Supporters raise their fists in solidarity to protect our Salish Sea, our Puget Sound waters. Photo: K. Kalliber
By Kim Kalliber, Tulalip News
Crowds of peaceful supporters came together at Seattle’s Sculpture Park on Monday, August 11, standing in solidarity to protect the Salish Sea and decrease oil train traffic in the Northwest. Proposed terminals include Cherry Point, located on the Lummi Nation’s sacred grounds.
After welcoming friends that arrived from water and land, members of the Duwamish tribe led the group in a healing song for the waters.
Native Americans, environmental groups and concerned citizens joined in the opposition with singing, dancing, prayer and strong words.
Photo: K. Kalliber
Water is one of the first things to go,” said Michael Evans, Snohomish Tribe of Indians Chairman. “We’ve already noticed that some of the fish are starting to die. If the fish can’t live in the fresh water, neither can man. We really need to pay attention to what we are doing to ourselves and to the land, it all affects the Salish Sea.”
One young supporter at the event said it was “all about Indian solidarity” and stressed the importance of standing together to oppose the increase of fossil fuels in our Puget Sound waters.
Monday’s rally was organized by Idle No More Washington, 350 Seattle, Protect the Sacred and Backbone Campaign.
By: Kathryn Batstone-Boyd, Ben Stone, and Karina Ordell, OPB
NETARTS BAY, Ore. — Mark Wiegardt steps slowly through knee-high water, pausing over some jagged lumps of brown-gray shells with a bent flat-head screwdriver.
He picks up a clump of oysters and rests it on his thigh, stabbing and wrenching until the shellfish crack apart.
The creatures inside are more valuable than ever, so Wiegardt tries his best to make them look nice by bashing off the sharp edges.
Oysters are biologically simple. But nothing is simple about the water in which they live. The Pacific Northwest’s ocean chemistry is changing. A phenomenon known as ocean acidification has shocked the Northwest oyster industry, causing farmers and hatchery owners to modify decades-old ways of cultivating oysters and to reconsider the murky future of their industry.
“Our business has definitely been altered by this changing water chemistry,” Weigardt said.
He understands the concern surrounding ocean acidification better than almost anyone. Wiegardt’s a fourth-generation oyster farmer and one of the managers of Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery in Netarts Bay, Oregon.
Like many hatcheries on the West Coast, Whiskey Creek grows Pacific oysters — a Japanese species introduced to America in the early 1900s. Farmers grow oysters in enclosed waters connected to the ocean, known as estuaries. But the coastal waters of the Northwest are too cold for Pacific oysters to spawn naturally. So, oyster seed suppliers like Whiskey Creek act as incubators.
Whiskey Creek houses huge vats of seawater that serve as swimming pools for young oyster larvae to develop. When the larvae are mature enough, the hatchery packs them in balls of paper towels before sending them to independent oyster farmers along the coast.
The farmers take the oyster “seed” to their nurseries and dump it into giant tanks, where the larvae “set” onto vacant oyster shells. When they are mature enough, the farmers remove the shellfish from the tanks and chuck them into the bay. The oysters will stay here for a couple years, fattening up by filtering algae and other nutrients out of the water. Eventually, the farmers will return and gather their harvest so the full-grown oysters can be bagged and sold.
Why Are The Larvae Failing?
In the late summer of 2007, the oyster larvae at Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery didn’t make it to the bay. Without warning, the larvae began to fail by the millions inside the vats.
“Everything was dying. The larvae were pink. Every larva in the place was not feeding,” said Sue Cudd, owner of Whiskey Creek.
Whiskey Creek couldn’t supply its customers with seed. No one could understand why the larvae were dying.
“The changes were so dramatic, we thought there was a very strong possibility that we were going to go out of business,” Wiegardt said.
A year after the first die-offs, Whiskey Creek engineer Alan Barton scrambled for clues explaining why Whiskey Creek’s methods were suddenly not working. Barton discovered that an upwelling of ocean water with unusually high acidity was corroding the oysters’ shells, causing the larvae to die while trying to form an exoskeleton. He was eventually able to stem the die-offs by adapting simple aquarium chemistry to equalize the pH in Whiskey Creek’s tanks.
