[All] Fw: We must break systematic racism in Canada

Tue Jun 2 22:55:31 EDT 2015

Hi everyone
My heart is flooding over with emotions regarding the Truth and Reconciliation report with recommendations being released by Justice Murray Sinclair. It sort of shakes one to the core when you know the stories, the people involved and details of unspoken stories of family and friends. I've shed a few tears on this today.
Never the less it moved me to write this letter to elected officials and Church reps. To help them to understand the big picture view. Our environment and the people living in it are one. The mindset of the monsters who destroyed these children's lives is the same mindset they use today to destroy the environment because the mindset of the people in power remains the same and they are still above the law and still killing us. I have spent most of my life working to end this circle of injustice regarding environmental/societal abuse. 
I don't know how else to tell the tale but to say the whole damn thing. So here it is.  
Lulu 

    ----- Forwarded Message -----
  From: Louisette Lanteigne <butterflybluelu at rogers.com>
 To: Prime Minister/Premier Ministre <pm at pm.gc.ca>; Tom Mulcair <thomas.mulcair at parl.gc.ca>; "justin.trudeau at parl.gc.ca" <justin.trudeau at parl.gc.ca>; Elizabeth May <elizabeth.may at parl.gc.ca>; DionStéphane [NCR] <stephane.dion at parl.gc.ca>; "francis.scarpaleggia at parl.gc.ca" <francis.scarpaleggia at parl.gc.ca>; "leona.aglukkaq at parl.gc.ca" <leona.aglukkaq at parl.gc.ca>; "minister.moe at ontario.ca" <minister.moe at ontario.ca>; "kwynne.mpp at liberal.ola.org" <kwynne.mpp at liberal.ola.org>; "Bernard.Valcourt at parl.gc.ca" <Bernard.Valcourt at parl.gc.ca>; "premier at ontario.ca" <premier at ontario.ca>; "reception at archottawa.ca" <reception at archottawa.ca> 
 Sent: Tuesday, June 2, 2015 10:27 PM
 Subject: We must break systematic racism in Canada

Dear Hon. Ministers, Ministers and church representitives.
My ancestors were Mi'lkmaq and Acadian.  My ancestors were subject to Genocide on both sides of my family. The Truth and Reconciliation process revealed that 25% of children in residential schools risked death. The legacy of these issues are not yet resolved. Lives are still at risk and attitudes and policies still needs to change to protect human lives in Canada. 
I am not an expert but I am the child born from a very old bloodline of  Mi'kmaq/Metis/Acadians. We lived in Nova Scotia but the genocide and deportation scattered our family. My family resettled in New Brunswick and it was a very isolated community but not by choice. After all the abuse endured, we were the only ones left for a long time.
The objective of this email is to share what I know in order to help protect sustainable economic jobs, Aboriginal/Acadian/Ethnic minority cultures and human lives. The Church played a key roll in how this happened to us.  I can't simply separate these issues categorically because the topics are so intertwined. Canadian government often separates jurisdictional powers to categorize issues as falling under different categories but to Metis folks like me,  we prefer to reflect the totality and inter connectivity of issues unlike the Canadian way which in my view reflects a state of myopic blindness in every department.  So here is the story of my family and ancestors that I would like to share to explain what took place from our observations. 
90% of my Mi'kmac ancestors were killed.  It was a genocide inflicted by British troops done in a number of ways.  They implemented biological warfare with small pox using handkerchiefs and blankets taken from small pox hospitals and traded it with the Mi'kmaq. Field Marshal Jeffery Amherst, 1st Baron of Amherst who conquered Louisbourg was known to use this particular method. One of my great great grandfathers Zac Dorion was the only surviving boy in a family of 14. By the grace of God he survived or I wouldn't be here. 
The  proclamation of 1749 initiated  by British Colonial Governor of Nova Scotia Edward Cornwallis which slaughtered both Acadian Metis and Mi'kmaq populations by offering a cash bounty for the scalps of Mi'kmaq men. Bounties for women and children were offered as well. This is well documented. 
http://www.danielnpaul.com/BritishScalpProclamation-1749.html

