At left, a Ktunaxa cradle board in the Royal BC Museum; at right, Ktunaxa mother Lizette Cronin holds baby Pete Clement in one such board, circa 1923. Cradle boards are used to protect and carry infants; they demonstrate the sacred space of children in the community.courtesy of Royal BC Museum
Troy Sebastian/nupqu ʔak·ǂam̓ is a writer from ʔaq̓am and is a PhD student in writing at the University of Victoria. He is the former curator of the Indigenous collection at the Royal BC Museum.
On a June day in 2010, the Ktunaxa Nation Council and representatives from the Royal BC Museum met in a room named after Chief David,the honoured Ktunaxa chief from Tobacco Plains, in a building that had once served as a chapel for a residential school. After six decades, the former school at the foot of the Rockies had closed down and eventually transformed intothe St. Eugene Mission Resort: a hotel, golf course and casino owned by Ktunaxa Nation, and the only such enterprise to operate at any former residential school in the country.
Gatheredin the Chief David Room on that summer day were provincial representatives, local politicians, Ktunaxa leaders and community members, including former students of the school. They were all there to witness a momentous occasion: the signing of a custodial agreement that affirmed the province’s recognition of the value of Ktunaxa culture, including the Ktunaxa cultural objects held in possession by the museum. The agreement also committed both parties to a formal relationship regarding the material’s management, use and protection. The pact, one of the first of its kind for any Canadian museum with any First Nation, was seen as a starting point for further steps together. That included the potential for repatriation – the process by which sacred and cultural materials as well as human remains held in the possession of cultural institutions and private collections are returned to Indigenous communities.
Part of the signing ceremony involved the return of 10 Ktunaxa objects for display at the nation’s Interpretive Centre, which is located in the basement of the St. Eugene Mission. The Ktunaxa items on display included a beaded cradleboard, belts and pipes, none of which had been in the territory for at least 50 years. Over the course of a few days, Ktunaxa from every community came to view, take pictures of, and – under the care and direction of museum staff – hold the objects. Elders had not seen the items since childhood. For younger Ktunaxa, it was their first time seeing the fine beadwork and craft of the items at all.
I was there, and I remember a reverence being paid to the Ktunaxa cultural material that day. Beholding these sacred objects, which had been banned by the province, taken by the museum and effectively outlawed by the residential school, was a powerful moment for everyone involved. It was a proud day for Ktunaxa.
But a few days later, the objects were returned back to the museum in Victoria. Few Ktunaxa have seen them since.
George Adrian carries a flag at the first meeting of Ktunaxa Nation at the St. Eugene Mission, a former residential-school site, in 2003.Bev Hills
The event highlighted the complicated politics and process of repatriation, which Indigenous people in Canada have been pursuing for decades. In a passage cited by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report in 2015, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) emphasized the importance of “fair, transparent and effective mechanisms” for returning human remains and cultural artifacts; in recent years, governments in Ottawa and in B.C. have passed legislation to start aligning laws with UNDRIP. Now, after a year of discoveries of unmarked graves on the grounds of former residential schools across the country, governments, museums and religious orders are under mounting pressure to undertake real action for justice – including through repatriation.
In December, the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation called for the repatriation of a sealskin kayak that the Vatican claims was a “gift to Pope Pius XI” from a Roman Catholic bishop, one of around 200 Indigenous artifacts that were exhibited in the 1920s and have since sat in the Vatican’s vaults. “It is not ‘the Pope’s kayak’ and rightly belongs in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region, where its lessons and significance can benefit Inuvialuit culture and communities,” said the group, which represents the interests of Inuit in the western Arctic.
But for years, institutions have played trickster, requiring First Nations to establish museum-quality holding capacity as a non-negotiable condition for repatriation – or, as in the case of Vatican, an institution with an infamously unquantifiable fortune, institutions have simply ignored or rejected the calls. The capacity issues that have purportedly disqualified Indigenous communities from repatriating their items, however, stem from colonization: a lack of housing, unsafe water, and unreliable sources of energy, just to name a few. For a time, provincial treaty-negotiation mandates required First Nations to accept a division of their material, with a portion to be held by the museum; one party would draw up two lists dividing the artifacts, and the other party would get first pick of one of the two lists. Such a policy was hardly just, and very few First Nations agreed with it. The result:the repository of held cultural items from First Nations is immense, singular and contested.
