Slated to open in the fall of 2018, the Indigenous art park named ᐄᓃᐤ (ÎNÎW) River Lot 11∞, pronounced (EE-NU) River Lot 11, is a partnership between the City of Edmonton, Confederacy of Treaty No. 6 First Nations, Métis Nation of Alberta, Edmonton Arts Council, and six Indigenous artists whose works will be permanently exhibited there.

Located within Queen Elizabeth Park in Edmonton’s North Saskatchewan River Valley, the park will display six unique pieces of art created by Canadian Indigenous artists. Carrying the theme “the stories of This Place,” each piece will showcase different ways Indigenous people connect to the land. For the city, the park is an “opportunity to restore, reimagine, and reclaim a part of Edmonton’s history that is often under-recognized.”

While the original owner of the park’s lot was Métis landowner Joseph McDonald, the park is actually located on ancestral lands of the Indigenous peoples whose descendants entered into treaty with the British Crown, resulting in the territory opening for settlement. And the banks of the river where it’s situated were used by First Nations for travel, trade, ceremony, and sustenance for thousands of years.

“The profound legacy left by our Kôhkominawak (our grandmothers) and Kimosôminawak (our grandfathers) is one of the sacred areas used to cross Kisiskâcêwansîpî (Saskatchewan River), where many ceremonies and rituals took place before crossing this majestic sanctuary,” steering committee member Elder Jerry Saddleback told media.

“Our original peoples of this area held sacred knowledge that gave them a close spiritual relationship with our Mother Earth deity. She is called the sacred river, as with all water of the Earth, Her own breast milk, nurturing all of humanity.”

ᐄᓃᐤ (ÎNÎW) is a Cree word meaning “I am of the Earth.”

“Indigenous Peoples, since time immemorial, have had a close relationship to the river valley,” said City of Edmonton Indigenous relations director Mike Chow. He says this is why ᐄᓃᐤ (ÎNÎW) River Lot 11∞ is the convergence of many narratives, and brings together the love of natural park spaces and public art with an opportunity to celebrate and amplify Indigenous cultures.

The chief of the Papaschase band whose traditional territory was once located in south Edmonton before it was pushed out via way of multiple annexations, says the park is a good way for locals to learn about Indigenous history.

“I’ve been saying for years that we need more Aboriginal art in this town,” said Papaschase Chief Calvin Bruneau. “It helps to beautify the local area. And in the process of collaboration, metro Edmonton can learn to work with Indigenous people better to create understanding and acceptance.”

Photos by Ryan Parker. From top to bottom: Untitled by Tiffany Shaw-Collinge; Mikikwan by Duane Linklater; Turtle by Jerry Whitehead; Iskotew by Amy Malbeuf; Preparing to Cross the Sacred River by Marianne Nicholson; and Reign by MaryAnne Barkhouse.

OBSESSIVENESS AND EXCITEMENT, NEVER GROWING OUT OF THEM, OIL AND ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, 40 X 60 INCHES

Wei Li’s painting speaks for itself. Her brush strokes tangle and twist in flashes of brilliant colour, in sumptuous variations of texture. It seems almost to evolve as you look at it, as if it might rearrange itself the moment you glance away. The startling immediacy of Li’s craft makes it no surprise to find her work, Obsessiveness and excitement, never growing out of them, among the 15 finalists in this year’s RBC Canadian Painting Competition.

Li, who emigrated from China in 2010 and now calls Edmonton home, characterizes her art as being about emotion and memory, and the subjective experience. “I try to bring the very complicated hybrid experience into my painting so it becomes very complex,” she says. “Something a little bit hard to recognize but you can sense it, you can feel it.” Her style is also remarkable for its use of “painterly gestures,” an intuitive method of painting that requires the artist to rely on instinct and experience. “I make decisions based on the moment when I’m painting,” Li explains. “I believe all the energy I put into the process will somehow find a way to stay on the canvas.” If Li’s work so far is any indication, that energy will not only stay on the canvas, it will also leap off to greet us.

The RBC Canadian Painting Competition, established in 1999, is an award intended to bridge the gap between emerging and established artists. The winner will be announced October 17.

The multidisciplinary artist went on to become the city’s grand slam champion and competed at Canada’s national youth poetry festival. Now, as Edmonton’s second-ever Youth Poet Laureate, Adem is working to spread her love of poetry, literature, and the arts to other youth in the city.

