Category: First Nations
Information related to First Nations
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Walking with Our Sisters
Over 1,181 native women and girls in Canada have been reported missing or have been murdered in the last 30 years. Many vanished without a trace, with inadequate inquiry into their disappearance or murders paid by the media, the general public, politicians and even law enforcement. This is a travesty of justice. ~ Walking With Our… Read more
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Walk for Reconciliation
Until last Sunday I’d never done this kind of thing before. By 3:45am I was driving through rainy blackness heading to the Sunrise Ceremony on Victoria Island, in the middle of the Ottawa river. The ceremony would mark the beginning of the close for the six-year-long Truth and Reconciliation Commission examining the effects of Indian residential schools… Read more
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Everything Changes: Shooting the Domtar Lands
Since mid-winter, I’ve had the pleasure of photographing the Domtar lands with a team of volunteers from the Workers History Museum in Ottawa. Windmill Development Group, Inc. is poised to re-develop the land which has been home to pulp and paper giants E.B. Eddy and Domtar since 1891. Because of the placement of the buildings, there isn’t much… Read more
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Marie Watt: Piecing Together A Story
It was my first community sewing circle. I couldn’t have chosen a better introduction than the one I received from Marie Watt, a Portland, Oregon-based artist whose storied circles bring creative ideas to life. A half-dozen tables bisected the Great Hall of the National Galley of Canada, arranged beneath the canopy of glass and steel that frames the finest views in Ottawa. … Read more
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LeBreton Flats: An Acre of Time
Dear Phil: It was my pleasure to meet you for coffee and finally put my hands on An Acre of Time, a history of LeBreton Flats. I wasn’t kidding when I said I discovered you in the most random of ways, a mention buried in the comments section of a review of a book of historical maps of… Read more
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The Inconvenient Indian
On the Canadian and American policies of forced removal and relocations – and re-relocations – of First Nations peoples from their own treaty-protected lands: Moving Indians around the continent was like redecorating a very large house. The Cherokee can no longer stay in the living room. Put them in the second bedroom. The Mi’kmaq are taking up… Read more
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Literary Houses: Emily Carr
[pullquote]Emily Carr (December 13, 1871 – March 2, 1945) was a Canadian artist and writer heavily inspired by the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast. ((http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Carr)) [/pullquote] A moment’s quiver of homesickness for Canada strangled the Art longing in me. To ease it I began to hum, humming turned into singing, singing into that special… Read more
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The Lost Villages of the St. Lawrence
The vintage homes and buildings look picturesque and inviting under the winter sky. They’re clustered together, in traditional village style, interlaced with Christmas-like trees frosted with snow. But what I see is not a real village. The clapboard church, barbershop, school and other buildings grouped by the side of County Rd. 2, near Long Sault,… Read more
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King Lear, Dementia, Filial Piety and the Profound Vulnerability of Aging
The 30-second summary of Shakespeare‘s King Lear is this: An elderly and increasingly demented King seeks to divide his kingdom in three, according to the degree of publicly pious devotion declared by his three daughters. The two eldest favour him with flattery but the youngest, his favourite, refuses to participate in the tawdry spectacle. He banishes her… Read more
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Living Inside the Belly of a Whale
A Thule Whalebone House, circa 1,000 a.d. “One thousand years ago, a group of people began a trek across the far north, up above the Arctic Circle. They were following the bowhead whales that they hunted for food. The whales gave them other things as well. The whale bones were the building materials for remarkable… Read more