The scalping proclamation of 1749 is still in the law books to this day. This law has not been rescinded. I personally wrote a formal requests to the Nova Scotia Government who stated to me it was not their jurisdiction to remove. The Federal Government wrote to me and stated it was the Province's jurisdiction not theirs. I forwarded the emails of the other's response in one email shared with both agencies but neither government level will claim responsibility for the fact these laws are still enshrined however I did get a response that reassured me this policy will not be acted upon. I was disgusted about that. Even in 2015 this law still exists.  Here is an article about this fact: http://www.thecoast.ca/RealityBites/archives/2015/01/07/its-2015-and-a-scalping-law-is-still-on-the-books  Following the scalping proclamation the Deportation of the Acadians took place soon after in 1755 to 1764 which killed several thousand of my ancestors by way of disease, illness, drownings, starvation and misery of all sorts. Families were broken up, shipped off to the US, England or France. My ancestors fled into the forests to escape to New Brunswick. They were heading to Burnt Church New Brunswick for shelter and found the community destroyed. Without food stored up they starved that winter. Some say they ate the leather of their shoes to survive.
1894 was the year my grandmother Obeline Lanteigne was born. She was raised in a community where reading was systematically forbidden. The English troops came to the community and they would raid the homes and remove all books and burn them. This included bibles and any written materials they found. Her father, Laurent Lanteigne, was a local store keeper who didn't know how to read or write. He created a system of his own writing which he scrawled on the wall of the barn at the back of the shop in order to keep track of credit. 
When my grandmother was a young girl, her father smuggled in a young 16 year old teacher from Quebec to teach my grandma how to read. Lessons had to be kept secret and they taught others in the community to do the same as they hid away in sheds, cellars and attics because it was forbidden knowledge. My dad's uncle learned in the storage area of the carriage house. My parents spoke to me of all this. 
By the time my parents were born there was a one room schoolhouse which they both attended.  This was in the 1930's in St. Simon New Brunswick.  Whenever the British inspectors walked the path to the school to do inspections, my parent's class would scramble to hide all religious items and items showing pride in Acadia, including flags, rosaries, bibles etc.  Later on the church took over the teaching. The priest/teacher they had was sadistic man who beat the kids with leather straps or wood. He sexually molested kids of both genders. My mom remembers when a boy she knew got raped. She was outside the door of the school at the time. We also knows how the priest fathered a child with one of my relatives. When it is the voice of a powerful man like a priest vs. the voice of an Acadian person, there was no justice. They priests were always above the law back in those days. They were untouchable no matter what.
The community was very poor and lacked resources to the point they would remove the thread from clothing to recycle it. They saved every button. Every nail was hammered straight for reuse. Every can saved to collect the nails. Every old shirt was recycled to create baby clothing, a quilt, patches for other clothes, dish rags or a rug. Even the catalogs were used as toilet paper. The running gag was every time someone had to go to the outhouse, they'd say they have to go shopping. We had so little back then. Nothing was wasted.
There was no doctors or hospitals, so my grandmother was the local midwife healer who used Mi'kmaq medicines to treat wounds and ailments. She knew how to make poultice from local plants to fight infections, what tree bark to use for coughs or colds and she delivered babies and saved premature babies by keeping them warm in a shoe box beside the wood stove. She saved many lives.  In a book is called St-Simon Histoire et Traditions and it speaks of how my grandmother healed her son who had an infection on the back of his neck. (Instead of Obeline, they called her Beline.) The article speaks of how he had a big lump on this neck, how she used hot water with a lye soap to open up the wound and used a  poultice from ingredients taken from the forest and cured him. There is a photo in the attachments about that. 
Unfortunately, there were also high mortality rates for the issues she could not help with. She lost one child at the age of three. Nobody knew why that child fell ill or what she died of.  My father lost his sister in her youth too. When unknown cause of deaths happened it was simply blamed on "weak constitution".  
My parent's community had no support from banking systems at all so my grandfathers were among the founders of the Credit Union of St-Simon. They all pitched in $5 to start up the system. It lasted over 50 years and my grandfathers were executives on the board for decades.  They were thrifty folks and knew how to maintain a sustainable economic system. Photos in attachments. 

Part of the reason we lacked resources was directly related to the racist views of the church because they called us as half bloods. That supporting information is here. It specifically names my family, Gallien and Lanteigne.  This historical document of a community audit conducted by a Roman Catholic official suggests we were the bottom that feeds the top. The church played a key roll in the fate they dealt my family. This document confirms it. http://echo.franco.ca/louismailloux/index.cfm?Id=34404&Sequence_No=&Repertoire_No=2137985663&Voir=journal
Education in the community was only provided til grade 8. Many of my family became lumber jacks, fishermen or worked in fish processing. If they wanted further schooling they had to leave town. My dad joined the Royal Canadian Air Force to finish high school. He became an engineer. Many of my aunts worked at the area fish plant. Some went to Montreal to work as maids, nurses or nannies. Some of my relatives were gifted with music and made their way as performers. My one uncle went to Vaudeville, another toured with Johnny Cash. Either way, the loss of youth and the lack of job diversity and access to education drove folks away to seek work. 
When my mother trained to be a nurse she put in her ours at Hôpital de la Miséricorde de Montréal where she saw first hand the result of sexual abuses of priests. This is where the pregnant unwed mothers gave birth. They were instructed to change their names upon entry. They had to clean the vomit, dirty laundry, handle all sorts of disgusting tasks as means to pay off the hospital fees. My mother was instructed by the nuns to not look any of these girls in the eye. They were treated as subhuman people by the nuns who ran the place. 
She told me many Aboriginal children were born here. Babies born of incest, or rape by priests were common because they could hide evidence of the scandal here. Many hermaphrodite or deformed children were born because of failed abortion attempts, drug addictions or other issues. Some babies were left to die of neglect or starvation because there was no way to help them. This hospital inadvertently facilitated the growth of the sex industry in Montreal because it gave a way for pimps to allow their prostitutes to give birth for free, have the girls give up the baby and continue working while the church picks up the tab for the medical costs. 
Once my mother got her hours of training completed, she left to work as a nanny in Boston for various wealthy families but her days at this hospital haunted her for years. Eventually the hospital was closed down for good.

