LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment

Wednesday, June 12, 2019

BREAKING NEWS ON 125 YEAR OLD LAND CLAIM IN ALBERTA

Blood Tribe wins massive land claim battle in Federal Court | CBC News

Encouragingly, while governments have always dealt cynically with Indigenous people in Canada and the courts at one time were just as bad, jurisprudence on Indigenous people has been improving since the Calder case in 1973. By the late 1990s, one of the important victories that Indigenous people had won in the courts is that their understandings of various deals with colonial governments, as preserved in their oral history, became admissible in the courts. The long history of lies on the part of negotiators for the federal government about what would be included in the treaties that were signed with First Nations leaders who were illiterate and had to depend on what negotiators told them was gradually documented.

Euro-Canadian scholars were once part of the problem. They only believed written documents and regarded only European sources as credible. They were the products of ethnocentric schools of thought. As scholarly work moved more in the direction of giving voice to all sides, it became clear that the negotiation of the treaties had been something of a con job. Closer investigations of government sources revealed that much of the cynicism in the negotiatons--tell them what they want to hear so that we can grab their land in documents that we will say are the "legal agreements" and ignore what we have actually promised--is evident in materials from both the government and Indigenous side.

Scholars increasingly became witnesses for Indigenous peoples, able to provide "European" source material that reaffirmed the oral histories told by Indigenous elders. Thanks to my friends, Sarah Carter of the University of Alberta History Department and Faculty of Native Studies, and Walter Hildebrandt, formerly of Athabasca University Press, University of Calgary Press, and Parks Canada, for their contributions to this work. Kudos to the elders of the Blood First Nation for telling their stories and to the whole Blood Nation for fighting a wrong that had been done to them 125 years ago.

Southern Alberta's Blood Tribe, the country's largest reserve, has won part of its 40-year land claim battle against the federal government.

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“Philadelphia’s first openly gay deputy sheriff apparently died by suicide just before the city’s annual Pride parade and festival, authorities said.”

Studies have shown that decisions about suicide are often fleeting and impulsive. Because guns are the most lethal means of suicide these impulsive fleeting decisions end up leading to death more often with access to guns. Studies have shown that about 80% of people who attempt to kill themselves do not attempt again. Most gun deaths are suicides. Better laws and less access reduces gun suicides.

Opinion | I gave the University of Alabama $26.5 million. They gave it back when I spoke out about abortion.

I am proud to have been born and raised in Alabama. My family’s roots run deep in the state and, for decades, we have been honored to celebrate that heritage by supporting the University of Alabama. It’s where my father learned to practice law, which gave him the tools to succeed in America along with a strong understanding of right and wrong. Over the past 30 years, we have chosen to repay that debt and make use of our good fortune by supporting the university financially. I’ve long believed that the school served the public good by training the next generation of leaders and, last year, I made the decision to donate $26.5 million so that those leaders could flourish just as my family has.

My love for Alabama is exactly why I was so horrified to watch its lawmakers trample over the Constitution last month. The ban on abortion they passed wasn’t just an attack against women, it was an affront to the rule of law itself. Part of being an American is engaging in public debate, and we can disagree over this issue. But the courts settled this matter a long time ago: Abortion is legal. So it was shocking to see legislators ignore this and pass a bill that turned women and health professionals into criminals, and it felt important to say so publicly.

I expected that speaking out would have consequences, but I never could have imagined the response from the University of Alabama, which on Friday said it would be returning my gift and removing my name from the law school. This decision will hurt future students. Less money will be available for scholarships, and there will be fewer resources for the school to use to educate young minds and help them grow....

WASHINGTONPOST.COM

Opinion | Canada grapples with a charge of ‘genocide.’ For indigenous people, there’s no debate.

The report is more than 1,200 pages long, with over 200 recommendations on how to prevent this tragedy from continuing. They range from asking that Canada create anti-racism and anti-sexism action plans and guaranteeing an annual income for all Canadians and indigenous people, to closing the sizable funding gaps between indigenous and non-indigenous services.

Of course, none of these recommendations are on the minds of the many Canadian pundits, journalists and editors who are opining on the report. Instead, they are focusing on rebutting the claim that murdered and missing women and girls are the result of an ongoing genocide against indigenous people in Canada, despite the commission’s inclusion of a 46-page supplementary report that lays out in detail how commission members reached their conclusion.

To see some of the arguments, one would wonder if they’ve read the report at all.