#Mowachaht/Muchalaht

[allthecanadianpolitics]

A Vancouver Island First Nation is poised to blockade the highway between the town of Gold River and its port to logging traffic until it gets compensation for the use of its land.

Mowachaht/ Muchalaht First Nation (MMFN) has announced its intention to restrict access to the portion of Highway 28 that passes through Ahaminaquus Indian Reserve Number 12 (IR 12) to the logging company Western Forest Products (WFP) effective immediately.

“This act is in response to WFP’s continued and repeated trespass on MMFN IR 12, and the province’s failure to fairly compensate MMFN for the ongoing trespass,” said the Nation in the statement. “Since MMFN never approved or consented to WFP’s use of the road that crosses MMFN’s IR#12, WFP’s continued use of the road constitutes an act of trespass.”

MMFN said it has the “right to control use and access to its reserve lands.” According to its statement, ever since Highway 28 was built 50 years ago, it has been in trespass. It maintains the land has never been legally transferred to the province and it has not been paid a cent for the use of the road by the logging company.

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

[canadianabroadvery]

All want to be understood few wish to understand

The grim truth about the News in Canada is that Canadians,need to know more about  about Brexit, what US Congress is up to and what did Dinky Donnie do today, than they do the Indigenous reality in Canada.  

Now It’s Election Time in Canada. You'll hear all the Politicians debating  the “Major Issues”. You may hear the occasional First Nations, Inuit and Métis “Issues”discussed. The issue will be seen in relation to pipelines and howIndigenous Rights affect business interests. Very little will be said about rights to safe drinking water, decent housing, missing First Nations women, education, healthy diet or even human rights. 

We’ll receive news about Human Rights elsewhere, Hong Kong or North Korea. As far as Fires in Brazil it’s all about the environment world wide. Who the fuck do we think live in the burned down world heritage rain forests all worry about? It is their whole world right now and in living color. Their “rights” conflict with business interests, but far less would be said if only the indigenous inhabitants were affected

Try not to be like the Political shills running in this election.Take time to learn what it means to be an “issue”. Don’t set a time limit, keep learning.

In 2016, 1.6 million people identified as Indigenous in Canada. The issues aren't abstract. Start to learn what first nations think their “issues” are. Start to understand by knowing who. Take some time and seek information on your own. Search names, find places, find out about these lives as they are. No need to think you have to understand by Election Day 2019. 

Please seek the truth for yourself. Sometimes we need labels to understand. Here is a list of first nations in Canada. Knowledge is the power behind change. Use the internet and libraries. You can even contact band offices for information. Please learn, few understand the First Nations, Inuit and Métis communities of Canada.

The list is not comprehensive, it does provide insight into the indigenous societies, and cultural ties in Canada. Start anywhere and ask questions for yourself.

Abenaki0

Innu (Montagnais-Naskapi)

Oneida

Ahousaht

Interior Salish

Onondaga

Algonquin

Inuinnait (Copper Inuit)

Pacheenaht

Assiniboine

Inuvialuit (Mackenzie Inuit)

Petun

Atikamekw

Kainai (Blood)

Piikani (Peigan)

Baffin Island Inuit

K'asho Got'ine (Hare)

Saldermiut Inuit

Beothuk

Kaska Dena

Sahtu Got'ine (Bearlake)

Blackfoot Confederacy

Kivallirmiut (Caribou Inuit)

Secwepemc (Shuswap)

Cayuga

Ktunaxa (Kootenay)

Sekani

Central Coast Salish

Kwakwaka'wakw (Kwakiutl)

Seneca

Coast Salish

Kyuquot and Checleseht

Shuta Got'ine (Mountain)

Cree

Labradormiut (Labrador Inuit)

Siksika (Blackfoot)

Dakota

Lilwat (Lillooet)

Slavey

Dakelh (Carrier)

Lingit (Tlingit)

Stoney-Nakoda

Dane-zaa (Beaver)

Métis

Syilx (Okanagan)

