As many as 150 aboriginals from five Quebec-based Innu groups began the hunt Saturday to make a political statement against the New Dawn Agreement, a contentious deal that has split the Innu people.

“It draws a line between the Quebec Innu and the Innu from Labrador,” said Armand MacKenzie, an adviser with the La Romaine Innu on Quebec’s Lower North Shore. “And it draws a map of where the Innu in Labrador will always be considered first in Labrador, leaving the Quebec Innu out of the loop.”

The agreement offered the Labrador Innu hunting rights within 34,000 square kilometres of land, plus $2 million annually in compensation for flooding caused by construction of the Churchill Falls hydroelectric project 40 years ago.

In 2008, its signing was hailed by Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Danny Williams as heralding a new era of partnership with the Innu people of Labrador.

Last week, the Innu Nation signed an agreement in principle that brings the province a giant step closer to developing the Lower Churchill megaproject and gives legal weight to New Dawn.

But MacKenzie said the deals have driven a wedge between Innu communities.

“The border was not even an issue a couple of years ago,” he said. “We were a nomadic people going from one place to another without taking into account the provincial border. For many, many years we were one people.”

MacKenzie contends Quebec Innu may lose privileges in the neighbouring province because of the deal.

“It’s all the constitutional rights, dealing with economic development, hunting rights, cultural rights, all of those rights that belong to Innu as a people,” he said.

Innu group slams deal

The Innu Strategic Alliance, an organization that represents a number of Innu people in Quebec, released a statement Saturday that slammed the proposal.

“Our ancestral land, which ignores all boundaries imposed by non-aboriginal governments, is largely located in Labrador where we have always hunted caribou and we will continue to do so,” said Real McKenzie, chief of the Matimekush-Lac John community.

Mackenzie said the Quebec Innu were left with no choice but to ramp up action through the courts, international pressure or civil disobedience.

“It leaves us with no other options but to assert those rights on the ground, in the trenches, by asserting our aboriginal right to hunt in Labrador and by using all legal recourse we might have,” he said.

“It’s a first step for further actions in the future.”

The hunters are expected to speak to the media on their return next week.

N.L. monitors threatened herd

The Newfoundland and Labrador government said Sunday that the hunt should not take place in an area that is closed to protect a threatened caribou herd.

Last year, the provincial government said Innu from Quebec hunted in the closed area. At the time, a government official said it was too dangerous to intervene.

On Sunday, the province said conservation officials are monitoring the area.

“Information collected by the Department of Natural Resources indicates that approximately 100-150 Innu hunters from Quebec are camped in an area populated by the George River caribou herd, but also closed to hunting because it is the core range of the threatened Red Wine caribou herd,” the government stated.

“We ask the Quebec Innu leadership to put conservation practices first and instead of risking killing the last of the Red Wine caribou to make a political point, accept our offer to sit down and work through these conservation issues as leaders do,” Justice Minister Felix Collins said in a release.

The Quebec Innu dispute the claim that they pose a risk to a threatened caribou herd.

Innu leaders from Quebec travelled to Ottawa in November to tell federal officials that they will block Newfoundland and Labrador’s development plans unless the federal government helps protect their rights on ancestral lands.

“Enough is enough,” Delbert Wapass, a vice-chief with the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations, told CBC News. “The RCMP are supposed to be there. They’re not there. Where are they?”

According to the federation, 30 First Nations in Saskatchewan have signed agreements with the federal and provincial governments that say designated RCMP officers will devote 80 per cent of their time to a particular reserve.

The provincial government, which oversees the delivery of policing services, acknowledges the agreements are valid.

But officials cite problems, including a lack of space.

“In many communities there aren’t police offices on the reserve,” said Murray Sawatsky, executive director of policing services for Saskatchewan. “There aren’t accommodation for members.”

Wapass says the excuse about accommodation doesn’t wash.

“The things we’ve been hearing is that ‘well, ‘you know, if there was a place for the RCMP to be, if this was set up, and we need this, we need that … we’d be there.’”

In fact, Moosomin and other First Nations have provided space for the RCMP, Wapass said, so “it’s leaning over to excuses.”

Insp. Bob Mills, one of the top RCMP administrators in Saskatchewan, said the problem is a lack of Mounties to meet the commitment to First Nations.

RCMP eager to improve service

“From our perspective we had one guy out there doing a job in a given community and we still got one guy out there doing a job in a given community,” Mills said. “So if there were an agreement on enhancement, certainly in many cases we weren’t resourced to deliver it.”

