The Dominion - Maya Rolbin-Ghanie

Squirreling the Days Away

Maya Rolbin-Ghanie — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 04:33:21 +0000

The life of the eastern gray squirrel

Resilient, sturdy and fast, the first-ever squirrels date back about forty million years ago and continue to evade the threat of extinction today. This tiny, twitching critter got its name from the Greek "skiouros," meaning shadow-tailed.

Apart from having large incisors that never stop growing and which they continually sharpen on branches and even power lines (causing many a power outage), squirrels also possess the unique superpower of being one of very few mammals that are capable of climbing down a tree head-first, due to their strong and limber claws that lend them incomparable skill in the world of grasping woody surfaces.

These little mammals are at their most active in late winter at the start of their mating games. The males chase both the females and their suitors through the trees at unfathomable speeds, all the while performing stunts that even the most fearless of stuntmen would dare not attempt. The female will usually choose the strongest male available to her, but this is a one-off; the next time she mates it will be with a different partner. Some say this is nature's way of preserving the genetic strength of the species, and may be why squirrels continue to survive and thrive.

A mother squirrel usually gives birth to one or two litters of about four baby squirrels each year, all of which are born completely bald, toothless, blind, and dependent on her for guidance for many weeks. But they grow up strong and they grow up fast—these well-adapted creatures not only live to enjoy excellent vision with their large, incessantly searching eyes, but they are also sexually mature and ready to carry on a legacy that would make Darwin proud only one year into their scuttling, scrambling lives.

Baby Squirrel

Cuts to First Nations Programs Keep Coming

Moira Peters — Tue, 18 May 2010 13:00:54 +0000

Canadian government's 2010 budget slashes funding for essential services

MONTREAL—Canada's 2010 Budget, released on March 4, 2010, addresses some crucial issues facing Indigenous peoples within its borders today.

“Budget 2010 invests $10 million over two years to address the disturbingly high number of missing and murdered Aboriginal women. Concrete actions will be taken to ensure that law enforcement and the justice system meet the needs of Aboriginal women and their families,” according to the Canadian government's budget website.

Director of the Native Women's Association of Canada's (NWAC) Sisters in Spirit (SIS) initiative, Kate Rexe, thought it likely, upon hearing this, that her work would continue to be funded.

NWAC began its Sisters in Spirit initiative in 2004, for the purpose of doing research and compile data on the increasingly high numbers of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada. On April 14th, 2010, SIS added 62 new names to the 521 cases of missing or murdered native women and girls it uncovered over the previous five years. According to Indigenous activists, this number is as high as 3000. This statistical discrepancy and quick increase, along with other numerical considerations, is seen by many as evidence that cutting funding to the research at this juncture is a huge mistake. According to NWAC's 2010 report, What Their Stories Tell Us, 226—or 39 per cent—of the cases identified to date have occurred in the past 10 years. Statistics on this matter were practically non-existent before SIS became what many consider the country's leading resource on the issue.

In spite of the government's $10 million allotment, funding for SIS expired in March 2010. Budget 2010 named violence against Indigenous women a priority, yet there has been no word yet as to whether any of the money will go toward the six-year old initiative.

Craig Benjamin of Amnesty International helped to complete the 2004 Stolen Sisters report in partnership with NWAC.

“NWAC's list is from limited sources. It presents only part of a picture. ... Police record the ethnicity of victims only 60 per cent of the time. ...Most officers I've spoken to have no understanding of the importance of recording this info. Most see the term 'Aboriginal' as a physical description—if she looks like it, she is, if she does not look Aboriginal in their eyes, they don't record it. ...In the very fact that the numbers are unknown, we begin to get a sense of the failure of the government," says Benjamin.

Rexe says that the Status of Women office, which funded SIS, has stated that there should be no more research, that now is the time for action.

Critics point out that it would be impossible to measure the success or failure of any action without continued research.

NDP Aboriginal Affairs critic Jean Crowder worries about the ambiguity of the government's funding commitment.

“Our concern is that it's going to go all into policing [on reserves], which would be a major problem,” says Crowder.

The Conservatives have yet to announce the funding allocation, and have not specified when they plan to do so.

“Politically the government controls and manipulates the timing of announcements. ...It leaves organizations completely up in the air. And I mean that shouldn't happen. It's a new fiscal year. People need to know if they're going to continue to operate,” says Crowder.

The government's lack of specificity in their financial commitments to First Nations programs in this year's budget is not an isolated incident.

The text of the budget states, “Budget 2010 commits an additional $199 million over the next two years to ensure that necessary mental health and emotional support services continue to be provided to former [residential school] students and their families, and that payments to former students are made in a timely and effective manner.”

"When we heard that—mental health and support services—we thought, well, that's us," said Mike DeGagné, the Executive Director of the Aboriginal Healing Foundation (AHF).

The AHF was established in 1998 and given a mandate "to encourage and support, through research and funding contributions, community-based Aboriginal-directed healing initiatives which address the legacy of physical and sexual abuse suffered in Canada's Indian Residential School (IRS) System, including intergenerational impacts."

Less than two years after Prime Minister Stephen Harper's apology for the Canadian government's role in administering the IRS system, AHF funding has not been renewed in Canada's 2010 budget, leaving 134 foundation-funded healing projects across the country without the means to continue operating. Many organizations were forced to close their doors as of March 31, 2010, when the cuts took effect.

The Native Women's Shelter of Montreal (NWSM), not as unlucky as some others, lost a third of its funding due to the cuts and has been forced to let three staff members go, including its sexual assault counselor.

“Without the AHF funding, we can provide the basics like food and shelter, but there's a really high percentage of the women that come through that have been sexually assaulted. Now that we're getting our funding cut, we won't have that specialized employee anymore,” said Nakuset, the shelter's Executive Director.

Co-founder of the Native Youth Sexual Health Network, Jessica Yee, speaks to why the budget cuts came as such a big surprise to most people.

“It [the budget] was all covered up in nice language. And that's the scary thing about the Conservative movement in general. ...They're getting really good at using social justice language, or trying to use social justice language, to either fool us or to pretend like they give a shit when they don't. ...It's smart because it masks itself, but it's to the point where they're trying to use our own tools against us, so it's really important to dismantle that and see through it.”

Although the AHF's funding agreement forbids any form of advocacy, supporters of the foundation have written letters, signed petitions, and even engaged in a few demonstrations and direct actions to convince the Canadian Government of the importance of renewing their funding.

A December 2009 report on the evaluation of the AHF undertaken on behalf of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC) concluded that “[T]here is presently no equivalent alternative that could achieve the desired outcomes with the rate of success that the AHF has achieved.”

The report recommends that the government continue support for the AHF at least until the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA) process is complete in 2011. The IRSSA provides payments to former students who lived at one of 139 officially identified residential schools, the last of which closed its doors in 1996.

Half of the $199 million allocated to deal with residential school trauma is going to Health Canada's First Nations and Inuit Health Branch and half to the IRSSA.

While the latter will provide small amounts of financial compensation to IRS survivors, the former will provide health services to individuals. But neither of these will do the work that the AHF was doing: providing culturally relevant, community-based, non-governmental healing programs. Many communities formerly served by AHF-funded initiatives do not even have Health Canada services in close proximity, making reduced accessibility to services another problem brought about by tearing down a well-functioning network in favour of one run by the government.

“I looked at the Health Canada website, and the loops you have to jump through to access services is [sic] daunting,” says Crowder.

Much as with the AHF, she says, Canada seems to be prioritizing the individual over the community in the funding case of the First Nations University of Canada (FNUC) as well.

“They [the Conservative Government] continue to say that FNUC students can access post-secondary education. They're making it an individual thing, you know—students can choose where they want to go. But then they eliminate the choice by making sure the university [FNUC] is not funded,” says Crowder.

FNUC, formerly Saskatchewan Indian Federated College, was established in 1976, and has been around in its current incarnation since 2003, with campuses in Saskatoon, Regina, and Prince Albert.

In February 2010 the federal and Saskatchewan governments pulled over $12 million in funding from the university. Reasons given included allegations of questionable spending and delayed governance reforms. Due to the fact that FNUC has taken steps to address the requested changes (including a shared management agreement that gives the University of Regina financial control over the university), the Saskatchewan government's funding share of $5.2 million has since been restored, but the federal government has only restored $3 million of its initial $7 million to keep the university open until August 31, 2010, and has not committed to any further funding. Without federal funding, officials have said the entire university will close down.

Since March 2010, students at the Regina campus have staged sit-ins and marches to protest the school's potential closure. Professors have held lectures to demonstrate to federal Indian Affairs minister Chuck Strahl the importance of Indigenous-based education. One student has been sleeping in a teepee outside the university since mid-March and continues to do so.

In spite of these actions, lay-offs have already become widespread. On May 3, 2010, FNUC president Shauneen Pete announced that the Saskatoon campus was for sale, due to the institution's fast-growing debt.

Manipulating the timing of announcements crucial to First Nations' organizations funding considerations, using language that is misleading to many, and demonstrating a preference for non-Aboriginal-run institutions over the alternative, even when Aboriginal-run institutions are proven to be the best at what they do, are all governmental budget ploys that should not be seen as new by any stretch, according to both Yee and Crowder.

“What I find interesting about everything, though, is that people are surprised,” says Yee. “They [the Conservatives] live up to every single thing that they said they would live up to.”

According to Yee, Native and non-Native activists alike are now faced with the challenge of better organizing themselves.

“Compared to the right, I think the left is doing a really shitty job organizing its youth. ...You can see that in First Nations communities too. You look at who's leading the Indigenous people's movement in any other country besides Canada or the US, and it's always the young people. ...In Bolivia they can get a million people out [to a protest]. And it's mostly youth and elders who are leading the movement. ...In the western context we have such a silo effect of what issue to get involved in—either you're an environmental justice activist, or a reproductive justice activist, or a sexual health educator, or you're this, or you're that. ...But I think an Indigenous way of thinking is that it is related. I refuse not to talk about my culture at the same time as I make a decision about my body.”

“They've [Aboriginal people] got to get mobilized,” says Priscilla Settee, a Cree First Nations community activist, academic, and former teacher at FNUC.

“It's our only chance. But it's not just they, of course. It's not just Aboriginal people. It's all people. People are very confused. The general public. They are unable to analyze and think about what to do next. People are not ready for action. ... There's a lot of resistance to thinking radically, critically. There's resistance to unsettling the status quo. So I guess until they really feel it in places where Aboriginal people feel it, I'm afraid, you know, there's a big immovable mask.”

Maya Rolbin-Ghanie is a Montreal-based journalist and activist.

FNUIC 9b

First Nations Budget

An Olympic Failure

dawn — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 06:21:34 +0000

At least 137 Native women missing and murdered in BC since 1980

MONTREAL—The February 14 Memorial March for Murdered and Missing Women has taken route along Hastings street in Vancouver every year since 1991 to honour Vancouver's murdered women, as well as more than 68 women still missing from the city's Downtown Eastside (DTES). East Hastings St, which runs straight through the DTES, is often referred to as the poorest postal code in Canada, and is notorious for a highly visible level of homelessness, drug use and sex work.

Vancouver's City Hall confirmed its support this fall for the march at the insistence of DTES residents, but previously, the city, along with 2010 Olympic officials and the Vancouver 2010 Integrated Security Unit, attempted to change the procession's route or date to defer to the predicted flow of Olympics-generated traffic on Hastings Street.

The games begin today, February 12, two days prior to the march. Already, the Olympics have led to increased poverty, homelessness, and policing in possibly the poorest neighbourhood in Canada.

The epidemic of missing and murdered women in Canada has not improved since the inaugural march 18 years ago. In fact, it appears to have worsened, particularly for Indigenous women and girls.

Of 521 known cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women across Canada since roughly 1980, half have occurred in the last decade. BC has seen the worst, where, as of 2008, approximately 137 of those cases had occurred.

According to Walk4Justice activists, (a group made up largely of Indigenous women who hold annual walks demanding justice for their missing and murdered friends and loved ones), and the Native Women's Association of Canada (NWAC), the actual number of missing and murdered Indigenous women is much higher, and likely in the thousands. Underestimation, they say, is due to insufficient research funding, which is also a phenomenon of the last decade.

Craig Benjamin, a campaigner for Indigenous rights with Amnesty International, estimates that Canadian police only note victims' racial identity about 60 per cent of the time, and the information is often inaccurate when they do. Many officers do not see the relevance of the information in the first place. “If [victims] don't look Aboriginal in their eyes, then they don't record it,” he says.

