Europe’s sealskin ban threatens her runway-ready apparel—and maybe the entire Inuit way of life A majority of the 27 member states of the European Union voted to ban the trade of seal product imports such as pelts, oil, and meat last July. The ban comes into effect in August 2010. Although the EU did allow […] More »

Many Canadians associate Sheshatshiu with images of children sniffing gas from paper bags. The troubled central Labrador Innu community received nationwide attention in the ’90s as a place in crisis. Now, years later, with the opening of the new Sheshatshiu Innu School, members are working to shed the reserve’s negative image and turn life around […] More »

The Royal Proclamation of 1763 included a clause prohibiting British colonists from purchasing “Lands of the Indians,” so as not to commit more of the “Frauds and Abuses” that characterized colonial takeovers of Aboriginal territory. To my reading, this measure was intended to make clear to the English colonists that Aboriginal Peoples enjoyed equal status. […] More »

B.C. Aboriginal groups are divided on the Olympic issue British Columbia’s First Nations are divided in their support for the Olympics. On one side, the chiefs and band councils of four indigenous communities—the Lil’wat, Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh—have endorsed the Games and set up the Four Host First Nations Society, an offi cial Olympic partner […] More »

Christopher Shaw’s day job is professor of ophthalmology at the University of British Columbia, but since Vancouver launched its bid for the Olympics more and more of his time has been spent campaigning against the Games—first as the founder of No Games 2010 and now as lead spokesperson for 2010 Watch. Shaw’s book, Five Ring […] More »

For a playwright from Toronto, creating a play about Canada’s North is a daunting task. How do you talk about a culture that, though Canadian, is as foreign as one from the other side of the world? How do you approach difficult issues like suicide when you’re not just an outsider, but also a member […] More »

Canada has a problem: since the early 1980s, over 500 Aboriginal women have been either murdered or reported as missing. It’s a shocking figure that’s motivated a pair of self-identified “survivors of the sex industry” to form the Coalition Against Violence Everywhere, an organization dedicated to stopping the violence by challenging the common narrative that […] More »

Nadya Kwandibens stepped off a Greyhound bus from Phoenix, Arizona, in Kenora, Ontario, in November 2006 with only her camera and her computer. During the two-and-a-half-day trip, her suitcase, containing all her belongings, had been misplaced at a transfer point in Omaha. She lost her clothing, her native powwow jingle dress, and sacred ceremonial items, […] More »

Nuclear power has always been controversial, but even green power sources like wind and hydro meet resistance from locals. When Nova Scotia entrepreneur Luciano Lisi unveiled a plan to blow 250 megawatts of wind-power into his province’s coal-based grid, he didn’t expect it to be this controversial. But his proposed wind-hydro hybrid project, involving 44 […] More »

In a small bright room in downtown Toronto, a young Aboriginal woman is auditioning for a role she never expected to play. “I’d like to read the part of Billy Jack,” she says. With script in hand, the woman narrows her eyes and begins to read: “It’s my medicine bag. Got some owls feathers, sacred […] More »

“You know that here in Colombia, there are many human-rights violations,” says José Oney Valencia Llanos, who earns his living cutting sugar cane in Colombia’s fertile Cauca Valley. “Business people, through multinational and transnational corporations, have violated human rights and attacked workers, directly and indirectly.” Oney told me this on a humid afternoon in El […] More »