Dene

Mi'kmaq

Tagish

Denesuline (Chipewyan)

Mohawk

Tahltan

Ditidaht

Mowachaht-Muchalaht

Tla-o-qui-aht (Clayoquot)

Ehattesaht

Nahani

Tlicho (Dogrib)

Gitxsan (Gitksan)

Netsilingmiut (Netsilik Inuit)

Toquaht

Gwich'in

Neutral Confederacy

Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in (Han)

Haida

Nicola-Similkameen

Tseshaht (Sheshaht)

Haisla (Kitamaat)

Nisga'a

Tsilhqot'in (Chilcotin)

Haudenosaunee (Six Nations or Iroquois)

Nlaka'pamux (Thompson)

Tsimshian

Heiltsuk

Northern Georgia Strait Coast Salish

Tsuut'ina (Sarcee)

Hesquiaht

Nuchatlaht

Tutchone

Hupacasath (Opetchesaht)

Nunavimmiut (Ungava Inuit)

Uchucklesaht

Huu-ay-aht

Nuu-chah-nulth

Ucluelet (First Nation)

Huron-Wendat

Nuxalk (Bella Coola)

Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet)

Iglulingmuit (Iglulik Inuit)

Odawa

Wetal (Tsetsaut)

Inuit

Ojibwa

Yellowknives (band)

[gaiusozarkus]

Mask ca 1778 Nuu-chah-nulth, possibly Mowachaht-muchalaht peoples Canada, BC, Vancouver Island;wood, paint, human hair. Menil collection

[jimabernethy]

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A post shared by 𝗝𝗶𝗺 𝗔𝗯𝗲𝗿𝗻𝗲𝘁𝗵𝘆 (@jim_abernethy)

#Repost from the Totally Awesome Vegan Conservationist... @maestro320v @download.ins --- "They Are As Curious As We Are" - 🔵Maestro's Notes: This clip courtesy of Tom Christensen @tommy_john55 • For all intents and purposes, the motorboating towards the end of the clip reminds me so much about Luna. Luna (September 19, 1999 – March 10, 2006) also known as L98 or Tsux'iit, was a killer whale (orca) born in Puget Sound. After being separated from his mother while still young, Luna spent five years in Nootka Sound, an ocean inlet of western Vancouver Island, where he had extensive human contact and became recognized internationally. Although Luna was healthy and his presence in the area attracted extensive publicity, there were concerns that his behavior could endanger watercraft and people. After years of debate, the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) authorized an effort in June 2004 to rescue Luna and return him to his pod. The plan was opposed by the Mowachaht/Muchalaht First Nations, who believed Luna was the reincarnation of a former chief. Over the years 2002-6, interacting programs of stewardship formed to protect Luna, with aspirations of returning him to join his pod in the Pacific. Beginning in 2002, Canadian and American whale advocacy organizations, some forming a Luna Stewardship Fund, pressured the Canadian and US governments and the public to move Luna out of Nootka Sound and return him to his pod in the open ocean. By October 2003, the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) was collaborating with the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service on a plan to lure Luna toward a reunion with his pod where he could hear his family's calls. If that plan failed, an alternate plan was to catch Luna in a net pen in the Gold River marina, then transfer him by truck to near Victoria where he would be released to make an acoustic connection with his pod. In 2004, the Mowachaht-Muchalaht First Nation people of Gold River – interpreting Luna as their reincarnated tribal chief – opposed DFO attempts to capture him, and used canoes to lead Luna 30 miles (48 km) westward along Nootka Sound toward the ocean.  (at Nootka, British Columbia) https://www.instagram.com/p/CFVRYRXJmtp/?igshid=198zz1317pqg1

[ourworldofenergy]

Canada and Energy: Part 2 – The Bad

Guest blog by S. A. Shelley In the previous blog about energy in Canada, I presented evidence that Canada has abundance of energy, ranging from hydrocarbon to existing renewable energy supplies. In essence, Canada has similar potential to Norway and even at a larger scale. Norway, like Canada, has been a prolific producer of oil and gas and continues to be so, but Norway is already in a position to be able to transition fully to renewable energy and has undertaken steps in that direction and to curtail fossil fuel consumption (see Independent.co.uk, and Fortune.com).