These responses to repatriation efforts hold a familiar cadence: repatriation if necessary, but not necessarily repatriation. And they show a cycle of behaviour that keeps Indigenous communities apart from their collections.
A beaded Ktunaxa belt in the Royal BC Museum’s possession. Ktunaxa territory has a unique mix of plants and animals that gives a distinctiveness to these works.Courtesy of Royal BC Museum
Museums, from Vatican City to Victoria, helped create and profit from the “Vanishing Indian” ideology of early 20th-century anthropology – a genocidal theory that presumed that Indigenous peoples were going to die off, and so their cultural material was more important than the peoples themselves.
For decades, the curatorial posture of many museums was a combination of that theory and “salvage anthropology,” a policy and practice aimed at taking cultural material of Indigenous peoples prior to extinction, and then displaying them in a framework that presupposed the superiority of western civilization. This remains, too often, embedded in the attitudes of many institutions.
Governments and churches also played a significant role in this process, in concert with museums: The province would take the land, the church would take the children, and the museum would take the cultural material.
Indeed, the vast majority of cultural material held by these institutions was collected while Indigenous peoples’ rights to practise their culture was effectively outlawed (including through the Potlatch Ban), and while residential schools, aimed at taking “the Indian out of the child,” were mandatory.
To say that the items collected by these museums was done without duress is to warp the very bounds of plausibility: it is simply not true.
So what is the path forward?
A beaded Ktunaxa bag, one of several examples of beadwork collected by the museum while the residential-school system was active.Courtesy of Royal BC Museum
Over the past 30 years, there have been positive, if slow-moving, changes. In 1990, the United States passed the Native American Graves and Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), a seminal policy standard which has resulted in the return of Indigenous human remains, sacred objects and cultural items across the Americas. Despite years of struggle, lobbying, painstaking research at institutions from Chicago to Stockholm, and countless and challenging community and cultural engagements within Indigenous communities – often done at a considerable cost – the first steps of repatriation began. Most started by returning human remains, the holding of which are now rightly seen as an unseemly and damning practice.
Here in Canada, however, the process has been slower going. In 2016, on National Aboriginal Day, then-B.C. premier Christy Clark announced that her government was committed to repatriation: “It is long past time that these items of such spiritual significance to First Nations in B.C. find their way home to those communities,” she declared. Later that year, her Liberal government announced $2-million in funding to the newly renamed Indigenous Collection and Repatriation (ICAR) department at the Royal BC Museum. The next year, a province-wide repatriation conference was held to hear from First Nations, a consultation that produced the Indigenous Repatriation Handbook, as prepared by the Royal BC Museum and the Haida Gwaii Museum at Kay Linagaay. Under that framework, First Nations across the province prepared to undertake repatriation efforts.
But when John Horgan’s NDP took power in the province in 2017, they quicklyfound the road forward beset by the attitudes of yesterday. And in 2020, after years of challenging and frustrating work attempting to get the Royal BC Museum ready forrepatriation processes, the director of ICAR resigned, citing a toxic work environment that was rife with racism.
Soon after, an independent investigation looked into workplace culture at the Royal BC Museum; last summer, the museum received the report and acknowledged “the colonial history of the Museum and the systemic racism inherent in that history,” and further, that “there have been acts of racism and discrimination at the Museum. Indigenous team members and members of other equity-seeking groups were subjected to microaggression and acts of discriminatory behaviour.”
The museum publicly apologized and committed the institution to align with the province’s commitment to UNDRIP and to replace and modernize the museum’s galleries. Then late last year, the museum announced its plan to close its popular third-floor permanent gallery in an effort to decolonize the institution.
However needed the changes to the museum’s galleries are, the question remains: when will the museum really begin its repatriation efforts? Six years after Ms. Clark’s commitment, very little has happened. Objects are still being held by the province, and First Nations are growing increasingly frustrated by the repeated appeals for patience.
