Tag: native americans

DNA study of nearly 200 Indigenous genomes reveals unknown Asian ‘ghost’ population contributed to American ancestry

Humans migrated to South America in three distinct waves over the course of thousands of years, a new large-scale analysis of Indigenous Americans’ DNA reveals. The investigation also found that genes related to fertility, metabolism and the immune response helped people adapt to their unique environment in the “final frontier” of human migration, the researchers said.

In a study published Wednesday (April 22) in the journal Nature, an international team of scientists detailed findings from the Indigenous American Genomic Diversity Project, which analyzed 128 genomes from people living in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay and Peru — an investigation that included 45 populations and 28 language families. The researchers’ goal was to better understand how and when people arrived on the continent and the factors that shaped these populations’ genetics.

“Until now, only two Amazonian Indigenous populations had been genetically characterized, and due to the particularity of their environment and their isolation, they were not very representative,” study first author Marcos Araújo Castro e Silva, a researcher at the Spanish National Research Council’s Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE) and Pompeu Fabra University in Spain, said in a translated statement. The research team worked in collaboration with Indigenous communities to develop the study and integrate the findings into Indigenous history, study co-author Tábita Hünemeier, head of the Human Population Genomics Lab at IBE, said in the statement.

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First Nations chiefs open to engaging in ‘civil disobedience’ if Alberta referendum proceeds

On Friday’s live stream, Tamara Ugolini, Drea Humphrey, and Tamara Lich reacted to First Nations chiefs in Western Canada asserting that “civil disobedience” may be required to fight against Alberta’s upcoming referendum on separation.

Treaty 8 chiefs warned on Thursday that they could mobilize to block highways or industry points if Alberta proceeds with its province-wide referendum on separation ‘without consultation’ in October.

Lich reacted to the apparent double standard in terms of authorities targeting her for peaceful protest while others threaten to block highways. 

“I just want you guys to imagine for one second, if I went online and said if I didn’t get my way, I was going to block a highway. The cops would be at my door and I’d be being flown back to Ottawa again,” she said.

“We definitely cannot make these kinds of threats, especially over a question, it’s literally over a question. Now that’s mischief. I was charged with mischief, I was charged with counselling others to commit the offense of mischief … to me this sounds like threats of mischief, or premeditated mischief, or counselling others to commit mischief, it’s not civil disobedience,” Lich continued.

Premier Smith responded to the chiefs’ threats, asserting that the rule of law will be enforced if civil disobedience occurs over the Alberta referendum, as detailed by the CBC. Speaking to reporters Friday, the premier cited the province’s critical infrastructure defence law, which imposes additional penalties on protesters blocking essential infrastructure like highways or railways.

“I think you saw how serious we are about enforcing that law as we have many times over previous years,” she said.

The Alberta referendum is set to take place on October 19, which will include a question asking residents whether they wish to remain in Canada or begin the constitutional process for a binding separation vote.

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Canada’s Senate rejects amendment to Bill C-9 that would ban ‘residential school denialism’

Canadian senators voted down a recent proposed amendment to anti-Christian “hate speech” legislation, Bill C-9, which would have criminalized “residential school denialism.”

On Wednesday, senators voted 41–32 against adopting an amendment sponsored by Sen. Nancy Karetak-Lindell (Nunavut), who claimed that residential school attendees such as herself faced harms, as well as other changes to the bill. There were two abstentions.

Karetak-Lindell’s amendment would have changed Canada’s Criminal Code to say that any person who willfully promotes hatred against indigenous peoples by “condoning, denying or downplaying” alleged abuses linked to Canada’s residential school system outside of a private conversation could face prosecution or even a summary conviction, which could then lead to potential jail time.

The new amendment to Bill C-9 would have needed a House of Commons ratification if the Senate passed the bill as it stands in the third reading.

The news of the Senate’s vote-down of the amendment received praised from Conservative MP Andrew Lawton.

“The Senate has REJECTED the Senate Human Rights Committee’s amendments to Bill C-9, including the criminalization of residential school ‘downplaying’,” he wrote in an X post.

It is not yet clear what this means for Bill C-9, but the recent vote likely means that the bill will be further stalled from becoming law.

As reported by LifeSiteNews, Bill C-9, which is before Canada’s Senate, would criminalize religious expression and belief when quoting parts of the Bible, including passages about homosexuality and gender.

Bill C-9 has been blasted by constitutional experts as allowing empowered police and the government to go after those deemed to have violated a person’s “feelings” in a “hateful” way. The bill was introduced by Justice Minister Sean Fraser last year.

