edge in the hiring process in terms helping an institution meet its diversity goals, or to appear more expert in one’s field, or both (or possibly neither). While a variety of ethnic and cultural groups have been the subject of such fraud, Native Americans might be the most consistently affected group.

• In the wake of Ward Churchill's controversial comments about Sept. 11, for example, the former University of Colorado at Boulder historian was investigated for claiming Native American heritage that some dispute. More recently, this summer, ongoing skepticism regarding the Cherokee background of Andrea Smith, the well-known associate professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California at Riverside, boiled over again with a series of blog posts questioning her self-proclaimed identity.

    

  And just last week, Dartmouth College came under fire for hiring Susan Taffe Reed as director of its Native American Program, saying that her alleged tribal affiliation -- Eastern Delaware Nations -- isn’t a universally recognized tribe. The group isn't recognized by federal or state authorities, but she defends it as legitimate.

• Seemingly in response to recent events, the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association circulated this week a statement asking colleges and universities to be more vigilant in preventing ethnic fraud, while at the same time proclaiming the issue one of integrity for faculty applicants.

    

  But the statement invites more discussion of just how to prevent ethnic fraud, and who’s responsible for doing so.

    

  “Issues of indigenous identity are complex,” the statement says. “Hundreds of years of ongoing colonialism around the world have contributed to this complexity. However, such complexity does not mean that there are no ethical considerations in claiming indigenous identity or relationships with particular indigenous peoples. To falsely claim such belonging is indigenous identity fraud.”

    

  The association says that its members are expected to show “commitment to the communities with whom we work, about whom we write and among whom we conduct research,” and to uphold the highest ethical standards of the profession. That includes honesty about ancestry and ties to indigenous communities. Anything less hurts the field and Native Americans, it says, calling fraud a form of appropriation that is continuous with violence.

• “In no way are we implying that one must be indigenous in order to undertake Native American and Indigenous Studies,” the statement continues. “We are simply stating that we must be honest about our identity claims, whatever our particular positionalities. Belonging does not arise simply from individual feelings -- it is not simply who you claim to be, but also who claims you. When someone articulates connections to a particular people, the measure of truth cannot simply be a person’s belief but must come from relationships with indigenous people, recognizing that there may be disagreements among indigenous people over the legitimacy of a particular person’s or group’s claims.”

    

  For these reasons, the association’s council says it “expresses its conviction that we are all responsible to act in an ethical fashion by standing against indigenous identity fraud.”

    

  According to the United Nations’ Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues statement on indigenous identity, the association says, the ethnicity "test" is “self-identification as indigenous peoples at the individual level and accepted by the community as their member.” It's not one of “enrollment, or blood quantum, or recognition by the state, or meeting any particular set of criteria for defining ‘proper’ or ‘authentic’ indigenous identity.”

• The statement seems to reject a 2003 recommendation from the Association of American Indian and Native Alaskan Professors that colleges and universities prevent ethnic fraud by requiring documentation of enrollment in a state or federally recognized nation or tribe, with preference given to those who meet the criteria. The association also recommended a case-by-case review process for those who can't meet the requirement. The now-inactive association also said institutions might ask applicants claiming Native American heritage to demonstrate past and future commitment to American Indian concerns.

    

  The 2003 statement has always generated some debate, even at its inception (although it also enjoyed substantial support). Michael Wilson, a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and former member of the organization, now heads up a Listserv of the same name. Wilson said he couldn’t say whether colleges or universities should check on Native American professors’ backgrounds because, for any number of reasons -- including that their ancestors didn’t want to be part of a federal accounting system -- some professors might not be able to present proof of an identity “the story of their lives” would tell. Other tribes are matrilineal, he said, meaning having a father of a certain tribe could still preclude one from membership.

• “I can’t deal in a binary on this one,” Wilson said, suggesting that colleges and universities might accept proof, if not require it.

    

  Others support the verification practice in full.

    

  Venida Chenault, president of Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kans., with a 100 percent Native American student body, said verification is "not as complicated as one may suggest.” While individual tribes may have some complicated enrollment policies -- a related but separate issue in Chenault’s mind -- she said cross-checking an applicant’s stated ethnicity with a federal tribal enrollment database is quite simple, and only makes sense. The university verifies every applicant’s claim.

• “I think it’s offensive when an individual claims the privilege of being native but has no sense of responsibility or integrity in terms of fulfilling any commitment to a tribe,” she said. “Otherwise it’s simply a box they check.”

    

  Chenault said the university’s faculty is about 50 percent Native American and 50 percent nonnative. While the university has never hired a faculty member simply for being Native American, she said that research increasingly supports the view that students benefit from having role models of the same ethnic backgrounds. So if a hiring committee were considering two otherwise identical candidates, they would take into account whether one was Native American, she said.

    

  Asked if the verification approach might work at a mainstream university that was looking to recruit faculty members from additional ethnic groups for which verification isn’t possible, Chenault said she didn't know. But she said she does know that on her campus, formal verification is one way to stop ethnic fraud in its tracks.

• “Every time this occurs and it’s ignored, these universities are complicit in allowing a fraud when there are qualified tribal people who could provide tremendous contributions,” she said.

    

  Some at non-Indian universities support the verification practice, too. Cutcha Risling Baldy, an assistant professor of American Indian studies at San Diego State University who blogs about cultural concerns in higher education, said verification should come from native nations. (Note: This sentence has been updated from a previous version to reflect Baldy's current institution.)

    

  “This is why schools, organizations and agencies should build positive and productive working relationships with tribes,” she said via email. “This requires the institution to also have a deep sense of responsibility for how they build these relationships and to educate themselves about history and contemporary politics of tribal nations and societies.”

• If an individual is not enrolled in a federally recognized tribe, “because of one of the myriad of reasons that could happen, then both the individual and the institution need to work with the tribal communities in order to develop methods for best moving forward with that claim,” she said.

