The excitement of the thousands of spectators gathered for the ceremonies that would kick off the 2006 North American Indigenous Games (NAIG) in Denver intensified as the 7,000-plus athletes representing 31 delegations from across Canada and the United States streamed on to INVESCO Field on July 2.
As emcees Waneek Horn-Miller and Drew Lacapa welcomed each team into the 1.8-million sq. ft stadium, the crowd roared their appreciation as athletes proudly waved and shouted their team names with enthusiasm.

The First Nations University of Canada (FNUC) is set to commemorate 30 years of operations this fall—three years spent in its present form as a university and 27 as the Saskatchewan Indian Federated College—but only time will tell how much the institution will have to celebrate.
That’s because this fall the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC) is set to conduct a review of FNUC, where ongoing problems have thrown its membership in the association into question.

As resource companies line up to pay multi-million dollar royalty fees to the provincial government for the right to harvest the vast untapped resource wealth of northern Ontario, First Nations have served notice that their interests can no longer be ignored.
Two remote Ontario First Nations find themselves at ground zero in the battle to bring a halt to the jurisdictional ping pong game that gets played between federal and provincial governments when Aboriginal land rights are involved.

After more than a decade of international intrigue, the United Nations draft declaration on Indigenous rights will finally go before the UN general assembly for ratification later this year, despite the efforts of Canadian government representatives.
The June 29 vote of the new 47-member United Nations Human Rights Council, which replaces the much criticized UN Human Rights Commission, was 30 in favor and two against, with 12 abstentions and three countries absent.

An open letter to Vice-Chief Morley Watson:

Dear Editor:
The Free Trade Agreement and fantastic globalized trade improvements have given Canada greater prosperity. So say our Canadian corporate heads and our government leaders of the last 20 years. And that is true for about the 20 per cent upper-income part of our population.

Dear Editor:

Dear Editor:
I’m a Migmaw from Nova Scotia. We had National Aboriginal Day in Nova Scotia, and I know everybody did across the country, but a lot of the people I talked to said there was only one thing missing. We don’t have a national flag across the country. The Canadians have a national flag, the American’s have a flag and the Acadians have their national flag and Nova Scotia has the flag, but isn’t it about time the Native people of Canada had a national flag that we could fly year-round alongside of the Canadian flag and the American flag.

Dear Editor:
I’m a Migmaw from Nova Scotia. We had National Aboriginal Day in Nova Scotia, and I know everybody did across the country, but a lot of the people I talked to said there was only one thing missing. We don’t have a national flag across the country. The Canadians have a national flag, the American’s have a flag and the Acadians have their national flag and Nova Scotia has the flag, but isn’t it about time the Native people of Canada had a national flag that we could fly year-round alongside of the Canadian flag and the American flag.

We read with dismay the letter Prime Minister Stephen Harper wrote to the editor of the Calgary Herald in mid-July announcing that he would initiate a judicial inquiry into the decline of the Fraser River salmon fishery.