Mills added that RCMP officers are keen to provide better service.

“You go out and talk to our members who are providing that service and they’ll give you those same frustrations,” Mills said. “They really want to contribute to making these communities safe, but they’re pulled in too many directions.”

Members of the Karuk Tribe blockaded a logging crew along the Klamath River in Northern California on Wednesday after learning the U.S. Forest Service had not imposed safeguards to protect a tribal religious site.

Tribal spokesman Craig Tucker said the tribe spent three years working with the Forest Service to be sure the thinning project near Orleans, Calif., did not cut big trees or run heavy equipment where world renewal ceremonies are performed, only to see it ignore the agreement.

“We’re not saying don’t cut any trees,” said Tucker. “We are saying just do what you agreed to that we spent three years working out, and stressed every step of the way how important this place is from the tribe’s religious perspective.’

Six Rivers National Forest Supervisor Tyrone Kelley said it was an oversight by the Forest Service that the restrictions were not written into the contract telling the logging crew what to do.

“This was just an oversight,” Kelley said, adding no one would be disciplined. “When the tribe brought it to our attention the first week of logging, we started working with the tribe to mitigate impacts.”

Kelley said the Forest Service had agreed to require a smaller kind of equipment to rig cables that haul logs up the hill to the loading area, which did not require anchoring to large trees that would be scarred and later cut down. But that was not specified in the contract.

Work in the ceremonial area has finished, and the logging crew will be resuming work in other areas, Kelley said.

Tucker said it was unacceptable to characterize the problem as an oversight.

“That is like saying, ‘Oops, we’re sorry, we didn’t mean to bomb the wedding, it was collateral damage,’” he said.

Jasper Joseph is a sixty-four-year-old native man from Port Hardy, British Columbia. His eyes still fill with tears when he remembers his cousins who were killed with lethal injections by staff at the Nanaimo Indian Hospital in 1944:

I was just eight, and they’d shipped us down from the Anglican residential school in Alert Bay to the Nanaimo Indian Hospital, the one run by the United Church. They kept me isolated in a tiny room there for more than three years, like I was a lab rat, feeding me these pills, giving me shots that made me sick. Two of my cousins made a big fuss, screaming and fighting back all the time, so the nurses gave them shots, and they both died right away. It was done to silence them. (November 10, 2000)

Unlike post-war Germans, Canadians have yet to acknowledge, let alone repent from, the genocide that we inflicted on millions of conquered people: the aboriginal men, women and children who were deliberately exterminated by our racially supremacist churches and state.

As early as November 1907, the Canadian press was acknowledging that the death rate within Indian residential schools exceeded 50% (see Appendix, Key Newspaper Articles). And yet the reality of such a massacre has been wiped clean from the public record and consciousness in Canada over the past decades. Small wonder; for that hidden history reveals a system whose aim was to destroy most native people by disease, relocation and outright murder, while “assimilating” a minority of collaborators who were trained to serve the genocidal system.

This history of purposeful genocide implicates every level of government in Canada, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), every mainstream church, large corporations and local police, doctors and judges. The web of complicity in this killing machine was, and remains, so vast that its concealment has required an equally elaborate campaign of cover-up that has been engineered at the highest levels of power in our country; a cover-up that is continuing, especially now that eyewitnesses to murders and atrocities at the church-run native residential “schools” have come forward for the first time.

For it was the residential “schools” that constituted the death camps of the Canadian Holocaust, and within their walls nearly one-half of all aboriginal children sent there by law died, or disappeared, according to the government’s own statistics.

These 50,000 victims have vanished, as have their corpses – “like they never existed”, according to one survivor. But they did exist. They were innocent children, and they were killed by beatings and torture and after being deliberately exposed to tuberculosis and other diseases by paid employees of the churches and government, according to a “Final Solution” master plan devised by the Department of Indian Affairs and the Catholic and Protestant churches.

With such official consent for manslaughter emanating from Ottawa, the churches responsible for annihilating natives on the ground felt emboldened and protected enough to declare full-scale war on non-Christian native peoples through the 20th century.

The casualties of that war were not only the 50,000 dead children of the residential schools, but the survivors, whose social condition today has been described by United Nations human rights groups as that of “a colonized people barely on the edge of survival, with all the trappings of a third-world society”. (November 12, 1999)

• Download the full report by Kevin Annett (PDF)

You can also visit the website: http://www.hiddenfromhistory.org

Below is the full video online of ‘Unrepentant – Canada’s Genocide’ by Reverend Kevin Annett.