Drawing from personal experiences growing up—from trying to fit in as the new kid in school to navigating her identities as a Black, queer, Muslim woman—Adem, now 22, is using her one-year term to speak to students and encourage them to tell their own stories. In classrooms across Edmonton, she conducts workshops and asks students about their lives—who they are and where they’ve come from, what they’re scared of and what they want to say. “I think the answers to those questions are poems,” she says. “When they’re true and honest, they’re always poems.”

Adem says it is important to empower students, reminding them that their voices are valuable and worth listening to. She recalls tuning out in high school because she couldn’t relate to the material being taught. Learning about poetry meant learning about concepts like metre and stress, not the emotional element of the form. “I felt very detached from human speech and its relationship to poetry,” she says. Instead, Adem took refuge in writing personal essays, working out her anxiety and depression by turning her frustrations into something tangible. Only later—outside of the classroom—did she turn to poetry. “I say that poetry saved my life and I don’t really take that lightly,” she says. “Using poetry as a way to heal and as a voice for trauma to make them real is another thing I strive to encourage and work through with students.”

Her more recent works have focused on redefining and reimagining identities surrounding race, sexuality, faith, and gender. Adem cites her mother, who raised her as a single mom, as a strong influence in her poetry. “Recognizing my mother’s humanity has been the key to me readily recognizing my humanity and everybody else’s,” she says. Adem always thought of her mother’s strength as indestructible; but as she got older, Adem began to recognize how the world affects her mother, and how that affects their relationship. Viewing her mother outside of her parental role taught Adem empathy and perspective. “It forces me to always think about my audience and to think about how my words are affecting other people,” she says.

For the past few years, Adem spent parts of her summers in New York, slamming and collaborating with other poets in the city. Taking cues from the vibrancy of the scene and inspired by the artists she met, Adem returned to Edmonton determined to bring some of those lessons back. “It’s helped me look at my community here and be able to see what’s missing and what’s not,” says Adem. During a trip last summer, Adem was inspired to write one of her favourite poems. She was walking home when she spotted a young Black girl practicing choreography on a street corner in Brooklyn. “This girl was [going] full-out, like not a care in the world,” Adem recalls. “She reminded me a lot of myself when I was around her age.” Adem later wrote Birthright, a poem discussing the experiences of Black women and children. The piece asks: “What do we owe our babies if not the same safety as the womb?” “It made me think critically about how much longer she will be afforded that carefree-ness,” she says.

In 2015, Adem founded Sister 2 Sister, a bimonthly artistic showcase for and by women of colour. Tired of participating in shows that lacked diversity both in performers and audience, she longed to create a safe space for other marginalized artists like her in the community. Next year, Adem hopes to expand the showcase to offer services and workshops for artists looking to learn how to make a sustainable living. She is also an artistic associate at the Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre, where she is curating Edmonton’s first-ever Black Arts Matters festival. The new three-day arts festival will bring together Black artists from across disciplines in an event that will include performances, workshops, and panels.

In the future, Adem sees herself moving to New York, a dream she’s had since she was a child. A true artist, she still wants to act, write plays, and record an album. But for now, she is determined to finish what she has started in Edmonton. “I want to make sure that when I leave, I’m not leaving other people like me with nothing,” she says. “I want to make sure there’s a safe space here for the artists of colour—they’re my priority.”

Thinking back to her high-school self—that young woman who took the stage some three years ago—Adem wishes she had opened herself up to the world of arts sooner: “If I had stopped apologizing for who I am, what I wore, the way I spoke, what I ate, and how loud I was, I would have been a lot freer a lot earlier.”

Wildrose Alliance leader Danielle Smith stumping during her summer tour of Alberta. The far-right party has weakened the right flank of the Progressive Conservatives. Image courtesy Wildrose Alliance.

At Marv’s Classic Soda Shop, Marvin Garriott, known for his oiled handlebar moustache, is often asked to speak of politics. He’s the local prophet on the subject; all small towns have one. A two-term councillor sitting for the 1,900-person Southern Alberta town of Black Diamond, Garriott poses for tourists and reporters, mugging in a bowling-alley inspired uniform matching the laminate, post-war decor of his pop shop. He knew the federal Conservatives would sweep to a majority, predicted the fall of the Liberals and even says he foresaw the Orange Crush (and the demise of the Bloc).