Specifically, Bill C-9 would remove Section 319(3)(b) of Canada’s Criminal Code. This section provides protection to good-faith expression of a person’s religious views, which are based on religious texts such as the Holy Bible.

Bill C-9 has been blasted by some of Canada’s premiers.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith recently said that she does not want to see authorities “monitoring” church services in her province in light of Bill C-9.

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Anti-Christian Bill C-9 amended to criminalize ‘residential school denialism’

The Canadian Senate’s Human Rights Committee voted Monday night to amend an anti-Christian “hate speech” bill to criminalize “residential school denialism.”

Only one senator on the committee voted against the change to Bill C-9, according to a report. The bill has not yet been voted on by the Senate body itself.

The sponsor of the amendment, Sen. Nancy Karetak-Lindell (Nunavut), claimed that residential school attendees such as herself faced harms.

“Every survivor experienced it in a different way,” she said. “We lost a lot of family time. We lost a chance to grow up in our culture, in our language. Yes, I did get education, but I also lost out on a parallel education that I would have gotten if I had been able to stay home.”

The new proposed amendment would change Canada’s Criminal Code to say that any person who willfully promotes hatred against indigenous peoples by “condoning, denying or downplaying” Canada’s residential school system outside of a private conversation could face prosecution or even a summary conviction, which could then lead to potential jail time.

The new amendment to Bill C-9 needs a House of Commons ratification, if the bill as it stands is passed by the Senate in the third reading.

Bill C-9 would criminalize religious expression and belief when quoting parts of the Bible, including passages about homosexuality and gender. Specifically, it would remove Section 319(3)(b) of Canada’s Criminal Code, which provides protection to good-faith expression of a person’s religious views based on texts such as the Bible.

The bill has been  constitutional experts for empowering the police and government to  those deemed to have violated a person’s “feelings” in a “hateful” way. The bill was introduced by Justice Minister Sean Fraser last year.

In 2021 and 2022, the mainstream media ran with  that hundreds of children were buried and disregarded by Catholic priests and nuns who ran some Canadian residential schools. The reality is that after four years there have been  at residential schools.

However, as the claims went unfounded, over 120 churches in Canada, most of them Catholic and many of them on indigenous lands that serve the local population,  to the ground, , or defiled.

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CBC report failed to inform readers that “tribunal” on residential schools is symbolic

The CBC is standing by its reporting on a self-described human rights tribunal that is “indicting” the Canadian government for alleged abuses and “genocide” in the residential school system, despite failing to note that the group’s lead prosecutor has a suspended law licence and that the organization has no legal authority in Canada.

The article, written by CBC reporter Joy SpearChief-Morris, profiles an activist group known as the “Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal” and its “trial” of Canada’s residential school system.

The report states that “seven international judges” would be “hearing evidence” during the proceeding as part of an investigation into missing Indigenous children and alleged “unmarked burials” associated with residential schools.

The hearing comes five years after the reported discovery of potential unmarked graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. On May 27, 2021, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation announced that a preliminary investigation had identified what were believed to be the remains of 215 children who attended the school.

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Not Satire: Newsom Took Money That Could Have Helped Stop Palisades Fires and Spent It Teaching American Indians to Start Fires

Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom of California continues to light his constituents’ tax dollars on fire.

Moreover, he has done it in the name of cultural pandering and with dubious constitutionality.

According to the urban policy-focused City Journal, the state’s “Tribal Wildfire Resilience” program, overseen by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or CAL FIRE, has distributed $24 million to “tribal groups and other nonprofits” to teach American Indians, identified as “cultural fire practitioners,” how to clear brush from forests in ways their ancestors would have found familiar.

Meanwhile, taxpayers have seen no appreciable return on that expenditure. How much brush have the tribes cleared? California has released no data.

Of course, this is not meant as an attack on the tribes — far from it. After all, one could probably find $24 million between the couch cushions at the Pentagon.

What makes this expenditure maddening is that it, like most things in California, is dripping with wokeness.

For instance, Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot, who effectively oversees the program, justified it not on fire management grounds but as a remedy for historical injustices. California, he said, originated in a “state-sanctioned policy of genocide.” Thus, Crowfoot made it sound as if the governor had a plan to return the land to the “leadership of California Native American tribes.”

Newsom, of course, has no such plan. But saying that he has one sounds good in upscale places like the French Laundry.

Worse yet, the “Tribal Wildfire Resilience” program engages in discrimination by allocating resources based on race.

“As part of this commitment to ‘cultural burning,’” the City Journal wrote, “California has created separate fire-certification processes for nontribal and tribal populations. White, black, Latino, and Asian fire bosses must receive technical certifications, including a 40-hour burn-boss course and, in some cases, a federal certificate. ‘Cultural fire practitioners,’ by contrast, are certified through simple tribal recognition that a person has ‘substantial experience’ burning for cultural purposes.”

