TORONTO - Alex Morlando finally met Nathan Louttit, the Attawapiskat native he’s been communicating with through letters, the Internet and Xbox since they were both in Grade 7.

“Our teacher assigned us pen pals and (said) we would have to communicate through letters,” said Morlando, now in Grade 8 at Toronto’s Our Lady of Fatima Catholic School. “We started off like that and then we started communicating a little more through Xbox and the Internet. That’s how I really got to know Nathan.”

Published in Education

WHITEHORSE, YT - Last week I wrote about my impressions of the Yukon on my first trip to Canada’s north. In many ways it is altogether different from anything I have previously encountered in Canada’s cities, or even in my parish on Wolfe Island. At the same time the Yukon raises questions that the Church in all of Canada must face.

It is frankly astonishing that anyone lives in some of these remote communities, where a summer visitor is impressed by the natural beauty but year-round residents have to cope with isolation and lack of services, to say nothing of the severe cold and oppressive darkness of the punishing winter. To imagine living up here in the early 20th century, before roads and four-wheel drive trucks and propane gas heating and food preservatives is mindboggling, especially given that an overland trek of several weeks would deliver one into the Okanagan, one of the loveliest climates anywhere in the world.

Published in Fr. Raymond de Souza

The bitter history of Canada's attempt to wipe out aboriginal culture through a system of Church-run schools has come to Canada's largest and most invisible Native community — and it's biggest city.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada is meeting with 600 delegates, including about 100 residential school survivors, in downtown Toronto at a May 31 to June 2 community-organized event called The Meeting Place, a name that freely translates the Mohawk word ktaronto, which eventually became the name of the city. There are about 80,000 aboriginal Canadians — Metis, Indian and Inuit — living in Toronto.

Published in Canada: Toronto-GTA

TORONTO - The long, hard national look at Canada’s history of the Indian residential schools comes to Toronto May 31 to June 2.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada is supporting a regional event at Toronto’s Sheraton Centre Hotel. The three days will give Toronto-area First Nations’ people a chance to learn about the history of residential schools and an opportunity to share personal stories about the residential school experience and how it has affected families.

Published in Canada: Toronto-GTA

A house is just a big container. It’s what you put in it that makes it a home. The St. Vincent de Paul Society at St. Kevin’s in Val Therese, Ont., knows the difference.

The Vincentians inspired parishioners at St. Kevin’s and their fellow Vincentians around the province to contribute $24,000 to help furnish pre-fab houses going to the native community of Attawapiskat, Ont.

Published in Canada

WINNIPEG - Anishinaabe elders and community leaders adopted Archbishop James Weisgerber of Winnipeg as their brother April 14 in a traditional ceremony at Thunderbird House in Winnipeg, the first event of its kind in the reconciliation between Indian residential school survivors and missionary churches.

"This is part of a long journey for me," Weisgerber said.

As a priest in Saskatchewan, he had been a pastoral minister at four of what were then called Indian reserves, "but nobody ever talked about the residential schools," he said. In 1990, Phil Fontaine, former National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, "made a public declaration and released a huge barrage, and more people began speaking and I began to understand," Weisgerber said.

Published in Canada

TORONTO - In his Grade 9 art class at Fr. John Redmond Catholic Secondary School in west end Toronto, Roman Makuch is drawing beavers, turtles and geese, trying to see through aboriginal eyes and express himself with First Nations’ symbols. The semester dedicated to studying aboriginal art is not easy, Makuch tells a visitor. But he believes it’s valuable.

“We’re all Canadian,” he said. “We’re all proud of being Canadian and part of our past is aboriginal.”

Grade 12 student Radiyah Chowthury spent last year reading aboriginal authors in her Grade 11 University Enriched Natives Studies English class at Blessed Mother Teresa Catholic Secondary School in Toronto’s Malvern community. She can’t imagine not studying aboriginal authors. As an immigrant kid, she’s unwilling to settle for a history of Canada that begins and ends with European sailors bumping into a big, cold land mass on their way to India.

Published in Features

OTTAWA - Shannen Koostachin had a dream for “safe and comfy” culturally sensitive schools for First Nations children like herself.

On Feb. 27, a vote in the House of Commons brought that dream closer to reality.

The House of Commons voted unanimously to “adopt Shannen’s Dream” by declaring First Nations children’s “equal right to high-quality, culturally relevant education” and to provide the necessary policy changes, consultation and funding support to make a First Nations’ education system “at a minimum” equal in quality to provincial systems.

Published in Canada

TORONTO - There is the poverty, the high cost of food, lack of clean water and acceptable housing, the lack of concern for the people’s wellbeing, the high rate of disease and of course the whole situation around the school. Nobody has the silver bullet that will fix education in Attiwapiskat in northern Ontario.

But that doesn’t mean we do nothing. Mother Teresa most often gets credit for telling us that we’re not called to be successful. We’re called to be faithful.

As a Toronto Catholic District School Board teacher, I’ve been working with Attawapiskat for 10 years. It started when I was a literacy resource teacher heading up our early reading intervention program. The principal of Attiwapiskat’s JR Nakogee School contacted me. The challenge at his school was and still is raising the literacy skills.

Published in Education

Churches need to define how they're going to help repair the damage residential schools did to aboriginal culture in Canada and the federal government must cough up the millions of documents that future historians will need to tell the story of Canada's effort to assimilate First Nations' people, says the interim report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.

The report marks the halfway point of the five-year mandate of the commission. It warns that government reluctance to provide full and meaningful access to Library and Archives Canada records threatens the mandate of the commission. The TRC intends to go to court to force greater government co-operation.

Published in Canada

SYRACUSE, N.Y. - Since first learning in December that Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha was to be canonized, the head of a committee named for her in the Syracuse Diocese said those who have a devotion to the saint to be "are walking on air."

