'We're just worried about the land' Posted By SUSAN GAMBLE, EXPOSITOR STAFF Friday night's TRUE meeting seemed to be a meeting of the minds. Four representatives of the Haudenosaunee Men's Fire offered a history lesson and an explanation of why land under construction by Empire Homes off Conklin Road and other properties in Brantford are so critical to the Six Nations people. And Caledonia resident Ken Hewitt -- once the spokesman for the Caledonia Citizen's Alliance -- explained why he's seeking a public investigation into a "two-tiered justice system" that he says favours natives. Hewitt has about 7,000 signatures on a petition calling for an Ipperwash-style inquiry into OPP actions. Hewitt said mistakes have been made on both sides and he feels the OPP have been victims of confused leadership. Haldimand-Norfolk MPP Toby Barrett, who supports the petition, told more than 100 people at Laurier's Odeon building that he doubts his private member's bill demanding an investigation will pass second reading in March. Also in the audience was Haldimand County Mayor Marie Trainer. The Men's Fire representatives -- Gene Johns, Stan Farmer, Wes Elliott and Kelly Curley -- worked to explain to the crowd that they operate under treaty law rather than Canadian law. The group, a traditional gathering that can include all men and is charged with the duty of protecting the land, the women and children, says it was reignited during the Douglas Creek Estates protest in Caledonia after being dormant for years. The protests at Empire Homes in particular are due to the land being part of the Clench tract, said Johns, which is a matter under litigation in the courts. "Everybody is worried about their home and getting eviction notices," said Johns. "Tell everybody their house is fine. We're just worried about the land." Johns -- who has been arrested for his part in trying to stop construction at the Conklin Road site -- encouraged people affected by the Empire protest or concerned about their own house to contact the Men's Fire representatives to talk. Farmer said the men were compelled to try and stop houses from being built on land they consider theirs as a way of protecting the remaining greenbelt areas. "Hamilton is having a problem with coyotes but you've interfered with their business, just like us. The animals need to have a place to hunt and fish, just like us." Audience member Gary Horsnell questioned why the Men's Fire is protesting at land it has no chance of having returned, according to the government. But Curley said that's the reason they protest at sites before houses are erected. "The federal government says it won't displace people, so if there's no house on the land, we have a right to that land." Farmer appealed to the non-natives in the crowd to consider the commitment and lack of sleep many of the protesters endure for their cause. "Don't look at me as a warrior or terrorist. I'm an individual born to an obligation. We're trying to keep the treaty of peace," said Farmer.

AUSTRALIA: Claims of child abuse pretext for land grab, uranium mining This is a very horrible act of aggression by the Australian government, under a particularly egregious pretext. This is today ... now ... 2008 ... not 1908. Canada is no less guilty of continuing land grabs, under various guises. Mining and forestry alone consume billions and billions of acres of land worldwide, and total destruction and contamination is inherent in the business: Corporations have a way of sucking out the resources and then going 'bankrupt', thus unaccountable for human and environmental destruction in their wake. But I digress ... again ... This is a gem of a quote (from below), and it is EXACTLY true in Canada: OVER HALF of the budget of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada never leaves Ottawa. 'Canada' (INAC) uses it to pay the cost of defending itself from Aboriginal 'land claims'.

A pervasive white myth, that Aborigines leech off the state, serves to conceal the disgrace that money the federal government says it spends on indigenous affairs actually goes towards opposing native land rights. In 2006, some A$3bn was underspent "or the result of creative accounting", reported the Sydney Morning Herald. Like the children of apartheid, the Aboriginal children of Thamarrurr in the Northern Territory receive less than half the educational resources allotted to white children.