According to the 2008 Greater Vancouver Homeless Count, almost 3,000 people in the area are homeless, a 22 per cent increase since 2005. Indigenous people make up 32 per cent of this population, though they make up just two per cent of the city's total population.

Front-line Indigenous human rights activist Gladys Radek, of Vancouver, has participated in the Walk4Justice for several years. While the 2008 Walk4Justice route went all-out (Walkers made a three-month trek from Vancouver to Parliament Hill in Ottawa) the month-long 2009 Walk last June saw 17 Indigenous women retracing the stretch of Highway 16 between Prince George and Prince Rupert, dubbed the "Highway of Tears," where so many of their relations had violently passed from this world.

“Once we got past Prince George,” said Radek, “it was really emotional because we were reaching the heart of the Highway of Tears. Lots of the women's spirits were with us as we were walking."

“You could feel there was no work being done for the family members. We were asking family members [up North] about certain organizations, and there were no answers for them up there so it was really disheartening. A real severe lack of support for any type of justice, equality, closure, or accountability. We're hoping to change that.”

Organizations from the grassroots Walk4Justice all the way to the United Nations have called on the Canadian government for a public investigation into the appallingly high number of unresolved, uninvestigated murders and disappearances of Indigenous women.

In November, 2008, the UN gave Canada an ultimatum to report back in a year on the status of more than 500 cases that "have neither been fully investigated nor attracted priority attention, with the perpetrators remaining unpunished."

Canada has not responded.

The problem of missing and murdered Indigenous women is systemic, and an extension of ongoing racist and sexist colonial policies such as the Indian Act. The issue is also country-wide, with the frequency of violence against Indigenous women growing in eastern provinces. BC, though, is still the site of the most alarming level of gendered and racialized violence toward Native women in the country.

Ironically, when deciding where to hold the 2010 Olympics, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) faced a choice between Pyeongchang, South Korea, and Vancouver. While South Korea pitched itself as the "peace" candidate, Vancouver sold itself as the "safety and security" candidate. The provincial government presented BC as a place where everybody gets along: rich and poor, rural and urban, Native and non-Native.

Increased Susceptibility to Homelessness, Trafficking

A June 2007 report by the Geneva-based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) found two million people worldwide have been forcibly displaced in the last 20 years to clear space for the Olympics. Vancouver has been no exception. The DTES has seen mass closure of social housing and low-income hotels, triggered by an effort to create more space for tourists and corporate investors.

Indigenous women have been at the receiving end of the city's clear priority of Games over homes: 45 per cent of homeless women identified as Aboriginal in the 2008 Greater Vancouver Homeless Count.

The precariousness of their living situation also leads to more Native women than the rest of the homeless population stating that they are involved in "illegal activities" for income. Most of these women said said they were involved in sex work.

This is reflected in other studies: Gang expert Michael Chettleburgh has found that 90 per cent of underage, urban sex workers in Canada are Aboriginal.

Canada is not ordinarily associated with violations like sex trafficking, but it was not even illegal here until 2001. The Olympics, however, have a long tradition of arriving hand-in-hand with a massive influx of prostitution and the pseudo-legalization of the sex industry for the benefit of businessmen and elite athletes. Again, Vancouver is no exception.

Former NWAC president Beverly Jacobs has stated that the organization has reason to believe that trafficking is playing a significant role in the continually high level of missing Indigenous women and girls, but the only body with adequate resources for an investigation of that caliber is the Canadian government, which has proven to be the least likely to implicate itself.

In Vancouver, trafficking has been historically associated with Asian and Indigenous women, beginning in the mid- to late-1800s as European colonization began. Today, both groups are still targeted much more than other population sectors.

“Vancouver is considered to be a hub for Pacific human trafficking... Traffickers will view the 2010 Olympics as the biggest opportunity for them in decades. Any time you have an influx of foreign tourists and money, you’ll see a huge demand for the sex trade," says Vancouver journalist Magda Ibrahim.

According to a report by Calgary-based Future Group, titled, Faster, Higher, Stronger: Preventing Human Trafficking at the 2010 Olympics, “There is a real risk that traffickers will seek to profit from the 2010 Olympics... This event could create an increased demand for prostitution, and also give an easy cover story for victims to be presented as ‘visitors’ by traffickers.”

Although the scale of trafficking within Canada is difficult to measure, it is likely much higher than RCMP estimates of six to eight hundred women per year.

Ottawa-based researcher Anupriya Sethi has identified trafficking triangles through which Aboriginal victims are moved: Saskatoon-Edmonton-Calgary-Saskatoon; Saskatoon-Regina-Winnipeg-Saskatoon.

"I don't know if there are international linkages," she says. "Once you're in Vancouver, where are you taken? Once you're in Toronto, are you taken to New York or do you go to Los Angeles? I don't know. It hasn't been explored."

“There’s a total myth that Aboriginal women either consent to or are born into the sex trade,” said Jo-Ann Daniels, interim executive director for the Metis Settlements General Council in Edmonton. “The average age of Aboriginal girls who are human trafficked is between seven and 12 years old.”

"Basically, their handlers start them in Vancouver," said Chantal Tie, a lawyer with the National Association of Women and The Law.

"They work for them there for a while, then they're sold to someone in Winnipeg and then to someone in Toronto, and so on down the line as they get moved around the country."

The RCMP's National Aboriginal Policing Service has expressed a desire to explore the issue further, but says it lacks the funding and human resources to do so.

Considering the extremely poor record of police investigations into violence against sex trade workers and Indigenous women in Canada, it is unlikely that any real attempt to check these practices during 2010 will take place.

Maya Rolbin-Ghanie is a writer active with the Missing Justice campaign in Montreal.

For up-to-the-minute Olympics resistance coverage, check out the Vancouver Media Co-op, and the 2010 Convergence website. Follow the VMC on twitter!

Missing and Murdered March

Missing and Murdered March II

Strangers Scour the Land

Maya Rolbin-Ghanie — Thu, 28 May 2009 05:28:11 +0000

The search for Maisy and Shannon continues

KITIGAN ZIBI ANISHINABEG–Maisy Odjick, 17, and her friend Shannon Alexander, now 18, vanished from Shannon's father's apartment in Maniwaki, Quebec, September 6, 2008. Both are from Kitigan Zibi, an Algonquin reserve adjacent to Maniwaki. Since September, neither the Kitigan Zibi Police Services nor the Sûreté du Québec has collected any evidence pertaining to the whereabouts of the two girls. When Maisy and Shannon vanished, their wallets and their money were left behind. The police are not ruling out the possibility that the two girls are "runaways." In addition, the police have repeatedly neglected to communicate with and report back to the two families. The little media attention this case has attracted may be attributed to the constant and determined efforts at media outreach by Maisy's mother, Laurie Odjick.

The two ground searches since the disappearance - December 7, 2008, and May 2, 2009 - were led by Search and Rescue Global 1; both times the Odjick family was the main organizer. According to Search Leader Lawrence Conway, the search for Maisy and Shannon is the first family-organized search he has ever taken part in. Normally, the police call rescue teams and arrange searches.

Indigenous women in Canada are five times more likely than other women to die as the result of violence. The official number of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada since 1980 is 520, two-thirds of whom were murdered and about one-quarter of whom are still missing. Roughly half of these murders and disappearances occurred in the last nine years and over 300 cases are as of yet unsolved. Indigenous grassroots activists and communities put the number of cases closer to 1800.

Amnesty International, the United Nations, and the Native Women's Association of Canada (NWAC) have all put forth comprehensive recommendations to the Canadian government to address the violence and discrimination faced by Indigenous women, but so far no action has been taken beyond a small amount of funding allotted for research.

NWAC President Beverley Jacobs points out that even working with a number like 520, taken proportionately that "would equal 18,000 women among Canada's white population. If there were 18,000 white women missing and murdered, it would be headlines. There would be something done immediately."

Maya Rolbin-Ghanie is an independent journalist and Indigenous solidarity activist living in Montreal. Dru Oja Jay is an editor with The Dominion.

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Mallard Duckling

Maya Rolbin-Ghanie — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 04:03:59 +0000

This baby Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) is among the most commonly found duck species in all of North America, and can be found almost anywhere in the world. This cute quack is happiest in the wetlands, because much vegetation, worms, insects, and snails live there, and these are some of her favorite things to eat. Generally tolerant of people, every so often this young Mallard takes advantage of human food sources, and gleans grain from their crops to supplement her diet.

Mallard Duckling

"And Then Let's Go For That Justice" Part II

hillarybain — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 10:22:02 +0000

Indigenous women demand respect in Ottawa

In honour of missing and murdered indigenous women, the Walk4Justice began in Vancouver on June 21, Aboriginal Day, and ended with a rally of about 250 on Parliament Hill on September 15.

The following article (part two in a series) explores the profound systemic flaws discussed during speeches at the rally; flaws that continue to encourage a deep-rooted Canadian prejudice against indigenous women, which is being supported by the 2010 Olympic Games and Canada's oil economy, specifically the Alberta Tar Sands.

Part one of this article can be read here.

MONTREAL – When it comes to women losing their homes, Alberta and BC are among the worst in Canada.

Alberta’s "successful" tar sands economy has created a severe lack of affordable housing, transitional housing and shelter spaces, particularly for women.

Women are often dissuaded from pursuing the resources and abilities essential to benefiting from the booming industry. Unequal wages, gender discrimination and sexual harassment are all significant deterrents. Those profiting most from the oil and gas workforce are predominantly male; current male-female ratios are 79 to 21 per cent for geoscientists and 96 to four per cent for trades.

Contributing to this imbalance is the fact that the exorbitant cost of rent makes it next to impossible for many women in Alberta to afford a home, unless their wages can compete with those in the oil industry.

In the oil town of Fort McMurray, where the housing crisis is rampant, none of the shelters accept minors. A report released by the region's Homelessness Initiatives Steering Committee found that some teenagers are resorting to sex-work in exchange for shelter for a night.

For those women who do manage to find a shelter, Alberta has no transitional housing program. As a result, there is often nowhere for them to go from a shelter, except back to the street.

“A longer-term transition house is what is needed, one that can be used for as long as people need. A house that has passion for the survival of a whole generation to get past this terrible point of life, in which they did not mean to live,” says Nicole Tait, a youth attending the Walk4Justice rally.

Under the Harper Conservatives, cuts to legal aid and income assistance, the closure of women's centres, political assaults on women's advocacy and support services, a lack of childcare support, cuts to welfare and changes to eligibility for welfare, the rising cost of living, and low-income work all contribute heavily to the significant disadvantage that many First Nations women face. The BC Human Rights Commission and Ministry of Women's Equality, both considered tools to fight discrimination, have also been eliminated.

The number of homeless in Vancouver doubled in 2005 and is predicted to triple due to the 2010 Olympic Games. These figures do not account for a much larger population that pays for sub-standard housing. According to the 2005 Greater Vancouver Homeless Count, there are 300,000 (official) homeless in Greater Vancouver, 30 per cent of whom are First Nations people, despite the fact that they make up just two per cent of the city's total population.

An endless host of Canadian development projects, from massive tar sands extraction sites to ventures intended to facilitate the 2010 Games, have rendered homeless many First Nations people who originally subsisted on their traditional territories or on government-assigned reserves. Many are compelled to move to large urban centres in search of work or to escape their consequently depressed communities.

The same pattern of forced displacement of First Nations communities and individuals is happening all over Canada.

For example, in Alberta, Indigenous people living on reserves close to tar sands plants, residing downstream from tailings ponds, or dwelling on land slated to accommodate government pipelines have a hard battle to fight: against health problems of all kinds – including soaring rates of cancer which are picking off their friends and family members at an alarming pace – and against a government that is constantly attempting to push them farther off of their land for the purpose of extraction and exploration. Many of these people, such as those in the northern Alberta communities of Fort Chipewyan and Fort MacKay, are fighting to stop the pollution and destruction of their homes, some are deriving what benefit they can from jobs in the tar sands industry, and others are leaving their reserves with little or no money to attempt a better life in Edmonton, Calgary, or Fort McMurray.

Similarly, the Olympic Games are acting as an unwelcome catalyst for many First Nations people living in BC, a number of whom have been embroiled in bitter land rights battles with the Canadian government for most of their lives. Rivers, mountains, lakes, creeks, and old-growth forests, along with trap lines, hunting grounds, salmon stocks, animal habitats, sacred sites, and important food and medicine harvesting areas are being substituted by tourist resorts and highway expansions, like the Sea-to-Sky Highway from Vancouver to Whistler. With vast areas of unceded land, on which indigenous communities depend for their general survival, being destroyed, many First Nations people have been, and continue to be, drawn into cities to seek out new modes of subsistence, often only to discover that they lack the resources necessary to make a living in foreign urban surroundings.