Since then, Whiskey Creek has learned to sustain healthy brown larvae in its vat water with a system that constantly buffers the water. However, the effectiveness of buffer chemicals is limited to hatchery tubs.
The die-offs made 2007 a defining year for West Coast oyster farmers.
Hedging Bets In Hawaii
Kathleen Nisbet, a manager of Goose Point Oyster Company in Willapa Bay, saw the die-offs as a signal to change. In 2009, Goose Point began constructing its first oyster hatchery in Hilo, Hawaii, in order to lessen its dependence on hatcheries like Whiskey Creek, which draw water from the Northwestern tides. Though the Nisbets had long done business with Whiskey Creek, and still do, they felt they had to set themselves apart geographically to insulate their business from the acidic waters.
“I employ 70 employees; I’m responsible for 70 families. That’s a big deal to me,” Nisbet said. “I can’t just say, ‘We’ll figure it out.’ I’ve got people I have to feed and it was our responsibility to look at what we needed to do.”
But even as one crisis seems resolved, another one looms. There’s a new concern that mature oysters may soon be at risk. Roberto Quintana, an engineer at Ekone Oyster Company on Washington’s Willapa Bay, has begun to see health defects in oysters out in the bay that he can’t correlate with natural events.
“Last year was when I first heard some of the old-timers from around here who were like, ‘We don’t know what the hell happened,’” Quintana said.
There is no consensus on what to do if water chemistry in the bays turns inhospitable for mature oysters. Quintana says there are a few options: genetically engineer a more hardy oyster species; try to apply buffer chemicals directly into the bays; or perhaps just give oysters more time in their safe nursery tanks.
Can The Oyster Industry Survive?
But for some, the thought of such dramatic changes to old farming techniques makes them question the long-term survival of the Northwest oyster industry.
“Those are big, philosophical questions,” Jambor said. “Do you get out of this business because you think it’s going to go down in 30 years? I don’t know.”
Whiskey Creek’s Wiegardt, however, is not about to idly watch the Northwest oyster industry go down in his lifetime. In the last few years, he has travelled many times with other Northwest shellfish producers to Washington, D.C., to tell their stories and ask lawmakers to pay for monitoring stations that would measure the water’s acidity.
“Farmers in general, I think we all like to complain a little more than we should,” he said. “[But] any time you know a little bit about something that may have a huge impact, you need to communicate that.”
Wiegardt thinks he has been well received in the Capitol, and he accepts these trips as his responsibility to the small community of Northwestern oyster farmers who know each other by first name.
“It’s not all doom and gloom,” Wiegardt said. “We’re solving a problem here as we speak.”
Kathryn Batstone-Boyd, Karina Ordell and Ben Stone are students in the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication. This report was produced as a class project. Video produced by Batstone-Boyd; photography by Ordell; article written by Stone.
TULALIP – The Grove Church in Marysville hosted a block party for the youth at Tulalip Boys & Girls Club as part of their iheart Go! kids campaign on Friday, August 8. The campaign is designed as a local summer mission trip that aims to connect church youth with their communities in positive ways, such as giving back to their communities.
The group, comprised of volunteer youth in grades fourth through eighth in the Marysville area, and church staff, are spent the week of August 5-9 reaching out to the Marysville/Tulalip youth through fun block parties that feature, games, bouncy houses, face painting and crafts.
The Tulalip Boys & Girls Club is one of five locations that iheart Go! youth, known for their identical bright neon green t-shirts, reached out to.
“It’s wonderful what you [Tulalip] dofor the kids at the Boys & Girls Club and the Grove Church is excited to be a part of this learning partnership. I love outreach and I love working with kids,” said Patty Thometz, Children’s Pastor at the Grove Church in an earlier interview with Tulalip News. “We couldn’t ask for a better day, the weather was gorgeous and we are so happy to be here. I think the kids are enjoying themselves.”
For generations, tribal peoples have witnessed the impact of faceless “persons” — corporations — on the land, water, air and human and environmental health. Though at times consulted, we have not been heard as a real voice in defending our traditional homeland territories. Instead, we have seen and experienced degradation of environmental integrity and destruction of healthy ecosystems. We suffered as our traditional foods and medicines were lost, and our people’s health plunged.