Shinnecock Indian tribal leaders first tried to open a casino on their reservation in Southampton in 2003, but they were told the Bureau of Indian Affairs must first formally recognize them as a tribe.

The preliminary approval received Tuesday sets off a review period that could bring final recognition by next spring.

Shinnecock leaders have said they are willing to negotiate an appropriate site for a casino, either on Long Island or in the Catskills upstate.

“We’re not even going to address it tonight,” Randy King told The Associated Press in a telephone interview when asked about a casino. When pressed, he said the tribe would “work closely with state, local officials and congressional leaders” on the subject.

“It’s a great exhale that the tribe is doing, but we’ve always known who we are,” King said.

James Eleazer Jr., a former trustee, said tribal members were gathering at its community center to celebrate with music and song. “Everybody is just extremely excited. This is long overdue,” he said.

“The Shinnecock petitioner has met all seven mandatory criteria for federal acknowledgment,” BIA official George Skibine said in a statement.

He said the criteria included that the Shinnecocks have been continuously identified as an American Indian entity since 1900; have been a distinct community since historical times; and have maintained political influence over members.

About 500 Shinnecock tribal members live in modest homes on a 1,200-acre reservation in Southampton. Nearby, some of the richest people in the world, including Wall Street power brokers and Hollywood celebrities, have sprawling estates worth tens of millions of dollars.

BIA officials reviewed ancestral records and other historical documents of the tribe before determining whether the Shinnecocks met the recognition criteria. The tribe had sought to circumvent the federal approval process by seeking recognition in federal court, but a judge rejected that effort in 2007.

Even with federal recognition, the tribe needs additional federal and state approvals before operating a casino. In addition to being able to operate a casino, federal recognition makes the Shinnecocks eligible for federal grants and other funding.

The Shinnecocks, whose earlier plans for a casino in Southampton sent shudders through their wealthy neighbors in 2003, reached an agreement with the U.S. Department of Interior last May that sped up the process for formal recognition by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The tribe has been seeking federal recognition since 1978 but stepped up its efforts in recent years.

Tribal leaders have been reticent about discussing their plans for a casino but previously indicated they are willing to negotiate with state leaders on a location. Belmont Park in neighboring Nassau County, as well as various sites on eastern Long Island, have been floated as possible locations for gambling.

The Shinnecocks’ reservation is situated at a narrow strip of waterfront land in Southampton where traffic nightmares — once only an issue for summertime visitors — have become standard year-round.

The BIA also found that the nation “has a governing document describing its governance procedures and membership criteria; and has provided a list of its current members who descend from an historical Indian tribe and are not members of another federally recognized tribe.”

When the Shinnecocks broke ground in 2003 on their proposed Southampton casino, town officials raced into federal court and got an injunction to stop it. Since then, Suffolk County officials formed a task force to study the issue; County Executive Steve Levy said he is waiting for the results of that study before taking a position.

“I think they are well aware and recognize that putting gaming at the reservation is troublesome,” said Suffolk County Legislator Wayne Horsely, who helped organize the task force. “The quality of life and traffic would be just awful.”

The definition of sovereignty is:

1. Supremacy of authority or rule as exercised by a sovereign or sovereign state.
2. Royal rank, authority, or power.
3. Complete independence and self-government.
4. A territory existing as an independent state.

The federal governments of Canada and the United States do pay lip service to the concept of Native sovereignty but that’s all it is.  During the Obama ‘08 campaign… it was stated that:

SOVEREIGNTY, TRIBAL-FEDERAL RELATIONS AND THE TRUST RESPONSIBILITY:
Native American tribal nations are sovereign, self-governing political entities and enjoy a government-to-government relationship with the United States federal government that is recognized expressly in the U.S. Constitution.

Self-Determination: Barack Obama supports the principle of tribal self-determination, with recognition that the federal government must honor its treaty obligations and fully enable tribal self-governance.

But lip service is all it is.   For instance… if the Navajo Nation was allowed by the United States of America to regain complete and absolute sovereignty, the Dineh people would have the right to trade arms and missiles with North Korea, or buy/sell nuclear technology with Syria.  The Americans or Canadians simply wouldn’t allow a situation to exist where that situation was a possibility.  Can you imagine going to a currency exchange store and saying “I’d like three thousand Dineh Dollars please“… ??

