Media.Knet.Ca

AFN press release ...

Negotiation or Confrontation: It's Canada's Choice - Senate Committee on Aboriginal Peoples report on Specific Claims acknowledged by National Chief

     OTTAWA, Feb. 7 /CNW Telbec/ - Today, Assembly of First Nations (AFN) National Chief Phil Fontaine commented on the work of the Senate committee on Aboriginal Peoples on the release of its federal specific claims report, Negotiation or Confrontation: It's Canada's Choice.

     The report of the special study, released in December 2006, echoes the AFN's recommendations presented to the Senate Committee on November 8th, 2006 to expedite the settlement of specific claims by establishing an independent claims body to be developed and implemented in partnership with First Nations within two years, and affirming the need for increased funding for the preparation, negotiation and settlement of outstanding specific land claims.

     "In order for First Nations to move from poverty to prosperity, Canada must settle its outstanding lawful obligations owed to First Nations," stated the National Chief. "The report, released by the Senate, encourages the development of a more efficient, speedier process for resolving the approximately 900 outstanding specific claims that represent a debt on Canada's books."

     The Senate Committee report acknowledges that improving the claims resolution system to enable quick, efficient and fair settlement of specific claims is a moral, economic, political and legal imperative for Canada. Within the existing process, it would take 200 years to settle all existing specific land claims.

     "I'm pleased that Minister Prentice has indicated that he looks to the Senate report for its recommendations on how to improve the process. We support him and we look forward to discussing with him the report and its recommendations to determine how we can jointly work towards creating a positive shift that will help turn the corner on First Nations land claim issues," stated National Chief Fontaine.

     The Assembly of First Nations is the national organization representing First Nations citizens in Canada.

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/For further information: Bryan Henry, AFN A/Communications Director, (613) 241-6789 ext. 229, cell (613) 293-6106, bhendry@afn.ca; Nancy Pine, Communications Advisor, Office of the National Chief, (613) 241-6789 ext. 243, cell (613) 298-6382, npine@afn.ca/

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From the Globe and Mail ...

$250-million a year is needed for native land claims, report says
More violence is probable if disputes remain unsettled, Senate study concludes - BILL CURRY - From Wednesday's Globe and Mail

OTTAWA — A major Senate report is warning of more Caledonia-style blockades and violent confrontations between natives and non-natives unless Ottawa starts setting aside $250-million a year to settle land-claim disputes.

After hearing from a wide range of native leaders and academics over the past year, the senators concluded in yesterday's report that a plan to settle these claims is a proven way to better the lives of Canada's natives. Resolving land disputes, they argue, allows native communities to benefit from economic activities such as housing developments and natural-resources projects.

"In every case where they have been settled, it has meant an immediate improvement in the lives of First Nations people," the report states.

Indian Affairs Minister Jim Prentice, who spent most of his pre-political career working on land claims, has pledged to reform the way Ottawa deals with land claims but has yet to announce his new approach. A spokeswoman said the minister will go over the details of the report before responding.

The Senate committee is chaired by Conservative Senator Gerry St. Germain, a Métis with a strong interest in aboriginal policy.

In an interview, Mr. St. Germain said federal leaders need to treat their legal liabilities in the same way a business would, setting aside enough money each year so that the debt can be paid off.

He said most of the natives' claims against the government are clear cases of Ottawa allowing development, such as roads or rail lines, on native land without compensation. "It's fraud, theft and mismanagement," he said.

Although the senators found positive results where deals have been reached, the nearly 300 resolved claims are a fraction of the almost 900 that are currently backlogged.

The report found that long delays -- and Ottawa's conflict of interest in acting as both defendant and judge -- means it will be at least 90 years before that backlog is cleared.

To speed up the pace, the senators recommend at least $250-million be set aside each year to settle these disputes. They also call on Ottawa to create a claims commission to rule on these matters independent of the federal government.

Hard numbers are difficult to find, but Mr. St. Germain estimated that settling all specific claims would cost between $3-billion and $6-billion. Even at $250-million a year, it would still take between 12 and 24 years to clear the backlog.

Mr. St. Germain said the threat that further confrontations like Caledonia -- the Southwestern Ontario town where Six Nations protesters have occupied disputed land for nearly a year -- will spread across the country inspired him to dig into the issue.

"I can see problems just lying there waiting to happen and I think we have a responsibility as members of Parliament to make certain that if something is imminent, that we deal with it in a responsible manner," he said. "[Addressing claims] is something that I think really, really hits right at the very core of what we have to do right off the top to deal with our aboriginal peoples."

The Conservative government had promised an independent body for such claims during the campaign but has yet to act on the file.

As Canada was settled by Europeans, a wide range of promises were made to native communities in the form of treaties and other land arrangements. But natives who felt those promises were ignored, either by neglect or outright fraud, were legally prevented from hiring lawyers to defend themselves until the 1950s.

Since then, hundreds of claims have been filed against the federal government. Known as "specific claims," they deal with violations of deals that already exist. Talks toward new treaties or land claims are called "comprehensive claims." The report found that Indian Affairs estimates its liability for all claims to be at least $15-billion, a figure that the senators said will continue to rise unless action starts soon.

In an interview in December, Mr. Prentice said self-government and settling land claims hold the most promise for addressing native poverty in Canada.

"My view of where we need to go in this country is we have to resolve treaties, we have to resolve the self-government issues and there has to be a gradual replacement of the Indian Act," he said. "I'm pretty passionate about this because I think it is the way forward."

On behalf of the Kenora Law Association, I would like to share the link to our web site to ensure that this online resource is known to residents of Nishnawbe Aski Nation.

Given the increased use of the internet by residents of northern communities, the Kenora Law Association would like to ensure our web address is made known to Aboriginal Organizations  in Nishnawbe Aski Nation territory.

The site can be found at:

http://www.kenoralawassociation.ca/

The site contains full information on all lawyers in the Kenora District, including e-mail addresses.

From http://www.cbc.ca/canada/north/story/2007/02/06/fontaine-speech.html

Living conditions for First Nations 'unacceptable': Fontaine
February 6, 2007 - CBC News

First Nations people in Canada live in "Third World" conditions, with a lack of access to clean water and decent housing, the national chief of the Assembly of First Nations said Tuesday.

"We rank no better than a Third World country, and that is simply unacceptable. There is no good reason why our people should be as poor as they are," Phil Fontaine said in Toronto.

In a keynote address at an assembly National Housing and Water Policy Forum, Fontaine said there is no question that the federal government must spend more money to address the serious problems in First Nations communities. 

Fontaine said problems include unsafe drinking water, crowded homes, high unemployment, high suicide rates, limited access to quality health care, and thousands of children being looked after by provincial child-welfare authorities.

There are boil water advisories on more than 100 reserves, with about 35 communities in crisis over lack of access to clean drinking water. As well, on average, there are more than four people in every First Nations home, Fontaine said.

"When we start talking about the many crisis situations that exist in our communities, the response is usually: more money is not the answer," he said. "We all know more money is needed."

Fontaine said the government has made millions available to upgrade military equipment for the Armed Forces and to correct a perceived fiscal imbalance among some provinces.

If the federal government wants to make money the answer to problems, it clearly can, he said.

"The health of our people relies on clean water, clean air and healthy homes," he said.

Fontaine acknowledged, however, that First Nations people must help to find the solutions to existing problems by working with government officials and business leaders.

"It is all up to us. We must do it. We must create the solutions ourselves. Our community must decide on our future. We must work together to fix the system that has produced the results that we are living today," he said.

"We want to be real contributors to Canada's prosperity. We never ever wanted to be dependent on someone else. Any suggestion that we are happy with our current situation is so completely wrong."

