Buffy Sainte-Marie performs at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2022. A CBC investigation has found a record of legendary musician Sainte-Marie’s birth certificate, other documents and details from family members who say she is not Indigenous.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Alex Lupul
The CBC report on iconic singer Buffy Sainte-Marie’s ancestry is having deep impact in multiple ways across Indigenous lands across Canada.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visits a memorial on Parliament Hill in recognition of the discovery of children’s remains at the site of a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick
Canada has officially recognized eight genocides that have happened around the world. It has not done the same for its own treatment of Indigenous children who they sent to Indian Residential Schools.
We need more positive Indigenous-settler alliances like the one with Shoal Lake 40 First Nation, which created 24 km Freedom Road to provide access to the Trans-Canada Highway. Here a teepee frame sits beside Shoal Lake.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/John Woods
The COVID-19 pandemic crisis could represent an opportunity to live up to all the recent talk of reconciliation in Canada.
The Beardy Blackhawks show solidarity after a game, thank each other and bring the game to a close, at Beardy’s Okemasis First Nation, Sask., Nov. 21, 2019.
Robert Henry
The Saskatchewan Hockey Association (SHA) recently eliminated the Beardy’s Blackhawks Midget AAA team — but needs to reconsider the team’s crucial community role in an era of reconciliation.
Cancer rates are rising among Inuit and critical oncology specialists and treatments are often located in urban centres, thousands of kilometres away from remote communities in Inuit Nunangat.
(Alex Hizaka)
A ‘shared decision-making’ model enables collaboration with Indigenous communities within Canada’s health-care system - to respond to TRC Calls to Action and address rising cancer rates.
The system of ‘birth alerts’ across Canada perpetuates the removal of children from Indigenous families begun by residential schools. Pictured here: a historical report on residential schools released by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.
(THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck)
To make meaningful progress on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s Calls to Action, all provinces and territories should promptly follow B.C. and ban discriminatory ‘birth alerts.’
Apologies without clear policy shift are typically rejected as ‘empty gestures.’ Here, more than 100 Indigenous people march on Parliament Hill in 1981 to protest the elimination of Aboriginal rights in the proposed Canadian Constitution.
The Canadian Press/Carl Bigras
It’s the 12th anniversary of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Canada has yet to implement this declaration even though the TRC says the road to reconciliation needs to start here.
UN Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (EMRIP) and Professor in Political Science, Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto