A touching intergenerational moment becomes bittersweet in Danis Goulet’s new film, Barefoot. Sixteen-year-old Alyssa’s kookum [grandmother] celebrates her granddaughter’s pregnancy, offering her a beaded baby carrier.

In La Ronge–the northern Saskatchewan reserve where the award-winning filmmaker and former ImagiNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival executive director grew up–so many young teenagers are having babies that Alyssa (played by Emily Roberts) just desperately wants to fit in with her peers (Cole Ballantyne and Kassie Svendsen).

Artist — Priscilla's Revenge
Song — Ape Boy and the Velcro Girl
Album — Third Gear
Year — 2011

Windspeaker: What one quality do you most value in a friend?
Jace Martin: I truly look for loyalty; someone who has your back and is there for you in the good times and bad. Nothing like knowing in your heart that you can count on someone.

WOLF SONGS & FIRE CHATS

I stand at the sink washing dishes. It’s one of the things that I do around our home that always feels like a ceremony. I can get meditative staring out the window at the lake and the mountain behind it and feeling the pull of the land all around me. It’s a centering thing really, and something that’s come to be important to me. Right after we eat I get to it, putting things away, squaring things and washing everything up. It’s a pleasure that I like to do alone.

The Urbane Indian

There was a fine mess cooking up in Toronto. It had to do with food. It also had to do with oddly titled food and some owners of a restaurant that seemed blissfully ignorant of certain elements of Canadian history and the racism that often tags along with it.

Still, they should have known, if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. It was the issue de jour in the twitterverse, Facebook, and chat rooms of Canada. One thing that’s become obvious now is that it just might be possible to slap a human rights charge on a hamburger!

Michele Audette’s journey in the Indigenous women’s movement began right from her birth, she insists, when her mother married a non-Native man and immediately lost her status under now-repealed sections of Canada’s Indian Act.

“She was kicked out from her community,” Audette recalls. “So we had to live outside our community.”

One day, as a child, she went to request funding from the Band Office.

“‘Ha ha!’” she recalls a freckled and fair-skinned boy taunting her. “‘I’ll get funding for the school!’”

As the flotilla of ocean-going Coast Salish canoes broached the rapids under Vancouver’s iconic Lion’s Gate Bridge Sept. 2, police boats followed with sirens flashing and officers keenly observing. To the north, hundreds of people gathered on a Tsleil-Waututh Nation beach to welcome the convoy.

The historian who alerted media earlier in September to vandalism of a glacial rock he said to be covered in Aboriginal carvings and images, is dismayed his word is being called into question by the archeological community.

Despite questions over a lack of documented evidence, Stanley Knowlton, head of interpretive services at Head Smashed-In Buffalo Jump and member of the Piikani First Nation, maintains that historical etchings, described as pictographs or petroglyphs, existed on a glacial boulder known as the Glenwood Erratic before being destroyed by an act of vandalism.

While Sophie Pierre is confident that recent changes implemented by the federal government for treaty negotiations will help move First Nations toward a strong economic base for self-government, she says there is still one important component missing.

“When there doesn’t appear to be real ability to finalize a treaty anytime soon, (the government) has to be setting aside the debt,” said Pierre, who recently had her contract as Chief British Columbia Treaty Commissioner extended a year.

John Duncan, federal minister of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development, recently told Windspeaker that Aboriginal representative organizations, some of which are facing an 80 per cent cut to their federal core funding, can make up the shortfall by accessing dollars from corporate and private sector donations.
Speaking after an address to the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce last month, Duncan said, “We think there’s an opportunity for these organizations to look at other forms of revenue.”