The Lummi, the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians, and all Coast Salish tribes, face devastating proposals that would bring coal by rail from Montana and Wyoming to the West Coast for export overseas. Indeed, the Cherry Point (in our language, Xwe’chi’eXen) proposal poses a tremendous ecological, cultural and socio-economic threat to Pacific Northwest tribes.
Xwe’chi’eXen is a 3,500-year-old village site where many of our ancestors lived and made their final resting places. Today, 60 percent of Lummis have direct ancestral ties to this site. Around it, the Salish Sea supports a Lummi fishing fleet (450 vessels) that feeds and supports tribal families.
Coal exports threaten all of this. We fear the desecration of Xwe’chi’eXen, the first archaeological site to be placed on the Washington State Register of Historic Places. We wonder how Salish Sea fisheries, already impacted by decades of pollution and global warming, will respond to the toxic runoff from the water used for coal piles stored on site. How will Bellingham’s recreational and commercial boaters navigate when more than 400 cape-sized ships, each 1,000 feet long, depart Cherry Point annually — each bearing 287,000 tons of coal? What will happen to the region’s air quality as coal trains bring dust and increase diesel pollution? And of course, any coal burned overseas will come home to our state as mercury pollution in our fish, adding to the perils of climate change.
Already, coal export officials have shown breathtaking disrespect for our heritage. To save time and boost profits, Pacific International Terminals bulldozed what they knew to be a registered archaeological site and drained our wetlands without a permit.
This proposal is not based on economic necessity. The inflated number of jobs promised is an old, old story; one filled with promises made, and broken. At the end of the day there would be far fewer jobs created and many sustainable jobs lost or compromised. The defeat of this madness is our aboriginal duty as the first Americans, but it also speaks to the collective interest of all citizens and — most importantly — as members of the human family who are part of, not masters over, creation. But this is a new day.
To those who would sacrifice the way of life of all peoples of the Pacific Northwest, we say: Take notice. Enough is enough! This summer’s proposed changes to the site design are beside the point. Mitigation is not the issue. We will stop the development of the export terminal and put in its place a plan that honors our shared responsibility to the land and waters of Xwe’chi’eXen and all our relations.
In August we make our journey from South Dakota to the Salish Sea and north to Alberta, Canada, stopping with many of the tribal and local communities whose lives unwillingly intersect with the paths of coal exports and tar sands. We will carry with us a 19-foot-tall totem that brings to mind our shared responsibility for the lands, the waters and the peoples who face environmental and cultural devastation from fossil fuel megaprojects. We travel in honor of late elder, and leader, and guiding light Billy Frank, Jr., who would remind us that we are stewards placed here to live with respect for our shared, sacred obligation to the creation, the plants and animals, the peoples and all our relations. He guides us, still. Our commitment to place, to each other, unites us as one people, one voice to call out to others who understand that our shared responsibility is to leave a better, more bountiful world for those who follow.
We welcome you to the blessing of the journey at 9:30 a.m., Sunday, Aug. 17 at the Lummi Tribal Administration Center, 2665 Kwina Road.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jewell James is a member of the Lummi Nation and head carver of the Lummi House of Tears Carvers.
Read more here: http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2014/08/11/3792147/2014-totem-pole-journey-honors.html?sp=/99/122/#storylink=cpy
Despite its own admission that it will cause an up to seven-fold increase in chemical pesticide use, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is poised to approve a new type of genetically engineered seed built to resist one of the most toxic weedkillers on the market.
Now, total approval hinges on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. If that federal body approves the new genetically modified organism (GMO), farmers will be free to plant corn and soy seeds genetically manipulated to live through sprayings of Dow’s Enlist Duo herbicide, a chemical cocktail containing both glyphosate and the antiquated, toxic chemical 2,4-D. Ironically, in the ’90s, chemical companies said the development of GMOs would eliminate the need to use older, more dangerous chemicals like 2,4-D. But as GMO use ramped up over the last few decades, chemical use increased, and many weeds are no longer responding to glyphosate, the main ingredient in Roundup, and the current chemical of choice for GMO farmers. This has created a “superweed” crisis, creating millions of acres of U.S. fields infested with hard-to-kill weeds.