Ask Garriott to predict the outcome of the upcoming provincial leadership race and his vision goes dark. “It’s going to be an interesting one,” he says, passing judgment on the provincial Progressive Conservative party with a wince and a so-so motion of his left hand. “They weren’t listening to us. And the whole health-care issue has been a fiasco, and it still is.” Albertans face a leadership contest and probable election come fall, and are calling for change. Considering Black Diamond is in the dark blue heart of Tory country, Garriott’s verdict is a surprising vote of non-confidence.

For 40 years, the Conservatives, under the auspices of King Ralph Klein and lately “Steady Eddie” Stelmach have boasted vote margins envied by now-deposed Middle Eastern despots. At least, until Stelmach’s bumbling leadership style cost him the support of party insiders. Facing declining oil royalties, ongoing economic sluggishness and a rogue MLA forcing the party’s failing health-care policies into an unflattering news spiral, the Conservative caucus is “dissolving,” according to David Taras, a media studies professor at Mount Royal University. “People elected [Stelmach] thinking he was experienced, but it turned out there was nothing steady about Eddie,” Taras says. “When 45 percent of your budget goes into health-care, that’s the gold standard. That’s the standard by which you will be judged.”

Following in the out-sized footsteps of the iconic Klein, Stelmach’s path was bound to be bumpy. But his political missteps have been scrutinized more severely by the formation of two new parties: the centrist Alberta Party and far-right Wildrose Alliance. The latter, led by charismatic former journalist Danielle Smith, has quickly leeched the support of the populist-minded and arch-conservative alike (though the pendulum may be swinging back lately).

Stelmach’s fading fortifications were dealt a fatal coup de main during budget talks in January. His finance minister, Ted Morton, reportedly threatened to resign rather than deliver a financial plan easy on cuts and leaning heavily on the province’s reserve savings. Stelmach beat Morton to the podium. The premier resigned during a hasty news conference. He took no questions. Two days later, Morton announced himself a leadership contender. The Conservatives are now staging a six-way race to elect a leader in a five-party province.

The turmoil may even lead to an actual contest come election day—a rarity in a region where there’s more competition within parties than between them. The root of Alberta’s electoral intractability lies in its history, according to Taras. Early American immigration, strong religious communities and the hangover of the Trudeau-Era National Energy Program mean it may be decades before the province sees any real political movement—the election of superstar Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi being the exception. Up to a quarter of Alberta’s budget relies on oil royalties, and the rest of the country is growing increasingly hostile to oil sands development.

The result is a hankering for a strong leader who can stand up to the environmentalists and robber barons of Eastern Canada: “The lesson is that we need majority governments that have to be strong vis-à-vis Ottawa, because if they’re not strong, bad things can happen,” Taras says. “People see environmental politics through the lens of ‘what’s Ottawa going to do to us now?’”

And here, it should be noted, Albertans have a point. Last year, the province’s taxpayers gave the federal government $7 billion more than they received in revenue and services—about the same as what Quebec received in equalization payments. The province also receives less than its fair share in health-care transfers.

Since the ’70s, Alberta’s politics have revolved more around the protection of regional interests than the promulgation of truly conservative social values. That leaves a cadre of leadership candidates that run the gamut from Red Tory to Stockwell Day—just as long as they support oil and gas, all seem to be welcome under the big blue tent. For decades, that made for a broad, stable conservative dynasty; now that base appears to be fracturing.

Gary Mar, a former MLA, recently quit his job as the Alberta representative in the Canadian embassy in Washington. He’s emerged as an early front-runner in the leadership race. High on his list of self-described credentials are his lobbying efforts for the Keystone XL pipeline—a tube that would carry crude oil to the U.S., angering environmental groups on both sides of the border.

At 48 years old, Mar is young and eloquent: traits he shares with fellow candidate Doug Griffiths, who holds the title of youngest MLA to serve the province at 29. Former energy minister Rick Orman and deputy premier Doug Horner both have strong resumes, but may be seen as too old-school to tap into the restless undercurrent.