But where Norway has long term vision and broad social and political consensus, Canada has acrimony, mismanagement and corruption.

I. Oil and Gas Wealth Squandered

Back in 1976, Alberta had the good idea of establishing a “Heritage Fund” to accumulate some oil wealth into a fund to benefit Albertans (and Canada) to save for the future, to diversify the economy (away from fossil fuels) and to improve the quality of life for residents. At about the same time, Alaska established its Permanent Fund and around 15 years later, Norway established its Sovereign Wealth Fund with similar goals. Let’s compare the growth of these funds (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1

The values in Fig. 1 are not adjusted for inflation. If I adjusted the figures for inflation then it would appear that the Canadian Fund is losing real value and that they should just throw in the towel. Reading the annual reports for the Heritage Funds it becomes obvious that Canadian governments did not have the discipline necessary to achieve the fund’s objectives and then through constant changes in policies, raided the fund for pet projects.

Why does this matter? Because Norway now has ample financial resources to pay for a transition to a fully renewable energy economy and to diversity its economy away from hydrocarbon production. Canada has no similar fiscal resource to accomplish such lofty objectives in the time frame espoused by its politicians. In the prior blog, I noted that the Prime Minister praised the good fortune of having 173 billion barrels of oil sands resources. However, just two months before that speech in Houston the same Prime Minister gave a speech in Ontario in which he argued that it is necessary for Canada to divest itself from oil sands.

The net result is that Canada, and Alberta in particular, is going into the age of oil retirement without any pension or any real plan to live out the post oil age comfortably.

II. Canadian Oil and Gas Assets Will be Stranded in the Future and Therefore Be Worthless

For the last few years, Canada has struggled to get its oil to market. Any online search will deliver tons of news about pipeline problems, foreign funded protester problems, production problems, and ineffective government action. Coupled with flattening global oil demand and increasing oil supply, the result is that for the better part of a year Western Canada Select has been trading at a discount (Fig. 2 – sources Statista.com, Ceri )

Fig. 2

In effect for the whole last year, producing and selling Canadian oil has a zero sum game, most likely a negative undertaking, because in Fig. 2, I only use the lowest production costs and lowest transport costs.

If Canada can’t find markets and continues to sell oil at a discount, especially if that discount results in producing oil at cost or even below cost, then instead of having $800,000 per capita in the bank (less production costs) Canadians will now have $0 in the bank. Carbon taxes won’t kill Canadian oil production, lack of access to markets will.

Aside:  Online searches will also bring about loads of stories about how toxic Canada’s oil is. Newsflash, all oil is toxic. Comparing again to Norway, both Norway and Canada have some of the strictest environmental, health and safety standards for oil production. Whereas other less open and democratic states focus on maximizing production without giving a care about environmental or safety issues.  So really, where should environmentalists focus their protests, in Canada or in Venezuela?

Fig. 3 Common site in Venezuela these days (source Bloomberg)

Without pipelines to transfer oil to ports to access world markets, Canada will be very dependent upon the U.S. to buy its oil using existing pipelines and existing rail services. American refiners along the Gulf Coast have been happy to buy cheap Canadian oil to blend for products, especially in the wake of oil production failures in Venezuela, but now comes another scary part for Canada. American refiners may find other suppliers, or worse yet, if Venezuela falls, then the new regime in Venezuela will be quick to ramp up production. The best market for heavy oil is the U.S. Gulf Coast refiners who can use either Canadian heavy crude or Venezuelan heavy crude in their production. There are pipeline constraints and protesters along the route from Canada to the U.S. refiners, but there are no such blockages on the sea between Venezuela and the Gulf of Mexico.

Furthermore, transporting crude by rail from Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast can cost from $10 to $15 per barrel. Shipping a barrel of crude from Venezuela by tanker costs around $2.