Despair leads to suicide
John Beaucage, grand council chief of the Anishinabek Nation, which includes 42 First Nations communities in northern Ontario, told CBC News on Tuesday that the poverty leaves young people on reserves with a sense of despair.

"This despair is resulting from poor housing, where there may be four or five families living in one house that has three bedrooms and they take turns sleeping on the beds at night," he said.

"It's a situation where they are unsure of their drinking water supply and that drinking water could have E. coli or other kinds of bacteria. I think probably the most disturbing thing is this despair often leads these young people even to contemplate suicide.

"The suicide rates in northern communities are astronomical. They are crisis in proportion," Beaucage said.

Fontaine told reporters after his speech that the northern Ontario community of Kashechewan, which was evacuated in 2005 because of contaminated drinking water, is one community where suicide is a huge problem.

According to media reports, as many as 21 people between the ages of nine and 23 tried to commit suicide last month. Fontaine said "urgent action" is needed in the community.

Beaucage said the three-day forum in Toronto will give First Nations leaders a chance to pool ideas on how to improve housing and bring clean water to their communities.

"We want to target the communities at greatest risk," he said.

Beaucage said the government has a role to play in solving the problems of First Nations but it must respect their right to govern themselves.

"We are just moving into a position where we are able to do the work ourselves and we are saying to the federal government, stand out of the way, let us do it."

Human rights complaint
Fontaine said Monday the assembly is planning to file a human rights complaint against the federal government because, the assembly alleges, Ottawa is underfunding aboriginal child-welfare services.

One in 10 aboriginal children is in foster care, compared with one in 200 non-aboriginal children. According to the assembly, child welfare agencies for First Nations receive 22 per cent less money than those that deal with non-aboriginal children.

After the Harper government took office last year, it scrapped a $5.1-billion aboriginal spending plan worked out by the previous Liberal government at a first ministers meeting in Kelowna, B.C.

Known as the Kelowna accord, it promised to improve the social and economic conditions of aboriginal people.

Fontaine said the government needs to look at how much it spends on First Nations every fiscal year because aboriginal people are the fastest growing segment of the Canadian population.

"It's a complete misrepresentation to argue that First Nations have too much money, or enough money," Fontaine said. "We all know the opposite to be true."

The assembly describes itself as the national representative organization of the First Nations in Canada. Canada has more than 630 First Nations communities and about 756,700 First Nations people.

Ontario government press release ...

Ontario Invests In Aboriginal Community Development - Feasibility Studies Pave Way For Community And Small Business Centres In Aboriginal Communities

TORONTO – The McGuinty government is helping 14 Aboriginal communities prepare for the future by investing in feasibility studies for community and small business centres, Minister Responsible for Aboriginal Affairs David Ramsay announced today. The investments highlight the government’s commitment to strengthening Aboriginal communities.

“So far this fiscal year, more than $570,000 has been made available through the Aboriginal Community Capital Grants Program to help 14 First Nations and Aboriginal organizations determine the viability of running or expanding community or small business centres,” said Ramsay. “These studies are the first step towards improving service delivery and creating economic development opportunities within Aboriginal communities, many of which are remote First Nations in northern Ontario.”

Community centres facilitate the provision of essential services and activities for community members. Small business centres support entrepreneurial activities and early-stage growth of small businesses by providing rental space, shared services and business counselling assistance.

In addition to funding feasibility studies, the program provides grants for the construction, expansion or renovation of these facilities. Improvements to the ACCGP during this fiscal year have increased the government’s possible contribution for total eligible project costs from 75 to 90 per cent.

“This government made a commitment through the New Approach to Aboriginal Affairs to create strong and prosperous Aboriginal communities,” said Ramsay. “These feasibility studies are intended to help fulfil that commitment.”

Further information on the program may be obtained by contacting Tim Sim, at 416-314-7217 or by visiting the Ontario Secretariat for Aboriginal Affairs website at http://www.aboriginalaffairs.osaa.gov.on.ca/english/economy/grants.htm

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Aboriginal Community Capital Grants Program

This program invests in the development of facilities that provide Aboriginal community services and encourage business activity.These facilities foster healthy lifestyles and skills development, especially among Aboriginal children and youth.

Eligible Applicants

First Nations, Aboriginal non-profit incorporated groups and Métis Nation of Ontario (MNO) Charter Communities sponsored by that Secretariat.

Eligible Projects

Projects involving construction, acquisition, renovation and expansion of community, friendship and small business centres, and feasibility studies leading to the development of each, are all eligible.

An eligible applicant community can obtain one-time infrastructure funds for each of:

• Community / friendship centre
• Small business centre

to a maximum of $500,000 (not to exceed 90 per cent of the total eligible project costs).

For remote, fly-in communities, a maximum of $750,000 will be considered on a case-by-case basis (within the 90 per cent maximum cap).

An eligible applicant community can obtain funding for a feasibility study for each type of infrastructure project to a maximum of $50,000 per project (not to exceed 90 per cent of the total eligible project costs).

The program is comprised of two program components.

The Ontario Native Community Infrastructure Projects component helps develop community and friendship centres that contribute to a healthy social base in Aboriginal communities. These facilities provide essential community services and activities.

The Native Small Business Centres component helps develop small business centres that support entrepreneurial activities and provide opportunities for business development in Aboriginal communities. These facilities support early stage growth of small businesses by providing rental space, shared services and business counselling assistance.

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What We’ve Done
Aboriginal Community Capital Grants Program projects approved since October 2003:

• BEARSKIN LAKE FIRST NATION received grant approval for $450,810 in September 2004 for a community centre.
• BIINJITIWAABIK ZAAGING ANISHINAABEK (ROCKY BAY) received grant approval for $33,000 in September 2004 for a small business centre feasibility study.
• FORT ALBANY FIRST NATION received grant approval of $33,750 in December 2003 for a small business centre feasibility study.
• KINGFISHER LAKE FIRST NATION received grant approval of $320,663 in September 2004 for a community centre.
• LAC SEUL FIRST NATION received grant approval of $3,750 in December 2003 for a small business centre feasibility study.
• LONG LAKE #58 FIRST NATION received grant approval of $26,625 in July 2004 for a community centre feasibility study.
• MISSANABIE CREE FIRST NATION received grant approval of $207,900 in August 2004 for a small business centre.
• MOHAWK COUNCIL OF AKWESASNE received grant approval of $300,000 in August 2004 for a community centre.
• NORTH SPIRIT LAKE FIRST NATION received grant approval of $23,250 in September 2004 for a small business centre feasibility study.

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For more information contact:
Tim Sim, Aboriginal Program Advisor
Ontario Secretariat for Aboriginal Affairs
Email: tim.sim@osaa.gov.on.ca
Phone: 416-314-7217

Ontario government press release ...

Ontario Government Approves Early Work for New Sioux Lookout Health Centre - Investing $1.49 Million To Start Work On New Centre Of Excellence

SIOUX LOOKOUT, ON, Feb. 5 - The McGuinty government is investing $1.49 million to proceed with the first stage of construction of the new Sioux Lookout Meno-Ya-Win Health Centre, Michael Gravelle, the MPP for Thunder Bay-Superior North, announced today on behalf of Health and Long-Term Care Minister George Smitherman.

"Our government is working to make sure that communities across Northern Ontario have access to the best health care available. That's why we are investing in the development of the new Sioux Lookout Meno-Ya-Win Health Centre," Gravelle said. "This new facility, which has been designated as a Centre of Excellence, will provide culturally sensitive health care services across Northwestern Ontario."

The McGuinty government is investing $1.49 million toward site clearing, site services and road work as part of this initial work leading to the construction of the new Sioux Lookout Meno-Ya-Win Health Centre expected to commence this fall. The centre has been given approval to tender a contract for this preliminary construction work.

