“Aboriginal Fatigue”

The raven is a part of Chanie’s story, guiding him to the spirit world when he did not make it home. In the Seven Grandfather Teachings, the Raven also represents honesty and is a reminder to live with integrity. We chose the raven as the symbol of Secret Path’s 10th anniversary to honour Chanie’s memory and the responsibility we share to carry this work forward.

The foregoing is a statement from the Gord Downie and Chanie Wenjack Fund website, from the page celebrating the tenth anniversary of “The Secret Path.” This multimedia package — an animated feature-length video, a collection of Gord Downie songs, and a darkly drawn graphic novel — purports to tell the true story of how 12-year-old Chanie Wenjack died while running away from an Indian residential school after allegedly being abused by a priest.

On June 2, 2022, then-prime minister Justin Trudeau gave the Siksika reserve in Alberta $1.3 billion as a land claim settlement. In March 2025, I toured the reserve and shot a video showing appalling housing conditions, rampant garbage, wild dogs, and general disorder on what should have been one of the wealthiest reserves in Canada. In response to the video, the reserve charged me with two counts of trespassing. That case is still before the courts today.

From Perth, Australia to Santiago de Chile to Nuuk, Greenland, to Oahu, Hawaii’s one metropolis, societies have been wrestling with something often called the “indigenous land question” in recent years. Descendants of the peoples who inhabited these places before the arrival of European, Asian and African settlers are demanding and often receiving grants of land, financial compensation and special political rights, jurisdiction and priority access to finite resources like wild fish to compensate for a putative “genocide” they supposedly suffered at the hands of early Old World settlers over the past half a millennium.

It took a week before an indigenous band came out in opposition to Mark Carney’s designation of the Pacific Link pipeline as a project in the national interest. That’s about six days longer than I thought it would take. There will surely be others getting in line to try and halt the projects soon. The court challenges are very lucrative for activists and the parasitic law firms that serve them.

Ranked No. 2 right after Remigration.

In the decade leading up to 2024/25, inflation-adjusted federal Indigenous spending jumped from $10.3 billion to $40.8 billion, growing seven times faster than overall federal spending, according to a new study published by the Fraser Institute.

The independent think tank found that inflation-adjusted federal Indigenous spending increased by an average of 4.3 per cent per year from 1969/70 to 2014/15. But from 2014/15 to 2024/25, average annual Indigenous spending increased 17.1 per cent, not including the “substantial” spending on lawsuits and court settlement payouts.