Daniel Myre, vice-president of the St. Hubert Soccer Association, on Montreal’s South Shore, said he met with players from the under-13 team and their parents Thursday night, and they denied making any racial comments. But he intends to investigate the accusations further, he said.

“What we’re going to do is contact the tournament organizer, and I want to speak to the referee that was there,” Myre said.

Gregory Brass, whose daughter plays soccer for the Kahnawake team, said he noticed she was angry after the game against St. Hubert.

“She was really, really angry. When I asked her why she was angry, she said they were making featherhead gestures and calling us sauvages,” Brass said.

Other players and parents of the Kahnawake team said girls from the St. Hubert side, as well as their parents, made racist comments during the game, which took place in Chateauguay.

Brass said he would like to see the parents own up if they did make the comments.

Harry Sharphead has been chief of the Enoch Cree, whose reserve is just west of Edmonton, for eight months. Two months into his term, he and the band councillors — who earn roughly the same — cut their salaries.

They were over $300,000 and were reduced to $250,000 and then to $180,000, Sharphead said.

“The group of council today, we’re working on looking at our budgets and we’re even willing to go down further.”

The salaries were raised during the economic boom, and have been reduced in response to the recession and the Enoch nation’s $8-million deficit, he said.

The salaries came to light because of a document delivered to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, said Colin Craig, Prairie director for the CTF.

“The first sentence in this document is that the person is writing to us out of pure frustration,” Craig said. “That’s something that we hear from people across the country far too often. People on reserves are trying to get information, but they’re being denied.”

Salaries for the chief and the nine council members were shared with people on the reserve at band meetings, said Sharphead.

“Currently the nation is trying to set up a website for our off-reserve nations too where they have full access to everything. I don’t believe in hiding stuff,” he said.

Sharphead defended the remuneration because of the risk associated with a two-year term.

“If we don’t get re-elected in our second term, we have nothing,” he said. “We have to come back to the nation for a job. Hopefully we get one. So, this salary kind of helps with that. So you can save.”

The average salary for elected chiefs across Canada averaged $60,000 for 2008-09, according to a spokesperson for Indian and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC). They ranged from a low of no pay to a high of $250,000.

For councillors, the average salary for 2008-09 was $30,000, ranging from no compensation to $216,000.

The department can only release salary information to band members, for legal reasons, the spokesperson said. Bands are required to provide that information, but INAC will get involved if a band member can’t get the information from their council.

The taxpayers federation is calling on the federal government to put salary information for all chiefs and councils across the country on its website.

Hundreds of peaceful protesters made their way to the legislature carrying paper fish on sticks and 1,000 metres of blue fabric to symbolize a” wild river.”

“We’re demanding justice and action on this issue,” Grassy Narrows Chief Simon Fobister said.

Residents suffering the effects of mercury in the water have not been adequately compensated, Fobister said, although their problems in some cases are worse than when the contamination of a local river was recognized more than 30 years ago.

The environmental group Earthroots released a study Tuesday supporting the reserve’s argument that mercury problems persist.

A Dryden, Ont., paper mill dumped the equivalent of 9,000 kilograms of mercury into the Wabigoon River between 1962 and 1970, causing long-term health problems for more than 100 people in the community, Earthroots said.

Dr. Masazumi Harada, a Japanese mercury expert involved in the Earthroots study, first visited Grassy Narrows in 1975. He found some residents with mercury levels over three times the Health Canada limit.

Harada visited again several years ago and found 43 per cent of the people who had mercury levels above Health Canada guidelines in 1975 had died. Even residents whose mercury levels were within the limits set by Health Canada were still experiencing mercury-related problems, Harada found.

“It is heartbreaking to hear the stories from the community members whose health has been affected by the mercury poisoning,” Angus Toulouse, the Assembly of First Nations Ontario regional chief, said at the Queen’s Park demonstration.

“The people of Grassy Narrows have raised their concerns for 40 years now, only to have these concerns fall on deaf ears.”

“Would members of the Ontario legislature or the House of Commons tolerate a situation where their families’ primary source of water and food was contaminated by a lethal poison? I doubt it very much,” said Patrick Madahbee, the Anishinabek Nation Grand Council Chief.