"I can't tell you how excited we are," said Emily Garrow-Stewart, a Mohawk who grew up hearing Blessed Kateri's story in her home.

"She has been a part of my life since I was a child," she said. "There was always a picture of her in the house. She is such a good role model and example. In my mind, there is always such a light about her."

Published in Features

TORONTO - A half-dozen aboriginal youth headed for Geneva have shameful things to say about Canada and how it treats First Nations children. But their testimony before the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child will be given in the hope that Canada can do better, the young delegates told media in Toronto Feb. 2.

"There's been talk for years and years and years. If there's just going to be more talk, I wouldn't consider that a success," said 24-year-old John-Paul Chalykoff from the Michipicoten First Nation on the north shore of Lake Superior.

Published in Canada

OTTAWA - The historic Crown-First Nations Gathering revealed stark differences on how the relationship between Canada’s founding peoples and the government, embodied in the Indian Act, should continue.

And whatever is resolved, an advisor to the Catholic Church said, must re-affirm historic treaties signed between the two.

It is about recognizing the sacred importance of covenants, said Gerry Kelly at the one-day gathering held in Ottawa Jan. 24. Kelly is the former director of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops’ secretariat on aboriginal affairs and now advises Catholic entities regarding the Indian Residential Schools legacy.

“Our whole understanding of our relationship with God is understood scripturally in terms of covenants,” said Kelly. “We understand what it means. A covenant is sacred. We can’t hold that position and not recognize the covenant relationship established by treaties. It is timeless and it is binding.”

Assembly of First Nations National Chief Shawn Atleo called the Indian Act “a breach” of the government’s commitment to First Nations peoples that was “built on a disgraceful premise of our inferiority.”

“It is well past time that we began to undo the damage that Act has inflicted on our peoples, and to our partnership,” Atleo said, noting it formed the basis for the reserve system, residential schools and prohibitions of spiritual and cultural practices.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, however, promised an incremental approach to remedying some problems inherent in the Act, but bluntly stated his government had “no grand scheme to repeal or to unilaterally re-write the Indian Act.”

“After 136 years, that tree has deep roots. Blowing up the stump would just leave a big hole,” Harper told the more than 150 First Nations leaders at the gathering. “However, there are ways, creative ways, collaborative ways, ways that involve consultation between our government, the provinces and First Nations leadership and communities, ways that provide options within the Act, or outside of it, for practical, incremental and real change.”

The gathering was called to find ways to improve the relationship between Canada’s First Nations’ people and the federal government. It had been planned for some time, with the date finalized during the period in late 2011 when images of the poverty on Canada’s reserves were brought to the forefront with the poor housing conditions that plagued Attawapiskat in Northern Ontario.

Kelly said incremental approaches are not problematic in themselves.

“So much of this depends on good intentions and fairness,” he said. The challenge in the past has been with First Nations and bands being pressured “to give up their full rights for a limited parcel of rights.”

The other problems with an incremental approach are strictly practical, he said.  

“The longer this process takes, the more resources are taken from First Nations lands in the context where their rights to resources and benefiting from those resources are ignored.”

Aboriginal entrepreneur and consultant David Acco, a Catholic and Montreal-based member of the Cree First Nation, said the gathering could not have taken place in the 1960s or ’70s with the kind of aboriginal inclusiveness of today. Aboriginal people have developed the leadership abilities and legal skills to put them in a better position to negotiate, he said.

Acco, president of Acosys Consulting, said a long-term vision is needed that takes into consideration how current negotiations will affect future generations.

“I don’t think aboriginal people are going to get another opportunity to right the wrongs of the past like we have now in another 100 years,” Acco said.

He also raised concerns about incremental approaches creating a hierarchy of “haves” and “have-nots” that will see some First Nations rewarded and others, like Attawapiskat, left behind. Communities like Attawapiskat need the Indian Act for their survival, Acco said, because of the fiduciary responsibility the Crown has to First Nations. An incremental approach decentralizes and potentially fragments any unity among First Nations, he said.

The gathering’s “outcome statement” affirmed principles in the Joint Action Plan the government and First Nations developed in June 2011 that included improving relationships and partnerships “respectful of aboriginal and treaty rights,” transparent and accountable governance, empowering success through education and opportunity, promoting self-sufficient communities and assisting economic development that will benefit all Canadians.

The statement called for immediate action on a renewed relationship that includes multi-year funding, improved financial accountability on the part of all with the goal of First Nations financial self-sufficiency. It affirmed an incremental approach to “removing barriers to First Nations governance,” by working around and through existing mechanisms in the Indian Act, which cannot be replaced overnight,”and committed both parties to “respect and honour our treaty relationship and advance approaches to find common ground on treaty implementation.”

Published in Canada

OTTAWA - Winnipeg Archbishop James Weisgerber believes that “rebalancing the relationship” between First Nations peoples and the government may be the most important issue in Canada today.

To that end, he hopes the Jan. 24 summit in Ottawa between First Nations leaders and the federal government will finally address what he calls the “tremendous inequalities and great suffering” of Canada’s aboriginal peoples.

“The federal government has a lead role,” Weisgerber said. “We arrived (and) we made treaties that are supposed to be the basis on which we share coming together.”

Published in Canada

OTTAWA - The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB) has launched a new webpage that traces the relationship of the Catholic Church in Canada and its First Nations’ peoples.

The site sketches the history of relations with indigenous peoples, many of whom became part of the Church and “gave much to it.” It cites Joseph Chiwatenhwa, Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha and “Grand Chief Henri Membertou, who became the first aboriginal leader to be baptized by the French, as a sign of alliance and good faith in 1610.”

Published in Canada