New program allows students to create their own skateboard brand and business for high school credit
University of Alberta grad Kristian Basaraba, ’01 BEd, has been skateboarding for over 30 years. But the high school teacher never thought he’d be leaning so heavily on the sport in the classroom. In 2019, he started the Sk8trepreneur program at Salisbury Composite High School in Sherwood Park, Alta., challenging students to create their own…
Doing a little isn’t good enough, especially when we ignore abuses
Prince George, B.C., officials recently decided to change the name of O’Grady Road, named after a former Catholic bishop of Prince George, to Dakelh Ti, meaning First Nation Road in the language of the Lheidli T’enneh. I knew Bishop Fergus O’Grady fairly well and I don’t think anything would have made him happier. The decisions…
Being stuck in the past won’t improve Indigenous lives. We need to focus on what’s next
The overwhelming majority of Canadians regret the history of European contact with Indigenous peoples, and the injustices and hardships that followed over the hundreds of years since. At the same time, they celebrate Canada’s accomplishments, which have created a Canada that is the envy of the world. New Canadians are more than glad to be…
Assisting landmark Indigenous cases, Anita Cardinal-Stewart graduates with even stronger passion
The caption on her junior-high yearbook photo reads, “Dreams of being a lawyer or an actress.” That was when Anita Cardinal-Stewart was full of hope, and anything seemed possible. But that hope evaporated through her teen years growing up in the Woodland Cree First Nation in northern Alberta. “I started to see how hard it…
Catholic church doctrine was used to justify colonization, subjugation and exploitation worldwide
The papal apology to the Indigenous peoples of Canada on April 1 was an extraordinary moment for the individuals whom Pope Francis addressed directly. And it has the potential for much broader implications. In the days leading up to the apology, Francis listened intently and embraced the pain of the residential school survivors who spoke…
Indigenous students engage in the spirit of kinship, learn ancestral languages and enrich lives
Danni Okemaw remembers playing outside with her cousins when her mom asked her to stop and watch the television. It was 2008 and Stephen Harper, then prime minister of Canada, was publicly apologizing on behalf of the Canadian government for its role in Indian residential schools – the first step for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of…
Has ordered a purge of documents that “may offend people”
Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov was not a nice man but, for a time, he was an important one. He was a favourite of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and was head of the NKVD, the Soviet Union’s secret police. He was responsible for the arrests, tortures and executions during his master’s Great Purge of 1936 to 1938.…
The claims of thousands of “missing children” are false
Things have taken a strange turn in Canada on the genocide front. Genocide? Canada? Those are words that you would not normally see together. Words like “polite” or “peaceful” might come to mind. But “genocide,” not so much. In fact, the picture of placid Canadians as practitioners of genocide is downright disturbing. But that is…
The price of Trudeau's empty gesture was nothing less than a cheapening of the Canadian idea
The Trudeau government’s decision to keep the Canadian flag at half-mast for more than five months was never more than a half-baked idea. On May 30 Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that the Canadian flag would fly at half-mast on federal buildings in remembrance of the residential school students who did not return to their…
A personal story of intergenerational trauma that was almost too painful to write
There were times Jordan Abel wished he’d never started Nishga, the memoir that earned him a nomination for Canada’s biggest non-fiction honour, the Hilary Weston Prize. Writing the book was just too painful, he said. It probes the darkest moments of his family’s history, particularly “the wake of violence that ripples outwards” from the Coqualeetza Industrial Institute,…