The new health centre will be a 60-bed facility that includes 47 acute care beds, eight complex continuing care beds and five substance abuse withdrawal management beds.

"We're delighted to be moving forward on the new Sioux Lookout Meno-Ya-Win Health Centre," Smitherman said. "This much needed, state-of-the-art hospital will improve access to quality health care for the residents of Sioux Lookout and its northern communities."

The commitment to build a new hospital is based on the Four Party Hospital Services Agreement signed by the Nishnawbe-Aski Nation, the Ontario government, the federal government and the Town of Sioux Lookout.

Other initiatives by the McGuinty government benefiting the health of Ontarians include:

• Increasing operating funding to provincial hospitals to $12.9 billion in 2006/07, growing to $14 billion in 2008/09
• Reducing wait times for five key health care services (hip and knee joint replacement, cataract surgeries, MRI exams, cancer surgeries and cardiac procedures) with a recent investment of $222.5 million
• Increasing medical school enrollment by 23 percent and funding long-term care homes to hire 1100 new nurses.

Today's initiative is part of the McGuinty government's plan for innovation in public health care, building a system that delivers on three priorities - keeping Ontarians healthy, reducing wait times and providing better access to doctors and nurses.

This news release, along with other media materials, such as matte stories and audio clips, on other subjects, are available on our website at: http://www.health.gov.on.ca under the News Media section.

For more information on achievements in health care, visit:
www.resultsontario.gov.on.ca.

For further information: Media Contacts: David Spencer, Minister's Office, (416) 327-4320; A.G. Klei, Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care, (416) 314-6197; Members of the general public, 1-866-532-3161

Representing First Nations across the country, the Assembly of First Nations is preparing to file a human rights complaint against the federal government dealing with the under funding of child welfare support. See the two news articles below ...

From today's Globe and Mail front page ...

Natives to hit Ottawa with rights complaint
CAMPBELL CLARK - Posted on 05/02/07

OTTAWA -- The Assembly of First Nations is preparing a human-rights complaint against the federal government alleging that the systematic underfunding of child-welfare services on reserves has fuelled a crisis that sees 27,000 aboriginal children in foster homes.

AFN National Chief Phil Fontaine will signal that Canada's aboriginal leadership is moving to a more confrontational approach on the issue when he warns in a speech today that his organization is preparing to file the rights complaint.

One in 10 aboriginal children is in foster care, compared to one in 200 non-aboriginal children, and the AFN argues the problem is exacerbated because child-welfare agencies for first nations get 22 per cent less money than those that deal with non-aboriginal children, despite deep poverty in many aboriginal communities.

"Our children need action now. So I am announcing today that we are putting governments on notice that a lack of action should be viewed as putting children at risk," according to the text of Mr. Fontaine's speech, to be delivered to the International Congress on Ethics in Gatineau, Que.

The increasingly confrontational approach to aboriginal child-poverty issues is part of a climate of frustration that exists one year after the Conservatives took power and scrapped former Liberal prime minister Paul Martin's $5-billion Kelowna accord on improving the quality of life in first nations communities.

"We've always believed that it's better to negotiate appropriate arrangements. But when we discover an unresponsive government, as we have in this case, then we have to take action," Mr. Fontaine said yesterday.

The Globe and Mail reported Saturday that the deep child poverty on first nations reserves in Canada is now attracting the attention of international children's charities such as Save the Children, which typically focus their efforts on helping children in areas that have been racked by war or disaster.

Two Save the Children aid workers visited two troubled communities in Ontario, Webequie First Nation and Mishkeegogamang First Nation, to write a report aimed at launching a campaign to pair reserves with non-profit aid agencies -- an initiative born out of frustration at government inaction.

In an interview yesterday, Mr. Fontaine said that first nations leaders have tried to move the federal government through good-faith arguments based on the evidence, but can no longer wait while the crisis grows.

"The underlying problem is the impoverished state of first nations communities. The families are suffering," Mr. Fontaine said.

"We exist with poor housing, poor schools, poor access to quality health care, poor drinking water, and the pressure as a result of this grinding poverty is just overwhelming for too many of our people."

That leads to the despair that causes other problems such as suicide and alcohol addiction, which experts say is a major factor in child neglect, the AFN argues.

And Mr. Fontaine said that because child-services agencies are underfunded, there are not enough social workers to help families they know are at risk -- and the agencies instead spend their resources on taking children away from their parents.

"When you don't have the support, the immediate decision is to remove children, so we end up with the numbers that we have -- and this is 27,000 children in care," Mr. Fontaine said.

The AFN sees the human-rights complaint, already drafted and expected to be filed this month, as the first step in a strategy of legal actions against the federal government, which could be followed by class-action lawsuits on behalf of children and Charter of Rights challenges in the courts.

And although the Canadian Human Rights Commission cannot order the government to spend the extra money, the AFN hopes that a ruling that the underfunding is discriminatory would prod the government to act.

"Such systemic discrimination must end. This situation for children in care must end. I have always said that I would rather negotiate than litigate or demonstrate. But if this is the only way to bring attention and action to the situation, so be it," the text of Mr. Fontaine's speech reads.

Calls to aides to Indian Affairs Minister Jim Prentice were not returned yesterday.

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From CTV News online ...

AFN to launch complaint over child-welfare crisis
Feb. 5 2007 - CTV.ca News Staff

The Assembly of First Nations is set to file a human rights complaint against Ottawa over underfunding of child-welfare services on reserves, according to a newspaper report.

The assembly's national chief, Phil Fontaine, will outline the group's plan in a speech on Monday to the International Congress on Ethics in Gatineau, Que.

The complaint, which has already been drafted, is expected to be launched later this month.

It's the first step in a strategy of legal actions against the federal government, The Globe and Mail reported.

Fontaine will say the federal government has contributed to a crisis that sees some 27,000 aboriginal children in foster homes, the newspaper reported.

One in 10 aboriginal children is living under foster care, while the same is true of one in 200 non-aboriginal children.

The assembly says child-welfare agencies for first nations are struggling to work with 22 per cent less money than those that work with non-aboriginal children.

"Our children need action now. So I am announcing today that we are putting governments on notice that a lack of action should be viewed as putting children at risk," according to the text of Fontaine's speech, to be delivered to the International Congress on Ethics in Gatineau, Que.

The newspaper reported Saturday that child poverty on reserves is attracting the attention of international children's charities such as Save the Children.

Two aid workers from the organization have visited two communities in Ontario -- Webequie First Nation and Mishkeegogamang First Nation -- to write a report aimed at launching a campaign to pair reserves with non-profit aid agencies.

Many governments have programs to address health inequalities experienced by aboriginal peoples, the Health Council of Canada said in a report earlier this month.

But it is unclear whether Stephen Harper's Conservatives will revive any part of the Blueprint on Aboriginal Health and the Kelowna Accord put forward in 2005 under the previous Liberal government.

After taking office, Harper scrapped the $5.1-billion plan, which was meant to improve native education, housing and economic conditions.

The North-South Partnership for Children (Caring for children in remote First Nation communities) is a new organization that is now in place. Tikinagan Child and Family Services is playing a key leadership role with this organization. Anyone keen to help the project can visit its Web site, www.northsouthpartnership.com, for information,

or call 1-800-263-2841.