With this week’s USDA final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) suggesting approval of the new GMO, many public food and safety experts say the American public faces unprecedented risks. After all, current chemical use is so high that foods now actually contain “extreme” levels of glyphosate. Because it’s systemic, it actually winds up inside of food. Adding 2,4-D to the mix is even more concerning, given its ties to cancer.
“USDA’s announcement is an outrageous abdication of USDA’s responsibility to protect our health and our food supply. The Obama Administration has ignored the interests and demands of millions of Americans, Members of Congress, and scientists, farmers and health professionals,” says Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of Center for Food Safety.
Farmers are upset about the decision, too. “Weed resistance is a major problem for farmers and we need a solution. This decision shows that the only options USDA is willing to consider are ones that lead to increased profits for chemical companies. We need to get off the pesticide treadmill, not increase the speed,” says George Naylor, Center for Food Safety board member and Iowa corn and soybean farmer.
Suggested approval comes despite USDA’s acknowledgment that Dow’s crops will trigger a three- to seven-fold increase in agricultural use of 2,4-D, foster 2,4-D resistance in weeds and inhibit farmers’ use of non-chemical weed control methods. “USDA’s decision represents a huge setback for farmers and sustainable agriculture. Independent scientists have linked 2,4-D to cancer, Parkinson’s disease and other maladies,” says Bill Freese, science policy analyst at Center for Food Safety. “Introduction of 2,4-D- resistant corn and soybeans will dramatically increase use of this toxic herbicide, leading to more disease, environmental harm and increasingly intractable weeds for farmers.”
The adoption of this new generation of GMOs also threatens farmer’s market favorites like tomatoes, peppers, grapes (and wine!) and potaotes. Any 2,4-D drift could cause these crops to become mangled and deformed, or even outright kill them.
COAST SALISH TRADITIONAL TERRITORY, Aug. 9, 2014 – In a heartless and illogical move, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans is refusing to allow Secwepemc First Nations devastated by the worst mining disaster in BC history to apply some of their Section 35 fish for salmon to catches in Musqueam First Nation’s downstream waters.
The Secwepemc First Nations refuse to catch the salmon they rely on at this time of year because of the water contamination fears from the impact of Monday’s massive Mount Polley tailings pond breach, which sent millions of liters of mine sludge flooding into the rivers and tributaries in the Cariboo region at peak spawning season. First Nations are already finding dead fish in the debris field. Yet rather than recognize this and act out of common sense and decency, DFO is insisting any salmon caught in Musqueam waters before they head further up the water system must be counted against Musqueam’s quota.
Musqueam Chief Wayne Sparrow stated, “This event illustrates the difference between ancient First Nations cultures and the governments. When people are in need the First Nations response is: how can we help? We will invoke our traditional protocols and will respond to the Secwepemc people whose vital salmon resource is impacted. We simply respond to the needs of the Elders and Secwepemc Chiefs rather than apologize for the irresponsible actions of industry.”
On August 8th, the Musqueam held a teleconference with Chief Bev Sellars and Chief Ann Louie and offered to provide them with salmon from the mouth of the Fraser. Chief Wayne Sparrow stated, “it was a moving telephone discussion to hear of their loss and the fears that they have to collect salmon in their territory. We have great respect for the interior First Nations who hold the territories that incubate the eggs for all of our communities’ future use.”
Chief Bev Sellars from the Xatsull First Nation states, “we don’t believe the BC government’s water tests and have reviewed the list of toxic heavy metals that were released from the tailings dam earlier this week. The Provincial and Federal governments seem to be taking the position that the water tests are fine so no harm is done. They are doing their best to stand up for the mining industry and leave us in the background to suffer the consequences. Governments should not be apologists for the reckless acts of industry but should work to reassure and support the Elders need for salmon.”
MacLean’s magazine is calling the fears raised by First Nations as ‘eco-babble’ because now the initial water tests are not as serious as expected. Chief Ann Louie from the Williams Lake Indian Band states, “I challenge anyone to come up to our territory and look at this disaster and say everything is fine. We are talking about the respect for basic human dignity and telling us the water tests are fine and at the same time don’t go in the water confirms our fears that we should not consume the fish in the impacted area as a source of food for the coming winter.”
The Musqueam are asking for others to speak out against the government’s ridiculous position that penalizes any First Nation that attempts to help others in need. Regardless of this decision by governments we are committed to support these communities with healthy fish.
