Oil’s Slippery Slope
I like oil. Oil brings me things. Things like home heating, air conditioning, electricity. It means people aren’t burning trees so I can hike through forests. It means people aren’t burning coal so I can breathe without blackening my lungs. It means communities don’t have to be flooded so someone can jam up a river...
One little planet. One BIG farm.
Since the ’30s, the days of the family farm have been numbered. The dustbowl sucked young farmers off the land faster than you can say “plague of grasshoppers.” But there were always dirt die-hards who hung on — even flourished — once the rain fell again and the insecticide giants and genetically modified crop scientists bent...
Saskatchewan First Nation’s novel solution to welfare: organic veggies
Just an amazing, all-around awesome story out of the Muskoday First Nation in Saskatchewan, courtesy of The Star-Phoenix. The article details efforts by the community, in partnership with Heifer International Canada, to pursue “Indigenous organic gardening, agroecology and organic food entrepreneurship” via the Muskoday Organic Growers Co-op. According to the Star-Phoenix, the Co-op’s roots (no...
If privatizing Indigenous lands is such a great idea, why the uproar over privatized PotashCorp?
Funny how being on the receiving end of a massive land grab can alter one’s perspective on what rules should apply to outsiders scooping up your territory and/or the resources beneath it. Recent months have seen much discussion in favour of ‘privatizing’ First Nations lands. Communal or collective ownership, we are told, has been a...
How the show goes on: imagineNATIVE festival realizes international return on investment
Report filed by Samantha Butler (TORONTO) — At 8 p.m., Wed. Oct. 20, a Maori boy set off with one thousand Torontonians on a guided tour of his life. Known simply as ‘Boy,’ the 11-year-old shows off a rickety farm house in rural New Zealand, where he lives with his Gran, younger brother, and five...
Is the ‘secret’ of some First Nations’ economic success all that secret?
A recent Globe and Mail editorial approves of a “special” Indian and Northern Affairs Canada project looking at “why some [65 First Nations] reserves are doing well economically.” The study’s aim: to “pinpoint the causes of their success.” The Globe then goes on to argue that a likely “common factor in these cases of prosperity”...
Rubber revival delivers cultural, economic bounce for Indigenous Amazonians
Awesome story in The Ecologist of how the tradition of Amazonian rubber-tapping has been successfully revived among Indigenous people in Brazil thanks in part to the critical assistance of local NGO Poloprobio. By “joining scientific research with the rubber-tappers’ empirical knowledge,” the partnership innovated a better processing method that doesn’t rely on electricity or machinery,...
Snatching the People’s Purse
The 500 or so people living on the Mosquito (Grizzly Bear’s Head) reserve in central Saskatchewan are undergoing some introspective times. This past spring, the chief and a councillor from the band office were charged with fraud and breach of trust as part of a 5-year investigation into the (mis)management of their people’s Treaty Land Entitlement (TLE) money. ...
Spectrum Sovereignty? Maori Treaty Rights to 4G Debated in New Zealand
Here’s a debate that opens all sorts of canned worms about what might be rightly considered the sovereign territory of Indigenous peoples. As we see in this report from TVNZ’s Te Karere, some Maori have put forth arguments claiming Indigenous title to the so-called 4G (fourth generation) wireless broadband spectrum in New Zealand. So far,...
