In 2024, a mandatory course for B.C. lawyers referred to the “discovery of an unmarked burial site containing the bodies of 215 children on the former Kamloops Indian Residential School grounds” which “(confirmed) what survivors have been saying all along.” When one lawyer proposed a correction, as no graves were ever found, the B.C. Law Society publicly disparaged him. He sued for defamation — but now, the trial has been called off.
The Assembly of First Nations (AFN) recently met for their annual shindig in Ottawa, and the outcome was predictable. They offered nothing but anger, indignation, and demands. It’s an organization overrun with a sense of entitlement and suffers from a chronic oppositional disorder. It’s time that taxpayers stopped paying for it. Taxpayers funding a lobby group whose primary output is demands for more funding creates a self-reinforcing loop detached from broader Canadian fiscal reality or voter consent.
Survivor accounts of residential schools vary — sometimes from the very same person. Nunavut Senator Nancy Karetak-Lindell told Nunatsiaq News in 2001 that her time at Akaitcho Hall was “a home-away-from-home” and that “it’s not like what you’re hearing about all the residential school issues today.” In the same piece, she said, “At Akaitcho, we were in a structured environment compared to where we came from. That taught us perseverance and how to discipline ourselves.” “It taught us a lot about doing things in life that we didn’t always want to do, but those things had to be done … We had to learn how to live with people from different cultures who spoke different languages and came from different parts of the NWT,” she continued, adding that those friendships helped her political career.
Making criminals out of people who merely ask questions about the residential school system is not the path to reconciliation, says B.C. lawyer Jim Heller.
Goodwill and open dialogue are needed far more than trying to imprison people under a “denialism” law, according to Heller, whose defamation suit against his own law society over potential graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School was recently settled.
Five years after Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc sent shockwaves around the world by announcing the First Nation found more than 200 possible unmarked graves at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, the chief says the community doesn’t yet know if or when it will proceed with excavation.
Kúkpi7 (Chief) Rosanne Casimir told CBC News the nation is still in an engagement phase with dozens of communities that sent children to the institution when it was in operation from 1890 to 1978 to try to get consensus on the path forward.
“For us, it is about truth and reconciliation and being able to work with all the different communities, our neighbouring nations, our consultants and our families,” Casimir said.
CALGARY — A Manitoba First Nations leader has said that indigenous communities should not have to exhume suspected residential school burial sites because those who died there “send us messages” confirming their presence.
Does David Eby now believe as well that FN chiefs can speak to the dead? This is a legitimate question to put to the leader of this province: Do you, @Dave_Eby, accept as valid evidence that dead people can speak to us from the ground? https://t.co/A25V9pq5x7
— Dallas Brodie (@Dallas_Brodie) July 19, 2026
Much of whether Prime Minister Mark Carney’s plan to fast-track economic growth through his Major Projects Office will bear fruit or remain forever aspirational will depend on how he manages negotiations with indigenous groups. The tone from and resolutions released by the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) at its recent annual gathering in Ottawa don’t bode well for the federal government.
Always.
In response to a recent Western Standard news story about indigenous grievances, Treaty 8 chiefs’ claims for resource revenue sharing on ceded Western Canadian lands lack a clear legal and historical foundation, which is essential for understanding their legitimacy and impact.
While the phrase “Treaty 8 territory” seems to refer to lands surrendered to the Crown in the 1899 agreement, understanding the temporal context of these land surrender agreements helps clarify why current claims for resource revenue sharing are legally and historically unfounded.
The Assembly of First Nations (AFN) has passed an emergency resolution that calls on Canada to criminalize residential school denialism.
The advocacy organization, which represents chiefs countrywide, is holding its annual general assembly in Ottawa this week. The resolution was passed on Tuesday.
First Nations chiefs spoke about the importance of the resolution at a news conference Wednesday.
There are two kinds of lobster trappers in St. Mary’s Bay, Nova Scotia: the non-Indigenous ones who have to abide by federal law, and the Indigenous ones who apparently don’t. The Liberal approach to governing the fishery has bred tension and violence between the two — and a recent Nova Scotia Supreme Court decision shows that we’re far from seeing it resolved.
In the United States, they refer to their national parks as “America’s Best Idea.”
Books and documentaries have been dedicated to the notion that in 250 years of nationhood their greatest creation has been national parks, starting with the world’s first, Yellowstone, in 1872.
Not here in Canada. Parks Canada, the government agency charged with preserving, protecting and operating this country’s 37 national parks now calls them a “colonial injustice.”
In 1878, an agent for the province of British Columbia predicted the legal battle that surrounds the declaration of Aboriginal title for the Cowichan Nation today.
Gilbert Sproat, a commissioner in charge of establishing reservations for Indigenous communities, sent a letter to his superiors urging them not to rush the business of handing out land grants to the province’s new settlers, who were eager to snatch up the best lands the province offered.
“It is extremely inconvenient to the province to have lands locked up from preemption or sale in fine districts, owing to the non-settlement of the Indian claims, but this is a necessity,” Mr. Sproat wrote in a letter that became a key part of evidence in the B.C. Supreme Court record in the Cowichan case.
A B.C. judge has ruled against a Richmond company that sought to reopen the Cowichan Tribes Aboriginal title case.
Last year’s landmark B.C. Supreme Court decision found the Cowichan held Aboriginal title to a swath of land in southeast Richmond, including privately owned lands.
Indigenous community members have encouraged federal officials to reflect on how the Order of Canada can overcome its “deep colonial symbolism and associations,” says an internal government presentation on efforts to modernize the Canadian honours system.
The April presentation, prepared for the Order of Canada Advisory Council, says recent feedback indicates that accepting the honour “could bring feelings of discomfort or shame” to some Indigenous people due to its colonial associations.
An American woman denied permanent residency in Canada due to convictions for impaired driving and drug possession has won another shot at staying here because the immigration officer who made the decision ignored “the best interests of her children and her experience as an Indigenous person.”
