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Aboriginal people living in British Columbia want more say in the operation of the world's first Aboriginal television network.

That was the general theme that emerged from a four-hour public consultation session at the Squamish Recreation Centre near North Vancouver on June 6.

All 20 current members of the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network's (APTN) board of directors were on hand, as was Jean LaRose, the network's chief executive officer. The board currently has one vacancy.

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The Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN) came within 10 days of disappearing from Canadian airwaves forever. A cash flow crunch put it dangerously in arrears with the company that transmits its signal.

Jean LaRose, the network's chief executive officer (CEO), was reached by phone while attending the Banff Television Festival in the Alberta mountain resort town.

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A total of 17 people showed up over the course of a day-long session of the Assembly of First Nations Renewal Commission held in Edmonton on May 26.

Lewis Cardinal, director of the University of Alberta's Native studies program, facilitated the session. He told Windspeaker the 17 people who attended in Edmonton was more than attended either of the Calgary or Saskatoon meetings.

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More than 2,000 Aboriginal people from across British Columbia, tired of having their rights ignored, marched in protest to the B.C. legislature on May 20.

Participants called for changes to provincial forest legislation and agreements that are being offered by government to First Nations that they say would compromise Aboriginal people's rights in exchange for limited economic benefits.

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A long list of new (or newly revived) initiatives that the Assembly of First Nations hopes to undertake over the coming months will cost a fist-full of money, some say upwards of $20 million.

Inquiries have shown that budgets for few of the initiatives have been finalized, but there is talk that the money flowing through AFN will again swell to an amount not seen since National Chief Phil Fontaine held office in the late 1990s.

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Dear Editor:

Enough already: I am appalled by the ongoing character assassination of Aboriginal people. In reading the newspaper and hearing the radio news broadcast May 26, it was once again affirmed that I, a Mohawk woman of Kanhesatake, must endure the omnipresent, institutional racism that exists in Canadian society.

Since 1990, many public figures have taken many privileges in making racist comments and judgments. Here I shall take privilege in naming the problem by making confrontational comments.

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Dear Editor:

In the May 2004 Windspeaker, Prof. Jack D. Forbes alleges, among other things, that the Bible book of Genesis does not give a single "correct" form of marriage. Forbes would have your readers believe that his accounting of the Genesis story is scholarly and reliable. Not so!

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Dear Editor:

An elected Member of Parliament said "I don't think it's a secret to anyone that in Aboriginal societies and in Kanesatake society there is a level of violence that is not found elsewhere."

Quebec's Minister of Public Security Jacques Chagnon also told the newspaper that "when a crow flies by (in Kanesatake) and someone isn't happy, they pull out their 12 (gauge shotgun) and fire at the crow. We don't see that anywhere else."

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By the time you see this you'll know one very important thing that we, as our deadline for this month arrives, don't know: who won the federal election.

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Chief Mike Smith of the Kwanlin Dun, a Native community bordering Whitehorse, said he believes that before the territorial and federal governments agreed to lend their support, Aboriginal languages were in decline. He added that today more people are interested in taking language lessons, but even so, he believes that it will take considerable time before there is a surge of fluent speakers in the territory.