John Gagnon

Publisher’s Note

Excuse my absence for the past few months, between year-end duties, Coronavirus and working from home, it's been an unusual time to say the least. After four months on lockdown working daily to avoid a fear filled virus called the Coronavirus, cabin fever has set in. We are all missing family and friend’s intimate interactions and conversations. Basically, we are missing hugs and handshakes.

Dealing with Healing Part 2

A defect with the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement (IRRSA) was the colonial system that perpetrated the ill treatment at IRS, was the same system that controlled the judicial process of the agreement. The service providers for applying for a settlement ultimately became the system for dealing with the healing. This makes for a difficult and awkward journey for acknowledging and moving past the pain and learning to live in a healthy way.

It appears that citizens from our communities are participating more and more in Canada’s Federal election. Some believe that engaging in the process will help our communities ensure that we are receiving our fair funding from Canada. Some think that we should not be involved, and should be working on our own self-governance models. What makes us unique is we usually block vote for one specific political party, which bodes well for them but rarely for our communities.

Traditionally, I was told that life was without dysfunction and all peoples embraced their individual, family and community moments, with language and culture unmolested. No one was without their natural common knowledge and life was certainly great, naturally challenging but humanly honourable. The transition of becoming wards of the state began by limiting and overall eliminating decision making from the family and community levels.

Wawatay was recently awarded a grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Over the next couple months in the Publisher’s Note we will show the progress of gathering the research and producing the paper for submission. This first note will give you the thesis or the main argument we are proving. Our research paper is titled, Blending Tradition with Technology and its Sovereignty in Broadcasting.