Under Ontario’s Long-Term Energy Plan, connecting remote First Nations to the province’s electricity grid was identified as a priority. The Remote Electrification Readiness Program will support the development of community readiness plans. These plans will help eligible communities identify opportunities for job-specific training, relevant health programs, business innovation mentoring and economic development supports. This initiative will help to fight climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Over the last seven months Talk4Healing has seen a 100 per cent increase in calls. The higher numbers are a result of promoting who they are and what they do, said program coordinator Robin Haliuk. “Women are hearing about Talk4Healing and are getting more and more comfortable with calling for help.” Talk4Healing has Aboriginal women, who have lived in remote communities and can relate to the callers, as the ones answering the phones. Beendigen in partnership with the Ontario Native Women’s Association launched Talk4Healing in October 2012.

Onigaming First Nation declared a state of emergency Oct. 31 following the suicide of an 18-year-old man in the community. The most recent death is the fourth suicide on the reserve in the past year, along with a number of suicide attempts. By declaring a state of emergency, the band council and Grand Council Treaty 3 say they are calling on governments, health care providers, the justice system and social services agencies to find ways to deal with the “crisis situation” in Onigaming.

First Nations boycott Sun News Media

We Are Born with the Songs Inside Us

By Katherine Palmer Gordon

(Published by Harbour Publishing)

Review by Shari Narine

Recent health developments surrounding former Vancouver Canucks’ hockey player Gino Odjick is a clear indication that he is a man, who has broken through the racial divide.

Odjick is one of 16 First Nations people in British Columbia highlighted in Katherine Palmer Gordon’s book We Are Born with the Songs Inside Us. And Odjick’s song is strong.

Medicine Walk

Richard Wagamese

(Published by McClelland and Stewart.)

Review by Shari Narine

Set with the backdrop of the BC wilderness, author Richard Wagamese intricately weaves the hardship of the physical journey with the emotional journey as estranged father and son travel a rocky ascending path to the beginning of understanding and forgiveness.

Ghost Detective

Zachary Muswagon

(Published by Eschia Books Inc.)

Review by Shari Narine

Ghost Detective is an engaging blend of supernatural and whodunit wrapped around life on the reserve. It could easily have remained a mystery novel with a twist, but author Zachary Muswagon makes it more as he explores the conditions on reserves and the reasons that motivate the antagonists.

Thirty teachers from the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board stood beside the National Aboriginal Veterans Monument on the edge of Confederation Park half a dozen blocks from Parliament Hill in the capital’s downtown core.

They were listening to Jaime Koebel, a thirty-something Métis artist and educator from Lac la Biche, Alta, explain the significance of the statue’s human and animal figures, and why Aboriginal soldiers are often overrepresented in the Canadian military in times of war.

Pre-eminent Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul has written on almost every topic, from the nature of ethics to the dangers of modern reason. He’s even been dubbed by TIME magazine a “prophet.”

Nonetheless, the 67-year-old essayist waited nearly two years after the explosion of the Idle No More movement to release his book on the Indigenous rights movement, and what he sees as its major impact on the future of Canada.

 Scholarship honours Winnipeg’s “cigarette poet”

Though he passed away in 2005, three years after publishing city treaty–his unabashed manifesto about colonialism–Manitoba’s Marvin Francis continues to influence award-winning writers like Katherena Vermette.

“Francis’s city treaty was the first book that made me say ‘I am going to do this too’,” said the winner of the 2013 Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry for North End Love Songs, quoted by The Toronto Quarterly Literary and Arts Journal last year.