III. Hydropower

A big impediment to developing more hydropower in Canada is the poor relationship that the Federal Government has with indigenous nations. There are other reasons, but this one is important enough to address specifically and I’ll give a small, true story, which local folks will be happy to discuss if you ask.

On Vancouver Island the village of Tahsis is located within the Mowachaht/Muchalaht First Nation area. There is hydropower potential in the area and a few years back a power developer started to develop a Run of the River hydro plant.  Run of the River hydro is supposed to be the least environmentally altering means of producing power. However, the firm working on the project decided that it would be necessary to alter the river run and without consulting anyone started dynamiting the river which then affected fish stocks. (The engineering firm was from the U.S. working for a Canadian developer.) That type of blast first approach to development is horrible but unfortunately characteristic of a lot of large Canadian projects. Fortunately, in Tahsis the First Nations managed to stop the project (and, if I had been there at the time, I would also have jumped all over the dumb-dumb engineering firm and developer for such an approach). Houston is the oil and gas capital of the world, and had tempestuous beginnings, but we’ve long since learned that it’s not prudent nor necessary to throw one’s weight around by dynamiting things or running rough shod over environments and indigenous residents. There are better ways.

IV. Wind Power

The first commercial wind farm in Canada was located in Alberta and became operational in 1993. Since then all provinces have been adding windfarms, with most capacity additions coming on line between 2010 and now. But let’s focus on Alberta and Ontario. Fig 4 compares historical electricity prices for those two provinces. In 2013 Alberta added its largest windfarm to date, about 150 MW capacity. Ontario, since then has been adding a lot more wind, as seen in Fig. 5.

Fig. 4

Fig. 5

What was going on in Ontario? It seemed that the more wind power that Ontario added, the higher its electricity prices went. “Correlation is not Causation”, correct. But in this case, Fig. 5 actually show a causation-effect graph. It’s true, because in Ontario, the Liberal government mismanaged implementation of wind energy (and other renewable energy) which consequently drove up electricity prices. During the same time, in Alberta, they got it right, with electricity prices falling.

V. Invest in Energy, Just not in Canada?

As we’ve seen, even if one can produce heavy oil in Canada and get it to market, it’s likely that one will lose money. Instead of working on ways to improve the oil business in Canada, governments seem hell bent on destroying it even more by applying carbon taxes and implementing other insanities. Diversification into plastics is, in my opinion, a dubious long term solution as the plastics industry faces pressure to reduce output as the world moves towards using less plastic (see prior blog) or using bio-plastics materials that are degradable. Politicians in Canada at times get their priorities by looking backwards and working accordingly.

The situation with natural gas is almost as convoluted as with Canadian oil. There are bottlenecks to export. And unlike oil demand, which is forecast to fall soon enough, gas demand will remain strong for some decades.

Hydropower could be brought on line if, and it’s a big if, the Federal Canadian government and its preferred contractor would stop patronizing indigenous nations as charities and instead treat them with dignity and respect and as equals.

The experience of wind power in Ontario has damaged the case for wind power in Canada and elsewhere. But if people could look past the government mismanagement in Ontario and instead to the successes in Alberta and Texas, Canada could then benefit from cheap, renewable power.

But these are a lot of “ifs” and Canada will have to get past the ugly in order to thrive again. It’s a choice between lower taxes, cleaner energy for all, and allowing initiative and ingenuity, or the government taking a share in home ownership, mandating speech, and dictating economics.

Published by Our World of Energy

Canada and Energy: Part 2 – The Bad was originally published on OurWorldofEnergy

[deepfinds-blog]

A Canadian Museum Promotes Indigenous Art. But Don’t Call It ‘Indian.’

A Canadian Museum Promotes Indigenous Art. But Don’t Call It ‘Indian.’

TORONTO — A group of visitors young and old gathered at the Art Gallery of Ontario in front of a well-known Canadian painting the docent called “Church in Yuquot Village.”