    

  Similar to Chenault, Baldy said that being considered Native American “is not only about membership or ancestry but about the responsibility to community and the continued fight for self-determination.” So in the case of those who claim native ancestry in academia, “individuals should be conscious of the politics and responsibility before making a claim to native identity,” she said.

    

  Baldy said that fraudulently claiming native ancestry has “deep roots in settler colonialism and the desire to normalize colonization and occupation of indigenous lands and indigenous histories.”

• She added, “There is a place for people who want to teach about, study and understand native nations and cultures who are not of native descent. There is no need to claim native ancestry to be a legitimate scholar in native studies when there is so much important work that could and should be done with allied scholars.”

    

  Those on some other campuses disagreed with Baldy’s take on verification, however.

    

  Diana Lawrence, a spokeswoman for Dartmouth, said it’s illegal under federal law to hire or deny employment based on an individual's nationality. So while Dartmouth “is concerned about ethnic fraud, we would never ask a job applicant to provide any kind of ethnic documentation,” she said.

• Benjamin Reese, chief diversity officer at Duke University and president of the National Association for Diversity Officers in Higher Education, said it is in fact illegal for colleges and universities to hire candidates for their ethnicity alone. Separately, he said, most colleges and universities believe that that “having the widest range of viewpoints and experiences and backgrounds is related to robust conversations on campuses and specifically in the classroom.”

    

  Both those factors aside, Reese said, trying to verify the increasingly diverse ethnic backgrounds of faculty candidates is simply “inappropriate.”

    

  “I think one’s experience that directly relates to employment, such as having a degree from an accredited institution -- those things should be verified,” he said. “But it’s a slippery slope when you start looking at criteria you can’t directly relate” to the job.

• Richard A. Baker, assistant vice chancellor and vice president for equal opportunity at the University of Houston and a regional director for the American Association for Access, Equity and Diversity, said that while he understood the concerns surrounding ethnic fraud or cultural appropriation, “it would be a big step backward for institutions to begin verifying or certifying employees’ self-identified race or ethnicity.”

    

  Institutions would be legally limited in how they could use that information due to antidiscrimination laws, Baker said. So institutions might better approach the issue in the same manner that they approach gender.

    

  “If someone self-identifies their gender, we do not make them prove it -- we take them at their word,” he said via email. “Why? Because it’s not about what we perceive but what they believe about themselves. In today’s diverse workplace, we understand that every employee deserves to be treated equally, with respect, and included regardless of what anyone perceives their race, ethnicity, gender or any other protected classification to be.”

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• About 36% of First Nations to lose funding for failing to report finances

   

   

  210 First Nations missed Aug. 28 deadline set by Aboriginal Affairs

   

      CBC News    Posted: Sep 01, 2015

• More than a third of First Nation communities across the country will have some of their federal funding withheld, starting today, because they haven't publicly posted their financial information online.

   

  Under the First Nations Financial Transparency Act, which came into effect last year, First Nations have to submit their audited financial statements for the past fiscal year to the Canadian government, including the salaries and expenses of their chiefs and councillors. 

   

  That information is then published on an Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada website. 

   

  This year, 210 First Nations, or roughly 36 per cent, have not posted their financial information online, a significantly higher number than last year when 98 per cent of bands complied with the new law.

• Ottawa plans to withhold funding for non-essential services if the bands don't fall into line.

   

  "Beginning Sept. 1, 2015, bands that have yet to comply with the law will see funding for non-essential services withheld," said Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt said at the end of July, less than a week before the federal election was called.

   

  "Further actions may include seeking court orders to compel compliance," he said.

• Not for public, First Nation leaders say

   

  The federal government took some of the First Nations bands to court in a bid to force them to comply with the law.

   

  After two days of hearings earlier this month, a Federal Court justice reserved his decision.

   

  Onion Lake Cree Nation, which covers territory in Alberta and Saskatchewan, is one of those bands affected by the ruling. Chief Wallace Fox said making that information public would hurt businesses owned by the band.

• "There would be a breakdown of company A in terms of expenses, revenue and all audits," Wallace said, citing a theoretical example.

   

  While the First Nations said they have no problem sharing public financial information, they don't believe they should have to make that information available to the general public.

   

  "The monies that we're talking about are not public funds, they're not taxpayers dollars," said Dene National Chief Bill Erasmus, who was in Saskatoon for the hearings. "This is why we're adamant that this relationship is between the federal government, ourselves\ and our own citizens." 

   

  CBC News has asked Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada to comment on this story but has yet to receive a response.

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• Australians Protest Forced Indigenous Community Closures
• Published 10 April 2015
     
     
                   
   
   
   
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  Activists say Indigenous Australians are being forced off their land nationwide.

      

             

  Thousands of protesters rallied in Australia's two largest cities Friday against government plans to forcefully shut down Indigenous communities.            

  Indigenous elder and activist Jenny Munro said the rallies were a “call to arms” to all Australians.            

• “This is about the community being made aware about the truth of what goes on in this country,” she told progressive news website New Matilda.            

  Munro joined thousands of other protesters in Sydney who marched from Belmore Park to the Redfern Aboriginal Tent Embassy. In a statement issued online, march organizers said they were both frustrated by plans to redevelop the Block – a chunk of the suburb of Redfern earmarked for affordable Indigenous housing.            
• Activists say the very organization charged with providing affordable housing – the Aboriginal Housing Authority (AHC) – is now trying to gentrify the area with commercial office blocks and student accommodation at the expense of Indigenous residents.

• However, march organizers said Indigenous communities aren't just being “broken up” in Redfern, but rather across all of Australia.            

  “We will be marching in solidarity with brothers and sisters in (Western Australia) staring down the imminent threat of withdrawal of essential services to once again force Aboriginal people off their lands,” they stated.            

