Original Peoples

A few days ago, some of my colleagues were discussing the findings of the so-called Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) — the Canadian-government established panel charged with a predetermined outcome: reconciliation, presumably under the status quo. After all, it was not called a Truth and Restorative Justice Commission.
I called the proceedings a whitewash because how could one conclude otherwise when the genocide is ongoing? ((See, for example, Kim Petersen, “

Whenever the winners of a war write its official history and pronounce absolution on themselves, the results are both tragic, and comic. Canada demonstrated that in spades this past week when the government-run Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) released its “official” report on the homegrown church-and-state slaughter of thousands of native children in the so-called “Indian residential school” system.

About an hour south of Mexico City, nestled in an extraordinary range of mountains called the Sierra del Tepozteco, whose fantastical rock formations studded with forest resemble those in ancient Chinese painted scrolls, an experiment in alternative living has been unfolding for more than 30 years now. The self-described “ecovillage” of Huehuecoyotl, where a group of itinerant artists from Mexico and elsewhere came to rest after traveling the world together for fifteen years, has become a kind of seedbed for visionary and transformative projects, particularly ecological ones.

Here in the US, we have been led to believe that we are an exceptional people and the indispensable nation. During our lifetime we have been exposed to lots of myths about the US, particularly about how we are always on the side of good. Below are insider comments challenging this key myth.

It was eighteen years ago this month that I first handed to a Vancouver Sun newspaper editor a list of possible mass grave sites of Indian residential school children on Canada’s west coast, based on government documents and statements from eyewitnesses who buried children there. I and these witnesses were flatly ignored: not only then, but every other time over the subsequent years that we presented such evidence to the same newspaper.

The BC Liberal government and LNG industry suffered a blow this week with a final losing vote amongst Lax Kw’alaams Band members over a billion-dollar package offered to support Petronas’ Pacific NorthWest LNG plant near Prince Rupert.
Lelu Island and Flora Bank (fore) – site of contentious proposed LNG plant(Skeena Watershed Conservation)

In the early morning of March 23, Native Hawaiian cultural practitioner Lanakila Mangauil heard that construction of the world’s largest optical telescope had begun atop the Hawaiian sacred mountain Mauna Kea. He immediately spread the word to the community, who had been keeping vigilant watch, and ran up the summit to stop the desecration of this wahi pana, a place of cultural significance and practice. Others followed Lanakila’s lead, however, nobody expected that this would spark a global movement to protect one of our planet’s sacred sites.

After a century of denial, the government of Turkey has finally expressed solidarity with what it calls “the Armenian tragedy” of 1915.  “It was a traumatic experience,” acknowledged Turkish spokesperson E. Bulent Sbendokter.  “There’s hardly a family without loss.  We Turks want Armenians to know that we feel their pain.”  I persuaded him to give me an interview.
Barb Weir: Why do you call the death of so many people a tragedy and not a genocide, Mr. Sbendokter?

As spring comes to the BC coast, young wild salmon are leaving the rivers where they were born and entering the ocean.  Our pink and chum salmon take an exceptional gamble – they don’t spend a year in fresh water, they leave their rivers right away, tiny slips of silver weighing less that 1/2 a gram.  These two species salmon are a gift to our rivers.  Adult pink and chum salmon deposit tons of nutrients in the rivers when they spawn and die, but their babies don’t feed on the insect life that this abundance of nutrients produces, they leave this food for the coho, chinook, sockeye, steelhe

Indigenous women are five times more likely to be murdered, and most attacks are from outside their communities, says Audrey Huntley of the No More Silence campaign in Canada.