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The Canadian government's official position that it won't compensate for the loss of language and culture of those who attended Indian residential schools is under attack from all sides.

Lawyer Vaughn Marshall of Calgary represents residential school survivors in southern Alberta. He and other lawyers are working to expose what they see as a self-serving and ultimately indefensible stance by the federal Crown.

Marshall briefed a two-day organizational meeting held in Calgary involving a number of prominent residential school survivors on Jan. 12 and 13.

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The racist statements made by police officers, captured on tape and shown to the Canadian public on Jan. 20 on CBC's The National, may not be the worst of the material under the control of police authorities or the Ontario government in regards to a fatal shooting at Ipperwash Provincial Park in September 1995.

The tape, referred to as Tape 6, was the subject of an access to information request and was released to the CBC after a long and complex fight against Ontario government officials who attempted to block its release.

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Dear Editor:

I can feel your pain, and painful emotions eat away at the human soul, and an individual's soul comes down from the Creator, yes, to revisit much pain, but the purpose then is to transcend it.

The Europeans who came, the ordinary people, the Scots, the Irish, the Ukrainians, were all desperate people fleeing starvation and harsh ruling classes and nightmare wars and famines and persecution. They were largely illiterate and had an average life expectancy of 40 years.

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Dear Editor:

I am writing in regards to an article in the January 2004 issue titled "Youth should be heard on issues."

I am 23 years old and I do not consider myself to be a youth. I share the same ideals as the writer in last month's issue, but I am not scared to speak my mind and put my name with it. I also do not have all of the answers, but I have ideas; ideas that will one day change the face of Indian politics forever.

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Dear Editor:

When one critiques or reviews an author's work of art it is just that, a review of the author's work of art, not an attack of one's soul.

In Windspeaker's review of Basil Johnston's Honour Earth Mother, I was profoundly hurt to read the personal attack and diagnosis [on Johnston] "It seems that the author may have unresolved issues from his residential school experience."|

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Windspeaker Editorial

We've been kicking and screaming about racism and cops and Indians for quite some time now. In fact, we are sick to death of reporting on the "isolated incidents" the authorities insist on labeling the police brutality and racism towards our people.

We continue to write about it, however, because the kind of racism we are talking about is the deadly kind, and if not fatal, fatally flawed because the people who love to hate have the power of life and death over the hated.

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With the cost of getting a post-secondary education constantly on the rise, saving today to pay for your child's future studies is becoming more and more important. One of the ways you can save is by contributing to a Registered Education Savings Plan, or RESP.

Through an RESP, a parent or other person makes contributions to a fund where the money grows tax-free until the beneficiary of the plan begins full-time post-secondary studies, at which time the plan makes education assistance payments to help cover education costs.

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We would all like to be able to save money, whether its to buy a home, save for a child's education,prepare for retirement or just have some money set aside for a rainy day. The question on most people's minds, however, is how to save when just making the money stretch as far as it has to is a challenge in itself.

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Whether you're a young person just entering the workforce or an older person counting the years remaining before retirement, a young couple thinking of starting up a family, or a parent wondering how you can afford to send your children to university, you could benefit from the services of a financial planner.

Stacey Agecoutay is a financial planner with the CIBC in Regina.

A member of Cowessess First Nation, Agecoutay has been working in the financial services industry since 1990.

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From public service announcements on radio and television to warning labels on cigarette packaging, we've all be told of the hazards of smoking-increased rates of cancer, heart attacks, strokes, and respiratory diseases among them. But for children, both before and after birth, the list of possible effects from exposure to cigarette smoke is staggering.