Back in New Brunswick my grandfathers continued to build boats and fish. Their crew were family and friends. They caught only the fish in it's own season and threw back the rest. There was no by-catch back then. It was considered bad to keep a mackerel if it was not mackerel season. This is how they sustained the prosperity of the fisheries for generations. It was based on values of sustainability which was the way of our people. I put photos in the attachment of my grandfather and his crew so that you can see how it used to be. This is my grandfather with his sons, son-in-law and a cousin of mine. 
Around 1970's the Trawlers started to dig up the bottom of the nesting grounds of fisheries in Caraquet where my ancestors fished for hundreds of years. My grandfathers called them the devil's boats. They were killing all kinds of species disrupting nesting grounds without discrimination. They warned it was the end of the fisheries and they were right. Cod stocks declined almost 90% during this era. There were factory ships from china processing their own catch which took jobs away from the the locals. There was all kinds of illegal fishing in Canadian waters from international fishing companies but little to no enforcement to stop it. The fisheries budget has always been underfunded and the department understaffed. 
On both the East and West coasts of Canada are First Nation's communities dependent on fish and lumber processing jobs but it got far worse when Harper bumped up the sale of Raw Lumber creating a non sustainable industry. He killed those jobs by allowing a massive increase in the sale of whole lumber and whole fish to China which killed lumber and fish processing plants in both BC and the Maritimes. 
This article regards the non sustainability of BC's Raw log exports: http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2015/02/04/BC-Raw-Log-Exports/

In spite of the fact the Cod stocks declined by 99% the government failed to declare them endangered under the Species At Risk Act. The Harper government actually bumped up fishing quotas without any evidence to prove the numbers are sustainable. http://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2013/06/07/northern_cod_threatened_by_new_fisheries_rules.html

Now we have the Harper Government putting BC's salmon industry at risk using the same strategies. At the root is the lack of regard for science.http://commonsensecanadian.ca/REPORTED_ELSEWHERE-detail/salmon-inquiry-first-nations-angry-harpers-lack-action/
The Harper government destroyed two sustainable pillars of the Canadian Economy: lumber and fish and all the related processing jobs to recruit workers for the unsustainable oil sands. They market to kids right from the high schools in the Maritimes. With young adults moving away to Alberta and the fish and lumber industries dying off from non sustainable quotas there are less constraints for oil and gas exploration along both the BC and Maritime coasts. It doesn't stop there. 
Canada still allows shark derbies for species that should be listed as endangered like the porbeagle sharks. Canada is the only nation on earth to still fish for them because they have been internationally recognized as being endangered. http://thechronicleherald.ca/novascotia/1052362-porbeagle-shark-swims-onto-endangered-list
  Without the sharks it bumps up the presence of faster breading lower predator species like squids which kill off more cod small fry in much higher numbers than the sharks ever did.  Removing top predators always allow faster breeding lower predators to do more harm to the ecology. 