The Secwepemc people of Skelkwek'welt and the St'at'imc people of Sutikalh have long resisted the establishment of Sun Peaks and Cayoosh ski resorts (intended to attract and accommodate tourists, Olympic athletes and trainers) on their land. Powerful and well-thought-out demonstrations of their opposition have been disregarded, ignored and covered-up by the BC government in attempts to profit from a territory for which treaties were never signed.

Native Youth Movement (NYM) member Kanahus Pelkey of the Secwepemc and Ktunaxa First Nations recalls the tactics employed by Sun Peaks to facilitate the construction of their ski resort:

The province bulldozed our home on International Human Rights Day. They hired Sun Peaks employees to tear down our sweat lodges. So you get an idea what happens when Native people stand up and fight for their freedom. We announced it to the media, and all the corporate media, they showed up at Sun Peaks, but the roads were deactivated. They [Sun Peaks] made big, huge ice blockades so no vehicles could get through. And Sun Peaks resort has many, many snowmobile businesses, but all the businesses were given orders by Sun Peaks not to rent any snowmobiles to any media, or anybody that day.

The Secwepemc people, rendered homeless and faced with the threat of arrest if they continued living on their land, retreated, some to Vancouver. Many had endured previous arrests for similar involvements and did not want to risk imprisonment with no chance of bail.

First Nations women living in the city are more susceptible than men to losing their homes due to abuse or conflict with a spouse or caretaker upon whom they are financially dependent. Because women are more likely to have children to look after, and are less likely to feel safe on the street or in shelters where men are also present, many return to abusive relationships when there is no alternative available.

Across Canada, there are more women among the Aboriginal homeless population than are found in the non-Aboriginal population. According to Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC), 35 per cent of the Aboriginal homeless population in Greater Vancouver is female, compared to only 27 per cent among the non-Aboriginal homeless population.

First Nations women are also vastly overrepresented in Canada’s community of sex-workers, and continue to be brutally criminalized by the police and simultaneously marginalized and taken advantage of by society in general.

In 2003, Pelkey, forcibly separated from her baby boy, spent two-and-a-half months in prison for her involvement with the Sun Peaks protests. During her incarceration, she met many First Nations women who had been imprisoned for sex-work and drug abuse. Most of the women's stories involved sexual molestation during childhood. Many women had experienced these abuses in residential schools, while others were the children of residential school survivors.

Aboriginal rights lawyer and President of the NWAC Beverly Jacobs stresses that often police lack an understanding of the cycles of abuse that occur within Native communities, and, as a result, do not possess the empathy necessary to view women on the streets as part of the public. As such, they do not feel responsible for the protection of these women. Jacobs has worked with Amnesty International as a lead researcher and consultant on their report “Stolen Sisters: Discrimination and Violence Against Indigenous Women in Canada.”

The controversial BC Coalition of Experiential Communities (BCCEC), the first sex-worker co-operative in Canada, is the brainchild of sex-worker Susan Davis, who has been trying to pressure the government to create legal brothels for the upcoming Winter Olympics in 2010. Despite the decriminalization of sex workers being one of the BCCEC's primary motives, the issue is contentious both among Canada's political elite and among sex-workers themselves. The move had the support of Vancouver’s then-Mayor, Sam Sullivan, and VANOC (the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games), but has so far been refused by Canadian Justice Minister Rob Nicholson.

Tait finds it difficult to understand sex-workers who support the move, and does not envision the legalization of brothels solving the problem of police brutality and societal marginalization.

“They are [Vancouver is] basing their research on one woman’s point of view for creating [legal] brothels in the DTES [Downtown Eastside]. This woman [Davis] is a prostitute by choice who doesn't have to make a living from the streets. She says that she enjoys what she does. I never met one woman who said that they enjoy being a prostitute, they say that’s just the way things happened. Others are trying to make a living for their family, which includes young mothers who are trying to put food on the table for their babies.”

Tsimshian youth, co-ordinator of North Coast Enviro Watch and member of Native 2010 Resistance Dustin Johnson notes that the Olympic tradition of catering to the elite as a means of social control can be referred to as a policy of "sex, screens and sports," a phrase coined to describe the 1988 Seoul Games. A massive influx of prostitution, coupled with the pseudo-legalization of the sex industry for the benefit of elite athletes and businessmen, has always been an Olympic norm.

Johnson maintains that not all sex-workers even made a career choice to begin with.

"You actually see, at some of the elementary schools in Vancouver, sexual predators, just waiting around to try to kidnap young Native kids. Some of these kids end up in the sex-slave industry, they get shipped all over the world. This is the kind of industry that VANOC and the people that are organizing the Olympics in Vancouver are trying to continue.”

Jacobs, too, stresses that the issue of violence against Aboriginal peoples in general and Aboriginal women in specific is not a three-decade concern, but instead extends to the past 300 years. The crisis is one of historic proportions. A report she wrote for the Native Women's Association of Canada looked to the history of colonization, and how it has affected Aboriginal women.

“Because a lot of First Nations cultures were matriarchal, women have suffered the brunt of colonization,” says Jacobs.

Her studies reveal that white policymakers noted the remarkable strength of First Nations women, and found ways of demeaning it. Despite the fact that many clans, and by extension, the status of individuals, were once determined matrilineally, the Canadian government’s invention of the status card changed this: status became determined by the male alone, creating a severe disconnect between Native people and their cultures. The previously significant responsibility of men to act as protectors was also adversely affected by this forced shift, creating internal oppression in First Nations communities that is still very present today.

“The responsibilities and the roles that come with being a Native woman are very highly respected, or at least they were. [First Nations people are] still having to deal with the issues internally within our communities because we’ve learned those patriarchal values and we’ve learned them really well,” observes Jacobs.

About half-way through the colourful roster of speeches on Parliament Hill, one of Prime Minister Harper’s aids came to formally accept the women’s documented demands. Dressed all in grey, he gripped the bright pink folder firmly, saying, “I will deliver this to Mr. Harper” as the crowd murmured their skeptical thanks.

But Akwesasne Elder and Bear Clan mother Harriet Boots quickly brought people back to the core of the matter.

“Every person today has a lot of tears. Let’s make it our strength. Let’s go ahead and cry. Take it all out of our system. And then let’s go for that justice.”

Maya Rolbin-Ghanie is a freelance journalist, creative writer, and barista living in Montreal.

An original version of this article was published by Oil Sands Truth (Fall 2008 print issue).

Missing women's memorial, Vancouver, 2007

Missing Women

"And Then Let's Go for that Justice" Part I

Maya Rolbin-Ghanie — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 09:47:13 +0000

The Walk4Justice

This article is part one of two on the Walk4Justice.

OTTAWA – It was hard to miss the giant Mohawk and Iroquois flags painting the parliament buildings with their splashes of red, yellow, brown and blue. On September 15, a crowd of about 250 was gathered in Ottawa for the Walk4Justice Rally. Even at ten a.m., there was a strong, shocking feeling of possibility in the air. This feeling would only grow as the five-hour stretch of speeches progressed, making parliament feel much more like a sacred village square.

According to a Canadian government statistic, young Indigenous women are five times more likely than other women of the same age to die as the result of violence. In honour of missing and murdered indigenous women, the Walk4Justice began in Vancouver on June 21, 2008, Aboriginal Day. Many First Nations women, men and children participated from across the country, walking for 87 days, ending in Ottawa on September 15.

The journey began with a vigil at the notorious Pickton farm site, where confessed serial killer Robert Pickton murdered 30 women (many of whom were sex-workers from Vancouver, and a third of whom were Native).

Among the many powerful speakers at the rally in Ottawa was a group of First Nations women who have devoted their lives to unpaid, front-line work with women living in Vancouver’s poverty-stricken Downtown East Side (DTES).

Bernie Williams is a front-line worker, residential school survivor, and Matriarch in the House of the Raven. She spoke of a lack of support for the Walk from Vancouver as well as a less than smooth experience along the way.

"It’s been a long walk and a very emotional one. I would be lying to you if I said that everything was all rosy out there on this journey. It hasn’t been. Since we left BC, we’ve been followed. One of our women has been stalked...We have compiled names all through the nation, all through your territories. We’ve added another three more in the last couple of days."

The Walkers began with a list of 500 — a rough estimate of the number of missing and murdered First Nations women in Canada over the last three decades (76 of whom were from the DTES), and by the time they arrived in Ottawa, they had compiled a list of 3,000 women. Upon their arrival, there were three more women to add to the list, two of whom are teens from nearby Maniwaki recently found to be missing.

The aim of the Walk was to deliver the list of names to the Canadian government and demand public inquiries into the many violent deaths.

Also present at the rally was Aboriginal rights lawyer and president of the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC), Beverly Jacobs, from the Mohawk Nation Bear Clan in Six Nations Grand River. Jacobs has worked with Amnesty International as a lead researcher and consultant on their report "Stolen Sisters: Discrimination and Violence Against Indigenous Women in Canada." One of the many recommendations included in the report was that Canada should support research into the causes of violence against Indigenous women. There are currently no statistics on the number of missing and murdered Aboriginal women, only estimates. She noted that although Canada is aware that reports have been done, many have been shelved or ignored.

Seventy-four-year-old Mabel Todd, who has seen four of her family members disappear, participated in the entire walk, making it clear that she would not be ignored.

Cecilia, an Elder from Tofino, BC, cried while speaking of her missing granddaughter, Lisa Marie, who disappeared in 2002.

"My daughter and I have a candle vigil every year, the day she went missing. We light candles, give out posters, T-shirts, hoping that somebody will see. Who knows what happened to her."

Richie Dominic walked for his aunt, Ramona Wilson, who went missing in 1994 at the age of 16 on BC’s now infamous Highway 16. After ten months, her remains were found, but no one has been held accountable to this day, and there are countless cases just like hers.

"Justice would mean a final bit of closure," says Dominic. "This is what we need [pointing at the crowd]. We need numbers. We need to show Canada that we do care. That the country does care."

The speakers, who ranged from youth to Elders in their nineties, emphasized the fact that most of the cases they were addressing had not been taken very seriously by police or the media. When the missing or murdered women happen to be sex-workers, they are taken even less seriously and their disappearances or deaths are rarely, if ever, investigated to the point of resolution.

In a radio interview, Jacobs cites the case of Pamela George as an example of prevalent attitudes that act as obstacles to justice.

George was a 28-year-old mother of two who struggled with poverty and occasionally worked the sex-trade in Regina. She was murdered in 1995 by two white, male university students who picked her up, beat her severely and left her by the side of the road.

Testimony at the trial indicated that the two men had attempted to pick up another Indigenous woman before they had encountered George. The woman testified that when she had refused to go with them they had called her "Indian trash" and a "squaw slut."

According to a friend of one of the killers who also testified, one of the young men later bragged about picking up an "Indian hooker," saying "She deserved it. She was an Indian."

The case was tried before a white judge and all-white jury. The men were each sentenced to a short six years in prison. According to Amnesty’s Stolen Sisters Report, little attention was paid to the victim throughout the trial; her sex-work was the main focus. The Crown prosecutor told the jury to consider the fact that she was a prostitute, "far-removed from them," and the judge told them to bear in mind her profession when they considered whether or not she had consented to sexual activity. A Court of Appeal decision briefly considered the prosecutor and judge’s comments and concluded they "were not made for the purpose of conveying a negative view of the victim to the jury."

Amnesty International expressed concern that comments of this type might reflect social attitudes faced by sex-workers in general, and Indigenous sex-workers in particular.

Jacobs cites the case of Helen Betty Osbourne as an example of the attitudes of many police authorities, also standing in the way of justice.

Osborne was a Cree woman, kidnapped and murdered by four white men in 1971. A Manitoba Justice Inquiry later concluded that the Canadian Justice Authorities had failed Osbourne, and criticized a "sloppy, racially biased investigation" that took over 15 years, and brought only one man to justice. The inquiry concluded that police had long been aware of who had been responsible for the murder.

Thirty-three years later, when Osborne’s cousin was murdered, the police reaction was similar. According to the young woman’s family, officers showed up at two a.m., interrogated everyone present, and searched their home. It was only six weeks later, when the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs (AMC) held a press conference, that an investigation finally commenced. The former pow-wow dancer’s body was eventually found.