The Tsleil Waututh First Nation, a neighbour to the Musqueam, has also offered to support the Secwepemc people by providing fish.
Wayne Sparrow is the elected Chief of the Musqueam First Nation located at the mouth of the Fraser River. Bev Sellars is the elected Chief of the Xatsull First Nation and Ann Louie is the elected Chief of the Williams Lake Indian Band whose collective communities were directly impacted by the Mount Polley disaster. Their traditional territory is approximately 500 km north of Musqueam.
This photo taken July 21, 2014 shows Kennett Consolidated School District Superintendent Barry Tomasetti meeting with young students in teacher Jane Cornell’s summer school class at Mary D. Lang Kindergarten Center in Kennett Square, Pa. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
By KIMBERLY HEFLING Associated Press
KENNETT SQUARE, Pa. (AP) – The cheerful sign outside Jane Cornell’s summer school classroom in Pennsylvania’s wealthiest county says “Welcome” and “Bienvenidos” in polished handwriting.
Inside, giggling grade-schoolers who mostly come from homes where Spanish is the primary language worked on storytelling with a tale about a crocodile going to the dentist. The children and their classroom at the Mary D. Lang Kindergarten Center, near both mushroom farms and the borough’s bucolic red-brick downtown, are a subtle reminder of America’s changing school demographics.
For the first time ever, U.S. public schools are projected this fall to have more minority students than non-Hispanic whites enrolled, a shift largely fueled by growth in the number of Hispanic children.
Non-Hispanic white students are still expected to be the largest racial group in the public schools this year at 49.8 percent. But the National Center for Education Statistics says minority students, when added together, will now make up the majority.
About one-quarter of the minority students are Hispanic, 15 percent are black and 5 percent are Asian and Pacific Islanders. Biracial students and Native Americans make up a smaller share of the minority student population.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan called the changing population a seminal moment in education. “We can’t talk about other people’s children. These are our children,” he said.
The shift creates new academic realities, such as the need for more English language instruction, and cultural ones, meaning changes in school lunch menus to reflect students’ tastes.
But it also brings some complex societal questions that often fall to school systems to address, including issues of immigration, poverty, diversity and inequity.
The result, at times, is racial and ethnic tension.
In Louisiana in July, Jefferson Parish public school administrators reached an agreement with the federal government to end an investigation into discrimination against English language learners.
In May, police had to be called to a school in the Streamwood, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, to help break up a fight between Hispanic and black students after a racially based lunchroom brawl got out of control.
Issues of race and ethnicity in school can also be more subtle.
In the Kennett Consolidated School District, Superintendent Barry Tomasetti described parents who opt to send their kids to private schools across the border in Delaware after touring diverse classrooms. Other families, he said, seek out the district’s diverse schools “because they realize it’s not a homogenous world out there.”
The changes in the district, about an hour southwest outside of Philadelphia, from mostly middle-to-upper class white to about 40 percent Hispanic was driven partly by workers migrating from Mexico and elsewhere to work the mushroom farms.
“We like our diversity,” Tomasetti said, even as he acknowledged the cost. He has had to hire English language instructors and translators for parent-teacher conferences. He has cobbled together money to provide summer school for many young English language learners who need extra reading and math support.
“Our expectation is all of our kids succeed,” he said.
Private schools nationally are changing as well, seeing a smaller number of white students and a greater number of Hispanic students in their decreasing pool of children.
The new majority-minority status of America’s schools mirrors a change that is coming for the nation as a whole. The Census Bureau estimates that the country’s population will have more minorities than whites for the first time in 2043, a change due in part to higher birth rates among Hispanics and a stagnating or declining birth rate among blacks, whites and Asians.
Today, slightly more than 1 in 5 kids speaks a language other than English at home.
But even as the population becomes more diverse, schools are becoming more racially segregated, reflecting U.S. housing patterns.
The disparities are evident even in the youngest of black, Hispanic and Native American children, who on average enter kindergarten academically behind their white and Asian peers. They are more likely to attend failing schools and face harsher school discipline.
Later, they have lower standardized test scores, on average, fewer opportunities to take advanced classes and are less likely to graduate.
Duncan said the disparities are unacceptable, and the country needs to make sure all students “have an opportunity to have a world class education, to do extraordinarily well.”