And that is also true in Canada. Do the math: Half the funding leads to half the graduating. nobrainer. Here's the full story from Australia ... http://www.abibitumikasa.com/forums/oppression-afrikans-generally/38400-australian-aboriginees-face-extinction-genocide.html Under cover of racist myth, a new land grab in Australia By John Pilger The Guardian, Friday October 24 2008 Claims of child abuse are proving a fertile pretext to menace the Aboriginal communities lying in the way of uranium mining Its banks secured in the warmth of the southern spring, Australia is not news. It ought to be. An epic scandal of racism, injustice and brutality is being covered up in the manner of apartheid South Africa. Many Australians conspire in this silence, wishing never to reflect upon the truth about their society's Untermenschen, the Aboriginal people. The facts are not in dispute: thousands of black Australians never reach the age of 40; an entirely preventable disease, trachoma, blinds black children as epidemics of rheumatic fever ravage their communities; suicide among the despairing young is common. No other developed country has such a record. A pervasive white myth, that Aborigines leech off the state, serves to conceal the disgrace that money the federal government says it spends on indigenous affairs actually goes towards opposing native land rights. In 2006, some A$3bn was underspent "or the result of creative accounting", reported the Sydney Morning Herald. Like the children of apartheid, the Aboriginal children of Thamarrurr in the Northern Territory receive less than half the educational resources allotted to white children. In 2005, the UN committee on the elimination of racial discrimination described the racism of the Australian state, a distinction afforded no other developed country. This was in the decade-long rule of the conservative coalition of John Howard, whose coterie of white supremacist academics and journalists assaulted the truth of recorded genocide in Australia, especially the horrific separations of Aboriginal children from their families. They deployed arguments not dissimilar to those David Irving used to promote Holocaust denial. Smear by media as a precursor to the latest round of repression is long familiar to black Australians. In 2006, the flagship current affairs programme of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Lateline, broadcast lurid allegations of "sex slavery" among the Mutitjulu people in the Northern Territory. The programme's source, described as an "anonymous youth worker", was later exposed as a federal government official whose "evidence" was discredited by the Northern Territory chief minister and the police. The ABC has never retracted its allegations, claiming it has been "exonerated by an internal inquiry". Shortly before last year's election, Howard declared a "national emergency" and sent the army to the Northern Territory to "protect the children" who, said his minister for indigenous affairs, were being abused in "unthinkable numbers". Last February, with much sentimental fanfare, the new prime minister, Labor's Kevin Rudd, made a formal apology to the first Australians. Australia was said to be finally coming to terms with its rapacious past and present. Was it? "The Rudd government," noted a Sydney Morning Herald editorial, "has moved quickly to clear away this piece of political wreckage in a way that responds to some of its own supporters' emotional needs, yet it changes nothing. It is a shrewd manoeuvre." In May, barely reported government statistics revealed that of the 7,433 Aboriginal children examined by doctors as part of the "national emergency", 39 had been referred to the authorities for suspected abuse. Of those, a maximum of just four possible cases of abuse were identified. Such were the "unthinkable numbers". They were little different from those of child abuse in white Australia. What was different was that no soldiers invaded the beachside suburbs, no white parents were swept aside, no white welfare was "quarantined". Marion Scrymgour, an Aboriginal minister in the Northern Territory, said: "To see decent, caring [Aboriginal] fathers, uncles, brothers and grandfathers, who are undoubtedly innocent of the horrific charges being bandied about, reduced to helplessness and tears, speaks to me of widespread social damage." What the doctors found they already knew - children at risk from a spectrum of extreme poverty and the denial of resources in one of the world's richest countries. Having let a few crumbs fall, Rudd is picking up where Howard left off. His indigenous affairs minister, Jenny Macklin, has threatened to withdraw government support from remote communities that are "economically unviable". The Northern Territory is the only region where Aborigines have comprehensive land rights, granted almost by accident 30 years ago. Here lie some of the world's biggest uranium deposits. Canberra wants to mine and sell it. Foreign governments, especially the US, want the Northern Territory as a toxic dump. The Adelaide to Darwin railway that runs adjacent to Olympic Dam, the world's largest uranium mine, was built with the help of Kellogg, Brown & Root - a subsidiary of American giant Halliburton, the alma mater of Dick Cheney, Howard's "mate". "The land grab of Aboriginal tribal land has nothing to do with child sexual abuse," says the Australian scientist Helen Caldicott, "but all to do with open slather uranium mining and converting the Northern Territory to a global nuclear dump." What is unique about Australia is not its sun-baked, derivative society, clinging to the sea, but its first people, the oldest on earth, whose skill and courage in surviving invasion, of which the current onslaught is merely the latest, deserve humanity's support. John Pilger: Under cover of racist myth, a new land grab in Australia | Comment is free | The Guardian

