CBC has revealed the findings of a new survey on police relations within Regina. It found that while the majority of people are satisfied with the city’s police force, First Nations and Métis are less likely to trust the police. The University of Regina justice studies department survey shows that of the 504 people randomly surveyed by phone between Aug. 15 and Sept. 1, three-quarters ranked the quality of the Regina Police Service as very good to excellent. Most of those who said they were satisfied with Regina’s police services had little to no contact with the police.

The Canadian Press has reported that First Nations in British Columbia are having a hard time fathoming the decision by Transport Canada to approve the use of oil supertankers along BC coastal waters, ignoring safety issues including poor weather, human error, and narrow, unforgiving waterways. Transport Canada recently filed its report to the regulatory panel considering Enbridge Inc.’s $5.5-billion Northern Gateway proposal to ship crude from Alberta to the West Coast by pipeline and export the oil to Asian markets in supertankers loaded in Kitimat.

What’s that, you ask? That’s the new name of the National Aboriginal Achievement Foundation. The new identity, Indspire says, signals a new day for Indigenous education in Canada. Indspire’s new tagline, says it all: “Indigenous education, Canada’s future.” Indspire is a combination of key concepts of Indigenous and inspiration to highlight the organization’s mandate.

Coaches honoured
A pair of youth hockey coaches are the recipients of provincial awards.

Winnipeg’s William Hudson and Kali Leary of Norway House Cree Nation are the 2011 winners of the Manitoba Aboriginal Coaching Awards. They were announced as the winners in early February.

The Manitoba Aboriginal Sport and Recreation Council annually recognizes a pair of coaches, one male and one female, with the awards.

It’s a good thing that Gord McKenzie-Crowe did not listen to his critics.

It was back in 2006 that McKenzie-Crowe, an Ojibwe from Ontario’s Alderville First Nation, decided to put together a pair of Aboriginal youth teams to compete in some summer hockey tournaments.

He said the idea came to him after seeing his two children, son Brenton and daughter Brooke, compete in various Little NHL tournaments, an annual spring event in Ontario that feature Aboriginal squads from across the province.

Indian Horse
By Richard Wagamese
Douglas & McIntyre
186 pages, $23.00

Award-winning author Richard Wagamese weaves an emotional and endearing story together in his latest novel Indian Horse that confronts the legacy of residential school in a young boy’s life and how the game of hockey serves as a way of coping.

Leader had the recipe for peaceful co-existence

Amidst menacing officers and talk of bombings by demonstrators if their demands weren’t met, a then-38-year-old Madeline Skead stepped into the 1974 Ontario Anicinabe Park crisis advocating building a “relationship” only to have a gun aimed at her chest.

“‘You’d better not miss’ was all she said, and that shows how courageous she was,” recalled daughter Eleanor Skead.

The controversy that surrounded the work of the National Education Panel, developed jointly by the Assembly of First Nations and Aboriginal Affairs, continues to flare after the panel delivered its final report and recommendations in early February.

First Nations leaders in Ontario are calling on the government for assistance in handling what they predict will be a health crisis following Health Canada’s decision to cut First Nation funding for the addictive opiate painkiller OxyContin.

Purdue Pharma Canada, the maker of OxyContin, will stop manufacturing the drug in Canada at the end of the month, and, as of March 1, OxyContin will be replaced with a new formulation of oxycodone called OxyNeo, which is formulated so that it is more difficult to crush, and therefore less likely to be abused through injecting or snorting.

The temperature dropped to just one degree on the morning of Feb. 14, with fine snow falling on people gathered to take part in the March for Missing and Murdered Women in Toronto.

Police pressed the crowd back as it swelled and spilled over the sidewalk as the group rallied outside of police headquarters at 40 College Street. It was a peaceful and calm crowd who stood together to remember those many missing and murdered women who were sisters, aunts, daughters and cousins that were taken from their families through violence.