Indian Country Today Media Network, based in New York City, boasts an international audience of 300,000 unique monthly visitors to its website, and a controlled weekly magazine print circulation of 22,500.
Mobilized by online social media, a good 3,000 people showed up for an Idle No More flash mob at the West Edmonton Mall, staging a full-scale Grand Entry, the ceremonial procession that opens pow wow gatherings.
Opposition continues to grow against Enbridge’s proposed 728-mile, $5.5 billion Northern Gateway pipeline, which would pump 525,000 barrels of diluted bitumen crude from Alberta’s oil sands to British Columbia’s coast, to be loaded on tankers for Asian export.
Through stinging temperatures far below freezing—plummeting down to -53F with windchill—six young men and a guide are snowshoeing on a historic two-month, more than 900-mile journey south to Ottawa as part of the Idle No More movement.
After more than a month of protests, hunger strikes, social media–organized flash mobs, round dances and teach-ins—and in the wake of Friday’s meeting between national aboriginal leadership and Prime Minister Stephen Harper—the sincerity of Harper’s pledge to focus on First Nations issues is being discussed heatedly among activists from coast to coast.
With the Idle No More movement rapidly spreading outside Canada’s borders – seeing Indigenous rights protests emerge as far away as Texas, New Zealand, New York and the United Kingdom – activists in Washington State and British Columbia are planning an action Saturday, January 5th that literally spans the frontier.
Here’s a look back over some of my key stories of the last year.
A resident of Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa decided to take Spence’s message more than 1,400 miles, all the way to President Barack Obama in Washington D.C.
Kinnie Starr has become a master at mixing worlds, transcending borders and declaring sovereignty.
Vancouver, B.C.’s nighttime streets were wet with fresh rain as a dozen members of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES) community set out on what they dubbed a walkabout tour through the poorest off-reserve area of Canada, accompanied by Indian Country Today Media Network.
As Attawapiskat First Nation chief Theresa Spence enters her 13th day of a hunger strike protest on December 24—surviving on only medicine tea and fish broth in a tipi near Parliament Hill—supporters say her strength is ebbing, but her resolve is not.
David P Ball 