Alison Redford rounds the centrist Tory position. Socially progressive, she supports boosting Calgary as a world energy capital. She’s also pulled some of the campaign brains behind Nenshi’s purple revolution, which saw the mayor sweep last year’s municipal elections. “We can’t continue to presume that an election takes place, we elect a certain set of officials and then those politicians go away to make decisions, and then ask people to vote for them again,” Redford says. “People are demanding a different conversation with their politicians.”

Then there’s Mr. Et-Tu? Morton, who stands for a more conventional, American-style conservatism that blends fiscal utilitarianism and hard-right values such as opposition to same-sex marriage. Whether he has a shot at the top seat in Alberta as the Wildrose splits the right remains to be seen. “The Wildrose has made a lot of inroads,” Garriott says. Stelmach, with his humble rise to the top, should be popular among the types of people who frequent Marv’s soda shop. He’s not. “For a country boy, [Stelmach] lost touch with reality.”

In Alberta, the reality these days seems to be: expect the unexpected.

An outdoor festival hosted by Edmonton's Arts on the Ave. Photo by EPIC photography.

When I meet Christy Morin, founder of Edmonton’s Arts on the Ave, in the community arts cafe The Carrot, volunteer baristas are working the bar and activists with Black History Month are collecting their posters. Nearby, two community liaison police constables are huddled with a by-law officer, talking about their “weed and seed” program that targets drug houses and “predatory retail” drug-dealing fronts.

Morin lives in this Edmonton neighbourhood, the Ave—short for 118th Avenue—where I grew up in the 1950s. Once a proud working-class and immigrant quarter, it deteriorated like many old, inner-city neighbourhoods as the suburbs metastasized around Edmonton’s periphery. Today Morin tells me, with glowing satisfaction, that AOTA has just managed to find rehearsal space for four bands above an Avenue pawnshop—exactly the sort of growth she had hoped for.

“We are a community-based, grassroots initiative engaged in developing 118th Avenue as the community arts avenue of Edmonton,” says Morin, with the goal of “tapping into the non-institutionalized soul of art.” As an incubator, AOTA is a catalyst for other projects. “It’s a place of convergence for the whole community,” she says. AOTA began seven years ago as Morin’s vision of bringing artists into a neighbourhood of still-affordable housing and studio space, to see what the impact would be on this distressed neighbourhood. It turned out her vision was attractive to people all over the city who wanted to get involved—some of whom moved into the Ave so that community members now include professors and international students, people on disability-related income assistance, West African immigrants, and retirees, as well as the founding artists. “A new artist from Namibia is starting a community choir,” Morin says, part of a new connection to faith-based communities in the neighbourhood.

The list of activities goes on: the Nina Haggerty Centre for the Arts has recently opened with a gallery of art by “those who face barriers to artistic expression”; AOTA has held public meetings to brainstorm uses for a vacant cycle shop; murals and back-alley paintings spruce up walls; The Carrot café holds open mics for “zoomers” and Aboriginal drummers. That’s in addition to a farmers’ market, a popular block party for neighbourhood dogs (and their humans), and the annual Kaleido Arts Festival, which holds a popular “No-Tie” Gala—because, Morin explains, “for a lot of residents art is outside their comfort zone” and the casual vibe makes it more accessible.

Arts on the Ave was initially supported by an arts-friendly mayor and council committed to neighbourhood revitalization. But what it represents now, says Morin, is a “futuristic model of community involvement and development, putting your ideas out there before you have structures, letting go of your brand. It’s a web.” But this web isn’t online—it’s right around the corner.

Visualizations of DNA strands. Pink Army Cooperative aims to sequence personalized cancer treatments using open-source principles. Creative Commons image via Wikipedia user Zephyris.

Andrew Hessel

The Pink Army is preparing an ambitious invasion, and Andrew Hessel is its general. This is one war you can actually feel good about supporting, though: namely, the fight against breast cancer.

Hessel is the founder and managing director of Pink Army Cooperative, the world’s first open-source synthetic biotechnology firm. Founded in Edmonton in 2009, Pink Army is pioneering a radical new way of researching breast cancer treatments, built on the same free and open software principles that drive huge firms like Mozilla, developers of the open-source Firefox internet browser. Pink Army is fully member-owned and democratically run; anyone can join for just $20. Using that grassroots support, the firm will work on developing custom cancer treatments, tailored to patients’ individual DNA. The idea is to affordably create bespoke treatments that definitively cure a single patient, instead of one-size-fits-all drugs that merely treat millions.