Walker Brenda Wilson explains why many families of victims eventually give up on police and the media:

"There’s a lot of barriers to face in finding your loved one. You have to prove to the authorities that your loved one is missing, that they didn’t just run away. And you also have to prove to them that they’re not all the same case…They each are an individual person, and they each have different cases…They need to be individuals, because when they left this world, they were individuals."

Wilson points out that many missing and murdered First Nations women have been stuck with the same label, which reads: "Highway of Tears," and not given much more thought. More than 30 women have gone missing or been found murdered on BC’s Highway 16 in the past 30 years. The RCMP has confirmed four murders and five disappearances linked to the Highway of Tears, only one of whom was non-Native.

Many families are very angry about how they have been treated by police, and object to having to wait a year or more in some cases for investigations to commence, if they do at all.

Seeing little progress in police investigations, BC private investigator Ray Michalko, a former RCMP officer, started probing into the cases at his own expense in 2006. Michalko has had to contend with numerous warnings from RCMP that he could be charged with obstruction of justice if he does not "tread carefully," almost ending his investigations more than once.

Walker Gladys Radek describes how front-line workers stand in for both police and media on a daily basis. Radek, like Bernie Williams, works front line in the DTES with homeless and poverty-stricken women, many of whom work in the sex-trade for survival.

"Families have approached us before they even go to the police. I remember families walking up to Bernie on the street: Have you seen my daughter, Have you seen my son? This is the kind of work she does and everybody knows it. She doesn’t get paid for what she does. None of us get paid for what we do. We work from our heart.”"

Maya Rolbin-Ghanie grew up in the woods and hopes to make it back there at some point. She currently studies life and works from Montreal.

The original version of this article was published in Oil Sands Truth (Fall 2008 print issue).

Walkers 4 Justice on Parliament Hill in Ottawa

Crowd Members at the Walk4Justice in Ottawa

Small Flags in the Ground

Maya Rolbin-Ghanie — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 10:54:22 +0000

Gold mining in Suriname's tribal communities

MONTREAL, QUEBEC–"I was 35 years old when the water flooded my village. I had sent my wife and my children away, but I wanted to see for myself if the water would really come...When we noticed that the water reached the cemetery, I went to look at my father’s grave and I went to tell my mother. We cried and we cried...Some of the coffins started floating on the lake," remembers Saramaka Elder George Leidsman in a 2007 court testimony. His village was only one of many Maroon communities forcibly relocated in 1963 to make way for a hydroelectric dam built to power the bauxite refining operations of US company, ALCOA.

Today, a people that have yet to let go of the great sadness that invaded their villages and permanently changed their way of life are being threatened yet again, this time by mining companies.

Suriname, a former Dutch colony situated along the northeast coast of South America, is almost entirely covered in rainforest. The area is the ancestral home of five indigenous peoples and six Tribal peoples – Maroons – totalling between 15 and 20 per cent of the population.

Maroons are the descendants of escaped African slaves who fought for and won their freedom from the Dutch colonial regime in the 1700s. Since then, they have maintained a distinctive culture based largely on a combination of African and indigenous Amerindian traditions.

Less than 30 years ago, Suriname was one of the wealthiest countries in South America. A military dictatorship, followed by a civil war, declining prices for bauxite (its main export) and the suspension of Dutch aid money left the country with considerable economic problems. In recent years, the government has been dividing and portioning off vast areas of the rainforest to multinational mining companies, claiming that mining is needed to finance foreign debt and stimulate economic growth.

At least 75 of the estimated 150 indigenous and Maroon villages in Suriname are located either in or very near mining concessions.

While the Surinamese government claims the rights to all "unencumbered" land as well as all the mineral resources below its surface, the Maroon Tribal peoples say they have a right of ownership and control over their traditional territory. This perceived right is based upon the struggle for freedom that was symbolically brought to an end in sacred treaties with the government in 1863.

According to a report released by the Forest Peoples Programme (FPP), an NGO that campaigns for the rights of indigenous forest-dwellers, the Maroon Tribes make no distinction between surface and subsurface rights. Their resources and land are viewed holistically and are intertwined with collective, ancestral and divine relationships that govern daily life.

Perceived threats to Maroon understandings of political and territorial autonomy are directly linked to fears of a return to the age of slavery.

Until 2007, when Suriname voted in favor of the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, it did not legally recognize any form of land rights for its indigenous or Tribal peoples. As stated in a report by the Nautilus Institute, the government has so far treated the Declaration the same way it has past treaties with the Maroons: as non-binding, "domestic political contracts."

"Suriname is a litmus test for why self-regulating standards don’t work," says Viviane Weitzner of the North-South Institute (NSI). According to Weitzner, without legal enforcement there is no guarantee that certain basic rights will be upheld.

Canadian mining interest has intensified in Suriname recently, mainly due to a vast increase in the price of gold in the last few decades.

In 1992, based on their claim of land ownership, the Surinamese government granted the Gross Rosebel gold concession to Golden Star Resources (GSR), a Canadian junior company. In 1994, a Mineral Agreement was signed between GSR and the Surinamese government granting exclusive exploration rights to the company.

Located at the centre of the 17,000-hectare Gross Rosebel concession is the community of Nieuw Koffiekamp, a N’djuka Maroon community of between 500 and 800 people.

The community and other surrounding communities affected by the concession were not consulted or even informed prior to its granting.

From its inception, Rosebel necessitated the relocation of Nieuw Koffiekamp in order to fully realize its potential: at least five open pit mines; about 1.8 million ounces of gold. The community, like many Saramaka villages, was already forced to relocate once for the building of the Afobaka Dam - the same dam that is now being used to power the mining operation that threatens to move them again.

An FPP report describes how elders, men, women and youth alike have testified that a second relocation would be equivalent to the cultural and social death of their community. So far, they have refused to move.

When GSR first began exploration in 1994, they constructed a camp less than one kilometre from the village. Soon after, community leaders reported that they were being denied access to their gardens, hunting and fishing areas, and locations where small-scale mining takes place. Small-scale gold mining provides a much-needed source of income for many of the villagers.

GSR security guards and the police working with them began using live ammunition to intimidate and frighten community members away from areas in which the company was conducting or planning to conduct exploration activities, according to an FPP member.

In 1996, Cambior Inc. of Montreal acquired a 50 per cent interest in the project.

In a meeting with the FPP, Cambior representatives stated that they did not wish to see the community driven off their land, preferring instead to convince them of the need to move instead. Cambior was not willing to accept the community’s right to give or withhold its consent to relocation.

The government and GSR have taken a less tactful position, stating bluntly that the rights of the companies by Mineral Agreement supersede any rights claimed by the community. GSR’s lawyer went so far as to describe community members as “squatters.”

The women of Nieuw Koffiekamp are among the most outspoken against the companies. As the primary caretakers of the agricultural plots around the village, they say they have been subject to harassment by company security and police. They say they are afraid to go to their plots with children. Some of the women were injured fleeing from shooting incidents.

GSR has denied all but one shooting incident.

In response to continued harassment, in 1996, the community blocked the access road to the mining camp. This lasted five weeks until Granman Songo Aboikoni (paramount Tribal leader) intervened.

A Gran Krutu (Great Gathering) of Indigenous and Maroon leaders held the same year demanded that the granting of concessions cease and activities in existing concessions be suspended until their land rights became legally recognized. Indigenous and Maroon leaders put aside long-standing conflicts and came together to condemn the practices of GSR and other companies with similar disregard for affected communities.

In 2006, Toronto-based IAMGOLD took over the Gross Rosebel project through its merger with Cambior.

As reported by Ivan Cairo of Caribbean Net News, gold production at the mine came to a halt in 2007 when angry workers walked out after salary negotiations failed to produce an expected collective agreement.

IAMGOLD claims that workers set up barricades and damaged 25 trucks and 30 all-terrain vehicles. The basement of the mill was also flooded by striking workers. After staging several strikes that same year, some wage increases were negotiated, and production returned to normal.

IAMGOLD is now known as the "main player" in Suriname, as stated by Weitzner, and holds many other significant concessions in the country.

Headley’s Reef, granted in 1992, around the same time as Rosebel came alive, is one of several concessions currently affecting those previously flooded and destroyed Saramaka villages.

Unlike the N’djuka, the Saramaka people have not yet been asked to re-relocate. But they were not informed of the mining either.

"I did not know anything about the concessions until we started to see people putting small flags in the ground in my village. They were from Canada. Later I saw a map and it showed that all of my villages are in a concession," remarked Head Captain Eddie Fonkie of the Abaisa clan of the Saramaka people in a 2007 court testimony against GSR.

Fonkie speaks sadly of his fellow villagers in Nieuw Koffiekamp.

"A few years ago the company and the government told them that they would have to move because they were on the gold. Some of the people there had to move when the dam was built. The Gaama [Tribal leader] asked me to talk with them about moving, but because I still have pain in my heart from when we all had to move before, I did not want to do this.

"Maybe one day someone will tell us that they [we] have to move again because we are on top of a gold mine, like what happened with the N’djuka... We worry about this all the time and especially when we see those little flags that the Canadians put in the ground."

In 2007 the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) issued the Saramaka People’s Decision against GSR, an unprecedented and binding decision for Suriname; the case recognized the right of a non-indigenous minority group to the natural resources within its lands. The decision means that Indigenous and Tribal people now have the legal right to prior and ongoing consent when it comes to the use of their lands.

The difference in policy is complicated, ambiguous, and operates on a case-by-case basis, at times offering compensation or "benefit-sharing."

When asked if the IACHR ruling has affected mining practices in Suriname for the better, an FPP member laughed bitterly, as though such questions were a mere formality.

In case there was ever any doubt, Fonkie points out what everyone in his villages already knows:

"Mining has brought very few benefits and many problems. What we need is security. If they mine here the people in the city and in Canada will benefit and the Saramaka will lose again.”

Maya Rolbin-Ghanie grew up in the woods and hopes to make it back there at some point. She currently studies life and works from Montreal.

Workers in the Gross Rosebel Concession

Tailing Pond at Rosebel Gold Mines

October Books

Moira Peters — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 03:29:14 +0000

New works by Bolaño, Lerch and Ohle

The Romantic Dogs
Roberto Bolaño
New Directions Press: 2008

Five years after his death, it’s hardly surprising that Roberto Bolaño’s name is becoming increasingly familiar in the English-speaking world. The lauded Chilean’s works reverberate with sex, exiled Latin Americans, literary obsessions, literary pretensions, violence, politics, and, well, more sex. While Bolaño is mainly known for his novels and short stories (The Savage Detectives being the best known), he wrote in prose only as a reluctant admission that, like many of his characters, poets earn one lousy living.

This collection of his poetry, the first to be translated into English, serves as an intriguing complement to Bolaño’s prose, but it probably won’t convert many readers who haven’t encountered Bolaño before. Although his romantic subject matter is well represented here, Bolaño’s novels are addictive largely because of the wild, ecstatic voices of his narrators. In his poetry, Bolaño takes on a more contemplative, detached tone that makes his poetry, if nothing else, less fun.

Most of the pieces in this collection are short vignettes that recall the loneliness and desperation of Bolaño’s formative years as an exile from Pinochet’s Chile. In front of this political backdrop, we find his preoccupation with love and literature. The short pieces give us some glances into Bolaño’s sense of black humour and satire: “Father, in the Kingdom of Heaven that is communism, is there a place for homosexuals?” (from “Ernesto Cardenal and I”). But it is the longer pieces that allow Bolaño to really be himself. One of the longest, “Visit to the Convalescent,” gives us a youthful narrator who has escaped from a fallen country to run wild in Mexico City while “the rest of the world’s cities are drowning in uniformity and silence.” Such sentiments show Bolaño at both his best and most irksome. These laconic verses make it nearly impossible to determine the depth of his irony and naivety. Bolaño’s writing is impossibly cool to the point that we are never sure whether the author is laughing at himself or his readers. In these short poems, Bolaño still manages to draw us in with his wanderer’s tales. Then once we are comfortable, he offers the occasional stab to the rest of the world who sat at home while he spent his life drifting from country to country, book to book, and love to love.

– Shane Patrick Murphy

Witness and Resist
Marilyn Lerch
Morgaine House: 2008

The very first poem in Marilyn Lerch's Witness and Resist makes clear what the poet feels a poem should accomplish: “to witness for beauty and resist despair.” This is a collection that confronts the state of the world with all the compassionate empathy and emotional activism essential to giving the individual a voice and sense of importance within that world. Lerch boldly takes on a wide range of personalities: Chilean tour guide Maria Luz, who has flashbacks to being raped and seeing her baby burned alive; dead soldier Joseph Terry Riordon, who "dutifully toured the First Sitting Duck Gulf War;" and widely looked-up-to intellectual role model Dick Clapp, who became a small town judge and "put a bullet in his brain." Lerch ups the ante by assuming the viewpoint of a dying man whose black skin is “shiny on knobs of bone:”

My life,
like the diamonds and zinc and oil
that lay under those black voids
on the old maps,
is being taken from me.