It was a peaceful 1929 image by a national figure, Emily Carr, showing a Mowachaht/Muchalaht settlement she had visited on Vancouver Island. The docent was careful to talk about Carr’s close relationship with “the First…

[sixstringnation]

Back among Educators @ETFO #FallLeadership

My dear friend and official Six String Nation photographer, Doug Nicholson, and I have had the thrill of taking our presentation and portrait booth to festivals and music industry events in every province and territory of Canada and as far away as Italy. With help from the National Speakers Bureau, we’ve felt as at home presenting to conferences of surveyors and health information management professionals as we have to financial cooperatives and tourism organizations. But the bread and butter that sustains the Six String Nation project is presentations in schools, so any chance to present to educators is one we treasure – at PD days and conferences and curriculum forums and subject seminars and history fairs and principals’ meetings, you name it. And if we get a chance to do portraits with teachers and let them know that they really are part of the project in a big way… well, even better; which is why it was so great to follow up on an earlier gathering of the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario in Ottawa with last week’s ETFO Fall Leadership gathering in Mississauga. The event brought together members from all across the province – including some just embarking on their teaching careers. And while some in attendance had seen me at other events over the years, it was great to introduce a whole new generation of teachers to the Six String Nation project and (hopefully) inspire them to want to bring me to their schools to share the project with their students and their communities. And, in my nerdy way, it was great to meet some of the people I’ve only heard about or seen on the news, like ETFO president Sam Hammond!

The reception was phenomenal – not only in the room for the presentation but at the portrait station afterwards, at the book signing table and over a beer at the end of the night, where I was privileged to get to know a few of these educators from around the province of Ontario dedicated to creating great learning environments and experiences for young students.

The great reception extended to the musical guests who brought Voyageur to life at the end of the presentation too. I’d worked with both Chris McKhool (pictured, left) and Kevin Laliberte (pictured, centre) on previous occasions but not in this particular configuration of the Sultans of String, where Chris played Voyageur for one song and switched to violin as he handed off the guitar to Kevin – joined by Drew Birston (pictured, right) on bass – for their virtuosic and evocative performance of Luna – a kind of instrumental storytelling of the Mowachaht and Muchalaht tale of one particularly legendary orca. We didn’t record the performance but you can watch the official video (with orchestral accompaniment!) here.

Thanks so much to ETFO’s Jim Giles for bringing us to the event and to ETFO members Valerie Dugale and Suzanne Gill for great assistance at the portrait booth. Special thanks also to Jeff Burnham of GoodMinds.com – a specialty indigenous bookstore from Six Nations – who handled book sales with enthusiasm and aplomb AND provided me with some welcome background and detail on the recent addition to Voyageur‘s case, the vintage Enos Williams lacrosse stick webbing now cradling the headstock pillow.

Back among Educators @ETFO #FallLeadership was originally published on Six String Nation

[respectanimalrights]

LUNA Luna (September 19, 1999 – March 10, 2006) also known as L98 or Tsu'xiit, was a killer whale (Orca) born in Puget Sound. After being separated from his mother while still young, Luna spent five years in Nootka Sound, off the west coast of Vancouver Island. Although Luna was healthy and his presence in the area delighted tourists and drew a large number of paparazzi, there were concerns that his behavior was endangering people. After years of debate, the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) authorized an effort in June 2004 to capture Luna and place him in captivity. However, the plan was ultimately thwarted by the Mowachaht/Muchalaht First Nations, who claimed to believe Luna was a reincarnation of a former chief. It cannot be substantiated that a belief in reincarnation was ever a part of Mowachaht culture. The orca was killed by a tugboat in 2006. His story is told in the 2011 documentary film The Whale, the 2013 book The Lost Whale, and the 2016 podcast "Our Americana: Gold River, BC". Video clip From THE WHALE You can watch the Doc here ➡ https://youtu.be/YoFXuUHYwok Link also in my bio. #bc #luna #orca #nootkasound #killerwhale #thewhale