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, includes two Aboriginal players, Jordan Nolan and Dwight King.

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.

“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 industrial project, the mother of two has for years wondered how to change the system.

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 money was transferred into trust funds for the provinces and territories to use.

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 the like-minded vision of the Oneida Language and Cultural Centre.

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 widespread than initially anticipated,” Starkman said.

If readers have been spending the last short days of summer down at the local river or lake (and who could blame them) they may have missed the dust-up over the name of an Ottawa minor league football club called the Nepean Redskins.

A man named Ian Campeau, a card-carrying Nippissing Ojibwe, also known as Dee Jay NDN from the band A Tribe Called Red, has been campaigning to convince the team to change its name to something… well… something that isn’t a derogatory description of the Indigenous people of North America.