The thing that makes the issue even more complicated is that international law is quite clearly on the same side as North America’s indigenous people.  The United Nations General Assembly clearly stated in the ‘Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples‘ that;

1. The subjection of peoples to alien subjugation, domination and exploitation constitutes a denial of fundamental human rights, is contrary to the Charter of the United Nations and is an impediment to the promotion of world peace and co-operation.
2. All peoples have the right to self-determination; by virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.
3. Inadequacy of political, economic, social or educational preparedness should never serve as a pretext for delaying independence.
4. All armed action or repressive measures of all kinds directed against dependent peoples shall cease in order to enable them to exercise peacefully and freely their right to complete independence, and the integrity of their national territory shall be respected.

Is it no wonder that New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the United States – countries with significant indigenous populations – balked at signing that declaration?

I’m not sure I subscribe to the theory but there is a train of thought that in the modern world Native people in the United States should cease to view themselves as sovereign nations, and instead view themselves as self governing  American ’states’ much like the 50 current states in the U.S.A.  Imagine… overnight, America’s state count exploding from 50 up to 614!

It sucks to say… but it may save native folk time and effort ceding sovereignty, and putting the issue to rest permanently so they can focus their energies towards other matters such as basic human rights.

A panel of the indigenous leaders gathered Dec. 10 at a conference side event in Copenhagen’s Bella Centre to make that case.

The panelists also called for a climate change agreement that includes a stronger acknowledgement of human rights and more protections for basic human rights, such as the right to freedom, equality, and adequate living conditions.

The new climate deal, to be hammered out between now and Dec. 18, should focus on people, because climate change is more than the environment and protecting “furry animals,” said activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier of Iqaluit.

“Not everyone relates to science, but you can relate to the human rights,” Watt-Cloutier said.

While serving as president of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, Watt-Cloutier promoted the link between climate change and human rights — what she calls the “human face” of climate change.

Watt-Cloutier filed a petition with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights the United States in 2005, saying the U.S. had violated the human rights of Inuit with its climate-warming activities.

The petition said climate change threatens the rights of Inuit to use and enjoy their traditional lands and personal property, their rights to health and life, to residence and movement and to their livelihood.

In the beginning, human rights were shoved to the backburner in the climate change debate in the Seychelles, admitted Ronny Juneau, the Seychelles ambassador to United Nations, who participated in the panel discussion with Watt-Cloutier.

The Pacific Ocean nation of 115 islands has been lobbying for higher cuts to greenhouse gas emissions to fend off rising sea levels.

But it’s become more clear that if “you melt, we sink” due to climate change — and now the human impact of climate change, and the need for more solidarity has become apparent, Jumeau said.

An urgent question for the Seychelles is what will happen to its citizens when they must abandon their homeland, become stateless and are “environmentally displaced.”

At least 60 per cent of the Seychelles’ islands would be threatened by any sea level rise.

Both its port and airport are built on reclaimed land, which would be severely impacted by a rise in sea level. Most of its coral islands would disappear under water, and thousands of people would have to leave their homes.

The climate change agreement must account for this kind of climate crisis, Jumeau said.

The panelists want the agreement to offer more money for mitigation and adaptation assistance to help those affected by climate change to deal with its impacts.

They also want the agreement to recognize areas dependent on ice and snow as being vulnerable to climate change, similarly to the low-lying countries, arid areas and developing countries with fragile mountainous systems, which are already mentioned.

The panelists asked everyone in the audience to lobby a delegate at the conference so that the final text of the agreement contains more and stronger human rights protections.

The panelists on the human rights aspect of climate change gained two new supporters, Ashley Tufts of Iqaluit and Janice Grey of Aupaluk.

The two students, who are part of Canada’s youth delegation at the conference, say the linkages between human rights and climate change were brought home by the image that “while our world is melting, they are drowning.”

Called the First Nations Certainty of Land Title Act, the bill would harmonize provincial property regulations on federally administrated reserve lands where a first nation wants to develop a specific project.

It applies to federally administered reserve land across the country, but would have an immediate impact for the Squamish, who are working on a proposal to build three or four highrise, leasehold residential towers adjacent to the Park Royal mall.

“This is an important first step to allow us to use our land to the highest and best use to support ourselves,” Squamish Chief Gibby Jacob said.

Chuck Strahl, the federal legislation is designed to help make on-reserve developments equally as valuable as off-reserve development and unlock economic opportunities for urban first nation communities.

“On-reserve commercial real estate has the potential to generate significant revenue for some first nations,” Strahl said in unveiling the legislation in Ottawa, “but such projects have been hampered by differences in property rights on and off reserve.”