This powerful New Brunswick poet not only plays the empath, but unashamedly includes herself in a universe of vulnerability with a ten-page exploration of and letter to her father: "Your absence was our intimacy, so/ how could I not believe/ this profound indifference to life/ included me?" Although the narrators' unselfconscious tales do at times get lost in obscure references that over-shelter the greater implications of the work, any confusion is quickly surmountable. Fearless of dealing in darkness, it is no surprise that this wide-eyed work also catches sight of the light: "Yes,/ always the dark and/ new stars in the making,/ the bombs will fall, compassion/ always possible.”

— Maya Rolbin-Ghanie

The Pisstown Chaos
David Ohle
Soft Skull Press: 2008

Whatever one might think of Cormac McCarthy’s father-son doomsday travelogue The Road, it is a novel that may present as doleful an elegy for the debasement of the American family as anything yet written this century. In a related (but different) vein, The Pisstown Chaos, the zany and strangely beautiful new novel by David Ohle, exhibits none of McCarthy’s penchant for scenes of sad kinship at the end of the world as we know it, even as it mines our cultural moment of extreme uncertainty in the service of a similarly apocalyptic mode. Ohle’s novel is a family dystopia in a more eccentric key: it whizzes between the radically divergent fates of its characters, the formerly wealthy Balls clan, with scatological merriment, from one depredation to the next, like some strange unproduced episode of Arrested Development collectively written by Anthony Burgess, George Saunders, and the Marquis de Sade.

In so doing, Ohle frequently opens up space for trenchant satire in the form of short news stories and community bulletins, collagistically laid out before each chapter. As one begins: “An imp herder working one of the Reverend’s meadows is fit to be tied. He found his most productive female dead in her pen yesterday. The belly was scissored open, the teats cut, the heart carried off. The herder wants to blame stinkers for the latest raid on his stock. The incident is doubly sorrowful, coming so soon after the same herder discovered the wings of his favorite banty imp nailed to the stump of an oak. Neighbors testify that he now spends his time stalking the reaches of the Reverend’s property, pistol drawn, so anxious to shoot a stinker that he has accidentally killed three of his best stud imps.” The bulk of the story pits ordinary citizens against the “stinkers,” a parasite-ridden lower caste of zombies, while the nation’s despot is a political bloviator and reverend seemingly modeled after right-wing American talk show host Bill O’Reilly. The result is a weird and precious addition to the growing literature of the gloomy. Bleakness has never looked so rich.

— Robert Kotyk

The Coup in Context

dru — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 09:37:23 +0000

A look behind the removal of Barriere Lake's traditional government

The Algonquins of Barriere Lake continue efforts to get Indian Affairs and the Canadian government to uphold the law and recognize the community's customary governance code, as well as to respect the Trilateral Agreement.

Courtney Kirkby and Maya Rolbin-Ghanie are members of the Barriere Lake Solidarity Collective

#1 BLS - Geographical Location of Barriere Lake

#2 BLS - Housing Conditions

#3 BLS- Hydroelectric Dams

#4 BLS- Logging, Tourism

#5 BLS- Logging, Tourism

#6 BLS- Logging, Tourism

#7 BLS- Trilateral Agreement

#8 BLS- Scrapping the Agreement

#9 BLS- Leadership Interference

#10 BLS- Third Party Mismanagement

#11 BLS- Ousted Acting Chief Benjamin Nottaway

#12 BLS- Cannon Speaks With a Forked Tongue

#14 BLS- Demands

#15 BLS- Arrested While Waiting for Cannon to Obey the Law

#16 BLS- Keeping up the Pressure

A Nation of Carefully Selected Immigrants

dru — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 02:34:43 +0000

Liberal MPs abstain, leading to major changes to immigration policy

On March 14, Canada's Conservative government introduced a series of amendments to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA). Instead of being presented as an immigration bill, the new reforms were slipped into Bill C-50, the 136-page "budget implementation bill" that pertains to this year's federal budget. The government launched an ad campaign in hundreds of ethnic newspapers, at a cost of $1.1 million, touting the measures while they were still before Parliament. In addition, Stephen Harper's government raised the stakes for any opposition by making the bill a confidence vote.

If Liberal MPs had voted against the bill, along with the Bloc Quebecois and the New Democratic Party, it would have triggered an election.

While all opposition parties condemned the changes, the Liberals abstained en masse to avoid forcing an election. On June 10, with the seats of 80 Liberal MPs empty, Bill C-50 passed into law.

Vancouver resident, political science graduate, migrant justice campaigner, indigenous solidarity organizer and single mom Cynthia Oka notes that in spite of Citizenship and Immigration Canada's attempted infiltration of ethnic media for the purpose of defending the bill before it had even passed, there is opposition to be found in those same venues.

"Grassroots immigrant communities are speaking out against the bill, but they're not finding voice through institutionalized channels. Some ethnic media are taking a decidedly more critical angle of the bill, which is encouraging."

In Canada, there are three categories of immigrants: family class, independent or 'economic' immigrants (admitted on the basis of skill, capital and labour-market preferences) and refugees. Under the previous system, anyone who qualified to come to Canada would get in, though the process often took years. The new system will allow Immigration Minister Diane Finley and her department to prioritize some people over others. Applications that are not dealt with by the end of each year will be sent back. Under the new law, the minister has the right to reject an application without any court review, even after the established criteria have been met.

The reforms will allow Finley and future immigration ministers to issue quotas and restrictions on people based on their particular categories and countries of origin. Humanitarian and Compassionate applications no longer have to be examined if the applicant is outside Canada. The minister also has the authority to decide the order in which the applications get processed, regardless of when they are filed.

The government has cited a "backlog problem" in the processing of immigrants as the chief reason for implementing reforms that give the immigration minister unprecedented control. Harsha Walia of No One Is Illegal (NOII) notes that, “instead of getting rid of the inexcusably long waiting list by easing immigration bureaucratic controls, their solution is to give themselves the power to simply kick people off the list.”

The result is a decision based on the needs of the employers and industry, rather than family reunification or human safety. Further reinforcing the standard of employability by which immigrants to Canada are reviewed, are the 'improvements' to the country's Post-Graduation Work Permit Program, which Finley announced in late April. Previously, foreign students studying in Canadian universities were allowed to work in Canada for a year (or two, in certain areas) after their graduation. Once they had acquired a year of work experience, they often had to return home since it was difficult for them to have their work permits extended long enough to allow their applications for permanent residence to be settled. Now, students who complete a program of study of two or more years at an eligible post-secondary institution in Canada can qualify to stay and work in the country for three years. Toronto immigration lawyer and columnist Guidy Mamann sums up the logic behind this extension.

"Canada will have an immigration system whereby we can actually 'test-drive' the candidates before accepting them as permanent residents here."

This move, contrary to popular belief, is not merely beneficial to foreign students, but is likely to further promote the gap between those who can afford the higher tuition fees reserved for out-of-country students and those who cannot. Finley's "improvements" also serve to emphasize the particular kinds of people her department deems worthy of permanent residency in Canada.

A number of agreements signed in recent years signify an endorsement of indifference, prejudice and enmity toward migrants who do not fulfill their roles as labour market commodities. The Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA) was agreement implemented in 2004 between the governments of Canada and the US in which both governments committed to bar most refugee claimants at the US-Canada border in order to better manage the flow of migrants at their shared land border.

The North American Security and Prosperity Partnership(SPP), implemented in 2005, mandates the arming of border guards and a forceful increase in the number of border security initiatives to keep Canada, US and Mexico borders "closed to terrorism yet open to trade." There has been an exponential increase in the Canadian budget for "security measures"--estimated at over $24 billion since 2001. According to NOII Vancouver, Bill C-50 and the STCA allow Canada to reject up to 40 per cent of people seeking asylum.

Support for Bill C-50 came mainly from employer organizations and the business lobby. Critics say the Conservatives' treatment of immigrants sends the message that people without credentials and with lower income levels are far less likely to qualify for permanent residency in Canada, and if they do qualify they are often limited to being temporary workers in marginal, often abusive jobs where loss of employment can sometimes end in deportation. Canada has become an increasingly antagonistic environment for people from other countries who are seen as either a security threat or as an unwelcome foreign imposition.

Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day announced on May 6 that the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) had arrested 45 people alleged to be in the country illegally.

"This large-scale operation protects the integrity of our immigration program and reinforces the security and prosperity of Canada," said Day. "The government of Canada continues to take this issue very seriously and remains committed to ensuring that those who wish to live in Canada do so according to our laws and by respecting the proper legal channels."

NOII Vancouver observes that, “This is particularly revolting in a context where the Canadian government and Canadian corporations actively participate in the creation and reinforcement of a system of global displacement of migrants and refugees who are fleeing poverty, persecution, war and corporate exploitation of their lands.”

Canada's own history (and contemporary reality) of war, persecution and corporate exploitation of land also comes into play. On June 4, while Finley was speaking at the Hotel Omni in Montreal, Samantha-Lee Chew Quinn of Montreal's South Asian Women's Community Centre (SAWCC) addressed a crowd of demonstrators who were denied access to the conference.

"This cannot be said often enough. We are a country of immigrants, but we must also keep in mind that Canada as a nation has been built on the dispossession of the indigenous people. Canada owes its international reputation to all who dwell here but this minority government wishes to ignore the wishes of the people."

Journalists from The Dominion and Al Jazeera were barred from attending the conference. Select members of the press were granted access.

On April 4, Finley addressed the House of Commons, claiming that, "We were able to welcome 430,000 new Canadians last year to this country, the highest in over 100 years." In fact, every year since coming to power, the Conservatives have reduced the number of permanent residents admitted to Canada. According to Liberal Citizenship and Immigration Critic Maurizio Bevilacqua, the government has cut the total number of people by 36,000 over the last two years.

"This misinformation campaign is really hurting the credibility of the process," said Bevilacqua.

While the percentage of permanent residents in Canada is decreasing, there is an increase in the number of temporary migrant workers without basic rights. In Canada today, the number of people admitted each year on temporary work visas is greater than the number admitted as permanent residents.

Finley's newfound right to impose different migrant quotas on different countries has been compared to previous racist legislation, like the head tax that was once applied to all Chinese immigrants, or the Chinese Exclusion Act that was passed on Dominion Day, July 1, 1923. Until 1947, when the act was repealed, the Canadian Parliament excluded all but 50 Chinese immigrants from entering Canada.

The Chinese-Canadian community viewed this law as the ultimate form of humiliation, especially given that Canada's attempts to restrict Chinese immigration to Canada began in 1885, with the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railroad (CPR) and the resulting shift in the needs of Canada's labour market.

The Canadian Conservatives' racist Continuous Journey Law, passed to discourage Indian immigrants from entering Canada, was responsible for the Komagata Maru incident of 1914, where 20 people from India were shot dead by British authorities for challenging Canadian legislation.

Ukrainian-Canadian internment, part of the confinement of "enemy aliens" in Canada during and after the First World War, kept about 5,000 Ukrainian men of Austro-Hungarian citizenship in internment camps.

The Harper government has made announcements to acknowledge past injustices and compensate people both directly and indirectly affected by immigration policies of the past, but often to the dissatisfaction of many. For example, when the prime minister offered an apology in 2006 for the head tax once paid by Chinese immigrants and a redress of $20,000 for those who were alive at the time to pay it (an estimated 20 Chinese Canadians who paid the tax were still alive in 2006), many were critical of the apology. Peter O'Neil of the Vancouver Sun noted that “factions of the Chinese-Canadian community were set to do battle as the federal government announced a head tax redress plan that doesn't provide direct compensation to individuals, and their descendants, who suffered because of racist Canadian laws.” The Chinese-Canadian community continues to fight for an acceptable redress from the Canadian government.

According to Oka, what is needed in order to counteract the duplicitous Bill C-50 is "a mass and visible response of people, organizations and communities saying, 'no.'"

"A big part of that has to do with making immigrants, and the work they do, more visible. It is not a bill that is happening in a vacuum. It's happening in a context of securitization and hyper neo-liberalism. The war on terror, the Olympics, the tar sands--it's all connected, and C-50 makes perfect sense when considered in that web."