Should anyone ever make a case of it, the U.S. Supreme Court almost certainly would find those race-based provisions unconstitutional.

Again, none of this reflects in any way on the tribes themselves. Perhaps some “cultural fire practitioners” really do have “substantial experience” in clearing brush via controlled fires. After all, early American history is filled with stories of Indians skilled in that practice.

In that case, however, why do they require public funding? Why must the privileged Newsom, one of the whitest of white men who ever lived, teach them traditional cultural techniques?

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Five years after the ‘unmarked graves’ claim, Canada still has no bodies — but plenty of demands for silence

The fifth anniversary of the claim that the remains of 215 Indian residential school students had been discovered at Kamloops, BC, has come and gone. Despite the fact that millions of dollars have been spent, and not one body has been found, there have been no apologies from those who made the claim. Quite the contrary, Canada’s Indian chiefs are now demanding the criminal prosecution of anyone who even questions the claim. As they see it, anyone disputing their claim — or even claiming that former residential school students had positive experiences at the schools — should be found guilty of “residential school denialism,” and severely sanctioned — even jailed.

Ottawa appears to be ready to oblige. Bill C-413 would make me a criminal for writing this article — and perhaps you for reading it and passing it on.

But if they get their way, they had better build a very big jail. And they will have to be prepared to throw many former residential school students in that jail. Because it is not hard to find positive residential school experiences described by former students.

Here is an example of a man heaping praise on his residential school and the dedicated people there who gave him a first-class education. According to him, if not for the years he spent at his residential school, he would have died as a drunk on skid row, like so many of his reserve friends. Instead, he went on to become a successful lawyer. He credited the 14 years he spent at a residential school for making that success possible. 

That fellow is Wilton Littlechild, who happens to be one of the three Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) Commissioners. He certainly changed his tune later, but for most of his life, he and his family considered themselves very fortunate for his education at the school. Every year, the family and community held a picnic at their rural home, with the chiefs in attendance, to honour the teachers and staff who gave their son and friends the education so many Indians didn’t receive.

Littleton shared this revelation during a 2011 interview with University of New Brunswick students and at a TRC hearing. You can read the full interview at Speak Truth to Power Canada. 

Will Mr. Littlechild be jailed for making these comments about his overwhelmingly positive experience at his residential school?

And while we are on the subject of TRC commissioners, here is what the late Commissioner Murray Sinclair had to say about residential schools.

“While the TRC heard many experiences of unspeakable abuse, we have been heartened by testimonies which affirm the dedication and compassion of committed educators who sought to nurture the children in their care. These experiences must also be heard.”

Would Sinclair have been prosecuted for that?

Sinclair’s grandmother — the grandmother who raised him, and who Sinclair credited for his success — received her education at a residential school. Would the chiefs have her jailed for repeatedly declaring how lucky she had been to have had a residential school education?

Then there is the famous Indian playwright and musician, Tomson Highway, who wrote a book about his experiences at the Guy Hill Residential School near The Pas, Manitoba. He described his experience there as overwhelmingly positive.

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Inside Canada’s hidden dog cruelty crisis on First Nations reserves

Canada has a worldwide reputation as a ‘progressive’ nation that champions not only human rights, but also animal rights, which is reflected in provincial and federal laws as well as our cultural attitudes. So usually, when we think of rampant animal cruelty, we think of other societies — not our own. Because surely, if that were occurring on Canadian soil, citizens would hear about it regularly, right?

Sadly, there IS a rampant animal cruelty crisis in Canada; a dirty little secret, happening right under our noses. There is a disproportionate amount of neglect, starvation and abuse of dogs going on in First Nations reservations nationwide, including frequent ‘culls’. This is well known among the dog rescue community, so why is this issue not being urgently addressed by most law enforcement officials, politicians or mainstream media?

While animal abuse occurs at the hands of people from all races, there is a glaring disparity in accountability and transparency when it is done by Canada’s First Nations population; conversations are generally shut down quickly with excuses or accusations of racism, a common pattern when discussing sensitive societal issues in modern, liberal Canada.

A few bold, compassionate Canadian dog rescuers are sounding the alarm about this prevalent issue, perhaps none so loudly as Reed Salmon, an Albertan musician and outspoken, controversial animal rights activist who refuses to be silenced when raising awareness for suffering rez dogs.

Reed is the founder of the Reed Salmon Foundation and is also working on a new, nationwide organization to carry out this work.

