First published in the Ottawa Citizen, July 8, 2014. The Supreme Court’s 8-0 decision recognizing Aboriginal title to land First Nations communities have inhabited since before European contact is huge. It legitimizes understandings of land tenure as habitation and...
Heather Menzies’ Blog postings on
Indigenous Rights
Our common connection to the land
In Halifax, the last leg of my book-launch tour, I met a beautiful person: a Mi’kmaw elder, Billy Lewis, who welcomed me to his ancestral land. I offered him a pouch of tobacco as my gesture of thanks. I also told him that I now understood why it was so important to...
Bill C-33: A Lost Opportunity to Rethink First Nations Education
What bothers me the most about C-33 as currently written —NOT being as the title (First Nations Control of First Nations Education Act) suggests— is this: It’s the lost or postponed opportunity at stake in genuinely returning control of First Nations education to...
On Thomas Berger and the Peel River Watershed
printed on rable.ca on February 24, 2014 Once again, Thomas Berger is at the centre of a case that questions whether only one understanding of development will rule, or whether justice demands negotiation among alternatives. In the 1970s Mackenzie Valley Pipeline...
Whose ‘development’? A reflection on Alanis Obomsawin’s film on Attawapiskat
printed in rable.ca February 5, 2013 What lingers from watching Alanis Obomsawin's new documentary on Attawapiskat's housing crisis, The People of the Kattawapiskak River, is the contrast. The buildings associated with the De Beers diamond mine close to the native...
What drew me to Chief Spence’s hunger strike
I went to Victoria Island first on Dec. 21st as a simple act of solidarity and support for Chief Theresa Spence who had put her body on the line to demonstrate how much it hurts for Canada’s Aboriginal peoples to be treated as though their rights, their vision and...
Idle No More is an historic opportunity for alliance building
Idle No More is an historic opportunity for alliance building rabble.ca opinion A seventh-generation descendent of Chief Tecumseh, who led the Native Nations in an alliance with General Isaac Brock in the War of 1812, came to Ottawa earlier this month to see Chief...