Anti-C-50 demonstrators

Samantha-Lee Chew Quinn

Finley Attendees Regard Protesters

"It's All About The Land"

hillarybain — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 13:07:50 +0000

Native resistance to the Olympics

"We are preparing to disrupt the Olympics any way that we can. We want to let the world know that our land is not for sale," said Kanahus Pelkey, at a February 1 talk held at the Native Friendship Centre in Montreal.

It was one of many stops on an extensive speaking tour of the Great Lakes and East Coast regions of Canada. The speakers included Pelkey, of the Secwepemc and Ktunaxa First Nations, and Dustin Johnson, of the Tsimshan First Nation -- both members of the Native Youth Movement (NYM) in British Columbia. The packed room saw many people sitting on the floor and standing for several hours.

The aim of the tour was to raise awareness about Native resistance to the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, while underlining the importance of restoring traditional Indigenous knowledge and arousing a sense of responsibility in First Nations youth to defend and maintain their people and territories.

The quickly-approaching mega-sporting event is acting as an unwelcome catalyst for many First Nations people living in BC, a number of whom have been embroiled in bitter land rights battles with the Canadian government for most of their lives. Vast areas of unceded land that Indigenous communities depend on for hunting, fishing and general survival are at risk. Rivers, mountains and old-growth forests are being replaced by tourist resorts and highway expansions spurred by the 2010 games. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent to build new resorts and expand existing ones in order to attract and accommodate tourists, Olympic athletes and trainers.

Indigenous communities in the Interior and on the coast of BC, including the Secwepemc people of Skelkwek'welt and the St'at'imc people of Sutikalh, have long voiced their opposition to the establishment of Sun Peaks and Cayoosh ski resorts on their land. Strong and organized shows of resistance have been disregarded, ignored and covered-up by the BC government in attempts to capitalize on territory for which treaties were never signed. One of many examples of this occurred in 1990, when the province began an expansion of Highway 99, upgrading a logging road that cut through the Melvin Creek watershed. In order to complete this project, it was necessary to expropriate a portion of the Mt. Currie reserve. When the Lil'wat people of Mt. Currie blockaded the road, 63 arrests were made and highway construction continued. Not long after that, the government announced it was seeking proposals for a ski resort in the area -- a project that would only be made possible with the expansion of the highway.

Plans for the Cayoosh Ski Resort on St'at'imc territory were begun in 1991 by Nancy-Greene-Raine Resort Consultants Inc. (Greene-Raine is an Olympic medalist and former board member on Vancouver's Olympic Bid Committee.) What many refer to as a 'camp' was set up at Sutikalh in May 2000 to stop construction of the $530-million ski resort. Eight years later, Sutikalh is one of the only re-possessed Territories where people live 365 days a year, even in February, in five feet of snow. It is a village and not a camp, far from the government-sanctioned reserves.

One NYM member remarks: "It is a strong point of Indigenous resistance and serves as a great example to Native people that we can still survive on our land, free of the system.

"Sutikalh needs more attention. The resort is still planned for the area. Many times the word is not spread about the struggle on the land because all those involved are on the land where there is no form of electrical communication, so a network must be put in place to help give an international voice to those isolated places that need the most support and resources." *

Sun Peaks Ski Resort, on the other hand, has forcibly pushed ahead with construction on Secwepemc territory, including the thorough clear-cutting of mountains to make way for ski runs, development on the drainage basin for commercial and residential real estate, and an 18-hole golf course. Invaluable mountain lakes, creeks, trap lines, hunting grounds, salmon stocks, animal habitats, sacred sites and important food and medicine harvesting areas have been destroyed.

"Right now they're using recycled sewage waste to make man-made snow for their ski resorts," says Pelkey.

There have been over 70 arrests in the fight against Sun Peaks. Most of these have been elders, women and youth from the NYM.

"The province bulldozed our home on International Human Rights Day. They hired Sun Peaks employees to tear down our sweat lodges. So you get an idea what happens when Native people stand up and fight for their freedom. We announced it to the media, and all the corporate media, they showed up at Sun Peaks, but the roads were deactivated. They [Sun Peaks] made big, huge ice blockades so no vehicles could get through. And Sun Peaks resort has many, many snowmobile businesses, but all the businesses were given orders by Sun Peaks not to rent any snowmobiles to any media, or anybody that day," said Pelkey.

A log cabin that the Secwepemc had built on the outskirts of Sun Peaks to fight encroachment on the untouched land from other directions "was burnt down to the ground," she said.

The Secwepemc people, rendered homeless and faced with the threat of arrest if they continued living on their land, retreated. Many had endured previous arrests for similar involvements and did not want to risk imprisonment with no chance of bail.

When fresh ski trails were inaugurated shortly thereafter, the public did not hear about what had come to pass between the Secwepemc First Nation and the B.C. government. The provincial and federal governments have refused to accept Aboriginal title or even enter into negotiations to create co-jurisdiction, despite legally binding promises to do so.

The Secwepemc held a protest at the Sun Peaks Resort on this season's opening day, November 17, 2007. As well as protesting the resort, they also called on the Austrian National Ski Team to boycott Sun Peaks because of the many human and Indigenous rights abuses the resort continues to perpetrate. The team had chosen Sun Peaks as a training facility leading up to the 2010 Games. Despite being confronted by Arthur Manuel of Indigenous Networks on Economies and Trade, who visited Austria in June of that year to expose the team to the abuses taking place on Secwepemc territory, Austria opened the 2007 ski season by formally inviting Felix Arnouse from the Little Shuswap Indian Band (representing few, according to an international statement issued by the Skwelkwekíwelt Protection Centre) in a media stunt to conceal the opposition of the Secwepemc First Nation.

In what many First Peoples see as an additional display of public disrespect and mockery of their cultures, the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC) created a trio of Olympic mascots that happen to be misappropriations of beings sacred to many Native people: a Sasquatch, a sea-bear and an animal guardian spirit.

"They know that's the way that it's going to make money. People want to come from all over the world, 'Oh, Native American, oh, what are the Native Americans doing?' But we want them to know that we're protesting," says Pelkey.

According to the 2005 Greater Vancouver Homeless Count, there are 300,000 (official) homeless in Greater Vancouver, 30 per cent of whom are First Nations people, despite the fact that they make up just two per cent of the city's total population.

"The UN human rights index will show Canada [ranked] right near the top, but registered Status Indians will be in the 50s, near any third world country," says Pelkey.

The number of homeless in Vancouver is predicted to triple by 2010 due to the large-scale closure of social housing and low-income hotels in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (DTES). Closures have been spurred on by the Olympics in an effort to create more space for tourists and corporate investors. Three hundred low-income housing units have been lost in the last two years alone due to rent increases. (The province of B.C. does not impose rent controls.) According to the 2001 Canada census, over 126,000 people in Greater Vancouver are at risk of homelessness.

Dustin Johnson traces the Olympic tradition back to ancient Greece in identifying the birth of current patterns of marginalization: "All the lower classes, slaves and women were prohibited from participating... You go back that far, you can trace exactly the kind of effects that imperialism has had on our people... The worst forms of colonial culture are being promoted by the 2010 Olympics. Crass materialism, selfishness, outright greed. It's dangerous -- [if] you maintain these cultures, you maintain a disconnection from our territories, from our land, from the spirit world and from our cultures."

A June 2007 report by the Geneva-based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) found that two million people worldwide have been forcibly displaced in the last 20 years to clear space for the Olympic Games.

When deciding where to hold the 2010 Olympics, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) faced a choice between Pyeongchang, South Korea, and Vancouver. While South Korea pitched itself as the 'peace' candidate, Vancouver sold itself as the 'safety and security' candidate, presenting the province of BC as a place where everybody gets along: rich and poor, rural and urban, Native and non-Native. Crafting just such an image, Mayor Sam Sullivan's November 2006 innovation, "Project Civil City," proposed to eliminate homelessness, the open drug market and the incidence of aggressive panhandling, with the goal of reducing all of these by 50 per cent by 2010. There have already been severe security crack-downs on the street; however, in an effort to accomplish this goal on time, over 10,000 police, military and security personnel will occupy Vancouver and Whistler during the Games, creating what many First Peoples have come to perceive as nothing short of a police state.

"You may think that Canada is a free country, but to us it is not. When you go out into the city, it's no different than prison, because the police can come and arrest you at any time," says Pelkey.

In 2003, Pelkey, forcibly separated from her baby boy, spent two and a half months in prison for her involvement with the Sun Peaks blockades. During her time there, she met many First Nations women who had been imprisoned for prostitution and drug abuse. Most of the women's stories involved sexual molestation during childhood; many women had experienced these abuses in residential school environments, while others were the children of residential school survivors.

The Olympic tradition of catering to the elite as a means of social control can be described as a policy of "sex, screens and sports," a phrase coined in reference to the 1988 Seoul Games, according to Johnson. A massive influx of prostitution, coupled with the pseudo-legalization of the sex industry for the benefit of businessmen and elite athletes, has always been an Olympic tradition, the Seoul Games and the 2004 Games in Athens being prime examples.

Among those who continue to be brutally criminalized by the police and simultaneously marginalized and taken advantage of by society in general are the city's sex workers, a community in which First Nations women are vastly overrepresented.

There are currently 500 (documented) First Nations women missing across Canada, 76 of whom are from BC.

"They're not all completely dysfunctional and degraded human beings," said Johnson. "Some of them are from good families, who've just been kidnapped outrightly by the most depraved, colonized peoples.

Meanwhile, the BC Coalition of Experiential Communities (BCCEC), the first sex worker cooperative in Canada, has been attempting to pressure the government to create legal brothels for the upcoming Winter Olympics in 2010. The move had the support both of Mayor Sullivan and VANOC, but has been refused by Canadian Justice Minister Rob Nicholson. Despite the decriminalization of sex workers being one of the BCCEC's primary motives, the issue is controversial both among Canada's political elite and among sex workers themselves.

Pelkey and Johnson stressed that their concerns are about much more than the 2010 Olympics and its effects. They acknowledged that "the Olympics will come and go," choosing instead to emphasize the fact that this globalized event can be used as a powerful tool for mobilization. Drawing attention to First Nations resistance, dating back to the 15th century and very much alive today, is among their top priorities. According to Johnson, Native resistance to the 2010 Games grew significantly following the death of Aboriginal Rights activist and respected Elder Harriet Nahanee in February 2007. The 73-year-old Pacheedaht woman died a week after serving a prison term for her protest of the Olympic-driven Sea-to-Sky Highway expansion, causing an uproar among youth in Canada's Native activist community.

Indeed, some of the effects of the powerful, growing Native opposition to the Games can be observed in the increasingly restricted access to Olympic events leading up to 2010. Due to the consistent disruption of VANOC/ IOC-organized celebrations by protests and demonstrations, many high-end hotels are now reserved exclusively for corporate sponsors like Visa and Coca Cola, and are entirely closed to the public.

In one of Vancouver's better-known anti-Olympics rallies held in February 2007, VANOC and the Vancouver Board of Trade were celebrating the unveiling of a "three-year countdown clock" in the downtown business district. Native people from all over B.C. participated in an anti-Olympics rally at the event, together with non-Native members from the Anti-Poverty Committee (APC). In a move garnering much sought-after media attention, a masked protester jumped on stage and grabbed the microphone from a VANOC official, shouting "Fuck 2010! Fuck Your Corporate Circus!" before being cut off and arrested.

Non-Native shows of solidarity with the First Nations anti-Olympic movement continue to grow, evident by the emergence of demonstrations such as the first annual Poverty Olympics, held on February 3 in Vancouver's DTES, with staged events like the 'poverty-line high jump,' 'the welfare hurdles,' and 'the broad jump over bedbug-infested mattresses,' to name a few. The objective was to embarrass the province into taking action against increasing poverty rates. Among other events being organized for the purpose of strengthening essential connections between Canada's First Nations and outside communities is the Massive Convergence scheduled for February 2010. Thousands are expected to arrive in Vancouver, many coming all the way from Mexico, for the purpose of banding together to counteract Canada's racist policies, to come up with solutions, and to commit to action.

Pelkey remarks that many non-Native people she has encountered on the tour have expressed bewilderment at what the best way to show their support might be.

"It's all about land and that's what everyone has to understand here," she replies. "It's about land and freedom. Non-Indigenous people should support that. Not always just the physically being there in the communities, sometimes that might be intrusive... understand the Nations that you're in, know what Nation you are occupying... and respect that."