The present members of the new alliance that is dedicated to improving life on native reserves include:

• The 30 first nations located in Northwestern Ontario
• Humanitarian agencies Save the Children Canada, Feed the Children Canada
• Tikinagan Child and Family Services, a native child-welfare agency based in Sioux Lookout
• Office of the Child and Family Service Advocacy, Ontario's official child advocate
• Laidlaw Foundation
• Kinark Child and Family Services, Ontario's largest children's mental-health agency
• Ryerson University
• Voices for Children, a child-advocacy organization

From the Globe and Mail online story available online by clicking here

A slap in the face of every Canadian - From Saturday's Globe and Mail - by MARGARET PHILP

The catastrophe of native life in Canada is old news. Decades pass, reports are drafted, articles are published, and nothing happens. Canadians have become as remote to the suffering as spouses in a stale marriage.

But now something extraordinary has happened. One of the international humanitarian agencies that fight malaria in dusty refugee camps is training its eye on some of the isolated, alcohol-drenched reserves here at home. Two international relief workers from Save the Children have just finished a tour in Canada -- a country ranked sixth on the United Nations' Human Development Index -- that takes a hard look at the poverty and hopelessness in the wilderness of Northwestern Ontario.

That communities so close to home could be candidates for international aid is a rude slap to Canadians who have donated billions of dollars over the years to building new schools for tsunami victims and shelter for African orphans. "Canada should be cleaning up the backyard at home before they go out and fix other places," says Michael Hardy, executive director of Tikinagan Child and Family Services, the native-run society responsible for protecting youngsters in the 30 first nations scattered across the province's Northwest. "I'm not sure what world we fit into here. Whether it's Third World or Fourth World or whatever. But something has to take place."

Death taunts Krystal Shewaybick like a schoolyard bully. She thinks of it now as she hunches over a sheet of paper in the school library, carefully writing the names of her four sisters. "Just the 5 of us 4-ever." She flips the page, scribbling in the corner: "R*I*P David Thadeus Shewaybick. Miss yah so much my cousin!!"

And she thinks of it again after school when she gets home, bursts through the door with its broken window and gaping hole where the doorknob belongs, and sweeps her year-old sister into her arms.

At 13, she might be thinking about clothes or movies. But not here on the Webequie First Nation, far from the theatres and shopping malls of Thunder Bay, which is 540 kilometres by air to the south. Since her 15-year-old cousin committed suicide last winter, hanging himself in the penalty box of the outdoor rink where he played hockey most of his life, she has lived in fear of death. Not only her own, but that of her four little sisters, whose pictures are plastered across her bedroom wall.

David Shewaybick was a popular traditional drummer and dancer whose death was the 24th suicide in two decades -- most by the hands of the young -- in this remote community of 700. At that rate, 4,250 Torontonians would have killed themselves last year -- more than the toll for the entire country.

"I don't want to commit suicide," Krystal murmurs, barely above a whisper. Two long braids tumble from underneath a black tuque pulled down to her eyes. Her eyes flicker for an instant from the library floor.

These are among the few words she utters in response to the questions being asked by curious strangers who have travelled thousands of kilometres from the South -- one from the United States -- in an attempt to understand what life is like for children in Ontario's remote native reserves.

One of the strangers is Barbara Ammirati of Save the Children, which specializes in trying to spare children the harrowing aftermath of war and natural disaster. For 18 months, she was deputy leader of the agency's Hurricane Katrina response. Now, not a week after packing her suitcase in balmy New Orleans, she has landed in the sub-zero North.

A reserve is unlikely turf for international aid workers, but Ms. Ammirati is here with Nicholas Finney, emergencies deployment adviser with Save the Children in Britain, to start work on an unprecedented partnership between northern first nations and southern social agencies. It's a project launched by a handful of child-welfare leaders whose frustration with a legacy of government failure on reserves had finally boiled over.

The two visitors, along with seven Canadian specialists, are spending a week conducting the sort of rapid-fire economic and social assessment of Webequie and the even more troubled Mishkeegogamang First Nation that each has done in devastated places from New Orleans to quake-ravaged Pakistan.

Their draft report, to be presented to the two communities next week, will become the marching orders for an unprecedented campaign to pair reserves seeking help with aid agencies that have access to vast charitable resources, in some cases global, that have never before been tapped to aid native Canadians. Government remains on the sidelines.

Judy Finlay, the province's official child advocate, co-founded the project after 12 trying years of working with native children, and has high hopes. "This is a turning point," she says. "It's the beginning of a movement, and that's not overstating it. . . . What's different is that this is not a story of a disempowered, hopeless group of people. It's a story of an empowered group of people, and here's what you as a civilized society can do.

"Whenever I talk to people about the issue, their mouths drop, but they think, 'There's nothing I can do about that.' Yet there is. This will allow people the opportunity to take action."

Life is good for most Canadians, and they know it. Every year, they donate about $360-million to relief agencies working overseas. At home, another $8.9-billion is handed over from individuals, along with $14-billion from charitable foundations, to Canadian churches, synagogues, hospitals, and charities whose social programs deal mostly with urban issues, such as inner-city homelessness.

But native poverty, alcoholism and suicide are almost never championed as a charitable cause. In the eyes of many, first nations are entirely Ottawa's responsibility. And under tax laws, charitable foundations can't give money to agencies not legally registered as charities, and no first nation is.

So it is easier for Canadians to write cheques for relief efforts in Afghanistan than to donate to struggling reserves in their own country, despite the overwhelming need.

In Webequie, everyone has lost a close relative or friend, and yet almost no one -- including parents of the dead -- has sought out the handful of crisis counsellors, often neighbours, employed at the local nursing station. Death is so lodged in the collective psyche that parents refuse to discipline their children for fear of inviting suicide.

After her cousin's death, Krystal Shewaybick threatened suicide several times. The threats stopped only when her father, Christopher, who had drummed with his nephew, exploded: "I'll watch you. Go ahead and do it. I've seen a lot of people hanging. I've seen my friends hanging. Why don't you just do it and I'll look at you?"

Looking back, Mr. Shewaybick says: "I was all burnt out. I couldn't handle it any more."

But his outburst struck home. Krystal broke down in tears for the first time since David's death. Still, the family pulled up stakes and moved to another reserve to escape Webequie's despair.

That lasted less than a year. They returned after Krystal started drinking and hanging out with a tough crowd of girls. The family arrived carrying almost no belongings, their furniture too expensive to move by air. Homeless for a time, they eventually moved into one of the smallest, shabbiest houses on the reserve.

Mr. Shewaybick collects employment-insurance benefits, pocketing a little money on the side by borrowing his brother's snowmobile to hunt marten for furs he can sell to the Northern Store. He hopes for a job when long-awaited renovations on the water-filtration plant begin. (There has been a boil-water advisory on the reserve for as long as anyone can remember.)

He remembers his nephew waving cheerfully to him the day before he died. "I don't know why he did it," he says, tears welling in his eyes.

David's was one death no one saw coming. Warm and happy, he was a gifted athlete as well as a proud drummer and dancer -- an emblem of the band's push to counter decades of drinking, drugs and violence by restoring native traditions and spirituality. He was not like the bored, brooding youth with nothing to do but watch TV, drink and smash windows.

"He was more of a loving person," says Susan Okeese, one of the reserve's two crisis-intervention workers. "He didn't have suicide characteristics or anything."

Since David's death, Ms. Okeese's son, Leslie, one of his close friends, has refused to attend school. He sleeps most of the day and goes out at night. His mother, still afraid she missed some sign of David's anguish, has no idea where he goes.

Webequie still depends on hunting, fishing and trapping to supplement what groceries a welfare cheque can fetch at the U.S.-owned Northern Store, where a four-litre bag of milk costs $12.89 -- nearly triple the price in Toronto. The nearest town, Pickle Lake, is a 250-kilometre flight south, and Oji-Cree is so prevalent that children are loath to speak English.

