Welcome to AMMSA.COM, the news archive website for our family of Indigenous news publications.
Established in 1983 to serve the needs of northern Alberta, Windspeaker became a national newspaper on its 10th anniversary in 1993.
Book Review
Jordin TooToo: The Highs and Lows in the Journey of the First Inuit to Play in the NHL
Lorimer Press
Written By Melanie Florence
“Fight your way through.” These were the words of Jordin Tootoo’s father when Jordin left Canada’s Far North to chase his dream of playing professional hockey.…
Community leader died trying to protect his wife
The violent death of well-loved Ojibway community leader Andrew Mixemong this summer in Midland, Ont. has left younger brother Wayne pondering the meaning of it all.
“I think Andrew was showing us to love each other, and especially to honor and love our women who look after Mother Earth’s water, traditionally,” said Wayne Mixemong…
An upcoming program to share filmmaking skills amongst Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES) residents got a preview on Aug. 20, with an evening workshop on how to fund cinema projects.
The Vancouver Film In Motion Initiative (VFIMI) hosted three respected directors for its “Master Class”: Hollywood director and writer Guy Shalem, Vancouver documentary-maker Ian MacKenzie, and Pete…
Thousands of people have already signed up for a free online Aboriginal education course the University of Toronto will be offering this coming winter.
The four-week, non-credit course titled Aboriginal Worldviews and Education, will begin in late February.
The course is offered in partnership with Coursera, an American-based company that started up early this year. Coursera has…
As far as Mary Spencer is concerned, time flies quickly, so the 27-year-old Ojibwe boxer who lives in Windsor, Ont. does not mind having to wait another four years for another shot at Olympic glory.
Spencer had originally hoped to be a retired boxer by now. But things didn’t go quite as planned for her at the recent London Olympics.
The three-time world champion had been…
Rebels win national title
The Six Nations Rebels are now the two-time defending Canadian Junior B lacrosse champions. The Rebels won their second straight Founders Cup tournament by edging another Ontario-based squad, the Akwesasne Indians, 8-7 in the championship final held Aug. 19. The Rebels played host to the six-team event at their home facility, the Iroquois…
It seems there is always one or two Aboriginal music artists that get to make a serious dent in mainstream radio airplay at any one time and these last few years, Ontario’s Crystal Shawanda is the Aboriginal community’s music superstar.
Crystal makes warm and inviting music that fans easily embrace along with their other country superstars. Fame has not changed this approachable queen…
Wolf Songs and Fire Chats
There are three traditional hand drums in our home. Two were gifts and one was made by my wife a handful of summers ago. They hang on our walls as reminders that we’re supposed to be prayerful, to be in gratitude and live our lives as though they were a ceremony.
When we center our lives on the traditional teachings within those drums everything is…
The Urbane Indian
Anybody familiar with Woody Allen’s recent “Midnight In Paris” will understand my nostalgia. It tells of a man magically traveling back to the 1920s where he would rub elbows with such seminal artists as Hemingway, Picasso, Dali and Fitzgerald who had no idea they were in a defining time.
Upon reflection, the end of the 1980s and early 1990s were to me like…
Thanks to members of the Los Angeles Kings, Aboriginal people in various parts of Canada have had up-close encounters with the Stanley Cup this summer.
A tradition is that each member of the National Hockey League championship squad gets to spend one day with the prized trophy during the off-season.
The roster of the Los Angeles squad, which captured the Stanley Cup in early June…
The federal government has balked at the push to secure a commitment of a national inquiry into murdered and missing women, and the chance to learn more about the violence that surrounds Aboriginal women and girls in Canada. But the United Nations is tackling the issue head on.
“This year, our new topic is murdered and missing Aboriginal women. It is our upcoming assignment and we will…
“How,” asks Eriel Deranger, “do you change the game?”
With piercings, thick-rimmed glasses and a tattoo across her heart–“Love Is The Movement,” its cursive letters read – the 33-year old Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation activist is not one you’d expect to be working in her Band office.
But in the foremost Indigenous community battling the Alberta tar sands, the world’s largest…
When the federal Police Officers Recruitment Fund concludes, that loss of funding will have an immediate and obvious impact on policing in Treaty 3.
“That’s 10 per cent of our (police) service basically,” said Treaty 3 Police Chief Conrad DeLaronde.
In 2008, the federal government allocated $400 million for a five-year period through the Police Officers Recruitment Fund. That…
Graduation from Oneida Language 101, under the tutelage of David Kanatawakhon, was a significant day in the history of a First Nations community, Oneida Settlement, located about 30 minutes southwest of London.
About 50 students made up the class.
The endeavor flourished from efforts between David Kanatawakhon, Mohawk Language Professor at the University of Western Ontario, and…
Akivah Starkman, executive director of the Indian Residential School Adjudication Secretariat, said the group is expecting to receive close to 30,000 applications by the time the Independent Assessment Process deadline passes Sept. 19, which will well exceed the first estimates of 12,500.
“I think that it appears, based on the numbers, that the incidents of abuse may have been more…