Sea Marsland already has a lengthy list of accomplishments.
And the 30-year-old Cree from Lac La Ronge is hoping to continue helping other Aboriginals for a long time.

Marsland was recently presented with a Heroes of Our Time scholarship, annually awarded by the Assembly of First Nations.
The AFN annually awards eight Heroes of Our Time scholarships in various categories.

Marsland won the Walter Dieter Award for Social Work and with it $2,000.

More than a million dollars has been awarded to 23 researchers at the University of Saskatchewan who are studying various Aboriginal issues.

The $1.2 million from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada will go towards research on issues such as the impact of oil sands, coping with environmental change, establishing a sense of place, incorporating Indigenous knowledge and the legal duty to consult.

Florence Highway and Evelyn Linklater are receiving national recognition for the education and awareness they have brought to countless members of First Nations communities in Northern Saskatchewan. The Canadian Diabetes Association acknowledged the activities of these two 60-something volunteers who are well-managed diabetics themselves, and able to speak to the youth in their native Cree language. The women jointly received a National Volunteer of the Year award in Toronto in October.

The concept of Neechie Gear really began years ago when Kendal Netmaker-Weenie was in elementary school.

A friend noticed that Netmaker-Weenie had a lot of talent when it came to sports, but wasn’t involved in any organized team sports.

 “He asked me, ‘Why aren’t you playing on these teams?’ and I told him...we don’t even have a vehicle, I can’t get to these practices, and we don’t have money for registration,” said Netmaker-Weenie.

An idea that has been in the works for a long time has finally come to fruition.

Officials with the Saskatchewan Indian Institute of Technologies announced in late October that they were launching a foundation.

Randell Morris, SIIT's president and CEO, said school officials had been entertaining the idea of having a foundation for about eight years now.

"It's our way to reach out publically to bring individuals and corporations closer to SIIT," Morris said about the establishment of a school foundation.

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Windspeaker Rank Comix March 2012 Adam Martin

Canada was before the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) on Feb. 23 for the start of two days of questioning about the country’s record on racial discrimination. The committee is a high level UN Treaty Monitoring Body and Canada is required to report every four years. Canada’s report focused on what they considered to be positive benchmarks and achievements towards the elimination of racial discrimination in Canada. Alternative reports challenged Canada’s record and presented a different perspective.

The House of Commons voted 268 to zero in favour of a motion for equity in funding for First Nations schools as compared with provincial schools with the goal of improving the quality of on-reserve education. “Today is historic and we are halfway there,” said MP Charlie Angus of the NDP. He was the member that brought the motion to Parliament. “It is up to the government to live up to the promise they made.” Angus has campaigned for the past number of years for Shannen’s Dream, a movement named after the late Shannen Koostachin, of Attawapiskat.

The North Slave Métis Alliance has filed a judicial review application against the Government of the Northwest Territories alleging discrimination against Métis hunters who were excluded from the Bathurst Caribou hunt. They say the government has given other Aboriginal groups, including the Yellowknives Dene First Nation and the Tlicho, rights to hunt the herd even though there has been a ban on hunting the herd in place since 2009. The alliance claims it has been trying for two years to get rights to hunt the herd, but have been denied.

Albert Joseph Delaire, the former chair of the Métis Addictions Council of Saskatchewan, was sentenced to a year in jail for defrauding the organization. He pleaded guilty to committing six counts of fraud and forgery between 2001 and 2004, including forging invoices and service contracts and authorizing payments to himself for work that was never done. Delaire was the minister of health for the Métis Nation of Saskatchewan and chair of the board overseeing the addictions council.