Hessel, a University of Calgary-trained biologist, is now a world leader in the new field of synthetic biology, a hybrid of traditional biology and engineering. Practitioners in the field see cells—the building blocks of all living things—as tiny computers that can be modeled, manipulated, duplicated, and more. “Cells are processors; DNA is a programming language,” Hessel said in a 2009 presentation. “We can look at biological systems much like computer networks. And because we have so much experience today with hardware, software and large scale computing, we are actually learning about our biology through the building out of these systems.” The same forces that drove the price of a desktop computer from $10,000 to $299 have also made it increasingly possible to quickly and cheaply sequence DNA. Once you can untangle a cancer patient’s genome, Hessel believes synthetic biology will point the way to a personalized cure—essentially a way to find the glitch in your cellular software and rewrite it.

Hessel acknowledges it sounds like science fiction, but says most of the technological pieces are already in place; what’s needed is a better, faster, cheaper research method. That’s why Pink Army is an open-source co-op: with no secrets, no patents, and no profits, Hessel believes he’ll be able to duplicate the enormous success of open-source software, but for biotech. Currently numbering 500 members, Hessel believes the co-op needs 2,500 to synthesize its first treatment, so it may be a few years before Pink Army is ready to treat its first patient. But their first shot may mark the start of a medical revolution.

Participants in a recent Next Up training session. Photo courtesy Next Up.

It was the sort of sectarian self-destruction that’s sadly all too common in left-wing movements. After winning strong majorities on Vancouver City Council, the school board, and the park board in 2002, the Coalition of Progressive Electors alliance split in two just a couple of years later. This paved the way for the right to retake city politics in the 2005 election.

Kevin Millsip was one of the COPE school board trustees during that tumultuous term, and the meltdown spurred him to rethink how best to channel his energies and skills. “It was kind of a low point,” he says, “but it led me to think carefully about leadership, unity, and how we build long-run capacities in our movement.”

Fortunately, within a couple of years Vancouver’s left got its act back together, and a united progressive coalition (composed of Vision Vancouver, COPE, and the Greens) handily won the 2008 municipal election. In the meantime, Millsip had co-founded Next Up, an amazing new initiative that has the potential to make an even greater contribution to the next incarnations of social and environmental activism than any single election victory ever could.

Next Up was co-founded by Millsip and Seth Klein (who works in the B.C. office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, which still co-sponsors the initiative). Millsip also tapped into other networks he’d been nurturing through the “Check Your Head” high school education project in Vancouver that he had been organizing since 1998. The group has cleverly leveraged other partnerships with the Columbia Institute, the Gordon Foundation, the Parkland Institute, and other established organizations, rather than trying to go it alone.

Next Up began operations in 2007 in Vancouver, and has now expanded to offer its program in Calgary, Edmonton, and Saskatoon. The core of the program is an intensive leadership development course for young adult activists aged 18-32. Each cohort meets one night a week for six months, plus five full-day Saturday sessions. Participants must apply for the program, and are selected based on leadership qualities, demonstrated activist commitment, and a short written assignment. They learn activist, organizing, and communication skills; hone their political analysis; and undertake hands-on activist projects. The program is free.

“We need to learn from how the right has put a deliberate, sustained focus on nurturing and launching a new generation of talented, connected leaders,” Millsip argues, pointing to efforts by groups like the Fraser Institute and the Heritage Foundation to identify and recruit young leaders, train them, and support them as they go out to foment change (change of the wrong kind, that is). In contrast, on the left Millsip believes there is an absence of structures through which progressive young leaders can consciously develop their skills, connect with like-minded activists, and build networks. It’s that void that Next Up aims to fill.

One of the most impressive aspects of Next Up is its deliberate strategy to maintain close networks among the alumni who have gone through the program. Annual alumni conferences (called “gatherings”) are a chance to reconnect with graduates from all years, discuss current issues and organizing strategies, and strengthen networks. The Next Up alumni community already includes 100 talented, inspired, and inspiring young leaders, and that number will grow like a snowball as Next Up offers more courses in more locations.

