Great interview with Dr. Marie Battiste on CBC Cape Breton Information Morning today (Sept. 30, 2016).

Marie is editor of Living Treaties: Narrating Mi’kmaw Treaty Relations, published earlier this year.

Marie addressed the ongoing restoration and renewal of relations with Mi’kmaq and the tradition of Treaty Day (held annually in Halifax on October 1).

“The problem has always been that Canada has completely denied the treaties … people grew up without any knowledge of the treaties … yet treaties are the foundation of Canada,” Marie said.

It has now been archived and you can listen to the full interview with this link.

Thanks to CBC for keeping the community well informed.

The September 2016 edition of Midwest Book Review is out and includes a brief but glowing review of Living Treaties: Narrating Mi’kmaw Treaty Relations, edited by Marie Battiste (CBU Press 2016).

“An impressive body of seminal scholarship and a critically important contribution to community, college, and university library Native American Studies collections in general, and Canadian Aboriginal Studies supplemental studies reading lists in particular,” writes Helen Dumont.

With “impressive,” “seminal” and “critically important”  ringing in your ear, you can read the full review at: http://www.midwestbookreview.com/mbw/sep_16.htm#helen

Not much fanfare over this, is there? What does that tell us about how serious we take the TRC?

August 9 is International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples.

The United Nations General Assembly, in 1994, established the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples to mark the day of the first meeting, in 1982, of the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations of the Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights.

Every year, 9 August is commemorated with special events around the world, including at United Nations Headquarters in New York.

This year’s International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples is devoted to the right to education. The right of indigenous peoples to education is protected by the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which in Article 14 states that “Indigenous peoples have the right to establish and control their educational systems and institutions providing education in their own languages, in a manner appropriate to their cultural methods of teaching and learning.”

Back in May (2016), the Canadian government indicated it would finally sign onto the UN declaration, but recent media reports would make it seem otherwise. The 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) summarizes:

“[T]he country has a rare second chance to seize a lost opportunity for reconciliation. We live in a twenty-first-century global world. At stake is Canada’s place as a prosperous, just, and inclusive democracy within that global world. [I]n order for that to happen, there has to be awareness of the past, acknowledgement of the harm that has been inflicted, atonement for the causes, and action to change behaviour.”

The implication of the TRC’s report—which spells out Canada’s actions over the past centuries amounting to cultural genocide—is that nothing can move forward in this country until we acknowledge and amend our behaviour.

Did you know that the Mi’kmaq were part of the UN Working Group that eventually formulated the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples? There is a fascinating and revealing account of their participation in Living Treaties: Narrating Mi’kmaw Treaty Relations, edited by Marie Battiste, recently published by CBU Press.

Living Treaties is highly readable and enlightening. It should be read and understood by every Atlantic Canadian. It’s available in most Atlantic Canada bookstores and on-line, including from our distributor Nimbus.ca, and for your e-reader from Kobo, Kindle and many other vendors. You can link to the book’s home page here.