Court orders mediator for B.C. land dispute: Province has failed to hold meaningful consultations with natives over 70,000-hectare tract, judge rules

MARK HUME

From Wednesday's Globe and Mail

November 5, 2008 at 5:00 AM EST

VANCOUVER — The Supreme Court of British Columbia has ordered that a mediator be appointed to resolve a dispute among a Vancouver Island band, the government and a resource company concerning traditional aboriginal rights on 70,000 hectares of forest land. The court says the mediator is necessary because the government has failed to engage in meaningful consultation with the Hupacasath First Nation (HFN), despite a 2005 court order requiring the B.C. Ministry of Forests to do so. At issue is the aboriginal use of a vast tract of privately owned forest land around Port Alberni that the government removed from Tree Farm Licence 44 in 2004. Madam Justice Lynn Smith said the removal decision opened the possibility for Island Timberlands to sell the property for development, raising Hupacasath fears that their traditional territory could become "cottage country," destroying traditional access to sacred places and hunting and fishing grounds. In the 2005 decision, the court ruled the government breached its constitutional duty to consult reasonably with the Hupacasath over the removal decision. The court stated there was "a duty to consult [in good faith] and attempt accommodation," and it set a two-year period for the parties to make progress in discussions. But in a decision released yesterday, Judge Smith said the government had failed to make a reasonable effort at accommodation. "I find that the Crown did not correctly understand what was required, and misapprehended its duty to consult and accommodate in the circumstances," Judge Smith said. The judge said government officials did meet with the Hupacasath on numerous occasions, but failed to focus on the possible impacts the decision to remove land would have on the band. "The Crown's position essentially was that the removal decision did not significantly change the Hupacasath's position, and that the Crown was not required to consider steps which would accommodate for what the HFN stood possibly to lose as a result of the removal decision."The judge listed examples of what the Crown could have considered: "Could the Crown find a way to assist the HFN in retaining access to at least the most important of their sacred sites? Was it possible for the Crown to provide improved access to resources on the Crown lands in replacement of the former access to such resources on the removed lands? Could wildlife corridors be protected so that the animals hunted by the HFN would still be available on the Crown lands? "Those are not the questions upon which the parties focused," Judge Smith said. She continued: "Reasonableness, not perfection, is required of the Crown in its efforts to consult with and accommodate aboriginal peoples when it makes decisions potentially affecting their claimed aboriginal rights. Here, I find that the Crown's efforts did not fall within a range of reasonably defensible approaches in the context of the 2005 decision and the history and relationship between the parties." The judge ordered the parties to appoint a mediator by mutual agreement, or said the court would appoint one if necessary. Judge Smith said the mediation will specifically consider including the Hupacasath in discussions with Island Timberlands regarding environmental, watershed and wildlife protection measures, among other things. Meanwhile, in other developments yesterday concerning aboriginal rights, the provincial and federal governments reached deals with the last of 22 bands who lost land after a royal commission set boundaries for reserves in 1912. Under the agreements, B.C. will return more than 50 square kilometres of land to four native bands, along with a cash settlement of more than $1-million. The agreements cover the Seton Lake band near Lillooet, the Gitwangak in the northern interior, and two bands near Prince Rupert - the Metlakatla and the Lax Kw'alaams