In Heather Ramsay's review of Nancy Turner's new book "Plants of Haida Gwaii", she finds a curious passage which notes that the knowlege of medicine derived from some plants is "considered to be private knowledge and because of this, and the danger of misuse, uninformed people should keep away..."

When she enquired about this, she was told "[i]t's because in the past everything has been taken from us. How can you ask us to give you more when you have taken our children, our culture, our land, our ocean, our trees? What have we got left?"

"Quebec's Inuit want a government apology and financial compensation for a mass slaughter of sled dogs that they claim plunged their remote communities into decades of dependency.

Without access to the sled dogs, hunters were unable to trap and provide income for their families. It created a level of dependency and physical inaction that prompted many to drink heavily and simply wait for monthly welfare cheques, Echo of the Last Howl states."

"The (Cheam) band, located across the Fraser River from Agassiz, and its members
may disagree with the law, but they cannot do so with impunity from
prosecution, (Provincial Court Judge Jim) Jardine ruled in one of two separate cases in provincial
court that date back to September 1999."

"Aboriginal groups and tax-based communities in the Northwest Territories are dipping into a new pot of money to cut deals with the developers of the Mackenzie Valley gas pipeline project."

January 19th 'Montreal'

PHOTO PRESENTATION and STORY-TELLING

AND

Zine Launch of

'LONG Before LONG After'

512 Years of Resistance to Kanada

The federal government's bill to modernize Canada's century-old animal cruelty act could lead to "cultural genocide" for aboriginal hunters, a Liberal senator said yesterday.

"An Indian helicopter dropping food and water over the remote Andaman and
Nicobar Islands has been attacked by tribesmen using bows and arrows.

There were fears that the endangered tribal groups had been wiped out when
massive waves struck their islands."

"After months of negotiation, victims of abuse at an Indian residential school in the Yukon are being told their claims are invalid.
Federal officials have determined students of the Baptist Mission School in Whitehorse are not eligible for government compensation."

"For thousands of years the Poplar River First Nation, an Ojibway Indian tribe in Manitoba, crossed this water quietly, ever so quietly, not a sound, paddles slipped into the water as if they were slicing clouds.

Bruce is wondering why others don't believe -- can't believe that building a road into this forest opens the path to its destruction, that cutting down the trees to make pulp into toilet paper seems wasteful. Why companies with their bottom lines and consumers with their insatiable needs don't think of the trees as having voices and the animals living in them as having souls."

Tuesday-Friday, 10 am, 800 Smythe St. BC Supreme Court.

Today in the BC Supreme Court in Vancouver the extradition hearing of John Graham began. The hearings are schedualed to take place for the next 2 weeks, though a decision could be made earlier.

The US is seeking to extradite John Graham on an indictment for first degree murder of Anna Mae Aquash whose body was discovered in the remote badlands outside of Wanbli SD in 1976. Both John Graham and Anna Mae Aquash were members of the American Indian Movement, and were actively supporting Traditional Lakotas who were in the middle of a life and death struggle to protect sacred lands from uranium mining. In late 1976 Leonard Peltier, who was also active in AIM in SD in the 70's, was extradited from Vancouver, Canada for the murder of 2 FBI agents. He was convicted, and is still in prison despite the fact he has already served his time. It is now in court records that his extradition was based on fabricated evidence. Parallells between Peltier's and Graham's case, can be made.

Part one:

The Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) is trying to put another railway in on

Secwepemc land. The CPR workers found some of our ancestors in an

ancestral burial ground and dug them up on Friday, November 19th, 2004.

The elder's and traditional people got together and had a ceremony and the

ancestors told them to rebury the remains at the original burial site.

Part two:

Sun Peaks Corp. and province stay charges against three Secwepemc Nationals

"If you eat seal or walrus, boil the meat and avoid eating the liver or fat. Better yet, eat arctic char or caribou.

That's the advice from a new report on persistent organic pollutants, toxic substances which are in the northern food chain and, at high levels, can cause severe damage to human health."

"Moses is a Tuscarora raised in Onondaga, N.Y. and lives with his partner, Alexis Shackleton and two daughters here in Kahnawake. He has travelled back and forth across the border countless times to visit his family, work and play lacrosse. This is the first time he has been denied access to Canada."

"They asked for my American passport but I told them I was not an American or a Canadian but a citizen of the Haudenosaunee."

''I think it's the proverbial elephant in the living room that nobody's willing to talk about, pretending it's not there. It is there, and we're coming to that time where we have to talk about it,'' he says. "I work with the public every day and it does come up in  conversations ... people always want to know what happened on Haida Gwaii; how the population went from over 10,000 down to 500 and how that all came about. They know that's something wrong there, that something happened (because) our people just disappeared like that."

About 1,000 residents of the Aboriginal community of Palm Island, Australia, burned down the local police station, court house and the home of the police officer-in-charge on November 26, after a coroner's report revealed that Cameron Doomadgee, a  36-year-old Aboriginal and Palm Island resident, had suffered four broken ribs, a ruptured liver and a ruptured portal vein, during an arrest for public drunkenness last Friday. Doomadgee died about an hour later in police custody.