REPORT ON RACIAL DISCRIMINATION AGAINST INDIGENOUS PEOPLES IN CANADA: SUMMARY To: United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination Re: Canada’s Violations of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) affecting Aboriginal Peoples in Canada Date: July 30, 2002 SUBMITTERS: CONTACT INFORMATION: Turtle Island Support Group CERD Report Ad Hoc National Network Coalition for a Public Inquiry into Ipperwash c/o PO Box 111 Friends of the Lubicon Postal Station C Skwelkwek’welt Protection Centre Toronto, Ontario Sutikalh Camp Canada, M6J 3M7 House of Smayusta, Nuxalk Nation
[email protected] This report has been prepared by an ad hoc group of community-based Indigenous Peoples and Canadian human rights organizations that share a common concern about the ongoing racial discrimination experienced by Indigenous Peoples in Canada. It demonstrates that Indigenous Peoples in Canada experience racism in all aspects of their lives, first and foremost as a result of their dispossession from their land and resources. In so doing, this report connects matters already well known to your committee and to other UN treaty bodies—such as the “fourth” world economic, social and cultural realities of Indigenous Peoples within Canada—with the repressive and oppressive treatment of Indigenous persons by state authorities and institutions. Canada’s failure to “recognize and protect the rights of indigenous peoples to own, develop, control, and use their communal lands, territories, and resources” contravenes the Convention’s General Recommendation #23. Overall, the report makes the argument that racial tension and conflict between Indigenous Peoples, governments, and settlers in Canada arise from the state-party’s systemic and institutional discrimination against Indigenous proprietary interests in land and resources.