The team conducting the assessment sees all this. They visit small houses crammed with three generations of families, stunned to find mattresses covering nearly every inch of the bedroom, rotting holes in the floor and spongy, water-damaged ceilings.

Even if people can feed themselves, those with snowmobiles must pay $2 a litre for fuel, more than twice the cost in the South, which makes a hunting excursion expensive. With the mild temperatures until lately, the winter road used to truck in goods more cheaply is only now being built.

Prospects for economic development are dim, but a few enterprising souls have started businesses. Located in a plywood shack beside the band office, the Coffee Shop offers groceries and coffee to customers who sit at a lone table in the corner. And in the surrounding bush there are a few fledgling tourist lodges for sportsmen, guided by locals, go to hunt and fish.

Lillian Suganaqueb, the local health director, owns one of the lodges and a convenience store near the school. By reserve standards, she is positively wealthy, and drives a shiny pickup truck. The neighbours, she complains, have been less than gracious about her good fortune.

When Ms. Ammirati sits down with Emily Jacob, who serves as the reserve's mental-health worker, she sees why people who need therapy rarely seek it. In such a close-knit community, it is hard enough to reveal their private pain to someone they have known since birth. Harder still when three desks are crowded into a tiny office.

"It gets really frustrating," says Mrs. Jacob, who also lost a son to commit suicide. "I can't really do much. We've had so much trauma over the past 15 or 20 years. There are only two of us, and the cases are so overwhelming. We're just dealing with day-by-day crises."

At the police station, one of the two Nishnawbe-Aski Police Service officers posted to the reserve says most of the crime stems from alcohol, but drug use is on the rise. More and more teenagers are becoming addicted to the prescription painkiller Percocet, which they snort like cocaine through empty pens.

But his biggest headache is a gang of teen girls -- some as young as 13 -- who are sniffing gasoline and drinking hairspray when they can't find liquor. "Their parents can't deal with them," he tells Ms. Ammirati. "The parents are scared to discipline for fear of suicide."

The doctor, Naseem Janmohamed, who has flown into Webequie every six weeks for six years, tells the team about the rampant diabetes and respiratory problems living in crowded, wood-heated, sometimes mouldy homes thick with cigarette smoke. Diets are rich in fatty, processed foods, with fruit and vegetables both expensive and never part of the traditional diet.

As well, she is always struck by the level of depression, anxiety disorders and massive unresolved grief: "Most people here have had experience with quite significant trauma, either through loss by the suicide of family or friends. Everybody in the community has experienced this multiple times," she says. "I often come across people who have had one trauma piled against the other."

None of it is new to Maurice Brubacher.

Now retired as executive director of the Children's Aid Society in Guelph, he first travelled to the North a decade ago, seconded from his job to head Tikinagan after its senior management suddenly quit. He was stunned by the monumental work of protecting children on reserves where two-thirds of the population was younger than 25, one-quarter of those suffered from prenatal alcohol exposure, suicides stood at six times the national average, houses were rickety and overcrowded, and native social workers were required to maintain foster-care standards drafted in Toronto.

He still is. Five years ago, he started Friends of Tikinagan, which has shipped used clothes and sporting equipment north to Sioux Lookout. Most years, Mr. Brubacher drives the truck himself.

But he wanted to do more, so he called Ms. Finlay. Long upset about northern child poverty, the provincial advocate agreed to help him and Tikinagan's Mr. Hardy arrange a meeting of social and humanitarian agencies that might set their sights on the North. Most have.

"If you look at a community and you see the poverty, the first impressions somebody would have is that these people don't have it together," Mr. Brubacher says.

"But when you get to know the leaders and you see the strengths they have and how hard they're working and what they're doing with what they have, you're impressed with the potential that's there. If we can mobilize some resources to provide more support, then there's great potential. There are also great challenges."

If dogs can be a measure of a native reserve's health, it's immediately apparent that the problems on Mishkeegogamang First Nation are profound. Gone are the lustrous coats of the friendly hounds at Webequie. Here, the dogs are mangier and meaner; visitors are warned to beware.

"The year 2006 was hard for us," band councillor Laureen Wassaykeesic tells the assessment team. "We hope to have a new beginning. But we're struggling. A lot of things have happened that we're really struggling with. At this point, we're not able to do it on our own."

Surrounded by an achingly beautiful landscape cut through by the headwaters of the Albany River, this sprawling Ojibwa reserve of 1,510 is 250 kilometres north of Sioux Lookout by road. Formerly known as Osnaburgh House First Nation, it is infamous for having succumbed over the years to the temptation of the liquor store in nearby Pickle Lake -- a down-on-its luck former gold-mining town a half-hour's drive away. Most people don't have vehicles, but there is a thriving black market run by bootleggers who charge more than double the liquor-store price.

Alcohol's toll is steep. Children have drowned, drunken men have been stabbed, car accidents have killed some, and a young mother and a teenage boy committed suicide in the last year alone.

While accidents are blamed for about 6 per cent of deaths in Canada, they account for more than half of Mishkeegogamang's staggering death rate.

Run-ins with the law are frequent, with band members incarcerated last year for a combined 3,000 nights -- an average of about two nights for every person on the band list.

At the school, where the curriculum includes classes in the Ojibway's language and culture, the children score on average between three to four grades behind kids their age in Southern Ontario. While the school is a towering new $7.5-million building with a teepee-shaped roof tall as a steeple and framed by pine timbers, Ottawa provides only about half the student allotment for education that schools elsewhere in the province receive.

"How can you expect that kids up North are ever going to be able to compete academically . . . if you're only prepared to spend half as much on their elementary-school education?" Mr. Brubacher demands.

About 60 children are in foster care with Tikinagan, the native-run agency -- a disproportionate number even in these parts -- with about 30 more legally declared Crown wards who may never return. Those numbers have dropped by more than half from a decade ago because the agency has a policy of placing children with extended family wherever possible to avoid shipping the children out. Still, few such foster homes are found here.

"Most of the children are in care because of alcohol," Tikinagan supervisor Jessie Duncan says. "Usually neglect and abandonment."

Lizabell Kwandibens has suffered more hardship in her 15 years than her sweet face would reveal. She was barely in school before she was sexually assaulted and sent to outside foster homes. As a teenager, she returned to live with her mother, a drinker.

Still a child, she gave birth to one of her own. Son Justus arrived in September, and it was only three weeks later that she awoke one morning to discover him lying cold and lifeless next to her. His sudden death was another shock to a community still reeling from a suicide two months before.

Autopsy results are pending. But without an official cause of death, Lizabell has been humiliated by rumours that she threw the baby at her former boyfriend. No one can defend her. No nurse ever visited the girl after the baby's birth. Likewise, there are no prenatal classes on the reserve. Whether she was fit to care for a baby is anyone's guess.

"I wish my son were here," she says, rubbing her eyes with nail-bitten fingers.

"He would love me forever.

"I feel so lonely without my baby. It just hurts inside. Sometimes I just feel like killing myself, but I don't want to hurt my family."

She slumps in a chair in a safe house, where she has lived for the past week. She was "almost raped," she tells Ms. Ammirati, by a man who threatened to beat her up if she told anyone, and she worries she is pregnant again. But it was hunger that drove her here. "There was no food. I was thirsty. The pipes froze. We got no hot water."

At the safe house, she has received counselling and spent time with a visiting traditional healer, who "makes me feel better inside." But before the visitors leave Mishkeegogamang, she is sent to a foster home in Sioux Lookout, where she is to return to school, leaving the counselling and healing behind.

"Lizabell is a victim," Ms. Ammirati observes, "yet it seems the system continues to punish her."