As the school-age population has become more nonwhite, it’s also become poorer, said Patricia Gandara, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA who serves on President Barack Obama’s advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for Hispanics.
Roughly one-quarter of Hispanics and African-Americans live below the poverty line – meaning a family of four has nearly $24,000 in annual income – and some of the poorest of Hispanic children are dealing with the instability of being in the country illegally or with a parent who is, Gandara said.
Focusing on teacher preparation and stronger curriculum is “not going to get us anywhere unless we pay attention to the really basic needs of these children, things like nutrition and health and safety, and the instability of the homes,” she said.
This transformation in school goes beyond just educating the children. Educators said parents must feel comfortable and accepted in schools, too.
Lisa Mack, president of the Ohio PTA, encourages local leaders to include grandparents and replace events such as a sock hop with one with a Motown theme that might be more inclusive or to provide opportunities for people of different ethnic groups to bring food to share at monthly meetings.
“I think one thing that’s critical is that schools and PTAs and everyone just need to understand that with changing demographics, you can’t do things the way you’ve done them before,” she said. “That you have to be creative in reaching out and making them feel welcomed and valued and supported in the school system.”
Some schools are seeking teachers to help reflect the demographics of their student population.
Today, fewer than 1 in 5 of the public schools teachers is a minority. “It is an ongoing challenge to try and make our teacher population reflect our student population,” said Steve Saunders, spokesman for the Adams County, Colorado, school district outside Denver that has seen a large shift toward having Hispanic students.
The New America Foundation, in a recent report, suggested teacher prep programs have at least one class for teachers on working with non-native English speakers and that education programs embrace bilingualism.
Andrea Giunta, a senior policy analyst at the National Education Association who focuses on teacher recruiting, retention and diversity, said you can’t assume that teachers are a good match just because of their background.
“Just because you speak Spanish doesn’t mean you speak the same Spanish your students are speaking and communicating with,” she said.
This comes as the NEA, the nation’s largest union, just elected an all-minority leadership team in July. The new president, Lily Eskelsen Garcia, is Latina, and the vice president and secretary-treasurer, Rebecca S. Pringle and Princess Moss, are black.
In Kennett Square, superintendent Tomasetti said Hispanic students in his district are performing at levels, on average, higher than their peers statewide. One recent graduate, Christian Cordova-Pedroza, is attending Harvard University this fall. Cordova-Pedroza is one of five children of a mushroom farmer from Mexico.
Cordova-Pedroza credited the motivation instilled by his parents combined with access to a variety of educational opportunities for his success, including an after-school program that included tutoring and help with college applications. He also was active in a Latino leadership club that helps provides translation services in the community and participated in summer programs at Penn State and Princeton.
“Certainly, I had to work hard to get there, but I feel like at every opportunity that I had a chance of participating in or doing that, I was always like, ‘Yes, I want to do that,'” he said.
Nearby, at El Nayarit Mexico Grocery Store, owner Jaime Sandoval, a native of Mexico with six kids, said he’s been pleased with the education his children have received. His 9-year-old daughter, he said, wants to be a teacher.
“She loves to read and all that stuff,” Sandoval said. “She always has good grades on English and she loves it much.”
UN Photo/Devra Berkowitz Left, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, and right, Grand Chief Edward John, Hereditary Chief of Tl’azt’en Nation and head of the First Nations Summit, as well as Vice Chairperson of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, in 2012.
It’s International Day of the World’s Indigenous People, as decreed by the United Nations 20 years ago, and First Nations in Canada are taking stock.
This year’s theme is “Bridging the gap: implementing the rights of indigenous peoples,” the UN said in a statement commemorating the August 9 event, occurring during the second consecutive International Decade of the World’s Indigenous People, as decreed by the international body in 2004.
It’s not solely about rights for their own sake, as UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and indigenous leaders pointed out. Indigenous Peoples can be “powerful agents of progress,” Ban Ki-moon said in a statement commemorating the occasion.
“In order for them to contribute to our common future, we must secure their rights,” Ban Ki-moon said. “Let us recognize and celebrate the valuable and distinctive identities of indigenous peoples around the world. Let us work even harder to empower them and support their aspirations.”