Premier Dalton McGuinty said he wants to take a good look at the Earthroots study before deciding whether to act.

“We have a report, apparently, which says we have a continuing problem, and this contrasts with the federal government saying that things are under control,” said McGuinty.

Grassy Narrows First Nations Chief Simon Fobister speaks with CBC during the protest at Queens park Wednesday.

A board was set up in 1985 as part of an out-of-court settlement Grassy Narrows and another community affected by mercury contamination — Wabaseemoong Independent Nations (formerly known as Islington and Whitedog) — reached with the federal and provincial governments and the paper mill.

The Mercury Disability Board administers compensation from a special fund to people whose health was affected by mercury.

Problems persist

Under the 1985 compensation deal, those with mercury poisoning recognized by the board received $250 to $800 a month.

The protesters, however, demanded that governments acknowledge that mercury poisoning is still a problem. They want the federal government to re-examine and tighten guidelines covering cumulative exposure to low levels of mercury.

They also want the government to permanently monitor mercury levels through an environmental centre in the community.

Ottawa stopped monitoring mercury levels in the area in 1999, claiming that the levels of mercury in the Wabigoon River are below federal guidelines.

Mercury has caused more than health problems for Grassy River. Fishing was banned from the river in 1970 after the river was contaminated. This caused an immediate jump in local unemployment — to 80 per cent — a level that has persisted ever since.

“[We want] our issues to be dealt with seriously by the medical establishment in Canada and in Ontario,” Fobister said.

The long-term health effects of mercury poisoning include tunnel vision, loss of co-ordination, numbness, tremors, loss of balance and speech impediments.

Without government support, it will take 63 years for the income gap between First Nations, Métis and Inuit and their non-aboriginal counterparts to disappear, says the non-partisan research institute Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, which did the study.

The findings are based on the median incomes of aboriginal people found in census data going back to 1996.

In 1996, the median income of aboriginal Canadians was $12,003 — $9,428 lower than the median income of other Canadians. Five years later, the median aboriginal income had grown to $16,036, but was still $9,045 behind that of other Canadians.

By 2006, the gap had narrowed to $8,135, when the median income of aboriginal Canadians was $18,962.

Reason for hope

Aboriginal people tend to make less regardless of sex, location or education level with one major exception, the study found: the 14 per cent of aboriginal women with at least an undergraduate degree tend to earn $2,471 more than non-aboriginal women with the same education level.

The report calls this discrepancy “a phenomenon,” but one that gives “reason for hope,” said Dan Wilson, who co-wrote the report.

The report acknowledges “that educational attainment among aboriginal people lags well behind averages for the Canadian population as a whole” and that non-aboriginal Canadians “are still far more likely to complete high school and to get a university degree” than aboriginal Canadians.

In 2006, eight per cent of aboriginal men and 14 per cent of aboriginal women had earned a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 25 per cent of non-aboriginal men and 28 per cent of non-aboriginal women.

“But you shouldn’t need to simply be a BA holder or a master’s holder before you can get comparable income,” Wilson said.

“While education is a driver for income levels in all groups, aboriginal and non-aboriginal, no community is made up entirely of university degree-holders, nor should they be expected to be.”

Instead, “there must be jobs available across sectors, pay levels must be roughly equivalent and workforce entrants must be greeted without bias and suspicion,” the report said.

The Conservatives are “already engaging in a new approach to providing support for First Nations and Inuit post-secondary experience,” according to Margot Geduld, a spokeswoman for the Ministry of Indian and Northern Affairs.

In 2008-2009, the government spent $300 million on post-secondary education for an estimated 22,000 First Nations students, Geduld said, with further funding set aside in the 2010 budget.

But the report suggests that’s not enough.

To erase the gap, the government should abandon its “traditional colonial style” of imposing “ideas that worked for the dominant culture,” the report said, in favour of allowing communities to develop their own educational and training strategies.

It will also require a major shift away from what the report calls “the colonial administration of aboriginal communities” by the Canadian government.

Geduld said the ministry is reviewing the report.

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.