The CBC documentary every non-indigenous Canadian needs to watch

Amanda Siebert

CBC

January 27th, 2017



COLONIZATION ROAD, CBC

With Canada's 150th anniversary and its outrageous $500,000,000 price tag garnering attention nationwide, massive Canada Day parties are being planned from Vancouver to Halifax.

But many have raised questions of how the federal government can justify such spending when atrocities like the ones listed below are taking place on First Nations reserves throughout the country:
A number of reserves are being affected by an overwhelming rate of child suicide. These reserves include Deschambault Lake, Attawapiskat, and Wapekeka. Despite numerous requests for funding and additional on-reserve health care services, most have been denied.

As of October 31, 2016, there were 133 boil water advisories in 90 First Nations communities across Canada. (Think about that one next time you grab a drink from the tap.)

The Grassy Narrows First Nation in Ontario is currently so contaminated with mercury that levels detected in soil there are 80 times what is expected in the rest of the province.

(A provincial environment minister called for a clean-up as early as 1984, but was ignored by governments at all levels.)

A federal inquiry into more than 1,200 missing and murdered Indigenous women is frustrating families because of the government's lack of consultation. The Native Women's Association of Canada has given it a failing grade for its slow progression.

Children living on First Nations reserves are chronically underfunded when compared to children living off-reserve.

This was made all the more clear a year ago when the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal found that the government discriminates against First Nations children on reserves. Prime Minister Trudeau made promises of funding, but has yet to fulfill them.

Critic and executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada Cindy Blackstock says the federal government must step up with $155 million for child welfare, "to give these kids a fighting chance to grow up in the families."

Indigenous people make up nearly one quarter of the federal inmate population. Nearly half of the children in Canada's foster care system are indigenous. (Keep in mind that only four percent of Canada's population is indigenous.)

Concerns regarding energy projects like the Site C Dam, the TransMountain Pipeline, the Keystone XL pipeline, the Alberta oil sands, and other resource-based projects brought forward by First Nations are largely ignored by governments at provincial and federal levels.

(Not to mention the ongoing dismissal of most requests made by First Nations communities of the government to uphold established treaty rights.)

Overall, indigenous people in Canada make less income, face higher unemployment rates, higher rates of suicide, higher rates of death among children, higher rates of incarceration, inadequate housing, and poorer health than the average Canadian settler.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, but also my way of telling you (yes, I'm telling you) to educate yourself about why Canada's First Nations, both on reserve and off, face hardship at a level few non-indigenous Canadians could even imagine.

In 2009 at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh, then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper declared to the world that Canada, "has no history of colonization." Eight years later, CBC has proved him wrong with a documentary called Colonization Road.

Airing for the first time yesterday, the documentary is hosted by Ryan McMahon, an Anishnaabe comedian hailing from the Koocheching First Nation in northwestern Ontario.

In it, McMahon takes viewers through a history lesson they undoubtedly never received in school: how the building of colonization roads post-contact destroyed First Nations communities.

Featuring notable indigenous scholars, researchers, and academics, including Pam Palmater, Al Hunter, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Lee Maracle among others, Colonization Road speaks to issues that will probably make fragile settlers feel uncomfortable. As it should.

"I think the problem is the relationship.... Reconciliation is us [First Nations] forgiving them [the government]. Well, I would forgive anybody for standing on my feet, if they fucking got off," Maracle says near the end of the documentary.

"It doesn't end. They agreed that they separated us from our teachings; they agreed that they separated us from our language, and thus the language was pretty much destroyed in ourselves; they agreed they separated us from our culture, and so we're culturally fractured, and destitute, but nobody's going to help us bring it back together.

"They're still educating us in their schools, in their culture, in their language. It's still going on. They are still on our feet."

Watch the documentary on CBC here.

Follow Amanda Siebert on Twitter and Facebook.

Why we tend to ignore climate change

Our preoccupation with "Presentism" leads us to ignore climate change as it is not of immediate concern, Emma Teitel says.

