Government celebrates year of Indigenous with funding cuts, raids

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March marked the end of the first quarter in the United Nations International Year of the World's Indigenous People.

And it was quite a month for Natives in Canada.

Federal and provincial officials celebrated the international year in their own special ways. There were funding cuts to Native programs across the country and in Manitoba, armed police raids on a reserve in Saskatchewan, and continued government disinterest in the Third World living conditions at Davis Inlet.

In the first two weeks of the month, Ottawa cemented its plan to chop away funding to Native organizations across the country in a move to reduce costs. The departments of the Secretary of State, Indian Affairs, Employment and Immigration, and Science and Technology all reduced their support to various Native programs by an average of 10 per cent.

Millions of dollars disappeared from the budgets of Native friendship centres, band offices and broadcasters that, for the most part, had trouble meeting payrolls and expenses as it was.

Two weeks ago, the government of Manitoba made its own cuts: $3 million in funding grants was withdrawn from 56 organizations across the province, half of them Native groups.

The 11 friendship centres in Manitoba were hardest hit, losing all $1.23 million of their funding. Numerous educational and support programs like addiction counselling, day care, and translation and interpretation are going to disappear.

The Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs also lost out, as did the First Nation's Confederacy, the Manitoba Keewatinowi Okemakanak and Native Communications Inc.

Manitoba politicians said it was not a deliberately nasty move on their part. Like the feds, the province maintains that funding cuts are the only way they can deal with an over-whelming deficit and debt. And like Ottawa, the province has demonstrated its insensitivity to the needs of the Native community.

Friendship centres provide essential services for Natives who have nowhere else to turn. Counsellors serve as mentors, guides, translators, defenders and friends. And the centres themselves are cultural sanctuaries for some urban Natives who don't have regular contact with their own communities on reserves.

Not that reserves themselves are sanctuaries of Native rights. RCMP crashed through the doors of the Bear Claw casino on the White Bear reserve in south-eastern Saskatchewan in predawn raid last week with guns drawn and police dogs in tow.

The province, unable to work out a way to commandeer profits from the unlicensed casino, called off negotiations in late February. RCMP rushed in to close the facility after finishing their three-week "investigation." During the raid, casino employees thought they were being held up because the masked and armed RCMP tactical squad did not even identify themselves as police.

Finally, there's Davis Inlet, the Native community in Labrador where the residents are desperately unemployed and children are addicted to solvent fumes. Most Inlet residents only want the chance to get off their remote island and back to the mainland where a chance at cultural survival lies. The government of Newfoundland, however, wants it done their way.

Davis Inlet chief Katie Rich said that means going where and when the government says. And in the meantime, the community waits, its residents living in squalor, until Ottawa or Premier Clyde Wells decides to allow the move.

And so, for some, March goes out like a lion.