Millsip himself embodies an impressive combination of hard-nosed organizing savvy and strategic analysis, with the soft-spoken touch of a new-age West Coast activist. He is refreshingly realistic and concrete about the skills and discipline that will be required for us to successfully combat and roll back the juggernaut of the right. But he performs his work with an inclusive humanity that effectively welcomes and encourages new activists, and respects unity and partnerships. (Think back to the bitter disunity that sparked his plan in the first place.) He connects perfectly with the young leaders he is helping to mentor; he has big plans for Next Up and, more importantly, for the activists who experience it.

Next Up is carefully considering further expansion to other parts of Canada, though Millsip is careful not to bite off more than the shoestring operation can chew. The program is already making a difference to the power and capacity of our broad progressive movement, and there’s much more to come.

Site of the now-rejected Kanata gravel mine on land owned by the Elizabeth Metis Nation. Satellite imagery via Google.

A project that would have provided hundreds of Metis with jobs and affordable housing was quashed on Tuesday, with a 7-6 vote by the Edmonton City Council. And though it may not seem so at first glance, that decision was likely for the best. While the project’s benefits were appealing, there were some deeper problems with the proposal, especially its environmental toll. But whether you agree with the Edmonton councillors’ decision or not, the case raises a host of important questions: how to address the pressing social and economic needs of Canada’s aboriginal communities, for instance, and how to balance economic prosperity with environmental sustainability. These are thorny, complicated, politically charged issues, so it’s important to pay attention to decisions like this and how they’re getting made.

Here’s the background: Kanata Metis Cultural Enterprises Ltd., which is owned by the Elizabeth Metis community, proposed a gravel mining operation to be started up on land it bought in 2009.  According to  the  corporation’s proposal, the mine would have been operated for three to five years, created up to 300 jobs for members of the Metis nation, and yielded 1.7 million tonnes of gravel, the profits of which would have been used to fund Metis-focused social programs such as building affordable housing.

Opposition to the mine sprung up because the proposed site was right beside the North Saskatchewan River and, according to local conservationists, better left untouched. The North Saskatchewan River Valley Conservation Society posited that a gravel mine in the river valley could damage nearby wetlands and kick up large amounts of dust, harmful to area residents.

The argument against the mine was bolstered by the fact that the Edmonton Municipal Development Plan of 2010 specifically prohibits the harvesting of resources in the North Saskatchewan River Valley.

The task of the Edmonton City Council was to determine whether an exception could be made to the prohibition. Normally such a decision would be based on the potential value of the proposed project. But this particular case gave councillors much more to think about, as it raised questions about environmental protection, self-government, and aboriginal land rights (The Kanata Metis appeared to have taken on the role of standing in for Metis people across Canada, the term “our people” having been used frequently by proponents of the mine).

At a very basic level, the case could be made that Kanata Metis Cultural Enterprises should be allowed to mine the land because they own it. And although the city has prohibited activities such as mining in that area, the question of land ownership and use is complicated when it involves Aboriginal groups, self-governance being a stated priority of the Canadian government’s relationship with Aboriginal peoples. Although the mining proposal isn’t a cut and dried analogue, aboriginal communities’ autonomy is part of the mix of issues here.

Another major argument in favour of granting the Kanata Metis corporation exclusive mining rights to the area, was that the Metis nation, like many Aboriginals in Canada, are in need of assistance, and owed some form of compensation.

The 2006 census reported that the Metis employment rate amongst adults was 74.6 percent. Although this was a four percent improvement over 2001’s figures, it still placed Metis behind the non-Aboriginal population, whose employment rate was 81.6 percent. The 2006 census also reported that, as of the previous year, the median income for Metis was $5,000 lower than it was for non-Aboriginals. This inequity was even greater in Alberta, where the median Metis income was $6,600 lower than non-Aboriginals’.

Evidently a job-creation project with a focus on Albertan Metis deserves some thought, especially if it is also going to contribute funding to housing and training programs, as the Kanata Metis corporation said the mine would have.

But while the local Metis population would have benefited from the gravel mine, how should that be weighed against the environmental costs?

While campaigning in favour of the mine, Archie Collins, a councillor of the Elizabeth Metis settlement, described the Metis people as “stewards of the land,” a cliché about indigenous peoples often invoked by interested parties, aboriginal or otherwise, that portrays aboriginals as inherently protective and understanding of the earth and environment.

