Free Republic

WARNING: This story contains distressing details. (CBC Warning) In a barren field of sagebrush alongside a road through the Osoyoos Indian Band, Chief Clarence Louie stands atop a concrete pad and surveys the rubble in front of him. This used to be the front entrance to St. Gregory's, the simple wooden church that hosted countless community celebrations, dinners and religious services, on the reserve just north of the Canada-U.S. border in central B.C. The church had stood for more than one hundred years as a symbol of the Catholic faith, but on June 21, 2021, someone burned it to the...

...“(Protesters) claiming they're not being racist or discriminatory actually are by tokenizing people in communities of colour to highlight this and other racist protests,” Chaudhry said. “The challenge I always have is in why we have a (hate) symbol visibly present at these protests if there are not any forms of bias or discrimination.” Some of the convoy’s organizers have a history of promoting white supremacist and racist views, Global News reports. The Canadian Anti-Hate Network has also documented some organizers’ past ties to far-right organizations.

The statue of Egerton Ryerson, one of the architects of the residential school system in Canada, was toppled and vandalized Sunday evening following a demonstration in downtown Toronto. The act occurred following a demonstration downtown in response to an announcement by the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation on May 27 that preliminary findings from a survey conducted by a specialist in ground-penetrating radar indicated the remains of what could be 215 children buried on the site of a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C. Since the, there have been calls from Indigenous professors and students to change the university's name...

After more than three years, dozens of community meetings and testimony from well over 2,000 Canadians, the missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls inquiry delivered its final report to the federal government at a ceremony in Gatineau, Que., today. The report includes many recommendations to government, the police and the larger Canadian public to help address endemic levels of violence directed at Indigenous women and girls and 2SLGBTQQIA (two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex and asexual) people. A copy of the final, 1,200-page report — and its 231 "calls for justice" — is available here.

ST. LOUIS - The first humans to spread across North America may have been seal hunters from France and Spain. This runs counter to the long-held belief that the first human entry into the Americas was a crossing of a land-ice bridge that spanned the Bering Strait about 13,500 years ago. The new thinking was outlined here Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Recent studies have suggested that the glaciers that helped form the bridge connecting Siberia and Alaska began receding around 17,000 to 13,000 years ago, leaving very little chance that...