Indigenous Canadians protest poverty

from AFP via Google



OTTAWA — Canada's indigenous people marched en masse Thursday to protest poverty in their communities, but much of the anger displayed in similar events last year appears to have dissipated.

Thousands demonstrated across Canada, chanting, dancing in the streets and beating traditional native drums, but the fires burning on rail lines and ramshackle buses parked across highways that blemished last year's protests were visibly absent this round.

"I don't think this year is going to be as it was last year," organizer and national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, Phil Fontaine, told public broadcaster CBC, adding there would be "no violence" this year.

"This is really a day of reaching out to Canadians to educate and inform Canadians of the situation that our people find themselves in," he explained.

"Too many (indigenous) people live in impoverished conditions. Too many of our children are going to school hungry. Too many of our (schools) are in a terrible state of disrepair."

"We need to move urgently to deal with First Nations poverty."

Protestors again this year called on the government to beef up funding for native communities and education, as well as expedite settlement of some 1,100 unresolved aboriginal land claims now twisting slowly through the courts.

However, they were heartened by the recent promise of a government apology on June 11 for the segregated boarding schools blamed for the loss of native culture and misery over more than a century.

Starting in 1874, Indian, Inuit and Metis children in Canada were forcibly enrolled in boarding schools run by Christian churches on behalf of the federal government in a misguided effort to assimilate them.

The last such school closed in the 1990s.

Survivors alleged abuse by headmasters and teachers, who stripped them of their culture and language.

Such experiences have been blamed for the loss of indigenous family ties, gross poverty, and desperation in native communities that breeds abuse, suicide, crime, and civil disobedience.

In April, Canada appointed the nation's top indigenous jurist to head a probe of the abuses, decried by Fontaine as "one of the darkest chapters in Canada's history."