If you look hard enough in the midst of Winnipeg’s sprawling and decaying inner city, you will see scattered islands of remarkable creativity and collective action: innovative community development (CD) initiatives battling the seemingly relentless spread of urban poverty. Most Winnipeggers are oblivious to this struggle: they choose not to know about it – or to care.

In February, 2002, the Grand Council of the Crees signed an agreement with the Government of Québec popularly known as the Cree New Relationship Agreement. This is the same organization that rejected and defeated the James Bay Phase II hydroelectric proposal of the early 1990s, and that later held their own referendum against Québec’s plan to separate from Canada while taking the Crees and their territory with it. Shortly after the signing of the new agreement with Québec, Grand Chief Moses issued this statement:

Northern Manitoba, with some of the oldest “contact” history on the North American continent, owing to its central position in the English fur trade, has over the last century become a Canadian backwater, rarely gaining attention even in alternative news sources. Although a crucial struggle took place in the seventies over hydroelectric development, the entire Aboriginal community of South Indian Lake relocated as a result of planned flooding, the conflict did not in general gain the kind of media attention generated by the James Bay Cree or the Dene of the Northwest Territories. Perhaps that is why Manitoba Hydro and the Government of Manitoba feel they can quietly get away with writing another page of colonial history on Cree territory.

According to the Aboriginal Justice Implementation Commission (AJIC) report of 1999, “Aboriginal women are the victims of racism, of sexism, and of unconscionable levels of domestic violence. The justice system has done little to protect them from any of these assaults.” Nearly five years on, events in Watson Lake, Yukon, lead many to wonder what, if anything, has changed.

As I have had occasion to remark before, “God save me from intellectuals!” especially right-wing Canadian intellectuals, when they take unto themselves the impulse to discourse on Aboriginal policy.

In recent years, these people have perpetrated some real howlers, whose only use has been to indicate how deep the gap remains between the beliefs and posture of Aboriginal people in Canada, and what could at a pinch be described as the thinking of many influential, fuzzy-minded, well- intentioned, ill-informed Canadians of European background.

Tom Siddon, Brian Mulroney’s minister of Indian Affairs, promised in 1990 to clear the backlog of Native land claims within 10 years. Today, not only has that backlog ballooned, but Canada’s sloth-like system of settling land claims is about to get a lot worse.

As part of our plans to celebrate CD’s 40 years of publication, our Editorial Collective asked certain writers to reflect on racism in Canada and consider whether or not it has diminished over this forty-year time span. Their excellent contributions appear in this issue of Dimension.

I am Judy. I lived at the Strathcona “Squat.” Today I am poor. In my life I have raised two children, I have loved, I have struggled and I have survived. I faced the struggles of so many Aboriginal women in a white world.

The past forty years have seen dramatic changes among the Aboriginal peoples of Canada. In 1963 the legacy of colonialism was deeply entrenched, Aboriginal peoples were seen as a ‘problem population’ within Canada, Aboriginal rights were widely ignored and unknown, there were few national voices or fora for Aboriginal leaders. In 2003 the struggle to decolonize is being engaged in a wide variety of institutions.