This is the great difficulty in writing about repatriation, especially when the cultural material in question is from one’s nation, community, family and parents: The tonal space lies between the funerary reverence of the recently departed and the impotent furor of sailors in a becalm sea. The loss is palpable, the need for a change of course is dire, and the calls for patience are a bitter echo that always seems to ring out. There doesn’t seem to be an appetite for seeking or crafting understanding. Determined exhaustion is the mentality of the moment. Indigenous peoples are tired of waiting for aloof cultural dinosaurs to return that which is rightfully ours.
This is particularly disappointing, given that all Canadians can surely understand the power of bringing history and culture back to its rightful place. On April 17, 1982, in front of a gathered crowd in Ottawa, Queen Elizabeth II signed a royal proclamation, marking then-prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s crowning achievement: the patriation of the country’s constitution. With the Queen’s signature, Canada’s constitution “came home,” transferring the British North America Act from the authority of the British Parliament to Canada’s federal and provincial legislatures, and changing the country forever by giving Canada the right to independently amend its own constitution.
However one feels about Mr. Trudeau, the Canada Act 1982 and its Charter of Rights and Freedoms have materially changed the country both in law and in culture. To have a constitution that was made in Canada, by and for Canadians, was a decades-long dream. Much of the cultural framework of the country and the stories it tells of itself are bound to that patriation; it gave renewed life to Canada, and whatever the path forward, one must imagine the 1982 patriation continuing in its seminal and central role for decades to come.
So too is the promise and necessity of repatriation for countless Indigenous communities across the country seeking the return of their national and cultural birthrights. Some may choose to leave objects on display in public museums; others will choose to hold them within their own communities, while some items will be returned to the earth, akin to the human remains they were or should have been buried with. But whatever the choice, it will be an Indigenous choice. That is, after all, what is at the heart of repatriation: the question of whether Indigenous peoples in Canada have the right to protect and own their culture. As Mr. Trudeau once said: “We wish nothing more, but we will accept nothing less.”
The reconciliation question: More from The Globe and Mail
The Decibel
For the first-ever National Day for Truth and Reconciliation last September, The Decibel took a look at the Canadian Reconciliation Barometer, a new tool made by Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers. Subscribe for more episodes.
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Democrats who control both chambers of the Virginia legislature are hoping to make good on promises made on the campaign trail, including becoming the first Southern state to expand constitutional protections for abortion access.
The House Privileges and Elections Committee advanced three proposed constitutional amendments Wednesday, including a measure to protect reproductive rights. Its members also discussed measures to repeal a now-defunct state constitutional ban on same-sex marriage and ways to revise Virginia’s process to restore voting rights for people who served time for felony crimes.
“This meeting was an important next step considering the moment in history we find ourselves in,” Democratic Del. Cia Price, the committee chair, said during a news conference. “We have urgent threats to our freedoms that could impact constituents in all of the districts we serve.”
The at-times raucous meeting will pave the way for the House and Senate to take up the resolutions early next year after lawmakers tabled the measures last January. Democrats previously said the move was standard practice, given that amendments are typically introduced in odd-numbered years. But Republican Minority Leader Todd Gilbert said Wednesday the committee should not have delved into the amendments before next year’s legislative session. He said the resolutions, particularly the abortion amendment, need further vetting.
“No one who is still serving remembers it being done in this way ever,” Gilbert said after the meeting. “Certainly not for something this important. This is as big and weighty an issue as it gets.”
The Democrats’ legislative lineup comes after Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin, to the dismay of voting-rights advocates, rolled back a process to restore people’s civil rights after they completed sentences for felonies. Virginia is the only state that permanently bans anyone convicted of a felony from voting unless a governor restores their rights.
“This amendment creates a process that is bounded by transparent rules and criteria that will apply to everybody — it’s not left to the discretion of a single individual,” Del. Elizabeth Bennett-Parker, the patron of the voting rights resolution, which passed along party lines, said at the news conference.
Though Democrats have sparred with the governor over their legislative agenda, constitutional amendments put forth by lawmakers do not require his signature, allowing the Democrat-led House and Senate to bypass Youngkin’s blessing.
