Sharing traditional skills and knowledge was part of the menu at the recent Island Indigenous Food Gathering near Port Alberni.

First Nations from across Vancouver Island are gathering this week to celebrate and strengthen traditional food sovereignty and deepen Indigenous communities' response to climate change and other emergencies.

Knowledge keeper and hunter Robin Louie is worried.

Worried his people’s food security, traditional knowledge and culture will suffer yet another hit with the dreaded arrival of chronic wasting disease in their territory in the southern Kootenays.

A coastal First Nation’s Guardian team is gearing up to test the waters to try to limit the impacts of drought in their traditional territories on northeast Vancouver Island.

Indigenous communities are leading Canada's clean energy boom, "and doing that with a slanted table," says a First Nations business leader working to build a successful climate economy that incorporates Indigenous Peoples and their world views.

At the end of spring, Canada’s National Observer published a five-part series on the incredible odds stacked against First Nation students in northern Ontario who must travel hundreds of kilometres away from their families to get a high school education.

Sol Mamakwa, Ontario NDP MPP for Kiiwetinoong, an electoral district spanning the northwestern edge of the province, stands in front of a room full of teachers, parents and students who were probably expecting a speech. He delivers, instead, a speak-through-the-soul conversation that moves between storytelling and political demands.

Lawrence Wesley Education Centre in remote Cat Lake, a fly-in community 400 kilometres north of Thunder Bay, is a well-equipped school, with new Smart Boards, a new gym, a library and a computer room and a cafeteria large enough for all the students to eat together.

Jackson Wesley is passionate about basketball. He plays for his high school team in Sioux Lookout, 180 kilometres from home. But it’s March break, and he’s back in Cat Lake First Nation for the week. His mom, Sylvia Wesley, is a kindergarten teacher at Lawrence Wesley Education Centre, so Jackson has a pair of keys to the gym if he wants to steal some practice time.

Last fall, Greg Quachegan took 10 students hunting, an annual tradition at Dennis Franklin Cromarty (DFC) High School in Thunder Bay, Ont. They bagged a moose, and the vice-principal taught his students how to be on the land, hunt, fish and clean the animals.

You may have heard about the Fallen Feathers, seven students who left their First Nations in the North for high schools in Thunder Bay, Ont., and never returned home.

My niece Z, her mom Ashley and I watched from our Walmart camping chairs as the tiny tots, dressed in their tiny regalia, toddled around the dance circle chaperoned by moms, dads, aunties and uncles. It was Pride Month in Toronto, and for the day, the Two-Spirited People of the First Nations Powwow had reclaimed a patch of grass from the former Canadian Forces Base in Downsview Park.

I watched the livestream of the Pope's apology with a piece of broken brick by my side.

The red clay brick is from my former residential school. I am sure people will wonder why I have it. The reason is simple: it is a reminder of Canada's assimilation policy and how residential schools impacted generations of Indigenous people, including my family.

As I walk off the dock on Mniku, also called Chapel Island, a group of Mi’kmaw kids run by, laughing. The afternoon sun beats down and the breeze off the Bras d’Or Lake is welcome.

The Saint Anne’s pilgrimage to this small island in the Potlotek First Nation in Unama’ki (Cape Breton) is the longest-running continuous mission in Canada.

In 2004, an assessment found about half of the First Nation’s 100 homes were dilapidated and unlivable, mostly due to mold. Today, dozens of homes have been replaced and more construction is planned. The community’s boil-water advisory will soon be officially lifted, ending a 13-year interruption to its water supply.

Pope Francis is in Canada this week to meet with Indigenous Peoples. That’s the big news dominating Canadian and international headlines.

There are slim hopes that the Pope might renounce a couple of centuries-old papal bulls, the foundation for colonization and slavery. But don’t hold your breath.

Warning: This story contains details that may provoke distress or trauma in some readers.

Shelley Clark’s mother is a survivor so emotionally scarred, she still cannot speak about what happened to her at the Mohawk Institute Residential School. So Shelley, who is Cayuga from Six Nations of the Grand River Territory, knows little of her mother’s history except that she attended the school in the 1940s or early 1950s.

Warning: This story contains details that may provoke distress or trauma in some readers.

Homalco Chief Darren Blaney has the tragic distinction of being a third-generation residential school survivor.

Like his father, and grandfather before him, Blaney was forced from his home, family, and culture in the small community of Church House in Bute Inlet along B.C.’s remote central coast.

If reconciliation has a birthplace, it is in the mostly beige West Block room numbered 371. On Feb. 17, 2005, a dozen members of Parliament shuffled into their seats, under sterile fluorescent lights, carrying mugs of tea and coffee.

Canadians may think that reconciliation was born of altruism. That the government gifted reconciliation to survivors in an act of contrition. But that’s not true.

An elder told me a story. It goes like this.

It was long ago and late summer in a remote northern village. A Cree village. Everyone still lived in tents. One day priests visited. They announced that the next time they came, they would take the children. It would be for the best, they explained. The children would go to school.