  A second march against the proposed closures also took place in Melbourne. The rally began near Flinders Street station, where protesters held a traditional smoking ceremony.            

• As many as 150 remote Indigenous communities in Western Australia could be scuttled after both the state and federal government claimed they couldn't afford to provide municipal services.            

  Prime Minister Tony Abbott has backed the decision, arguing Indigenous Australians living in remote areas are living a taxpayer-funded “lifestyle.”            

• Speaking to teleSUR earlier this month, Indigenous community organizer Jodie Bell warned wholesale community closures isn't just about cost-cutting.            

  “It's about assimilation – many non-Indigenous people cannot fathom or understand the Indigenous connection to country,” Bell told teleSUR. “And because they do not understand it, they trivialize it and think they are helping people by moving them off country.”            

  Bell also dismissed Abbott's characterization of remote communities as a “lifestyle choice,” explaining, “Our spiritual and cultural life is intricately linked with our country.”            

  “We have fought hard in the past 30 years to regain the ability to live in our country following years of displacement as a result of government policies,” Bell said. “We will not move, we cannot move.”            

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• Kahnawake mixed couple subject of 'marry out, stay out' protest

   

   

  Mohawk man, non-native wife say they are afraid for their family's safety

   

      By Tanya Birkbeck, CBC News    Posted: May 02, 2015
• Dozens of protesters spent Saturday demonstrating in front of a house in Kahnawake, Que., where a Mohawk man lives with his non-native wife.

• Marvin and Terry McComber woke up Saturday morning to spray-painted graffiti on the front of their two-storey yellow house, and on their daughter's car.

   

  Terry McComber told CBC News she feels intimidated by the protesters, and fears for the safety of her children.

   

  The protesters say the couple is breaking a law that has been on the books in Kahnawake since 1981. It states that any Mohawk resident who marries or lives with a non-native must move away from Kahnawake.

   

  Nineteen-year-old resident Keisha Goodleaf is among the protesters outside the McComber home.

   

  "Well I am here because I was raised [knowing that] you marry out, you get out. We all knew that. Everyone in town grew up knowing that," Goodleaf says.

   

  She says she is worried about losing native land, language and culture.

• Seven mixed-race couples, including the McCombers, are taking the band council to court over the law, in a case that is not expected to be settled until 2017.

   

  Barry and Sandy Stacey, who moved from Kahnawake when they married, are participating in the lawsuit. They attended the protest in defence of the McCombers and others in their situation.

   

  "It's not right, I feel, because we're all human beings. I married my wife not because of her colour or her race, but because she's a lovely person. She loves me for who I am and I love her for who she is," Barry Stacey says.

• Band council spokesman Joe Delaronde says he does not condone the vandalism, but the protesters have a right to demand the law be respected.

   

  "They are asking that people respect the law on residency and membership," Delaronde says.

   

  "One of the problems we've been having is that people, especially on the outside, not understanding that this is not about people not being able to have relationships or marriages with people from elsewhere. All it is, is that you can't live here. You can work here. You can play and you can visit every day."

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• Updated 

  Winnipeg Folk Festival urged to ban headdresses

   

   

  Woman spotted wearing traditional head piece, face paint angers festivalgoers

   

      CBC News    Posted: Jul 12, 2015

• Angry festivalgoers took to Twitter over the weekend to air their frustrations after a woman was spotted at the Winnipeg Folk Festival Saturday night wearing a traditional feathered headdress and face paint.

   

   

   

  First Nation headdresses are usually only worn during special ceremonies. Even then, the headdress is reserved for a select few people — typically from the indigenous community — who earn the right to don the garment.

   

  That is why some people are now calling on festival organizers to ban the wearing of headdresses at the festival going forward.

   

  People at the Main Stage during Saturday night's musical performances saw a woman standing in the crowd wearing one of the traditional head pieces.

   

   

   

  Shocked and upset that the @Winnipegfolk festival would allow someone in wearing a full headdress and face paint. #WFF2015

  —   @Denezy 

   <script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>  

  Déne Sinclair said she was taken aback when she saw the woman.

   

  "We were walking by on the way to a show last night and saw a young woman wearing a headdress and paint all over her face," Sinclair said. "I thought that was very strange and probably not appropriate, as a lot of other festivals have had a headdress ban in the past."
• Sinclair said she approached the woman and asked her about what she was wearing. But the woman declined to talk to her, Sinclair said, adding others approached the woman as well to explain why they found it offensive.

• How could you let someone wear a headdress at #WFF2015 ⁉️ Very disappointed in you @Winnipegfolk

• Sinclair tweeted the Winnipeg Folk Festival several times about the incident.

   

  "I think this is an opportunity for the Winnipeg Folk Festival to be a leader towards reconciliation in this time of history," Sinclair said.

   

  "Huge international festivals, like Glastonbury, have banned headdresses. There's a festival in British Columbia that banned the sale of them, as well as the wearing of them last year, so there is precedence out there for the folk festival to follow."

   

  Osheaga, a big annual music festival in Montreal, announced on Monday that wearing headdresses will no longer be permitted at its festival.
• "The First Nations' headdresses have a spiritual and cultural meaning in the native communities and to respect and honour their people, Osheaga asks fans and artists attending the festival to not use this symbol as a fashion accessory," the festival said on a post to its Facebook page.
• A Winnipeg Folk Festival spokesperson said historically faux headdresses haven't been an issue, because most festivalgoers are mindful of what is or is not culturally appropriate.

• "We have talked in the past about having a policy about such things (cultural appropriation), but because it's never come up before it's something we deemed not necessary at the time," said Rebecca McCauley, the festival's manager of marketing and communications.

   

  After this year's incident, McCauley said festival administration is going to sit down and discuss whether to restrict the wearing of headdresses in future years.

