Manitoba Pipestone - October 2014

Group works to dredge Red River

Sparked by the discovery of 15-year-old Tina Fontaine’s body in August in the Red River, a group, which includes Bernadette Smith, whose sister Claudette Osborne went missing six years ago, has organized the dredging of the river’s bottom. The group is called Drag the Red and has volunteer crews, who will use boats to pull metal bars with dragging hooks along the bottom of the river to pick up anything, including bodies. A pipe ceremony was held on Sept. 14, with 100 people in attendance, many of whom have missing family members. Dredging began a few days later. There are approximately two dozen volunteers on the boats, which include Aboriginal people with experience dragging Manitoba lakes for remains, said Smith. The Drag the Red has 700 members on Facebook. While the Winnipeg Police Service has done dives, and recently had the Edmonton Police Service’s Missing Persons Unit conduct a search of the shoreline through visual observation, there has been no dredging. Critics say dredging will only pull up garbage.

The Aboriginal People’s Choice Awards quickly became about more than honouring Aboriginal talent Sept. 12. Rappers Winnipeg Boyz opened the show in Winnipeg wearing t-shirts that read “Where are our women?” It was in reference to the more than 1,100 missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada. Indigenous rapper and University of Winnipeg director of Indigenous Inclusion Wab Kinew talked about the long history of misogyny in rap music. “I would like to challenge all of the hip hop and rap artists in our community to stop making music with language that’s disrespectful and demeaning to Indigenous women.” An open letter from activist Clayton Thomas-Muller questioned the role of corporate sponsorship for the awards. Thomas-Muller pointed out that much of “the APCA show was sponsored by some of the biggest violators of Indigenous/Treaty Rights in this country…” Thomas-Muller challenged the night’s recipients to post on Facebook their thoughts about the operations of the companies that sponsored the APCA.

In mid-August, the province extended a ban on feeding deer, elk and moose in western Manitoba to Aboriginal hunters to better control the threat of chronic wasting disease. Officials say the ban was enacted after consultation. The new regulation recognizes Aboriginal hunting rights have now been taken into consideration. “The communities we talked to, the hunters we talked to, the’’re very much in favour of the work we’re doing to prevent the spread of the disease,” said Manitoba Big Game Health Program manager Richard Davis. He said subsistence hunting is not widely practised in western Manitoba. CWD is a fatal disease of the central nervous system of deer and elk. The theory behind a ban on feeding is infected animals probably transmit the disease through animal-to-animal contact and/or contamination of feed or water sources with saliva or bodily waste material, possibilities that increase greatly when animals gather at a single source of supplied food. The new regulation comes about two months after the province made amendments to the Wildlife Act’s general hunting regulation.

In early September, a group of youth took over a protest camp in Winnipeg that’s calling for a national inquiry into missing and murdered Aboriginal women. The original camp in Memorial Park since late August folded its tents because it saw the call by Canadian premiers to hold a roundtable on the issue as a positive first step. “Our biggest complaint right now is ‘cause all the missing and murdered Indigenous women, they’re mostly young people and we want to get action taken on to why people aren’t listening to the youth and why they’re letting this happen,” Corey Bruce of the youth camp told CTV News. The group says they plan to camp for 12 days before making a trip to Ottawa.

Winners of the second edition of the Burt Award for First Nations, Metis and Inuit Literature will be announced on Sept. 27 at the Manitoba Theatre for Young People in Winnipeg. Nominated are The Girl Who Grew A Galaxy by Cherie Dimaline (published by Theytus Books); The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America by Thomas King (published by Doubleday Canada); They Called Me Number One by Bev Sellars (published by Talon Books); and, Tilly, a Story of Hope and Resilience by Monique Gray Smith (published by Sono Nis Press). In 2013, more than 7,500 copies of the first three winning titles were distributed to 980 locations in all provinces and territories. The reaction from community workers and educators who received the books to use as part of their curriculum or programming with First Nations, Metis and Inuit youth was overwhelmingly positive.  Prizes of $12,000, $8,000 and $5,000 will be awarded to first through third placing authors. In addition, publishers of the winning titles will be awarded a guaranteed purchase of a minimum of 2,500 copies, which will ensure that First Nations, Metis and Inuit youth across Canada will have access to the books through their community’s schools, libraries, or friendship centres.

Compiled by Shari Narine