Kaskawulsh Glacier in the Yukon has been melting much faster than anywhere else in the world, but people seem more interested the day to day issues that surround us, Emma Teitel says. (CANADIAN HERITAGE GALLERY)

EMMA TEITEL

National Columnist

Star Columnist
Fri., April 21, 2017


For the first time in modern history, a river changed direction almost overnight. This happened not by the awesome hand of God (or the wooden staff of Charlton Heston), but by the perfectly ordinary human hand of climate change.

In more scientific terms, news emerged this week that the gigantic Kaskawulsh Glacier in the Yukon receded so extensively, its “meltwater” actually changed course. As a result, it is now flowing into an entirely different body of water. The scientists who made this discovery last summer call the water-rerouting phenomenon, “River Piracy.”

River Piracy: it sounds like a really bad indie rock band listed in fine print at the bottom of a Coachella poster. Unfortunately for Planet Earth, it’s an adverse environmental event of biblical proportions — an event that highlights just how suddenly and significantly climate change can impact the world — and even more troubling, an event that is likely the consequence of human behaviour.

In other words, it’s big news. Big, bad news. Yet it doesn’t feel like it at all.

Why is this? Because even though climate change is a problem routinely dubbed “The Issue of Our Time” by scientists, journalists and world leaders, it also happens to be an issue we appear to know and care very little about. A river suddenly changing course for the first time in modern history is news that should provoke the kind of fiery Facebook rhetoric and debate that follows a Donald Trump Twitter tirade, but it doesn’t. Instead, it falls as flat as an arctic plain.


I’m not judging anybody here. I am just as guilty of ignoring The Issue of Our Time as the next person who absent-mindedly throws her apple core in the garbage can. The first time I read about the receding Kaskawulsh Glacier, I abandoned the story halfway through when my eyes caught another breaking news alert: “Prince Harry Reveals He Sought Counselling in Aftermath of Princess Diana’s Death.” If only Prince Harry lived at the bottom of a melting glacier. Perhaps we’d take a greater interest in the planet’s health if it were bound up in the health of the royal family.

Alas it is not. So, research shows, we keep on ignoring a global problem we deem too big and confusing to curtail. But why do we do this even in the face of disturbing environmental events? And what will it take to get us fired up about something called River Piracy? American social psychologist David Dunning says the prevailing barrier to mass interest in climate change is “Presentism,” i.e. a preoccupation with the present moment.

“The major human tendency that often seems to be in play,” Dunning says, “is that people are much more interested in what’s happening now — today. Things that are more far off in the future, people have a harder time getting motivated about.”

Per Espen Stoknes, a Norwegian organizational psychologist who wrote a book about climate change apathy called What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming, is of a similar mind.

“Global warming feels distant in time: the years given — 2050 and beyond, seem very far away,” Stoknes says. Climate change is also, for the most part, invisible to the average human being: “CO2 is colourless and odourless. If CO2 was a black ooze, we’d have solved it a long time ago.”

Glaciers may be melting right now, in present time, and sea levels might be rising in places like Florida and Bangladesh, but the end result — i.e. the cinematic catastrophe everyone fears — when the planet warms over and society collapses — isn’t projected to take place for decades. The general consensus then among regular people seems to be: “What’s one more runny ice block in the interim?”

Perhaps what’s needed in the quest to get society to care about something that won’t cause it massive grief for years to come is a universal rejection of “Presentism.” Dunning and Stoknes are right: we love the present. But not only do we love the present, we live in a culture that has a near pathological obsession with it. The cult of mindfulness, living in the moment, YOLO-ing, dispelling negative thoughts in favour of Good Vibes Only: this is our secular religion. It’s a religion that actively campaigns against thinking too much and too hard about what lies ahead.

And while this religion is a friend to the individual — especially the individual who’s just returned from a hard day’s work and would rather read about Prince Harry than River Piracy — it’s the enemy of long-term critical thinking and long-term change. Until we ditch the power of now, we’ll continue to live in the moment at the expense of the future.