   

  "After the festival, it is absolutely something that we will talk about and revisit."

   

  The festival wrapped up Sunday night.

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• New 

  Headdresses banned at Osheaga music festival

   

   

  Appropriated headdresses also outlawed by Heavy Montreal and ÎleSoniq

   

      CBC News    Posted: Jul 13, 2015

• Montreal's Osheaga music festival says wearing a First Nations-style headdress is a fashion don't — it's asking festivalgoers to do away with the inappropriate "accessory."

   

  A Facebook post on the Osheaga 2015 page says: "First Nations Headdresses have a spiritual and cultural meaning in the native communities and to respect and honour their people, Osheaga asks fans and artists attending the festival to not use this symbol as a fashion accessory.

   

  Heavy Montreal and ÎleSoniq have also adopted the ban.

   

  The Osheaga website lists feathered headdresses and First Nations headdresses under things that aren't allowed at the festival.

   

  According to the website, any headdresses will be confiscated. 

• Winnipeg Folk Festival under pressure to enforce ban

   

  Headdressees are usually only worn during special ceremonies and they're usually reserved for select members of the indigenous community. 

   

  In recent years, performers and music-lovers at music festivals across North America have been in hot water for wearing headdress as a fashion item. 

   

  Over the weekend, angry festivalgoers took to Twitter after a woman was spotted at the Winnipeg Folk Festival wearing a traditional feathered headdress and face paint.

   

  Now some are urging organizers at the Winnipeg Folk Festival to ban the practice for future years.

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• Pope Francis asks pardon for church's 'crimes' against indigenous peoples

   

   

  Francis acknowledged 'crimes committed against the native peoples during the so-called conquest of America'

   

      The Associated Press    Posted: Jul 10, 2015

• Pope Francis apologized Thursday for the sins, offences and crimes committed by the Catholic Church against indigenous peoples during the colonial-era conquest of the Americas, delivering a powerful mea culpa on the part of the church in the climactic highlight of his South American pilgrimage.

   

  History's first Latin American pope "humbly" begged forgiveness during an encounter in Bolivia with indigenous groups and other activists and in the presence of Bolivia's first-ever indigenous president, Evo Morales.

• Francis noted that Latin American church leaders in the past had acknowledged that "grave sins were committed against the native peoples of America in the name of God." St. John Paul II, for his part, apologized to the continent's indigenous for the "pain and suffering" caused during the 500 years of the church's presence in the Americas during a 1992 visit to the Dominican Republic.

   

  But Francis went farther, and said he was doing so with "regret."

   

  "I would also say, and here I wish to be quite clear, as was St. John Paul II: I humbly ask forgiveness, not only for the offences of the church herself, but also for crimes committed against the native peoples during the so-called conquest of America," he said to applause from the crowd.

• 'There was sin'

   

  Then deviating from his prepared script, he added: "I also want for us to remember the thousands and thousands of priests who strongly opposed the logic of the sword with the power of the cross. There was sin, and it was plentiful. But we never apologized, so I now ask for forgiveness. But where there was sin, and there was plenty of sin, there was also an abundant grace increased by the men who defended indigenous peoples."

   

  Francis' apology was met with wild applause from the indigenous and other grass-roots groups gathered for a world summit of popular movements whose fight against injustice and social inequality has been championed by the pope.

• "We accept the apologies. What more can we expect from a man like Pope Francis?" said Adolfo Chavez, a leader of a lowlands indigenous group. "It's time to turn the page and pitch in to start anew. We indigenous were never lesser beings."

   

  The apology was significant given the controversy that has erupted in the United States over Francis' planned canonization of the 18th century Spanish priest Junipero Serra, who set up missions across California. Native Americans contend Serra brutally converted indigenous people to Christianity, wiping out villages in the process, and have opposed his canonization. The Vatican insists Serra defended natives from colonial abuses.

• Benedict's controversial statements

   

  Francis' apology was also significant given the controversy that blew up the last time a pope visited the continent. Benedict XVI drew heated criticism when, during a 2007 visit to Brazil, he defended the church's campaign to Christianize indigenous peoples. He said the Indians of Latin America had been "silently longing" to become Christians when Spanish and Portuguese conquerors violently took over their lands.

• "In effect, the proclamation of Jesus and of his Gospel did not at any point involve an alienation of the pre-Columbus cultures, nor was it the imposition of a foreign culture," Benedict told the continent's bishops.

   

  Amid an outcry from indigenous groups, Benedict subsequently acknowledged that "shadows accompanied the work of evangelizing" the continent and said European colonizers inflicted "sufferings and injustices" on indigenous populations. He didn't apologize, however.

• The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said that Francis wrote the speech on his own and that the apology for the sins, offenses and crimes of the church was a "particularly important declaration."

   

  Church officials have long insisted Catholic missionaries protected indigenous peoples from the abuses of military colonizers and were often punished by European colonial powers as a result. Francis' own Jesuit order developed missions across the continent, educating the indigenous and turning their communities into organized Christian-Indian societies. The Jesuits were expelled in the 17th century.

• 'The church stole our land'

   

  Campesino leader Amandina Quispe, of Anta, Peru, who attended the grass-roots summit, said the church still holds lands it should give back to Andean natives. The former seat of the Inca empire, conquered by Spaniards in the 16th century, is an example.

   

  "The church stole our land and tore down our temples in Cuzco and then it built its own churches — and now it charges admission to visit them," she said.

   

  Francis' apology was not the first. After his 1992 apology, John Paul II issued a sweeping but vague apology for the Catholic Church's sins of the past during the church's 2000 Jubilee. A year later, he apologized specifically for missionary abuses against aborigines in Oceania. He did so in the first ever papal email.