The UN counts an estimated 370 million indigenous people in about 90 countries, constituting “15 percent of the world’s poor and about one third of the world’s 900 million extremely poor rural people,” the international body said. “Practicing unique traditions, they retain social, cultural, economic and political characteristics distinct from those of the dominant societies in which they live.”
Back on Turtle Island the call was reiterated and rebroadcast, with renewed exhortations to uphold the treaties.
“The International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples is a time to celebrate the strength, resilience and resurgence of Indigenous peoples and nations around the globe,” said Assembly of First Nations National Chief Ghislain Picard. “At the same time, it is an opportunity to reflect on this year’s theme—‘Bridging the gap: implementing the rights of Indigenous peoples’—and the long-overdue and necessary work that we still must do here in Canada to give life to First Nations rights, Treaties and title. This year marks the 250th anniversary of the Treaty of Niagara between Indigenous Nations and Great Britain that reaffirmed our nation-to-nation relationship. This relationship has existed for centuries but we must move now and work together to honor and implement the principles of that relationship.”
Now in particular the notion of bridging the gap is extremely important in Canada, said Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations (FSIN) Chief Perry Bellegarde.
“The theme of ‘bridging the gap’ between Canada’s First Nations and non-First Nations people through the implementation of inherent and treaty rights has never been more relevant, or more important, than right now,” said Bellegarde in a statement. “The time for rhetoric and assurances of future actions by the Government of Canada has come to a close. It’s time for concrete steps that will positively impact the day-to-day lives of all First Nations people in Canada – in their homes, at their jobs and with their families.”
He also noted that within Canada, First Nations are rated 63rd in the UN Human Development Index when their collective statistics are assessed—even as the country as a whole ranks sixth.
“This is concrete evidence of the gap in living standards in Canada,” Bellegarde said. “It’s also sad commentary that a country with Canada’s economic strength would allow this to continue.”
The Chiefs of Ontario said the lack of a national inquiry into unsolved murders and disappearances of nearly 1,200 indigenous women over the past few decades was another indication of the gap.
“Unfortunately, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Rights is constantly being undermined here in Canada with the ongoing attack on First Nation rights,” said Regional Chief Stan Beardy of the Chiefs of Ontario, in a separate statement. “Internationally, Canada has been criticized for its human rights record and in particular its rejection of the UN call for a review of violence against aboriginal women.”
As of Saturday morning, Prime Minister Stephen Harper had not commemorated International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, though he had released a statement noting it was National Peacekeepers Day in Canada.
“Today we celebrate Canada’s long and proud tradition of contributing to international security,” Harper said in his statement. “Since the mid-1950s, Canada has participated in dozens of international security missions around the world, helping to prevent or contain conflicts and contributing to global and regional stability.”
John Ashe, president of the UN General Assembly, said relegating Indigenous Peoples to the fringes was still a prevalent practice worldwide.
“The historical marginalization of indigenous peoples is still an unfortunate reality in today’s world and in many places, daunting obstacles are a part of daily life,” Ashe said in a statement. “There is still a long way to go in the journey towards the concerted and decisive action.”
“We don’t want to just train technicians — we want to train healers,” Alan Shelton, the clinical director for the tribe’s authority, told McClatchy News. “And the way we train healers is we connect them to the Native American community and they learn about ideas of wellness and spirituality. And when they connect with patients, they connect with them on a deep level.”
The Puyallup Tribe was the first in Indian Country to utlize program. The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma is the second and more tribes could join if Congress authorizes an extension.
“[W]e’re actually training doctors in rural settings or tribal settings so that they will then be employed there, where we have the highest need,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-Washington), who has introduced the Community-Based Medical Education Act to keep the program running through 2019, told McClatchy.
The matchup between the Atlanta Dream and the Seattle Storm drew Schimmel fans from across the Northwest. Many chanted her name in the stands, which motivated her rivals even more.
“We were mad,” Storm forward Camille Little told The Seattle Times. “This is our home court. We wanted to play well, and we’re playing for our lives right now.”
The Dream ended up falling to the Storm by a score of 88-68. But Schimmel was still grateful for the support she received.
“This is home for me, and for everybody to come out tonight and show support, thank you guys,” Schimmel said after the game, The Oregonian reported.