When the assessment teams knocks on his door, Josh Roundhead is playing a video game on his television screen, one of his few possessions in a house devoid of furniture. At 28, he has battled the bottle for years, even resorting to mouthwash and hairspray when he can't meet the bootleggers' prices. He has perfected the technique of drinking hairspray -- by adding milk and sugar -- to stop it from burning as it goes down his throat.

He works part-time as a security guard at the band office for $12 an hour. He pays the household bills. His brothers, Cauley and Reggie, pay for the groceries from their welfare cheques. Eight people live here, three of them children, but not a morsel of food remains in the fridge, save for bottles of barbecue sauce, maple syrup and two cans of baby formula.

Mr. Roundhead watches his three-year-old son, Ishmael, a child so small for his age that he playfully hides inside a kitchen cupboard. He remembers the drinking binges with his girlfriend that led to Ishmael's diagnosis of fetal alcohol syndrome. Once while she was pregnant, he came home to find her passed out, the baby kicking so vigorously in her belly that it was visible through her clothes.

"I wanted her to drink," he says. "I didn't think anything of it -- until he came out and had FAS."

Fetal alcohol syndrome is rife on the reserve. In a place where destructive habits betrays a wholesale loss of self-respect, the growing numbers of teenage girls becoming pregnant think nothing of treating their unborn children as recklessly as they do themselves.

"We can't do anything about it until the baby comes," says Rachelle Wavey, 23, a Tikinagan worker who was raised here. "We can talk to them, but they don't listen. They just say, 'It's my life. I can do what I want.' "

The homes here are even more overcrowded and dilapidated than in Webequie. With few exceptions, every house on the reserve -- 10 clusters with names like Bottle Hill and Ten Houses scattered along a 30-kilometre stretch of highway -- bears broken windows patched with plywood or cardboard.

In a few houses that appear boarded-up entirely, only smoke trickling from the chimney indicates that someone lives inside. There are empty lots where arsonists have done their work.

No one fixes their broken windows, since idle teens -- Mish has no community centre, no organized sports, no clubs -- will soon smash them again.

The waiting list for a house stands at 102. With the band receiving enough money from Indian and Northern Affairs Canada for about four houses every year, it has borrowed from the bank to build more even though the debt disqualifies it from other project funding.

Without enough houses, some band members have moved to Pickle Lake, where every summer they construct a shantytown of wooden pallets, scrap plywood and rusted oil drums in the woods by the town dump, where the Northern Store truck unloads food scraps on Tuesday.

The front window is also broken in Michele Kwandibens's house. Touring the reserve in a Tikinagan van, Ms. Ammirati and a few members of the assessment team happen upon 14-year-old Michele, Lizabell's cousin, as she trudges through the three hours of blowing snow and minus-40-degree cold between her uncle's house near the school and the district where she lives. With no bus service, people hitch rides or walk for hours.

Inside her house is a chaos of children. Pre-adolescent boys hang out the kitchen window, gusts of frigid air rushing into the house. Girls run in and out of the few small rooms. Michele's older brother plays a video game on a large television screen.

In the midst of the fray is her mother, Maryann, seated on a tattered couch cradling her newborn grandchild, who also lives here.

Eleven people are crammed into this dark, dingy three-bedroom house, holes punched in every one of its inside doors, mattresses tossed on bedroom floors to sleep everyone.

Michele's father works on a road-building crew, bringing home $725 every two weeks -- about twice what the family would collect on welfare. But without a car, they must hire a taxi to the Northern Store in Pickle Lake to buy groceries at a whopping $170 for a return trip, a common extravagance for dirt-poor families on this reserve. With this bite out of the budget several times a month, the money quickly vanishes.

"Sometimes we can't pay all the bills," Mrs. Kwandibens allows. "Sometimes we're out of food. Sometimes our friends give it to us."

Many of the children abuse alcohol. Michele's drinking problem was serious enough that Tikinagan social workers shipped her to Toronto last year for treatment. Her older brother, Franklin, 22, admits that he drinks too, although he wants to stop, land a job and move into a house of his own. He wishes the community would call meetings to talk openly about its problems. But even if one were called, there is no community hall in which to meet.

"Who do you talk to when you have problems?" Ms. Ammirati asks Franklin.

"Me? I go to her," he jabs a thumb at his mother. "She's the only one I trust."

Tears spring in Ms. Ammirati's eyes at this unexpected gleam of light. "That's so beautiful," she tells the young man.

"A family love that transcends physical surroundings," she says after leaving the house.

And so it goes on the two reserves.

The team is assaulted by images of filthy crowded houses, stories of rampant alcoholism, violence, unfit parents, government dependence, hopelessness, and death. Yet, unmistakable are the deeply loving families and the inspired community leaders who, despite it all, have bottomless faith that their first nations can return to the vibrant societies they once were.

"I feel like we started with a whole circle of despair and defeat," Ms. Ammirati says. "I still see it, and I don't know how to get people off thinking, 'We can't do it because we can't do it.' But today we saw some bright lights. Individuals who are out there doing things for their people."

Bright lights like the handful of activists in the Webequie Women's Circle who banded together after being frustrated by the epidemic of youth suicides, the alcoholism, the widespread lack of parenting, the silence around sexual abuse so common in their homes and the male-dominated council's tendency to fixate on the reserve's economic problems rather than its deep-rooted social ones. One of their first efforts is a proposal to impose a curfew.

"Most of the women have been in pain, in grief, in losing their children to suicides," says Elsie MacDonald, a band councillor and former chief. "They wanted to take action."

In Mishkeegogamang, there is Chief Connie Gray McKay, 44, a mother of six who was raised by grandparents in the bush before finishing high school, heading to university and returning to run the education authority before becoming a band councillor a dozen years ago.

Chief for the past two years, she believes that, if there is hope for a place like Mishkeegogamang, it lies in restoring the health of families -- teaching people themselves raised in poverty and neglect to parent and providing them a decent place to live as a start.

"The last message we want anybody to say about us is, 'Oh, those poor little Indians.' That's not what we want," she says. "We want the message to be very clear that as first nations people, when you talk about what is the answer, we just want our resources to be the same as everybody else so we can provide adequate housing and adequate education."

The assessment team has come away with no shortage of things to recommend in their report, starting with an immediate shipment of floor-hockey equipment and 150 pairs of cheap shoes for children to wear in the new school whose polished floors are distractingly cold.

But few of the other possible recommendations are that simple:

With welfare cheques in Mishkeegogamang issued by the band as food vouchers at the Northern Store, a chunk of the economy drains from the reserve the moment it pours in. Some people wonder why, with some business training, couldn't reserves start their own co-ops to sell groceries and sundries?

In Webequie, investment should be invited in the budding eco-tourism industry, bringing money and jobs into the community.

A small bus could be purchased for Mish to ferry people around the reserve and to Pickle Lake several times a day

What about youth-recreation programs for adolescents on both reserves where they are none, including excursions to the bush to learn traditional land-based activities like hunting and fishing?

Agencies from down South should provide counselling and training should be provided for burnt-out, barely qualified crisis workers lurching from one emergency to another.

Perhaps gas could be subsidized for hunters who go into the bush for food.

"There are basic needs not being received, and for me, that's a situation that requires humanitarian action," says Nicholas Finney of Britain's Save the Children. "We shouldn't make excuses for the government. They're the duty-bearers here and it shouldn't be taken away from them. But there are things that can be done that can make people's lives better on a day to day basis."

In Canada for the first time, Mr. Finney struggles to reconcile his Third World humanitarian experience with the Canadian aboriginal context of profound poverty and suffering. He is more accustomed to places in the grip of sudden disasters like earthquakes or war.

