The committee members also watched a video of an Australian Aboriginal woman talking about racism in her society and who said that Indigenous people have, for too long, stood on the sidelines as non-Indigenous legislators made decisions about their lives.

“We don’t ever get to turn off the Indian. We are always Indians in this city.

“I only had two heroes in my life and one of them was Martin Luther King Jr.,” he says, “And, if he couldn’t fix it, I hope you’re not expecting me to.”

“I only had two heroes in my life and one of them was Martin Luther King Jr.,” he says, “And, if he couldn’t fix it, I hope you’re not expecting me to.”

“When you have a reputation, when you are trying to build a community, when you are trying to attract professionals to your city, when you are trying to attract doctors and engineers,” he adds, negative talk, “doesn’t make that job any easier.”

“If you are a non-Indigenous person in Thunder Bay, you love cross-country skiing and you love the Sleeping Giant and it’s absolutely beautiful,” says Ms. Boucher, a First Nations advocate and inspirational speaker. “And if you’re an Indigenous person in Thunder Bay, you worry about your kids surviving high school and not ending up in the river, and you deal with eye rolls from store clerks because we use our status cards, and just these constant stereotypes. Racial slurs and jokes are still considered funny in Thunder Bay.”

European powers used treaties to settle land disputes. In 1763, King George III of England issued the Royal Proclamation, which became the constitutional basis for negotiations between Europeans and Aboriginal people. As such, it has sometimes been referred to as the Indian Magna Carta, which alludes to the Magna Carta, an eleventh-century English document that was key in the historical development of constitutional law in the Western Hemisphere

H5P TAG HERE

And she desperately needs to add five officers to her criminal-investigations branch, which is understaffed and undertrained.

Following the War of 1812 and Canadian Confederation in 1867, the new federal government could not identify a place for native cultures in the new Canada. It adopted a view that native cultures were inevitably to become extinct. In the interim, the native peoples became wards of the government, and were subsequently accorded very limited rights and territories by new treaties which were often incomprehensible to the native representatives who signed them, but advantageous to the government.

They are also often portrayed as alcoholics, which ignores a common tendency by Aboriginal people to be genetically indisposed to a tolerance for alcohol.

Even the meaning of justice is different in native cultures. While the Aboriginal concept of justice is focused on the restoration of peace and the reconciliation of both wrongdoer and wronged, the justice system to which they are subject is based on punitive concepts and measures that seek to integrate rehabilitated wrongdoers into society by isolating them from it. As such, Aboriginal people are systematically denied the benefit of justice circles that have served their culture for thousands of years.

The native cultures of Canada were mostly semi-nomadic in nature, employed stone-age technology, and held a mystical view of nature. They built no enduring structures and monuments, and had no written language or centralized form of government. Their cultures were so unsophisticated and fundamentally different in comparison to those of Britain and France that the emissaries of those empires regarded North American Indians as little more than savage children, and thus treated them accordingly.

The Liberal party won the election, and Trudeau took office in November 2015, vowing to repair relations with Indigenous communities. UN human rights expert Barbara Bailey praised Trudeau’s willingness to talk about the systemic inequality that Indigenous Canadians face. In January 2016

According to Joanna Smith for the Toronto Star, in the run-up to the 2015 national election, all three major national parties pledged funding for First Nations and Aboriginal education as part of their campaigns, with Conservatives pointing to almost $450 million in the 2015 federal budget and Liberals committed to $2.6 billion. PM Harper had a tense relationship with Aboriginal peoples.

While the committee praised Canada for legal and institutional steps it had taken to implement the terms of the ICCPR, it noted several areas of concern, including the domestic abuse, disappearances, homicides, and murders of Aboriginal women and girls, and the government’s inadequate and ineffective response to these issues.

One positive development was the passage of the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement, which was negotiated with the federal government in May 2006. Common experience payments were being processed and sent out by the fall of 2007. Unfortunately, this again has led to discrimination against Aboriginal peoples, as scam artists and others targeted recipients of these lump sums of cash, especially older, more vulnerable citizens.

While Aboriginal people made up only 4 percent of the Canadian population, the office reported, they made up 23 percent of the country’s incarcerated population. The office also found that rehabilitation programs systemically failed Aboriginal offenders, leaving a large gap in positive correctional outcomes between non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal people.