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• Listuguj Mi'kmaq $64M land settlement approved by Ottawa

   

   

  All residents in Listuguj to receive $15K share of settlement

   

      CBC News    Posted: May 08, 2015

• The Federal government has approved the $64.5 million compensation package for people living in the Mi'kmaq community of Listuguj.

   

  The money will provide compensation for past loss of use of five parcels of land around the community.

   

  The land was taken for use outside the community, including for a highway and the entrance to the interprovincial bridge between Quebec and New Brunswick.

• People in Listuguj held a referendum on the proposed settlement in December 2014. They voted to distribute the money evenly to everyone living in the community.

   

  That means each resident will get a cheque for around $15,000. The band council will also receive $4 million to pay for legal expenses.

• A unique deal

   

  Senior negotiator Jeff Basque said the settlement is unique in Canada because, while it provides compensation for past issues, it does not settle any future claims on the parcels of land.

   

  "If there's any dispute between us and them on exercise of our aboriginal or treaty rights, this agreement cannot resolve them. They will still have to go to court" he said, adding, "you know, we prefer negotiation."

   

  No timeline was given for the distribution of cheques since officials have still not calculated exactly how many people in Listuguj are eligible to receive the compensation.

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• Hawaiian Sovereignty and Island Knowledge

   

  Rebekah Garrison | University of Southern California
• We include this interview in “The Decolonial Gesture” issue to signal the importance of native political struggles in relation to land claims and anti-militarization organizing in the Pacific Islands, and specifically for the case of Hawai‘i. For Kãnaka Maoli the ongoing colonization of their land space, language, education, and cultural heritage since Captain Cook’s arrival on the island in 1778, and illegal US annexation in 1898, amounts to ongoing violence and depletion, but also motivates fierce political activism for a future where sovereignty remains on the horizon. Dr. Haunani-KayTrask lays out an urgent vision against the vestiges of colonial usurpation and a legal system that discriminates against indigenous populations, beyond the new colonialisms brought by US settlers and the multi-billion dollar tourist industry. In this interview, Trask draws together the histories of the Pacific and the Caribbean, and invites new generations to challenge the projects of militarization, settler colonialism, and tourism as they are currently configured in the archipelagos. 
• On January 28, 2010, I sat down with Dr. Haunani-Kay Trask at the Kamakakūokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies to talk about the complex decolonial processes that islands around the world confront.  It was through this conversation, and the many more that came before and after as Trask mentored me in her final year teaching, that I began to explore how islands linking the Pacific Ocean to the Caribbean Sea can be positioned within a greater dialogue of oceanic solidarity.  
• As demonstrated by the International Women's Network Against Militarism, which includes chapters in Vieques, Hawai‘i, Guahan, Philippines, Japan, Okinawa, South Korea, Puerto Rico, and the United States, from the Pacific to the Caribbean, islands are connected to each other through their archipelagos, global waterways and cross-cultural kinship ties. Trask describes in the interview these connections between islands and a path forward for Kãnaka Maoli in the present history where the land and sea are captured by many forms of colonization and resistance.  Included with this text is video of a fragment of this interview:
• Haunani-Kay: My name is Haunani-Kay Trask.  I got involved with Kahoʻolawe and the whole archipelagic idea of bombing ranges when I came back from college [in the mid-1970s from the University of Wisconsin Madison].  My mother, who was very straight, said you better come home, these people are going out there [to Kaho‘olawe] and getting arrested, and some of them are dying.  It sounds like something you’d like.  So that’s how I got into it. I did come home, and I didn’t write my dissertation for two years because I was so engaged in this process.  So, that was the beginning of the great drama for us.  Getting the people to go, and so many people said, we’ll donate the boat; we’ll take you over there. Then it became an everyday thing and practically everybody I knew wanted to go. So, to me, even if some things appear to be absolutely impossible, you never know.
• Rebekah Garrison: The US Navy began land expropriations and military training on both Vieques and Kahoʻolawe in the 1940s.  Also, similar to Kahoʻolawe, in the 1970s there was a big demilitarization movement in Vieques. Could you expand on these connections?
• H-K: People in Vieques helped us understand that we had so much in common.  So that every time, for example, I gave a speech or I was in a rally, I would always bring them up, and it’s kind of like comradeship.  You become part of somebody’s struggle because you’re suffering under the same conditions.  It was great because [the movement] started growing and other people started to say, well where are the rest of the other places?  I said, they’re everywhere.  That’s what the Pacific is for.  It’s a bombing range for the countries that want to beat each other up.  Why did the French take Tahiti?  Where do you think they tested the bombs?  They didn’t test them in France.  And that’s what Vieques is for, and we have 26 military bases [in Hawai‘i].  You don’t think [the military] came here for what we call “bonga-bonga land?”  You know coffee and the beach, and a boyfriend.  No, that’s not why they’re here.  It’s a mid-Pacific location, and it goes on and on and on.  And you can really see it.  All you have to do is just pick up a map of the Pacific and look at FR for France, and England, and the U.S.  All you have to do is look at a map, but maybe people don’t look at maps anymore.
• RG: Could you talk about how you were taught Hawaiian issues and the illegal annexation? How did you understand Kahoʻolawe as you grew up?
• H-K: My grandfather was a territorial senator, and my father was a lawyer, and they had nine children, of which five were lawyers.  So, my whole youthful life was my father telling me, this is what they took away from us.  So by the time I went to Kamehameha Schools, I knew everything about that.  Who took what, when they took it, and that’s the great thing about having a nationalist father, who was a lawyer who taught us when they banned the language, why they banned the language. It was amazing, because you don’t realize it until you’re older.  Going to college, because I went away to college, I realized how much people don’t know about Hawaiʻi.  In fact, 90% of it is made up by the Hawaiʻi Visitor’s Bureau that says: “Oh we’re soft and kind and we wanted to be part of the United States.”
•  It’s all a lie! So it later became a part of the [sovereignty] movement. Reclaiming what was ours.  Not just our language, but the truth of what happened to Hawaiʻi, when they [the United States] took it, why they took it.  Now I don’t think, at least for the Hawaiians, that there’s anybody who doesn’t know about the overthrow, that there’s anybody that doesn’t know about the banning of the language.  And if there’s anything that we contributed to the next generation, it’s those two things.  So, lots of young people speak Hawaiian now, including all my nephews and nieces.  And lots of them want to do things that are beneficial for the next generation. We are not Americans. We will never be Americans. We’re going to die as Hawaiians.  