There are already conservation laws to which aboriginals are exempt because of their cultures’ unique relationships to nature. Hunting and fishing regulations, for example, do not apply to aboriginal Canadians, on the grounds that their cultural traditions, which include hunting and fishing, supersede Canadian laws.

Gravel mining, however, is not part of the Metis cultural tradition. It would have been undertaken only as a commercial opportunity, which makes it quite different from the hunting and fishing examples. Collins’s “stewards of the land” image, while romantic, does not exactly jibe with digging up a river’s watershed in search of gravel.

There is no doubt that the Kanata Metis Cultural Enterprises mine would have brought some needed material prosperity for Edmonton-area Metis. There is even less doubt that the Metis — like all Canadian aboriginal peoples — are owed some manner of reparations after a long history of oppression and marginalization. But there are better ways to help than the North Saskatchewan River gravel mine. There are definitely less environmentally damaging options. In the end Edmonton City Council made a tough choice, but it was the right one.

A partial map of Canada's North, c. 1776. Province-like powers are needed to improve living conditions, but only if the negotiations are fair.

Territorial devolution is key to a successful North…

After decades at a frozen impasse, it appears the federal government’s position on devolving province-like responsibilities and powers to the Northwest Territories has finally thawed. In October, a draft agreement-in-principle between the feds and the territorial government was leaked to media, marking the NWT’s first small step toward taking control of its own land development, administration, and natural resources.

The potential benefits are huge. The territorial government estimates that over the last five years, more than $200 million in resource revenues flowed out of the territory to Ottawa. Had this money remained in the territory, it would have provided much needed funding to fight longstanding social and housing problems, which are major root causes of the NWT’s embarrassing crime rate, currently six times the national average. Plus, a devolution deal would likely move north hundreds of jobs that are now located in the south. Even a few jobs would substantially boost the territory’s poorest areas, says MLA Tom Beaulieu, who represents the tiny towns of Fort Resolution and Lutselk’e. “There would be a lot more money circulating,” he told the CBC, “and employment rates would be a lot better.”

…but not without aboriginal inclusion

Not so fast, say aboriginal governments. When news of the deal leaked, their opposition was loud, immediate, and nearly universal. Surprisingly, they’d been omitted from the bilateral negotiations; unsurprisingly, they weren’t happy about it. Many fear the agreement could transfer authority over their traditional lands to the territorial government. Of the seven groups currently party to the deal, only one has stated its support: the Inuvialuit, whose land claim encompasses the oil-rich Beaufort Delta. UPDATE: the agreement in principle was signed on January 26, 2011 by the federal and territorial governments and the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation; the other aboriginal governments did not sign and said they opposed the agreement.

Territorial officials won’t say whether they’ll continue without aboriginal support or with only a majority on board, like the Yukon did in 2003. In the meantime, Premier Floyd Roland has tried to circumvent opposition by telling aboriginal groups there is nothing legally binding within the agreement. Roland maintains the draft agreement, which he calls “a road map for future negotiations,” won’t negatively affect land claim agreements or future settlements; aboriginal leaders have told him to can the platitudes. Despite a recent meeting with chiefs—weirdly, outside the NWT, in Edmonton—Roland has been unable to break the deadlock. With a winter of discontent looming, it looks like the road toward self determination may once again freeze over.

Documentaries about drug use and life on the street can easily become depressing cautionary tales. The NFB’s website Playing It Safe avoids this type of tired cliche by offering at-risk youth a chance to make their own films. The project paired at-risk youth and peer filmmakers from Vancouver and Edmonton. As Vancouver prepares for the 2010 Olympic Games, these aren’t the  kinds of stories the city wants to the world to hear.

Being at once the filmmaker and the subject of the documentary, the people in these films tell honest, thoughtful stories. They talk about the different paths that led them to the streets, and speak openly about both the positive and negative aspects of their lifestyles. Some want to keep using drugs and living on the street, others are going to school and working with other at-risk youth.

Many of the films don’t offer a happy ending, and can’t try to sum-up difficult issues in a simple package. The goal isn’t to scare at-risk youth straight, but to reflect their lives and remind them that they’re not invisible.

There are currently eight films on the site, and more are posted each week.