"Building a collective, open movement from the ground up," adds Johnson. "That's what really needs to happen, in a lot of people's opinions and their beliefs, and it's really helping because it's promoting the culture of the human."

*On May 1 the eight-year anniversary of the re-possessed Sutikalh territory will be marked with an annual gathering. Anyone wishing to show support is welcome and encouraged to come. For more information, write to nymcommunications [at] hotmail.com.

Cayoosh Mountain Range

Kanahus Pelkey

What in Tar Nation?

dru — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 09:12:22 +0000

Life among the tar sands

We leave Fort McMurray and hitch a ride to Fort MacKay, a Native community 40kms north, where we stay for three days.

Celina, the elder with whom we stay, speaks of the trap lines from which she and her husband Edward once gleaned a life, and of the bushes teeming with berries that tickled this land before the tar sands plants opened, and stole their land, along with the health of the fish and animals. She lists the kinds of berries: raspberries, high bush cranberries, Saskatoon berries. She lists them off in circles, repeating the names, once, twice, three times, drawing attention to the abundance that she has no pictures to prove. She pauses after each name, breaking in remembrance to taste each one.

We talk about quality of life. About how apples and tomatoes, rumour has it, aren't as robust, tasty or nutritious as they were in our parents' generation and that our parents' apples and tomatoes didn't measure up to those of previous generations either. Oranges and celery; mangoes and carrots; fish, moose; the vitamins of life. I read an article about it that recites percentages, that recaps parentages.

Since the Alberta government implemented its Mineable Oil Sands Strategy in 2005, its priorities have been easier to justify and enforce: the area has been declared a "co-ordinated zone within which mining has the highest priority; policy is in place that specifically stipulates wildlife in the tar sands zone will not be protected before or during mining, "according to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

Young people, old people and people in-between are dying of cancer. The air here is laced by unrelenting stacks. Oil and water meet but refuse to coalesce in harmony. Like Celina, the people of Fort MacKay who live upstream from the plants get their drinking water from a source other than the river. Celina doesn't trust the water anyway and has met with oil plant representatives and observed for herself their unwillingness to drink tap water. As a result of one such meeting, Syncrude agreed to provide and pay for all the bottled water that she and her husband can drink. She smiles when she tells us that they hate her big mouth. The people living downstream from the plants, most notably in the isolated Native community of Fort Chipewyan (farther north and only accessible by plane), draw water directly from the Athabasca and are the most affected. Five cases of a rare cancer of the bile duct, cholangiocarcinoma, have occurred in Fort Chip's population of 1,200 in the past five years. Normally, only one in 100,000 people contract it. Years ago, Celina tells us, white, non-native people in the neigbouring town of Fort McMurray complained of difficulty breathing, and of green-black, deadly smoke being emitted from a Syncrude plant. As a result, the plant was closed down.

She shows us pictures, not of high-bush cranberries, but of people she's known, and some she's loved. She tells us about her eldest son, who died six years ago. She speaks of how good-looking and kind he was. The neigbouring town of Fort McMurray, where he died, seems almost entirely populated by oil rig workers, or by those in close association. The town has seen massive growth in recent years: more people, more trucks, more drugs, violence and money. Before her son was stabbed in the heart by somebody she doesn't know, Celina knew it had happened.

Our last morning in Fort Mackay we wake up to find that Celina has not returned from Bingo the night before. Just as we're beginning to worry, she arrives. She has spent the night in the hospital with her youngest son, Murray. "I think he ate a bad hamburger," she says. "Maybe food poisoning," she seems to hope. I find myself hoping as well. How serious can food poisoning be? White people who eat in fancy restaurants get it, so it can't be fatal. "The barbecue was brand new," she says. "You can't just cook meat on a brand-new barbecue. There are toxic chemicals all over these things--you have to get the factory off of it before you use it to cook with." She shakes her head at the floor and places her hand on the kitchen table to steady herself. "I don't trust other people's cooking. I don't trust it unless I've cooked it myself. I just don't trust it at all." She continues to shake her head, sadly. "A lot of people don't have a clue. They don't know how to cook a burger right. The woman who cooked it didn't even know that you can't just buy something from the store and use it right away. She probably had no idea. Half the time people have no idea they're eating poison," she says.

We meet Billy in the only restaurant in Fort Chip. He works for Parks Canada as a firefighter, away from home. On days off, he has a few drinks. He drinks and has a lot to say. He tells us of his job at a tar sands plant, how it lasted three months. "They clear cut these huge areas," he says, "but instead of giving it to the elders for firewood or something like that, they just bury it all underground with their huge machines." He raises his voice in anger. "They've taken fish from this river with sores and puss all over them. They've even found fish with two heads," he says, eyes wide. "Indians are supposed to live to 100," he smiles, "but I know sooner or later, I'm going to catch something." He is well-built, athletic, and seems healthy to me. "These plants know exactly what they're doing," he says. "They don't care if they kill us all off. If we survive, it's a bonus, but if some of us die of cancer, oh well." I find myself wanting him to become the community activist, the one who makes the noise. He's got it; he should start something. "I buy all my food in the store. I don't touch any wild meat," he says. "Would you eat a fish with puss all over it?" When we ask if he drinks the water, he nods, solemnly. "My baby bathes in it."

The fish plant in Fort Chip, not surprisingly, has gone straight downhill in the last 10 years. But the biggest problem, according to one employee, is the lack of fishermen. Apparently the government is making it harder and harder to get a fishing license. People can't afford to fish, and so they don't. Many believe that this is a government tactic, to keep the actual number of sick fish quiet.

Billy invites us to sleep at his house and we meet his wife and three-year-old daughter. He is generous with his home and his food and insists that we help ourselves to anything, that when he visits Montreal he will expect the same.

In the morning Billy seems to have lost some steam. He seems dejected and less eager to talk about the tar sands. But when we show him a video interview with Celina he pulls his chair up close and leans in to hear. He seems to agree with his entire body. On-screen Celina says: "Once they take all the oil out of this place, what are our kids going to live on? You can't drink oil. You can't eat money."

"She knows what she's talking about," he says when it's over, shaking his head. "But what can you do?" He exhales, leans back in resignation and pats his daughter's head. I can see him thinking and I hear his outrage shifting back into motion by the sound of his breathing and the grinding of his jaw. He continues to stroke his daughter's hair. After a while, he says, "You know, maybe I will get some guys together and start something." He sits up straighter. We shake hands to say goodbye. When the door is closed I lose sight of everything but Billy and his daughter and a sad part of me wants him to leave while he can.

Mackay Sky

For Many Women, Alberta's Boom a Bust

dru — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 02:30:15 +0000

Rising housing costs, lack of alternatives lead to precarious situations

Driven by the tar sands, Alberta's white-hot economy continues to make headlines. But the gendered repercussions of the province's boom are often neglected, understated, or altogether denied.

Alberta's tar sands operations have made the province an attractive point of relocation for many in the last couple of decades. A large number of jobs have been created, many paying six-figure salaries. Other industries, most notably the service sectors, have had to compete with these salaries in a struggle to retain workers. As wages have been pushed higher in order to lure employees, rent has increased as landlords capitalize on the increases in income. Those without the resources or skills to tap into Alberta's renowned boom and profit from it are the most likely to have to deal with its negative consequences.

In the case of the tar sands, women have often been discouraged from pursuing the very resources and skills necessary to capitalize on the booming industry.

This is due in part to many female workers' experiences with sexual harassment, gender discrimination and unequal wages. Sixteen years ago, Mobil Oil's first female landman, Delorie Walsh, submitted a claim of gender discrimination, a poisoned work environment and unequal pay. She was finally compensated in October 2007.

Those benefiting most from the oil and gas workforce are male. For example, current male/female ratios are 79 to 21 per cent for geoscientists and 96 to 4 per cent for trades.

The significant gendered imbalance of access to jobs means unequal access to housing. Observers say this has led to a steady decline in quality of life for women. "The boom is great if you're a CEO in downtown Calgary," says Edmonton NDP MLA Ray Martin. "Saskatoon is now experiencing a mini-boom too. But this means that more and more people are falling behind." The "successful" economy has created an urgent lack of affordable housing, transitional housing, and shelter spaces, particularly for women.

Women tend to be more susceptible to losing their homes due to abuse or conflict with a spouse or caretaker upon whom they are financially dependent. Because women are more likely to have children to look after, and are less likely to feel safe on the street or in shelters where men are also present, many return to abusive relationships when there is no alternative shelter available.

This is one of the reasons why men make up the more visible segment of homeless populations, says author Susan Scott. Earlier this year, Scott interviewed over 60 homeless women across Canada about their lives. She is critical of the limited definition of the term "homeless."

"If a woman is sleeping with her landlord to maintain a roof over her head, then she is homeless," says Scott. "Other women will do it for money for drugs, to medicate a trauma that they've suffered which has gone untreated--they are also homeless. Others will hang out in a bar, hoping for a bed and a safe place--they are also homeless."

The Women's Emergency Accommodation Centre (WEAC) in Edmonton is the most well known of less than a handful of women's shelters in the city. It can accommodate just 75 women per night, and there are generally 25 to 30 women staying there for a longer term, which means fewer beds available for those seeking emergency shelter.

Amy Gillis, an inner-city physician in Edmonton, says there are few other options for women seeking shelter. "There's the George Spadie Centre, but you usually have to be intoxicated to go there. There's the Hope Centre, but they have far fewer spaces available for women than men. There are not enough absolute spaces for women, and there is little stability in these places."

The shelter situation in Fort McMurray is grimmer still. Currently, none of the shelters there accept minors. A report released this month by the region's Homelessness Initiatives Steering Committee found that some teenagers are resorting to prostitution in exchange for a bed or couch for the night.

Jan Reimer, Provincial Co-ordinator of the Alberta Council of Women's Shelters and a former mayor of Edmonton, says the need for spaces far outstrips supply. "Last year, we served 13,000 women and children. On top of that, 25,000 could not be accommodated and 15,000 simply could not find a place to stay. Only four shelters in Alberta have all of their beds funded by the province. The capacity really needs to be increased."

Part of the reason there are so many more women and children in need of shelter than there is shelter space is that Alberta has no transitional housing program. As a result, there is often nowhere for them to go from the shelter, except back to the street. Establishing a good transitional housing program would help women dealing with trauma, or legal issues, but more importantly, it would buy time, which is what many need most. "A lot of women can't find a place to live, due to a lack of references, or a bad history with landlords. What they need is physical support in the community," says Gillis.

Affordable, quality child care is one indication of a community's support of women. A lack of child care can result in women's inability to access social services necessary to get out of shelters. Alberta is the only Canadian province that has not added child care spaces over the last 15 years. In fact, it is the only province that has seen a decrease; between 1992 and 2004, the number of spaces dropped by 7.2 per cent.

Despite a serious lack of child care spaces, Alberta's population is growing at five times the national rate, and faster than anywhere in the Western world. The strong economy has encouraged migration to the province, which has contributed to a 10.4 per cent increase in total population since 2001, and a rental vacancy rate of 0.9 per cent--the lowest in a generation, and a third of the national average.

If current economic growth continues apace to 2025, the province could face an estimated shortfall of 332,000 workers, many of whom are expected to come from other countries, and will also need places to live. Already, housing formerly considered affordable has been purchased for "worker housing." There now exists a new group of workers that cannot afford to pay rent. In Fort McMurray, for example, it is common to pay over $1,000 for one room.

"Not enough money is being spent on infrastructure to keep up with the speed of tar sands development," says Ray Martin. "I think that there are just too many tar sands projects going on right now. There should be fewer projects."

Federal Liberal cuts to social infrastructure in the 1990s and decades of provincial Conservative inaction on social housing have together set the stage for Alberta's current housing crisis. Alberta's Affordable Housing Task Force, which toured in the spring of this year, found that Calgary's 2006 homeless count indicated a 32 per cent increase over the past two years. Edmonton showed an increase of 19 per cent, while Fort McMurray's homeless population rose by 24 per cent. Housing prices in Calgary have soared by 50 to 60 per cent in the last year alone, and by an average of 14 per cent in all of Alberta.

Alberta has yet to adopt rent-increase guidelines similar to those employed in Ontario or BC. Of all the recommendations made by Alberta's Affordable Housing Task Force, the most controversial item by far was the proposal to introduce rent control. According to Martin, who supports the recommendations, the Task Force, for the purpose of proposing effective measures, presented a package deal which would have to have been accepted in totality or not at all.

For example, a law stipulating the amount of legal increases, and a law limiting rent increases to only once a year, are complementary, whereas picking and choosing from the recommendations creates loopholes. "There is resistance to approving the whole package," says Martin.