With his blunt posts about the tragedies occurring on reserves, Reed has made serious waves online. He’s been accused of every label in the book, but he refuses to be silenced and aims to be a voice for the voiceless dogs who cannot speak up for — or defend — themselves. He also does on-the-ground rescue work, including delivering straw bales and dog food to reserves, emancipating dogs who are emaciated or freezing while tied up on short chains, and fundraising for rescues in the prairie provinces.

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Ottawa spent more than $1 million on Yukon ‘Indigenous food systems’ project

A federal agency handed more than $1 million to a small Yukon school board to promote “Indigenous food systems,” according to records tabled before the Senate agriculture committee.

According to a story broken by Blacklock’s, the funding came through the federal government’s Northern Isolated Community Initiatives Fund, a program that costs taxpayers roughly $6 million annually and is set to run until 2027.

According to the records, the Yukon First Nation Education Directorate received a total of $1,015,646 from the Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency.

The largest portion of the funding, $845,000, went toward planning a “traditional processing kitchen” in Whitehorse.

“This one-year project focused on completing architectural and detailed design plans for a centralized traditional and local foods commercial kitchen,” the agency told senators.

According to the agency, the proposed facility would support the processing and storage of wild game in an urban setting and help promote traditional food-processing knowledge in First Nations curriculum.

Another $170,646 was spent on the Directorate’s urban nutrition program, including the purchase of a temperature-controlled delivery van.

Federal officials defended the spending as part of Ottawa’s broader push to address food security in remote northern communities.

“The fund plays a targeted role in advancing food initiatives that build local capacity,” agency managers wrote.

The Northern Isolated Community Initiatives Fund was launched in 2019 and bankrolls projects ranging from greenhouse operations and farming initiatives to traditional harvesting, food distribution systems and “food innovation” programs.

Records show taxpayers also funded:

  • $800,000 for an egg farmer in Hay River;
  • $600,000 for a grocery store in Wekweeti, Northwest Territories, population roughly 130;
  • $250,000 for a grocer in Arctic Bay;
  • $710,000 for fish freezers in Cumberland Sound.

“These examples show how the Agency supports food security, infrastructure and economic growth across the North in line with community needs and regional priorities,” managers wrote.

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Pickering councillor facing backlash for questioning Kamloops residential school narrative

City of Pickering Councillor Lisa Robinson is learning — the hard way — that in uber-woke Canada, one is forbidden from questioning certain official narratives. Or even speaking the truth if that truth might be uncomfortable or offensive when it comes to the sensibilities of certain people.

Recently, Robinson dared to venture near that political third rail that is the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in B.C. This is the site of a mass grave of 215 bodies.

Or is it?

To date, not a scintilla of forensic evidence has been provided to prove that that there is a single body buried there.

And this fact was the crux of the matter when Robinson recently posted a four-minute video entitled: “215 ‘Mass Graves’ at Kamloops: Zero Bodies Found After 5 Years — The Lie Exposed.”

Cue the outrage from the usual suspects.

This included Pickering Mayor Kevin Ashe who is now formally lodging a complaint against Robinson with the city’s integrity commissioner.

Mayor Ashe wants to see Robinson stripped of three months’ salary. Astonishingly, Robinson has already been docked a whopping 21 months’ salary. Not for uttering death threats or racial epithets, but rather, for “wrong-thought”.

And with her commentary regarding Kamloops, this over-the-top vendetta shamefully continues.

And as far as we can tell, Robinson spoke the truth.

We ventured out to Pickering just east of Toronto to interview Robinson, who feels she is yet again being unfairly maligned for no valid reason. She had plenty to say about this latest attack on her for embracing free speech, which seems to be increasingly under fire in Canada these days.

Rebel News also extended an opportunity for Mayor Ashe to come on camera. That offer was declined, although his office did provide the following statement:

“I want to acknowledge the harm caused by recent comments made by a member of Pickering City Council regarding the Tk̓emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation’s investigations at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School site.

“I offer my sincere apology to Indigenous community members, Survivors, families, and all those affected by these remarks. Comments that dismiss, distort, or cast doubt on the truths shared by Survivors and Indigenous communities are deeply hurtful. They undermine reconciliation, re-traumatize those carrying the legacy of residential schools, and have no place in respectful public discourse.

“The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada gathered testimony from more than 6,500 Survivors and witnesses and reviewed millions of federal records to support our education on the systemic harms, cultural genocide, and intergenerational traumas caused by residential schools. These are not matters for political speculation or denial.

“The legacy of residential schools persists in our everyday institutions, and we must hold public servants accountable to our responsibility to acknowledge our shared history, honour Survivors, and advance meaningful efforts in Truth and Reconciliation.

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