For the Squamish, Chief Bill Williams said the legislation “is a very big development.”

“The opportunity that exists before the Squamish now, once the legislation is passed, will be very fundamental for creating wealth,” Williams added, including employment for band members as well as other economic opportunities.

A presentation delivered by the Squamish in support of the legislation estimated the initial residential development could draw $472 million in investment to the community and more than 6,000 jobs.

However, Williams said, after consultation with band members, Phase 2 could see development on another 140 acres of reserve land over the next 20 years with potential for $7 billion in investment and more than 15,000 jobs.

Premier Gordon Campbell, on Thursday, voiced his support for the federal legislation, though the Squamish are looking for the province to take additional steps to make the legislation workable.

“There are always going to be negotiations back and forth, but we want to see first nations and non- first nations work together,” Campbell said in a media scrum, and the federal legislation is one tool to accomplish that goal.

“I think the way to close economic gaps, education gaps and social gaps is to form these partnerships.”

Campbell spoke on the issue following his own announcement Thursday on an agreement to conduct shared decision making for land use on the north coast of the province.

However, Jacob added that the Squamish still need provincial cooperation on using the provincial land-title system, strata-property regulations that don’t apply on reserve land.

The Squamish also want the ability to levy property transfer taxes on the subject projects on reserve lands to raise the money the first nation would need to administer the new responsibilities.

“The Indian Act was never designed to support residential development,” Jason Calla, a Squamish band member and consultant to the first nation said in an interview.

“We just want to make so that if you’re going to buy these places, [you] get the same rights as people at West Royal Towers. That’s the general idea.”

“[The Squamish want] to give investors the same comfort, the same transaction procedures, the same certainty you get from the [provincial land registry].”

George Abbott, the provincial Minister of Aboriginal Relations and Reconciliation, said the province has had “extensive discussions” with Strahl and his staff about whether or not the province can support extending those items to reserve land, “and I believe that we can.”

The legislation, Abbott added, “provides another route for first nations to realize some economic development on their land, and we think that’s hugely important.”

West Vancouver Mayor, Pamela Goldsmith Jones, echoed the provincial politicians’ support of the legislation, which “enables [the Squamish] to become significant contributors to our regional economy.”

“I think it’s an important step forward for all first nations in the country really, because it allows them to get out from under the Indian Act,” Goldsmith Jones added.

The legislation will not require that the Squamish follow zoning rules of the adjacent municipality, but Goldsmith Jones said she is confident all North Shore municipalities will be able to work with the first nation to make sure development is complimentary.

“On the North Shore, things will be very different over this next several decades,” she said.

The Squamish community’s planning documents talk of “harmonizing the Squamish developments with neighbouring municipalities.”

Williams added that the Squamish do plan to work as “good neighbours” with the municipalities.

The Coastal Reconciliation Protocol features $25 million in federal-provincial funding for a new ferry terminal at Klemtu, shared decision-making on resource and land use, allocation of carbon-offset revenue from forests on First Nations’ traditional territory and revenue-sharing of commercial recreation permits.

Premier Gordon Campbell signed the protocol Thursday with leaders of the Gitga’at First Nation, Haisla Nation, Heiltsuk Nation, Kitasoo band, Metlakatla First Nation and Wuikinuxw Nation.

It’s the latest such deal between the province and an aboriginal group as two decades of treaty negotiations move at a glacial pace with dozens of First Nations.

Opposition last summer also derailed the province’s proposed Recognition and Reconciliation Act, aimed at forging what Campbell deems a new relationship with First Nations.

The premier told a room full of aboriginal leaders Thursday this protocol “will ensure lasting and comprehensive reconciliation with the coast First Nations by giving those First Nations a direct say in the decisions that impact their people.

Percy Starr, the Kitasoo’s longtime band manager, said the new ferry terminal will restore Klemtu’s regular transportation link to the rest of the province, enabling it to expand its aquaculture industry.

“The relationship that I’d like to see us develop is starting to take shape,” he said.

Campbell said the protocol ensures coastal First Nations’ inclusion in the new carbon economy, with opportunity “that drives social improvement in the lives of First Nations.”

Art Sterritt, executive director of Coastal First Nations, praised the agreement, which he said was achieved after a decade of effort to establish a new economic base on what coastal residents call the Great Bear Rainforest.

He credited the pragmatism of federal and provincial ministers and the work of a new generation of aboriginal leaders who refused to be handcuffed by legislation governing First Nations’ relationship with government.