• RG: So, growing up, there was a dichotomy?  

   

  H-K: That dichotomy is definitely the result of the takeover by the United States. That’s when they banned the language. So now, the language has come back, and it’s an intellectual renaissance. I hear it all the time. I’ll be in the building [the Kamakakūokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies] and the younger generation speaks it like that (snaps her fingers).  I’m so proud I’ve lived long enough to see that. 

   

  RG: Could you explain the similarities between the histories of Hawaiʻi and Puerto Rico?
• H-K: What happens is that little archipelagos are swept up by gigantic nations and that’s true for the Pacific. So everybody who suffers it is from a small place.  But then there are other reasons that they [gigantic nations] want [islands], like bombing ranges here in Hawaiʻi so that the U.S. can control the ocean. The real problem is that, first of all, we’re separated from each other. So we speak English, The Tahitians speak French, all of that was done by the colonizer. The first time I ever said that in class, I thought my students were going to fall on the ground. They said that’s absolutely correct. 

• But they separated us. Here’s the Tahitians, here’s the Māoris, here’s the Hawaiians. We are actually one people.  Even though we speak different dialects, we are ocean people, and that’s what we need to go back to.  And so we started visiting people. Oscar Temaru is one of the leaders in Tahiti, and he was so wonderful because he traveled around getting the message out that we are indigenous people.  When I met him I said do you know what you’ve meant to us?  He said, we know all about you Ms. Trask. I said, good, that’s great! 

   

  We are in an ocean that makes us very aware that we are small countries in a big place, and that place is controlled by the United States. So, we’re all comrades in that moment. And that’s why when the Māoris first came here, they did a whole chant for me because they know that we’re fighting for what they’re fighting for on the other side of the ocean. A comradeship builds up all over the place, and it’s like the engine inside that keeps you going.   

• RG: How does this relate to 1898: Cuba, Puerto Rico, and then Vieques and the connections with Hawaiʻi and Kahoʻolawe, the Philippines and Guam? 

   

  H-K: Yes, yes.  I have never seen a bigger base than [on Guam], and Guam is so small, that the base is like this: (forms a circle with her fingers) and you just think, where’s the rest of the Chamorus?  Well, they’re away in the diaspora.  It’s the same thing with Hawaiians.  The Americans took over Hawaiʻi and now we have all of these Hawaiians living in California, suffering from heartache and alcoholism because they lost their home.  It’s so repetitive to see it everywhere you go; that conquerors ruin the Native place. They did it in the U.S., otherwise known as Indian Country.  So these poor people get jailed essentially in these horrible little places that are just, the same as us.  That’s why I’m always pleased when people invite me, because there’s the solidarity. Whether it’s the American Indians, or Vieques, or whoever it is, Okinawans. I can’t believe Okinawa -- It’s unbelievable. I was so shocked, I cried. They said, Oh we should have told you. And I said, you did tell me, I just didn’t expect it. I didn’t expect planes coming and going on a tiny little island. The sound! Those jets, I don’t know how the people don’t go deaf.

• RG: What is the Pacific history of resisting U.S. militarization?

   

  H-K: All of these little places, Tahiti, Aotearoa, Hawaiʻi, Vieques, everybody now who is Native is fighting, and it’s an insurgency, is really what it is.  And it took a long time because the Pacific is a big ocean.  Not everybody has been to Aotearoa, or Tahiti. The whole ocean area needs to be liberated.  Vieques, Hawaiʻi, Aotearoa, everybody, Guam – it is so tiny and they only have the perimeter.  

• RG: Where is the movement now? Where do you hope to see it go in the future?

   

  HK: The younger generation has to pick it up because we’re old already.  It’s really true that young people know things we don’t know because they come through in another era. You’re working for the next generation.  We don’t know who they’ll be. Go out there and make a contribution. You got to get out there and do something. Now it’s your turn for public exposure.

• RG: I have this quote from you in 1978 from the Advertiser.  It says, “Gentleman, if you must bomb, destroy, and annihilate, why not practice on your own historic sites?” Please expand.

   

  H-K: The imperialist decides that history begins when they arrive, and so therefore, that’s why movements are absolutely imperative. That’s how we got the building [the Center for Hawaiian Studies], and that’s how we stopped the bombing even though people died in the [Kaho‘olawe] struggle [George Helm and Kimo Mitchell].   I think that it’s true that movements come and go. As we age, the next generation either has to pick it up, or do something else. You need to see young people because it’s young people continuing.  

• RG: What would you say to visitors?

   

  H-K: Learn something about a place before coming, because it might be that like Hawaiʻi, we don’t need any more visitors.  We have millions and millions of people, and so we don’t need that. What we really need is for people to understand that Hawaiians have their own issues: We lost our country. So stop doing this to places like Vieques,Tahiti, Aotearoa, Hawaiʻi, and Guam.  
• Rebekah Garrison is a doctoral student, Department of American Studies and Ethnicity, University of Southern California.  Her research interests include the intersections of empire and island epistemology, indigenous cartography, and decolonial theory.

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• Fake Cherokee?