"There's been no sudden disaster here. It's a gradual disaster that has emerged, unfolded, and been propagated, whether it's intentionally or by negligence, by people that should know better, by people in power, over a long period of time. That much has become clear," he says.

"I work for Save the Children and we're a child-rights organization in whatever context. And we always focus on vulnerability. And I've seen some very vulnerable kids and some very vulnerable families, living on the edge of survival. . . .

"I don't think people are able to live a life with dignity in a lot of places we've seen, and that troubles me."

Mr. Finney says he returns to London "very angry" and eager to share the little-known story of aboriginal misery in Canada that dates from the time British traders first came to these shores. But standing in the wings waiting for the assessment report are a few other humanitarian agencies considering the uncharted territory of northern first nations.

One of them, Feed the Children Canada, has already shipped nearly 100,000 pounds of food, new clothing and supplies to Sioux Lookout. It got involved here months before the partnership formed after the school principal in Mishkeegogamang called the agency's head office in Oklahoma to appeal for food for his students. Its most recent tractor-trailer load included the shoes and floor-hockey equipment that had been promised just the week before.

Now one of the partners, Feed the Children is planning to tackle a more ambitious role, raising funds and recruiting expertise to build community centres and schools on reserves and provide education for struggling single mothers.

"There's a lot more we want to do up there," says Antero Manninen, the director of procurement and special programs. "We're quite committed."

Charitable foundations are also showing interest. The Laidlaw Foundation is already on board. And at the Atkinson Charitable Foundation, executive director Charles Pascal is intrigued by the project and its "genuine reciprocity" between North and South, rather than the paternalistic approach typical of government.

"In the wake of big-brother government programming and funding that just doesn't work as often as it might over many, many decades and many different governments, here we have a situation where non-governmental organizations are saying, 'You know what? We're just going to get on with this,' " says the former deputy minister with the Ontario government.

"Governments need to sit on the sidelines right now and watch a project like this with a pad of paper, a notebook, and take notes on how genuine reciprocal relationships might be the answer."

In Webequie, Ms. Ammirati breaks the stout silence of Krystal Shewaybick and three of her classmates by asking them to write about or draw something that makes them feel safe.

Krystal scribbles furiously on a blank sheet of paper. "Where I feel safe is STAYING HOME. Being with my family. Follow wherever my parents go."

At home are rules and boundaries not observed by most of the neighbours. There is hardly any furniture but for bare mattresses, a couch, and big-screen television, but the floor is freshly mopped.

"We're always telling Krystal what to do," says her mother, Marilyn. "She has to be here, to get home early. Doing her chores too."

Odds are stacked against this family. They are poor, racked by suicide and despair, with little to do but watch television and nowhere to go without a snowmobile. But the family bond endures. In a place of near hopelessness, this is the starting line.

Margaret Philp is a Globe and Mail feature writer based in Toronto.

Band aid

Anyone keen to help the project can visit its Web site, www.northsouthpartnership.com, for information,

or call 1-800-263-2841.

The members of the new alliance dedicated to improving life on native reserves include:

• The 30 first nations located in Northwestern Ontario
• Humanitarian agencies Save the Children Canada, Feed the Children Canada
• Tikinagan Child and Family Services, a native child-welfare agency based in Sioux Lookout
• Office of the Child and Family Service Advocacy, Ontario's official child advocate
• Laidlaw Foundation
• Kinark Child and Family Services, Ontario's largest children's mental-health agency
• Ryerson University
• Voices for Children, a child-advocacy organization

The following message is a copy of an email I sent to CBC concerning the singing of the National Anthem in Cree on Hockey Night in Canada on Saturday, Feb 3. I am hoping that others feel the same way as I do and will write to CBC suggesting that they address this inappropriate decisions on their part and that they give Akina Shirt another chance to sing the anthem in Cree in Toronto!

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Sent to CBC - Saturday, Feb 3 by David Fiddler ...

I'm a big fan of hockey and HNIC but right now I don't even feel like watching it. Tonight was to be a very proud moment for First Nations across Canada, where the National Anthem was sung in the Cree language by a 13 year old in the game between Calgary Flames and Vancouver Canucks. I was sitting with my family waiting to watch " O Canada " sung in our language. It was very disappointing, to say the least, that it was not broadcast. Instead, there was steady stream of commercials while this event was happening.  I can't help but feel that we as First Nations are, again, being marginalized and CBC should be ashamed for their role in this. CBC must do something immediately to rectify this wrong. We had conducted a publicity campaign on the internet and locally to encourage people to watch this very important event for our people.
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I did end up seeing the short taped portion during the intermission that provided us with one line of the song. I don't feel this did justice to what it could've been for all of us. I  feel CBC should do more to rectify this situation, perhaps by arranging to have Akina Shirt appear on another broadcast of HNIC, in Toronto (a much bigger market providing more exposure).

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From http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20070203/cree_anthem_070203/20070203?hub=Canada

Cree teen sings 'Ka Kanatahk' for hockey fans
Feb. 3 2007 - CTV.ca News Staff

A Cree teenager became the first to sing O Canada -- or Ka Kanatahk -- in the Cree language at the start of an NHL hockey game.

Akin Shirt, 13, of the Saddle Lake Cree Nation performed in front of about 20,000 fans before the Calgary Flames and Vancouver Canucks faced off Saturday night at Calgary's PenGrowth Saddledome.

"Cree is a beautiful language and it's spoken among aboriginals across Canada and it's great to have this exposure on a language and for me to share this with canadians," she told reporters after an afternoon rehearsal.

"Each time I hear her, it brings a lot of emotion inside," said her mother, Jean Cardinal.

Shirt actually lives in Edmonton with her parents. She's a Grade 8 student at the Victoria School of Performing and Visual Arts there.

Besides participating in three choirs, Shirt takes guitar lessons. She counts Inuit singer Susan Aglukark as a role model.

While this was her first time in front of an NHL crowd, Shirt performed the anthem in front of the Saddle Lake Warriors junior B hockey team last year.

In fact, she turned into something of a good-luck charm for them.

"Whenever I sang for them, they won, so I'm 6 and 0 right now ... I'm hoping I can go for seven wins," Shirt said.

If you're wondering what side she was on, Shirt was wearing a Calgary Flames jersey.

How did she get her shot at the big time?

Chief Eddy Makokis of the Saddle Lake Cree Nation happened to be playing golf with one of the Flames owners last summer.

"We asked general manager Darryl Sutter to see if they could get her in," he said.

The Flames asked for an audition tape.

"I thought my goodness, this is going to be wild," said Geordie MacLeod, a spokesman for the club. "She sounded great of course."

During a CBC radio report on the recent release of the Canadian Boreal Initiative, an Inuit elder stated, "Today I have nothing ... but if the land and the animals are healthy, our people can survive for a thousand years." Maybe it is time for the consumers, their governments and corporations in the south to begin to learn from the wisdom of the original people of this land. Read the Dene Nation press release below ...

Dehcho Leader Calls for Tar Sands Moratorium

Fort McMurray, Alberta – Jan. 31 – After completing a tour of the Suncor oil sands facilities north of here, Grand Chief Herb Norwegian of the Dehcho First Nations, called on Canada and Alberta to support a moratorium on further development of the massive oil producing Athabasca Tar Sands “until some sanity can be brought into this situation.”

Norwegian led a delegation of 11 chiefs and elders from the Dehcho to view the operations of Suncor, and meet with leaders of First Nations groups in northern Alberta to discuss what he called “the serious decline of the quantity and quality of water in Mackenzie River watershed.” The Mackenzie River watershed flows through some 212,000 sq km of the land 5,500 Decho live on. Their claim to the land they have always lived on is currently being negotiated with Canada.

