Stories by Steve Bonspiel

Many issues frustrate Indigenous people, but none quite like how our taxation rights - in other words our inherent rights - are constantly flouted by businesses, “adjusted” by successive governments, and just ignored overall.

A lot has changed in the past five years, but then again, a lot hasn’t. On July 1, 2021, many Canada Day events were cancelled, or at least dramatically scaled back, after the Kamloops announcement confronted Canadians with the genocidal reality of the residential school system.

I used to think that 20 years was a relatively short time to call something a career, but it has now been 23 years for myself in journalism, and 18 years of owning The Eastern Door as of July 1, and let me tell you, it’s a long haul.

The Parti Quebecois, the frontrunner to win Quebec’s October election, has released its “Blue Book,” a 524-page plan for an independent Quebec, but there’s one chapter missing, and that’s the one on Indigenous relations.

It has been nearly two years since the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake (MCK), at the urging of community members, agreed to hash out a media protocol for public meetings.

Human beings have always been eager gatherers and sharers of information, but journalism as we know it today didn’t always exist, and if the conditions that support it go away, it could be lost. And that would be bad, because journalism matters.

As the country wrestles with the interim ruling of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal issued Friday - that Canada is committing genocide against Indigenous Peoples – we mark National Indigenous History Month.

The international Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal is in Tiohtià:ke this week, probing a legacy of missing children and unmarked graves associated with residential schools.

Last week marked the annual Moose Hide Campaign, a fast-growing, Indigenous-led movement coming out of BC with a simple goal, to unite folks around putting an end to gender-based violence once and for all.

“Stop drinking, Wab.” These words were uttered in the chamber of the Manitoba Legislative Assembly to Wab Kinew, who is the only First Nations premier in the history of the country.