Currently in Nova Scotia they are burning Tar Sands petcoke for power.http://thechronicleherald.ca/canada/1134233-nova-scotia-power-burning-high-sulfur-petcoke-from-detroit
How many cancers are linked to the former tar sand workers and how much is related to the petcoke particulates which blows northbound and deposits particulates in the water that end up along the shores where folks like my family eat mussels, clams, lobsters etc.   I lost 5 relatives in the last two years alone. All in New Brunswick, all from cancer.  Some in their 50's. . 
All across Canada First Nation's  people are dying and suffering from chemical contamination because reservations are not protected by Provincial environmental laws and the Indian Act has not been revised to consider toxic risks.  As a result, companies set up shop next to reserves and pollute without prosecutions. 
In Sarnia, they have the lowest birth ratio boys to girls in the world. They live next to oil refineries and illnesses mirror that impacting the folks in Fort Chip Alberta. When pollution happens they can't call the Ontario MNR. They are told by Feds it is a provincial issue, province says they are on a reserve it's a Federal Issue and nobody deals with it! The pollution continues, they lack policies to protect their kids and take to the streets in protest and Canada calls them radicals.  
In Grassy Narrows people are crippled with Minimata disease and the babies born there today suffer seizures because the province allowed mercury laced toxins to be dumped over the aquifers that provide their water supply and their fish. The groceries are too expensive, especially when the medicines they need use up most of their budget. Milk costs $16. Parents are left with the choice to feed their kids contaminated fish or send them to bed hungry. 
I was a delegate at Line 9. There was no crown consent process and I witnessed Enbridge admit under oath they haven't read a single treaty even though the line crosses over 18 First Nation's territories. It never had crown consent.
Rio Tinto just flooded the cemeteries of the Cheslatta Carrier First Nation and now body parts are washing up along the shore, Would this happen in a non reserve community?  http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/human-remains-wash-ashore-in-nechako-river-flooding-rio-tinto-alcan-blamed-1.3089786  
We have reservations all across Canada without water. Others without affordable access to food. I'm trying to help folks with the Kitchener Waterloo's Helping Our Northern Neighbors to promote a local garage and bake sale this Saturday to help sponsor the costs of shipping groceries and baby products to the Ajagutaq Food Bank in Ikpiarjuk/Arctic Bay. The prices for basic items is so high nobody donates the goods to give in this Innu community and they are absolutely desperate for basic goods like diapers, sanitary products, vegetables and milk. As climate change happens traditional food supplies dwindle. These folks need help and it shouldn't be paid for by garage sales.
Currently Bill 111: An Act to Address Environmental Racism on First Nations has been introduced in Nova Scotia to help stop the contamination of First Nations, Acadian and African Canadian communities. This issue is being promoted by the David Suzuki Blue Dot program after their studies found waste materials were being dumped adjacent to these specific communities; http://bluedot.ca/stories/addressing-environmental-racism-to-ensure-rights-for-everyone-in-canada/?mkt_tok=3RkMMJWWfF9wsRoiuq7LZKXonjHpfsX56%2BopUae1lMI%2F0ER3fOvrPUfGjI4HSsJjI%2BSLDwEYGJlv6SgFS7jNMbZkz7gOXRE%3D
These issues have directly involved my family for over 300 hundred years. On the scraps of what Canada tossed us, it didn't stop us.  The system was designed by the church, province and Nation to keep us impoverished and to exploit us for cheap labor and to exploit our resources and pollute our lands. We fished your lobsters as we got stuck with Kraft Dinner. Now that the greed has destroyed what was once valued they kill the fish (and the people) to get to the oil along the shores. This isn't sustainable or reasonable. 

We need a Canada where communities are protected EQUALLY. We can do that by implementing the following:   
   - Bump up environmental laws to protect First Nations/Acadian/African Canadian communities with equal rights as other communities   

   - Secure a Federal inquiry on Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women   

   - Help establish programs to provide sustainable clean water and to produce healthy food on First Nation's reserves   

   - Secure an inquiry on why First Nations people are over represented in Canadian jails
   - Base our economic systems, food and water security on long term sustainability objectives in line with both Aboriginal values and Canadian government objectives and work collaboratively within the given sustainable limits.    

   - Support scientific studies to determine the carrying capacity of lands to scale growth rates within the budget of existing water supplies, air quality and contamination limits to assure prosperity and health for generations to come. 20 year scopes are not long enough. Think 7 generations.

Most importantly,  I strongly support the recommendations of Justice Sinclair's Truth and Reconciliation Report. I firmly believe if we act on that report, we can build a stronger, healthier nation for all. 
The time has come to restore justice and to value and respect the duality of Canadian/Aboriginal nationhood. This requires a collaborative and sustainable approach to assure social cohesion in line with shared values to foster both economic growth and prosperity for all.
We can secure clean water and healthy food for all. We can protect human lives with equity. We can re-create sustainable forestry, sustainable fisheries and sustainable food and water but we need political will to make it happen. 
The global demand for food, water and lumber is only getting higher, especially in the age of climate change. Nobody does sustainability of these resources better than our First Nations people because they know the value of balancing the resources because their lives, like my relatives, depended on it. We need to invest in the protection and preservation and development of long term sustainable natural capital resources. 
By focusing on this, we can secure happy prosperous people and a healthier society for all. .
Louisette Lanteigne700 Star Flower Ave.Waterloo ONN2V 2L2

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