“It takes a tremendous amount of courage in the legal framework that we’re operating in to move forward and sign off agreements,” Sterritt said.

Although dozens of First Nations have become involved in treaty talks with the provincial and federal governments since the early 1990s, only one treaty – with the Tswwassen First Nation south of Vancouver – is in effect, while another final agreement has been ratified.

Instead, the B.C. government has signed specific land use and economic deals with several First Nations.

The province has also had to regroup after aboriginal leaders withdrew support for the Recognition and Reconciliation Act, saying it didn’t go far enough in acknowledging aboriginal rights and title.

Speaking to reporters, Campbell said governments don’t have a “shining” history of responsible relationships with First Nations.

“I think the fact of the matter is you build trust one step at a time and you build trust where you have First Nations and communities that are willing to take that step,” he said.

“What we’ve done is we’ve said where there’s a willing partner we want to find the ways where we can get through.”

Sterritt said in an interview the real reconciliation that has to take place is between Crown and aboriginal title.

“This government sees the necessity of kind of reconciling those, making sure those two titles are able to co-exist and bring benefits to British Columbia at the same time,” he said. “They got it right.”

Sterritt, a former member of the B.C. Treaty Commission, said he spent 10 fruitless years at the table where government negotiators had no mandate to make agreements and First Nations were skeptical of signing something where they didn’t know the long-term implications.

That’s not the case with the type of deals announced Thursday, he said.

“What our people look at this as, is a way to incrementally build up that you may put a ribbon around at the end of the day and call it a treaty, if it works.”

“One is headed toward the abyss,” Nenadich said during Saturday’s introduction to the XI Native Gathering of the Americas, held at the Carbondale Recreation and Community Center. “It is going full speed and has no driver.

“The other is headed toward the salvation of humanity,” he said. “It is moving more slowly, and stopping all the time. It is the train of forgiveness, of humbleness and of understanding. The driver of that train is the indigenous people.”

Most of society is on the wrong train, he said.

But with more gatherings like the one he has helped organize for the past 11 years may come greater unity of indigenous people. In time, perhaps that will lead to broader understanding, and maybe more people will change trains, he said.

Nenadich started the Centro de Estudios Indigenas de las Americas, which began convening the gatherings each year.

He related his story of how he once was very ill, and as part of his healing process in the mid-1990s said he heard a calling to help unify indigenous people up and down the American continents.

The three-day gathering, which was cut short Sunday evening due to the snowstorm, brought close to 100 people to Carbondale from as far north as Alaska and as far south as Argentina and Chile.

Among those representing “Turtle Island,” a Native reference to the lower 48 contiguous states of the United States, were several western nations, including Ute, Cherokee, Arapaho and Navajo.

Attendees took part in blessing and healing ceremonies at the Carbondale Nature Park, as well as the nearby Sustainable Settings Ranch. They also met for discussions at the community center related to economic development, exercising of sovereignty among Native American nations, cultural integrity and human dignity, and concerns related to ecosystem destruction.

A major thrust of the conference was the founding of the new International Foundation for the Advancement of Indigenous People, for which several fundraisers were held over the weekend as well.

The community was treated to an opening concert of world music Friday night, and Native American dancing, singing and drumming at a special Cultural Evening held Saturday.

“It was through the good will of so many people who worked together to make this happen,” Nenadich said.

The weekend gathering, which followed meeting of tribal leaders in Fort Collins late last week, was originally to have been in Denver until plans fell through in early November.

Nenadich was put in touch with several people in the Roaring Fork Valley, including Rita Marsh, who runs the Davi Nikent organization in Carbondale, and valley resident Sue Gray.

“The response from the community has been awesome, and it shows you can put on an international event in three weeks,” Marsh said. “And, to have it here in the heartland of Ute country proved to be deeply meaningful.”

Ute elder Clifford Duncan said the high Rockies were a favorite place for the Ute people, until they were removed to the reservations 128 years ago following the Meeker Massacre.

“There are many sacred sites here that are still being used — connecting points of our ceremonies,” he said. “There is a connection to the land here in a spiritual way.”

Gray said she feels a connection to indigenous cultures, even though she is not indigenous herself.

“I felt called by the heart to the healing and love for humanity, and love for the earth that Ramon and his organization represents,” she said.

The week’s activities conclude with another fundraiser for the newly formed foundation, an Evening of Music at Steve’s Guitars in Carbondale tonight beginning at 7:30 p.m. Donations will be accepted.