      

   

         

    July 6, 2015

      

   

     

  By

       

    Scott Jaschik

• When the scandal broke last month over Rachel Dolezal, the Spokane, Wash., NAACP leader and adjunct instructor of Africana studies at Eastern Washington University who apparently faked being African-American, there was widespread discussion in academe. But Dolezal was not a major player in African-American studies.

    

  The focus on Dolezal has renewed scrutiny of Andrea Smith, associate professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California at Riverside, who is being accused of faking a Cherokee heritage that many say she lacks. Smith, unlike Dolezal, is a prominent scholar. Her books are considered significant in Native American studies, and her writing and public appearances have routinely included references to her having Cherokee roots.
• Smith's ethnicity also played a role in a tenure dispute. In 2008, the women's studies department at the University of Michigan (one of two departments in which Smith worked) voted against Smith's tenure bid there, but the American culture program (the other department in which she worked) backed the bid. Lack of backing from both divisions doomed her chances. In the ensuing protest, graduate students and others who supported Smith accused the women's studies program of abandoning a talented minority scholar. Some say that Smith has since admitted to not being Cherokee (while the record on that is in dispute). But when her job was threatened, she allowed her defenders to point to her Cherokee status as a reason Michigan should have promoted her.

• The reports about Smith are not new, and some in Native American studies report hearing about this possibility years ago. But a series of blog posts in the last week has focused renewed attention on the accusations that Smith has misrepresented her background.

    

  The issue is both important and sensitive to many Native American studies scholars. Leaders in the field stress that they believe that outstanding scholarship has been done by people with a variety of backgrounds, Native American and other. But many also say that there is a particular obligation in this field -- when the number of Native American scholars with prominent university positions is so small and when Native Americans have been misunderstood by scholars for generations -- to be open about one's background.

• "All scholarship should be based on integrity and that integrity includes honesty and transparency," said Winona Wheeler, president of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, associate professor indigenous studies at the University of Saskatchewan, and a member of the Fisher River Cree Nation. "One of the significant tenets of indigenous studies as a discipline is that we strive to [situate] ourselves with our research. So it's really important in the discipline that we advise our readers somehow about the place that we're coming from."

    

  Smith did not respond to requests from Inside Higher Ed to requests on the controversy, and she has not commented in social media or elsewhere. Public support for her has not been visible.

• 'Andrea Smith Is Not a Cherokee'

    

  Much of the information that has circulated about Smith has been summarized in a new anonymous blog called "Andrea Smith Is Not a Cherokee." The blog is a mix of examples of where she has described herself as a Cherokee and cases where she reportedly has admitted to people that she lacks evidence for this, or that she flat-out is not a Cherokee.

• Many of her activities suggest that Smith is a minority woman and/or a Native American. She helped organize the group INCITE, which describes itself as "a network of radical feminists of color." She has been active in the group Women of All Red Nations. Her scholarship is about Native Americans (which of course doesn't mean she is one). Her best known book is Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Duke University Press).

    

  For many of her campus appearances, she is described in ways that explicitly call her Cherokee. For an event at the University of Illinois at Chicago, she was called a "Cherokee intellectual." And for an event in May at Bridgewater State University, the program described her as a "Cherokee feminist." There are also videos of her being introduced at conferences as a Cherokee -- this video shows her as that happens.

• The problem, according to Smith's critics, is that she is not Cherokee and has known that for years. The blog and an article in The Daily Beast quote people as saying that they confronted her about her background and that, at various times, she pledged to stop describing herself as a Cherokee.

    

  Steve Russell, an emeritus professor at Indiana University at Bloomington whose research is on Native American studies, is among those cited by the blog, and he confirmed to Inside Higher Ed that he received a direct promise from Smith to stop calling herself Cherokee. Russell described how he signed a petition on Smith's behalf when she was denied tenure at Michigan, but felt betrayed when he found out more. That's a common pattern among some of those who backed Smith in the past. Russell has spoken out at scholarly meetings about Smith's status.
• Patti Jo King, interim chair of American Indian studies and director of the Center for American Indians at Bacone College and an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation, also confirmed to Inside Higher Ed having discussions with Smith years ago in which Smith pledged to stop claiming Cherokee status. "But instead of coming clean and showing herself to be a true advocate for Native women, she continued her deception, proving to me that she is merely masquerading for money," King said. "She is not the first to do this -- indeed there are hundreds of 'pretend Indians' who use the guise to sell their 'authentic' books to an unsuspecting and naïve public. Although we have tried to enlighten the public for decades about our objections to kind of identity fraud, the pretenders seem to feel they have a perfect right to misrepresent themselves."

• Does Ethnicity Matter?

    

  While Smith's ethnicity (now disputed) was cited in debates about her employment at Michigan, she currently works in California, where the state Constitution bars public colleges and universities from considering race and ethnicity in hiring. A spokesperson for the university, asked about the controversy, said via email: "Professor Smith is a teacher and researcher of high merit who, on that basis, earned a tenured faculty position at UC Riverside. The University of California is precluded by law from considering an individual’s ethnicity in any hiring or advancement decisions."

    

  While UC Riverside can maintain it doesn't care about Smith's ethnic status, other universities where she has worked have taken positions on the importance of accurate ethnic identities.

    

  The American Indian Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where Smith had a postdoctoral fellowship, in 2010 issued a statement called "Identity and Academic Integrity."

• Robert Warrior, director of American Indian studies at Illinois, said that Smith didn't prompt the statement, but that the reports about her were "a topic of discussion throughout our development of it. We knew about the ethical issues regarding her claims to Cherokee descent at that point."

    

  The Illinois statement said in part: "We recognize the importance of being able to identify ourselves clearly and unambiguously. Too often, we realize, American Indian studies as a field of academic inquiry has failed to live up to its potential at least in part because of the presence of scholars who misrepresent themselves and their ties to the Native world. While we do not in any way want to suggest that only Native scholars can do good scholarship in Native studies, neither do we want to make light of the importance of scholars who work in this field being able to speak with clarity about who they are and what brings them to their scholarship and creative activity."