“Our people who saw this massive development from the air as we flew in from the North and again today from the windows of a bus, were shocked,” Norwegian told a press conference. He pointed out that 87 percent of the Mackenzie River flows through the Northwest Territories and yet the huge reductions in water levels and changes in the fish and wildlife come from here, south of the NWT, he told reporters while Suncor officials listened.

“We are all devastated by what we have seen these days. This so-called ‘development’ project is out of control and we have to tell the politicians that it is like a cancerous tumour and that the Mackenzie Gas Project is designed to feed that tumour.” The MGP has currently applied to the National Energy Board to build a pipeline to bring natural gas from the High Arctic down the Mackenzie Valley to the pipeline networks of Alberta. The Dehcho oppose the pipeline until their claims are satisfactorily settled and serious environmental questions answered.

Elders and chiefs described how water levels have been fluctuating as much as 10 feet in some places along the mighty river and that fish and waterfowl are being negatively affected as well as wild game and the habitat they live on. The water is not fit to drink or swim in some places and fish have become soft and discoloured in others. The Dehcho rely on the water, fish, birds and game for food and trapping.

“Our elders have been telling us of these changes for a long time,” Norwegian said” and we think that these water problems are coming from here in this huge area around Fort McMurray. We live upstream from this and are severely impacted by this blowout of adevelopment. The problems for us and our land and animals and people are here. We have to sit with the developers and the governments and other First Nations in open doors, not closed meetings and the federal government has to pay the major role in cleaning up this mess that affects all Aboriginal people.”

Ironically, as Norwegian was speaking, Alberta’s new Premier, Ed Stelmach, had been telling people of Fort McMurray the Athabasca tar sands project had only “a very narrow window of opportunity” to address, and fix, the problems fuelled by the massive and rapid growth.

There are more than $100 billion of work planned for the region in the next decade but, as Norwegian stated “the water and the environment we live in is in danger of destruction and we in the Dehcho are not even consulted. The tar sands are also Canada’s largest producers of greenhouse gas emissions, the cause of frightening global warming and climate change.

Stelmach agreed with people, the latest being the Dehcho, who have said that the situation is critical. Fort McMurray, a city of some 50,000 has massive social problems, inadequate housing, three times the number of motor vehicle fatalities per capita than the rest of Alberta, drug abuse and four times the average of sexually transmitted diseases.

“With each project approved, the growing demands on water and the environment and the absence of any sustainable solutions weighs more heavily on the people of the north,” Bill Erasmus of Yellowknife, national chief of the Dene Nation, who accompanied the Dehcho delegation.

The DFN delegation held meetings in Fort McMurray to discuss with the Athabasca Tribal Council and neighbouring first nations the way forward. Last year, the Dehcho, at the urging of their elders held a large conference in Fort Simpson to discuss the serious water problems in their land and issued a declaration that First Nations are Keepers of the Waters”. Norwegian urged this meeting of key Aboriginal players to form an alliance to address the water issues and the issues of massive development.

They heard of the degradation of the boreal forest ecosystem, the “dewatering” of rivers and streams to support the tar sands operations and the threat to the cultural survival of the people according to their treaty rights. The areas of concern are under Treaties 8 and 11, Treaties that ensure that lands of First Nations should not be taken away from them by massive uncontrolled development which threatens their culture and traditional way of life.

Late last year, Norwegian told his people, Suncor, the oldest tar sands mine in the region. was granted an expansion of its operations which already produce 225,000 barrels of oil per day (bpd) and will reach 500,000 bbd by 2012.

During the tour, the Dehcho were accompanied by two Suncor public relations people who would not allow the group to take pictures. Questions about the impact of largetailing ponds bursting toxic waste on the land, the proximity of the mining operations to the Athabasca River, in some places an estimated 150 feet, and destruction of the boreal forest were not answered.

The grand chief told his people of research done by pro-moratorium supporters across Canada that for every barrel of oil produced by Suncor that between four and eight barrels of water were used from the Athabasca River, which flows through the tar sands and is part of the Mackenzie Valley watershed.

Using the latest figures available from the Alberta Energy Board, Suncor sucked up 45.5 billion barrels of water in 2004 although its claims to recycle 75 percent of this but its quality is questionable. Holding tanks for toxic waste, some of them as big as 15 sq km, are larger than many natural lakes in the area. It is estimated by the AEB that current and future projects will require an unimaginable 175 million litres of water a day.

“I cannot even imagine what figures like this look like, they are almost meaningless to the average person from Dehcho,” Norwegian said, “but I do know this whole place looks like a moonscape. “ And it will get worse. Imperial Oil and Shell Canada have been granted permission to build new sites, bringing the total of existing and planned tar sands producers to 11 with more leases opening up almost daily.

“The government and the oil companies talk about ‘balance’, a balance between the environment and the economy. But this is no balance, this whole scheme is unbalanced to the point it is out of control. We aboriginal people need to demand a stop to this until we can find out where the mess is going. We have to ask the hard questions: do we need this? Is this kind of development just a waste? What is going to happen to our land and our water? And our people? As Dene we do not differentiate between the land, water, air, earth, wildlife, birds, fish and people. The people and the land are inseparable. That is real balance, “ he said.

For further information, please call Grand Chief Herb Norwegian: (867) 695-2355/2610

From Kenora Daily Miner and News archives ...

World of high-speed Internet opened to 15 local rural communities

By Mike Aiken, Miner and News, February 01, 2007

Rural communities in Northwestern Ontario are gaining access to economic, educational and social opportunities, thanks to a multi-million dollar broadband technology project.

“It’s a world-class project in the works,” said the mayor of Sioux Narrows Nestor Falls, Bill Thompson.

“It’s a huge advantage to us,” he said, noting it has helped saved the community’s school by providing a connection to resources across the country and around the world.

In all, 15 communities surrounding Lake of the Woods, including First Nations and municipalities, will have high-speed Internet access with the completion of the four-year project.

“This initiative demonstrates our government’s commitment to work with community partners for the benefit of the people in Northwestern Ontario, providing them with the tools they need to compete in today’s global market,” said the minister responsible for health and FedNor, Tony Clement, in a press release.

“I think this is critical for us in the Northwest,” said Ryan Reynard, chief executive officer of the Lake of the Woods Business Incentive Corporation. “(Lake of the Woods Business Incentive Corporation) is proud to have brought together the partners necessary to build the required infrastructure to help businesses and local residents reap the benefits of technology.”

The business incentive corporation initiated the Greater Lake of the Woods Broadband Project, with funding from public and private sector partners. The project received $563,000 from Industry Canada’s Broadband for Rural and Northern Development Pilot Program, $575,000 from the province’s Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corporation, $710,000 from the Connect Ontario Broadband Rural Access program, as well as $310,000 from FedNor. KMTS and Bell, the project’s private sector partners, provided approximately $2.5 million in capital funding.

Jodi Gibson, vice-chairman of the corporation’s board, who also sells recreational properties in the area, said the project will definitely help both the community, as well as her job selling real estate, because it will allow seasonal residents more access to internet technologies.

Kenora Mayor Len Compton said access to high speed technologies was necessary for economic development in any community in the area, given the challenges presented by the area’s remote geography and low population density.

The 15 areas and communities connected through the Greater Lake of the Woods Broadband Project include: Sioux Narrows, Whitefish Bay First Nation, Storm Bay (Heenan Point/Longbow Lake), Laclu, Pellatt, Kendall Inlet, Kenora East, Washagamis Bay First Nation, Poplar Bay, Shoal Lake 39 First Nation, Shoal Lake 40 First Nation, Wabaseemoong First Nation, Clearwater Bay, Angle Inlet 33 First Nation and Windigo Island 37 First Nation.