Instead, the General Assembly must pass proposed amendments twice in at least two years, with a legislative election sandwiched between each statehouse session. After that, the public can vote by referendum on the issues. The cumbersome process will likely hinge upon the success of all three amendments on Democrats’ ability to preserve their edge in the House and Senate, where they hold razor-thin majorities.
It’s not the first time lawmakers have attempted to champion the three amendments. Republicans in a House subcommittee killed a constitutional amendment to restore voting rights in 2022, a year after the measure passed in a Democrat-led House. The same subcommittee also struck down legislation supporting a constitutional amendment to repeal an amendment from 2006 banning marriage equality.
On Wednesday, a bipartisan group of lawmakers voted 16-5 in favor of legislation protecting same-sex marriage, with four Republicans supporting the resolution.
“To say the least, voters enacted this (amendment) in 2006, and we have had 100,000 voters a year become of voting age since then,” said Del. Mark Sickles, who sponsored the amendment as one of the first openly gay men serving in the General Assembly. “Many people have changed their opinions of this as the years have passed.”
A constitutional amendment protecting abortion previously passed the Senate in 2023 but died in a Republican-led House. On Wednesday, the amendment passed on party lines.
If successful, the resolution proposed by House Majority Leader Charniele Herring would be part of a growing trend of reproductive rights-related ballot questions given to voters. Since 2022, 18 questions have gone before voters across the U.S., and they have sided with abortion rights advocates 14 times.
The voters have approved constitutional amendments ensuring the right to abortion until fetal viability in nine states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Ohio and Vermont. Voters also passed a right-to-abortion measure in Nevada in 2024, but it must be passed again in 2026 to be added to the state constitution.
As lawmakers debated the measure, roughly 18 members spoke. Mercedes Perkins, at 38 weeks pregnant, described the importance of women making decisions about their own bodies. Rhea Simon, another Virginia resident, anecdotally described how reproductive health care shaped her life.
Then all at once, more than 50 people lined up to speak against the abortion amendment.
“Let’s do the compassionate thing and care for mothers and all unborn children,” resident Sheila Furey said.
The audience gave a collective “Amen,” followed by a round of applause.
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Associated Press writer Geoff Mulvihill in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, contributed to this report.
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Olivia Diaz is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative.
NEW YORK (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump says he will nominate anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, putting him in charge of a massive agency that oversees everything from drug, vaccine and food safety to medical research and the social safety net programs Medicare and Medicaid.
“For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it comes to Public Health,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social site announcing the appointment. Kennedy, he said, would “Make America Great and Healthy Again!”
Kennedy, a former Democrat who ran as an independent in this year’s presidential race, abandoned his bid after striking a deal to give Trump his endorsement with a promise to have a role in health policy in the administration.
He and Trump have since become good friends, with Kennedy frequently receiving loud applause at Trump’s rallies.
The expected appointment was first reported by Politico Thursday.
A longtime vaccine skeptic, Kennedy is an attorney who has built a loyal following over several decades of people who admire his lawsuits against major pesticide and pharmaceutical companies. He has pushed for tighter regulations around the ingredients in foods.
With the Trump campaign, he worked to shore up support among young mothers in particular, with his message of making food healthier in the U.S., promising to model regulations imposed in Europe. In a nod to Trump’s original campaign slogan, he named the effort “Make America Healthy Again.”
It remains unclear how that will square with Trump’s history of deregulation of big industries, including food. Trump pushed for fewer inspections of the meat industry, for example.
Kennedy’s stance on vaccines has also made him a controversial figure among Democrats and some Republicans, raising question about his ability to get confirmed, even in a GOP-controlled Senate. Kennedy has espoused misinformation around the safety of vaccines, including pushing a totally discredited theory that childhood vaccines cause autism.
He also has said he would recommend removing fluoride from drinking water. The addition of the material has been cited as leading to improved dental health.
HHS has more than 80,000 employees across the country. It houses the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Medicare and Medicaid programs and the National Institutes of Health.
Kennedy’s anti-vaccine nonprofit group, Children’s Health Defense, currently has a lawsuit pending against a number of news organizations, among them The Associated Press, accusing them of violating antitrust laws by taking action to identify misinformation, including about COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines. Kennedy took leave from the group when he announced his run for president but is listed as one of its attorneys in the lawsuit.