"One of the main arguments is that accepting rent controls would provide even less incentive for the government to create much needed affordable housing. But the fact remains that there are no limits on rent and I still haven't seen more affordable housing being created."

A tenancy law passed in May that promises tenants a full year's eviction notice (when landlords plan to convert their apartments to condos) is being avoided in practice through a number of loopholes. The full year's notice only applies to periodic tenants, whose leases are renewed without notice. For everyone else, the majority of whom are fixed-term tenants, the lease ends on the date indicated, and no notice has to be given by the landlord to end the tenancy.

Dania Kochan, an Edmonton resident whose lease had expired, had made an agreement with her landlord to rent on a month-to-month basis. In June, she was given one month's eviction notice, and told by Service Alberta, the government branch that oversees and enforces tenancy laws, to "get a lawyer" when she complained.

Jim Gurnett of the Edmonton Coalition on Housing and Homelessness (ECOHH) finds the situation tiring. "Poor tenants are not a high priority," says Gurnett.

"Just as long as the government can point to a law that's there to protect them," they feel that's enough. There were 4,100 condo conversions in Calgary between January and May of this year, and the number keeps rising.

Alberta's housing crisis is massive and affects people across demographic boundaries. "Employees at Calgary women's shelters are as in need of affordable housing as the women they serve," says Reimer. "What's worse, the salaries being paid in the oil industry are so high, they can't find people to work in donut shops, let alone shelters."

The province has resorted to hiring government employees from the service sector and has successfully recruited employees from women's shelters. Women's shelter workers see this as adding insult to injury. Reimer cites occurrences of workers from women's shelters being lured from their jobs for positions at Dunkin' Donuts, a company known to offer 'signing bonuses' of $1,500 to increase their chances of acquiring staff.

"What needs to happen immediately," says Reimer, "is a government investment that will allow the [human services] sector to provide competitive wages and benefits that will attract and retain a workforce. Frontline shelter workers need to be respected by the government."

Susan Scott says that there is no substitute for a real strategy for dealing with homelessness. The responsibility, she says, lies with the government and with the people of Alberta.

"Alberta is really good at band-aid solutions," says Scott. "People will give at Christmas, and Thanksgiving, so you can see it's really not a thorough process; we give, and we turn right around and blame the victims. No housing means that people will be homeless. Shelter is a right. Society has set it up so access is limited to those who can afford it."

The Edmonton Small Press Association contributed information and contacts to this article.

Housing Demonstration

Housing Demonstration 2

Downtown Eastside Women Ask Politicians for Housing Swap

dru — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 19:30:33 +0000

Living conditions deteriorating from cuts, Olympic preparations, says group

Shelters, transition houses and safe houses in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES) turn away about 200 people each night, leaving many on the streets without access to basic amenities.

A press conference held on July 4 by Power of Women (POW) at the DTES Women's Centre revealed a group of women who have experienced -- and continue to experience -- poverty first-hand in a myriad of unsettling circumstances. Some young, some old, and all looking a little weary, the women who assembled to share their stories and their demands were exasperated, but not lacking in focus or energy. They seemed to relish the opportunity to speak out and possibly be heard by as many people as watch the evening news. The room was charged with a feeling of legitimacy that can only come from the recounting of lived struggle. They took turns speaking and acknowledging one another. Some had a lot to say, and said it loud, while others were only there to share a few succinct words. The press conference came days after the group presented an open letter to Mayor Sam Sullivan and City Council. The letter challenges the 11-member council to swap homes with POW members for eight weeks. The demand was spurred by the upcoming 2010 Olympic Games; the number of homeless in Vancouver doubled in 2005 to approximately 2174 and is predicted to triple due to the Olympics. These figures do not account for a much larger population that pays for sub-standard housing in Vancouver’s DTES; their situations rendered increasingly more precarious by rising housing prices and urban development, the impoverished are finding that there are fewer and fewer places to go.

Canada's poorest neighbourhood, the DTES has long been dubbed a nucleus of deplorable living conditions. People are forced to live in hotel rooms and boarding houses due to an affordable housing crisis of massive proportions. Many such hotels are notorious for sudden and unexplained evictions. For women, indigenous people and people with disabilities, obstacles quickly accumulate. For those able to find work, the province has not made things much easier. B.C.'s privatization of public services has cost over 20,000 unionized workers their jobs, three-quarters of whom are women. The B.C. Human Rights Commission and Ministry of Women's Equality, both considered tools to fight discrimination, have been eliminated and pay equity provisions in B.C. have been repealed. This means that there is no longer a requirement that women receive equal pay for work of comparable value to that performed by men. Women working low-income jobs, whether or not they have dependants, often live below the poverty line and seldom have the time or energy to investigate the reasons behind the scarcity they encounter on a daily basis.

Cuts to legal aid and to income assistance, the closure of women's centres, political assaults on women's advocacy and support services, the lack of childcare support, cuts to welfare and changes to eligibility for welfare, the rising cost of living, and low-income work: these have all had devastating, gendered effects. While women have historically been marginalized in politics and public planning, they carry the burden of care-work and are therefore the most directly-affected by those policies. Prime Minister Stephen Harper's cuts to Status of Women Canada (SWC) centres and his cancelled agreement with the provinces for more daycare spaces has many feeling that women's rights are being trampled upon by the government, which is systematically eliminating institutions intended to secure them. The budget allotted to SWC has been cut from $13 million to $5 million, leaving 12 of their 19 offices facing closure, and indicating an end to core funding for all 37 Women's Centres in B.C. In an effort to depoliticize SWC, the government has prohibited the agency from funding groups that undertake advocacy for women's rights. The word "equality" has also been removed from the agency's mandate.

At the press conference, many members of POW described the physical conditions of the "way of life" that they experience: hotel rooms are rarely, if ever, cleaned; faeces, condoms and clothes from previous tenants are often left strewn about; most often, rooms are infested by bugs or rodents; bathrooms are generally shared and sometimes lack a shower; people that have paid rent for years, sometimes decades, are evicted without notice or justification; and the expulsion of their belongings, and themselves, is often police-enforced. Ex-sex worker and POW member Susanna Kilroy spoke of hoping to "survive the Olympics." Another woman, Beatrice Star, said she hopes and prays "not to get evicted before 2010." POW Member and indigenous rights activist Anita Chubb-Kennedy said: "where is everybody's social conscience? These people are not animals. It's social cleansing, what they're doing." Chubb-Kennedy invited Phil Fontaine, chief of the Assembly of First Nations, to comment on the situation facing indigenous people in the DTES: "every native is supposed to have a house, but the actual situation is comparable to the third world...we [aboriginal peoples] are still the first owners of the country," she said. "It's not up to Stephen Harper to 'give' land that's not his. The treaties aren't done being worked through." 'No Olympics on stolen Native land' has become a rallying cry for indigenous resistance to the games. "One question I think deserves a bit of focus is the athletes," said Kilroy. "Do they know? That people are dying?"

A June 2007 report by the Geneva-based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) found that 2 million people have been forcibly displaced in the last 20 years to clear space for the Olympic Games. Jean du Plessis, executive director of COHRE, said, "Our research shows that little has changed since 1988 when 720,000 people were forcibly displaced in Seoul, South Korea, in preparation for the Summer Olympic Games. It is shocking and entirely unacceptable that 1.25 million people have already been displaced in Beijing, in preparation for the 2008 Games, in flagrant violation of their right to adequate housing." The hosting of the Olympics in Atlanta in 1996 as well as those in Sydney in 2000 led to immense difficulties faced by tenants, boarders and lodgers, ranging from substantial rent increases, no-fault evictions and the closure of cheap rooms. Much like Mayor Sullivan's "Project Civil City," which many contend is aimed to police and criminalize Vancouver's poor, Atlanta and Sydney both undertook measures to "clear the streets" of the poor in order to make way for an enormous influx of tourists. In 2004, the Olympics in Athens forced the eviction of the Roma community of Marousi for a parking lot and road enlargements.

A march for safe and long-term affordable housing organized by POW and held on June 8 occurred in solidarity with the Women Against Poverty Collective (WAPC) in Toronto, who on June 3 orchestrated a housing takeover to draw attention to the connection between safe housing and women's ability to live free from violence. WAPC members, along with many others, marched to an abandoned building near Sherbourne and Bloor with the intention of converting it to safe housing. Once inside, the women hung a banner and pitched tents on the property, saying that they would keep the building and provide their own affordable housing for women and their children. The group said this action is necessary because the government hasn’t followed through on promises for housing and childcare. The police ended the standoff, arresting two people in the process.

In one of Vancouver's better-known anti-Olympics rallies held in February, the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC), and the Vancouver Board of Trade were celebrating the disclosure of a "three-year countdown clock" in the downtown business district. Native People from all over B.C. participated in the rally, together with non-native members of the Anti-Poverty Committee, who are protesting the gentrification of their neighbourhood and the eviction of hundreds from low-income housing in the DTES. Seven protesters were arrested during the protest. Tselletkwe of the Native Youth Movement (NYM) made a statement upon her release, stating: "Our land is not for sale, we are still at war with Canada, we have never surrendered our land. We want the whole world to know not to come to our country and to boycott Canada and the 2010 Olympic Games. Tourism is not welcome here."

Unlike members of POW, or NYM, who are fighting for their homes and their land and who would rather see the Olympics shut down than have to deal with the catastrophe that it will wreak on the quality of their lives, the province has made choices that reflect a desire for worldwide Olympic tourism. In June 2004, Visa announced two global agreements with Tourism Vancouver and Tourism Whistler to promote domestic and international travel in the run-up to and during the 2010 Olympics. The multi-million-dollar global agreements will offer Visa cardholders worldwide value-added offers and incentives to visit Vancouver and Whistler and are expected to stimulate tourism spending in Western Canada. Tourism Vancouver maintains that their leadership “benefits the society, culture, environment and economy of Greater Vancouver.”

The proposed House Swap with the women of the DTES is intended to breed understanding through experience. POW member Joan Morelli pointed out that "even the well-meaning politicians don't understand. That's why we're challenging them. There is no understanding without experience." The swap is also focused on issues of respect: "if Sullivan wants a civil city, let politicians show some courtesy," said Morelli. Council members would live on the same amount as an average single person on social assistance: $610 per month. After the cost of shelter, this averages to less than $8 a day. As it is believed that it would be much easier for Council members to rent hotel rooms due to the fact that many wear their privileged lifestyles on their sleeves, and that many are, in fact, white, or male, at least two of the eight weeks must be spent homeless. Meanwhile, the women who offered the challenge would live as the Councillors do. To date, not a single member of Council has accepted the terms of the swap. A few have expressed reasons they do not wish to participate, such as bedbugs and concern for the safety of their children. Councillor Suzanne Anton said she was "interested in doing a night, but I don't think I'd be interested in spending a long time." Mayor Sullivan himself declined because, he said, he's already familiar with the issues, as he once collected welfare and spent several years in a social housing co-op and a paraplegic lodge in Vancouver's East End.

Sullivan's "Project Civil City,” proposed in November of 2006, outlines his aim to "eliminate" homelessness, the open drug market, and the incidence of aggressive panhandling, with the goal to reduce all of these by 50% by 2010. He also aims to "increase the level of public satisfaction with the City's handling of public nuisance and annoyance complaints" by 50% by 2010. These targets are aggressive and require aggressive law enforcement, which is causing the concern of many living in the DTES. “People chalk it [poverty] up to inefficiency, inactiveness,” said Chubb-Kennedy.

A research team, coordinated by COHRE, spent three years studying past and future Olympic host cities and the impact that the Games have had on housing rights. The report also addresses the housing effects of other mega-events like the FIFA World Cup, World Expos, IMF/World Bank Conferences and beauty pageants such as the Miss World and Miss Universe contests. It concludes that mega-events can cause a number of breaches in housing rights. "It is possible (and imperative) for mega-events to be organized without forcibly evicting people, without criminalizing the homeless and without rendering housing unaffordable," said Du Plessis. COHRE calls on affected communities and support organizations to closely monitor these processes, and to take action to ensure that no housing rights are violated as a result of mega-events. To the women of the DTES, however, and many others, the onus for ensuring that no housing rights are violated should fall on the government, rather than groups with little or no funding who must struggle to be represented by the media.

Refusal of the terms of the house swap and Councilors’ excuses for not participating are not acceptable to the women of the DTES. "This would be a confirmation," they said, "that there is absolutely no political will to eliminate poverty."

Anita Chubb-Kennedy

Joan Morelli