• Does Honesty Matter?

    

  The new focus on Smith has prompted much discussion among Native American studies scholars.

    

  Joanne Barker, an enrolled member of the Delaware Tribe and professor of American Indian studies at San Francisco State University, wrote a blog post comparing the Dolezal and Smith cases and the relative lack of attention (in the mainstream media) to the latter case. Within the field, Barker wrote, it is important to note that while many people didn't know about Smith until recently, many did. And she asked in her blog about the responsibility of those who knew -- even if they admired Smith's scholarship.

• "There are certainly many people who knew/know, so why have her ethics and integrity not been questioned or challenged in the same or similar way to those of Dolezal?" Barker wrote. "Why does Smith’s fraud get excused on the grounds of 'her good work' but Dolezal does not?"

    

  Another piece attracting attention is by David Shorter, a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, about doing work on Native Americans while not being one. Shorter is a fan of Smith's scholarship, but says that misrepresentation matters.

• "She has done incredible theoretical work in the academic field of indigenous studies and has even been recognized internationally for her broad and groundbreaking antiviolence coalition building. So does it matter that she did all of that in redface?" wrote Shorter in an essay in Indian Country Today. "Yes, it does. Andy Smith did not just appear out of an egg, as a fully formed 'woman of color' advocate, validated as an indigenous scholar, and a Nobel Peace Prize nominee. She got there by grabbing the microphone, keeping others away from it and deciding to speak both 'as' and 'for' a group of people."

    

  And there is no reason to have done so, Shorter said, noting that he is but one of many who, without being part of an Indian nation, have still managed to study Native Americans, build relationships in various tribes and be taken seriously by scholars of a range of backgrounds. How might Smith have pulled this off? The answer is in Shorter's headline: "Four Words for Andrea Smith: 'I'm Not an Indian.'"

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• Amanda Deer, non-native boyfriend driven from Kahnawake home by protesters

   

   

  Criminal record of man is reason for protest on Mohawk territory, says Grand Chief Mike Delisle

   

      CBC News    Posted: May 18, 2015

• Tensions remained high Monday on a Quebec reserve after a mixed-race couple and an 11-year-old boy were driven out of their home by protesters a day earlier. 

   

  There are conflicting views as to why some residents of the Kahnawake reserve near Montreal wanted Amanda Deer and her non-native boyfriend to leave. 
• • BACKGROUND | Kahnawake eviction policy 
   
  • Kahnawake mixed couple subject of 'marry out, stay out' protest
   
  • Mohawk Cheryl Diabo faces eviction threat from Kahnawake
   
  • Former Olympian Waneek Horn-Miller among Mohawks suing Kahnawake council

• A group of people gathered outside Deer's home Sunday and demanded the family leave.

   

  She said she's not sure whether it's because her boyfriend has a criminal record, or because they were trying to enforce a territory law that says any Mohawk who marries or lives with a non-native must move away.

• "Two people in the pro-eviction [group], they were trying to break my front door down. They started handling the handle, banging on the door, banging on the porch," Deer said.

   

  "People were on the side of my porch in the back where the pool is. I had the back door gate locked by the pool, they're trying to kick it in. 'Get the f--k out of here, get the hell out of here. We want him out!' And the police are standing there doing nothing."

   

  Deer said she and her family decided to temporarily leave their home, fearing for their safety.

   

  Protesters also told CBC News and Radio-Canada reporters to leave Kahnawake on Sunday.

• Boyfriend accused of violence

   

  Many of the protesters at her house have attended prior protests over membership issues in Kahnawake. But Deer's neighbour, Michael Jacobs, said that wasn't the issue. 

   

  He said protesters were upset because the boyfriend has spent time behind bars and was released back into the community on Friday.

• "The guy's a violent felon and we took it very seriously," Jacobs said. "I haven't slept for four days."

   

  Grand Chief Mike Delisle said he doesn't believe the protesters were targeting Deer because of her non-native boyfriend, but rather because of her boyfriend's reputation and because a court ordered the boyfriend to remain in Kahnawake as a condition of his release from jail. 

   

  "Case workers, court workers, or what have you, should realize and understand that putting a condition on a non-native individual to reside in the territory isn't going to work," Delisle said.

   

  Still, Delisle said the tactics used by protesters in this case may have gone too far.

   

  "We're not looking for vigilantism," he said.

• Eviction policy

   

  The controversy surrounding Kahnawake's "marry out, stay out" policy has spurred much consternation among Mohawks living on the land just south of Montreal.

• The policy has been in place since 1981, but has not been widely enforced.

   

  The rule means Mohawks who marry non-natives have to leave the community of about 8,000 residents. Over the years, some have left by their own accord, but others have chosen to stay despite Kahnawake's membership law.

•  In 2010, the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake voted to evict 26 non-natives.

   

  The controversy then began anew last year, when some people living in Kahnawake said they were being intimidated by pro-eviction protesters. 

   

  Many families since then have been targeted by people insisting they vacate the premises, including Marvin and Terry McComber, Cheryl Diabo and Waneek Horn-Miller.

   

  Some of them are in the process of suing the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake over the eviction policy.

• Feds condemn law as 'racist'

   

  The office of Bernard Valcourt, minister of aboriginal affairs, had strong words for the Kahnawake policy, calling it "racist and unacceptable."

   

  "We urge community leaders to enact a more inclusive membership and residency approach, one that is in line with the spirit of Canadians' values of equality and freedom," the statement said.

   

  Geoffrey Kelley, the Quebec minister responsible for native affairs, said last week he is concerned for the safety of the mixed Mohawk and non-native families.

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