NICOSIA, Cyprus (AP) — In a Cypriot National Guard camp, Ukrainians are being trained on how to identify, locate and dispose of landmines and other unexploded munitions that litter huge swaths of their country, killing and maiming hundreds of people, including children.
Analysts say Ukraine is among the countries that are the most affected by landmines and discarded explosives, as a result of Russia’s ongoing war.
According to U.N. figures, some 399 people have been killed and 915 wounded from landmines and other munitions since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, equal to the number of casualties reported from 2014-2021. More than 1 in 10 of those casualties have been children.
The economic impact is costing billions to the Ukrainian economy. Landmines and other munitions are preventing the sowing of 5 million hectares, or 10%, of the country’s agricultural land.
Cyprus stepped up to offer its facilities as part of the European Union’s Military Assistance Mission to Ukraine. So far, almost 100 Ukrainian armed forces personnel have taken part in three training cycles over the last two years, said Cyprus Foreign Ministry spokesperson Theodoros Gotsis.
“We are committed to continuing this support for as long as it takes,” Gotsis told the Associated Press, adding that the Cyprus government has covered the 250,000 euro ($262,600) training cost.
Cyprus opted to offer such training owing to its own landmine issues dating back five decades when the island nation was ethnically divided when Turkey invaded following a coup that sought union with Greece. The United Nations has removed some 27,000 landmines from a buffer zone that cuts across the island, but minefields remain on either side. The Cypriot government says it has disposed of all anti-personnel mines in line with its obligations under an international treaty that bans the use of such munitions.
In Cyprus, Ukrainians undergo rigorous theoretical and practical training over a five-week Basic Demining and Clearance course that includes instruction on distinguishing and safely handling landmines and other explosive munitions, such as rockets, 155 mm artillery shells, rocket-propelled grenades and mortar shells.
Theoretical training uses inert munitions identical to the actual explosives.
Most of the course is comprised of hands-on training focusing on the on-site destruction of unexploded munitions using explosives, the chief training officer told the Associated Press. The officer spoke on condition of anonymity because he’s not authorized to disclose his identity for security reasons.
“They’re trained on ordnance disposal using real explosives,” the officer said. “That will be the trainees’ primary task when they return.”
Cypriot officials said the Ukrainian trainees did not want to be either interviewed or photographed.
Defusing discarded munitions or landmines in areas where explosive charges can’t be used — for instance, near a hospital — is not part of this course because that’s the task of highly trained teams of disposal experts whose training can last as long as eight months, the officer said.
Trainees, divided into groups of eight, are taught how to operate metal detectors and other tools for detecting munitions like prodders — long, thin rods which are used to gently probe beneath the ground’s surface in search of landmines and other explosive ordnance.
Another tool is a feeler, a rod that’s used to detect booby-trapped munitions. There are many ways to booby-trap such munitions, unlike landmines which require direct pressure to detonate.
“Booby-trapped munitions are a widespread phenomenon in Ukraine,” the chief training officer explained.
Training, primarily conducted by experts from other European Union countries, takes place both in forested and urban areas at different army camps and follows strict safety protocols.
The short, intense training period keeps the Ukrainians focused.
“You see the interest they show during instruction: they ask questions, they want to know what mistakes they’ve made and the correct way of doing it,” the officer said.
Humanitarian data and analysis group ACAPS said in a Jan. 2024 report that 174,000 sq. kilometers (67,182 sq. miles) or nearly 29% of Ukraine’s territory needs to be surveyed for landmines and other explosive ordnance.
More than 10 million people are said to live in areas where demining action is needed.
Since 2022, Russian forces have used at least 13 types of anti-personnel mines, which target people. Russia never signed the 1997 Ottawa Convention banning the use of anti-personnel mines, but the use of such mines is nonetheless considered a violation of its obligations under international law.
Russia also uses 13 types of anti-tank mines.
The International Campaign to Ban Landmines said in its 2023 Landmine Monitor report that Ukrainian government forces may have also used antipersonnel landmines in contravention of the Mine Ban Treaty in and around the city of Izium during 2022, when the city was under Russian control.
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