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    Accusations of “Race-Shifting” Prompt Canadian Cabinet Minister to Resign

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    Randy Boissonnault, who resigned as employment minister, had long described himself as the great-grandson of a Cree woman, but now acknowledges he was wrong about his family’s ancestry.Randy Boissonnault, who was Canada’s employment minister until Wednesday, once sat with his Liberal Party’s Indigenous caucus. In Parliament, he has said that he was adopted into a family with Cree heritage. And in interviews, he described himself as the great-grandson of a “full-blooded Cree woman.”But following reports about his family’s past in The National Post, a Toronto newspaper, Mr. Boissonnault found himself facing accusations from political opponents of “race shifting” or being a “pretendian” — falsely claiming to be Indigenous.On Wednesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s office issued a brief statement announcing that Mr. Boissonnault, the sole cabinet minister from Alberta, “will step away from cabinet” and “focus on clearing the allegations made against him.”The resignation is another blow to an already embattled Mr. Trudeau, who has made reconciliation with Indigenous people and respect for Indigenous cultures top priorities of his government.The episode is only the latest high-profile example of what Indigenous people see as brazen attempts to appropriate their culture, in a country whose history includes extensive mistreatment of Indigenous people and attempts to eradicate their cultures.Mr. Boissonnault has never publicly identified as Indigenous himself, but has said that he was adopted into a family with Cree heritage, although one that was not registered as Indigenous with the federal government.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Norway Apologizes for Forced Assimilation of Sami and Other Minorities

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      A policy of “Norwegianization” silenced the languages of Indigenous people and forced their children into boarding schools. The long-awaited apology avoided the issue of land rights.For more than a century, Norway forcibly suppressed the language and culture of Indigenous people and other minority groups, including removing children from their parents, in a system of “Norwegianization” whose devastation continues to be felt.This week, the country’s Parliament issued a formal apology to the Sami, Kven and Forest Finn peoples, and outlined 17 resolutions to address the discrimination they still face, including protecting minority languages and ensuring that children are taught those languages.The move, which Parliament approved on Tuesday, was welcomed by Silje Karine Muotka, a Sami leader, who described the moment as “a day with many emotions.” But she also said it needed to be followed up with concrete and significant action.“Going forward, we expect an active policy of reconciliation,” she said in a written statement. “The decision from today ensures long-term follow-up, and it has both financial and legal repercussions. But unfortunately, no settlement is made with ongoing injustice and conflicts over land and water.”Norway has some legislation on the Samis’ right to grazing land, but the Sami have long been at odds with the government over land use in relation to their culture and way of life.The apology and resolutions stem from a report by a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, published last year, that outlines how Norway could begin to reckon with its oppressive past. King Harald V has previously apologized to the Sami people, but this is the first time that the Kvens and Forest Finns have received such a public acknowledgment of the harm they endured.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Cathy Merrick, Advocate for Indigenous People in Canada, Dies at 63

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      She was on the front lines of dogged fights against injustices, including a recent series of murders of Indigenous women by a white man.Cathy Merrick, a towering figure in the fight for Indigenous rights in Canada and the first woman to be elected grand chief of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, representing 63 First Nations, died on Sept. 6 in Winnipeg, the provincial capital. She was 63.The Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs announced her death in a statement.Ms. Merrick died while doing what she had dedicated her life to: advocating for Indigenous people. She had just attended the trial of a corrections officer who had been charged in the death of an Indigenous inmate. The man had been acquitted, and Ms. Merrick was standing on the courthouse steps expressing her disappointment to the news media when she suddenly collapsed.She was taken to nearby St. Boniface hospital, where she was declared dead. The cause was not immediately known, and an autopsy was to be performed.Ms. Merrick’s death was met with deep grief across Canada. Hundreds attended her wake as she lay in state last week at the Manitoba Legislative Building, only the sixth person and the first woman ever to receive that honor.“Grand Chief Cathy Merrick was a relentless and incredibly effective advocate for First Nations peoples, especially for those most vulnerable,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada said in a statement.Catherine Ann McKay, whose traditional Cree name was Kameekosit Ispokanee Iskwew, was born on May 31, 1961, at Cross Lake, the English name for the Pimicikamak Cree Nation, in northern Manitoba. She was the adopted daughter of Hazel and Thomas Spence. Her mother was a nurse, her father a carpenter.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ancient Maya Genomes Sequenced for First Time

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      Thousand-year-old DNA from Chichén Itzá offers eye-opening details of the religious rituals of ancient Maya.In the spring of 1967, workers building a small airport behind Chichén Itzá, the ancient Maya city in Mexico, ran into a problem: Their excavations had uncovered human remains in the pathway of the proposed runway. The airport was set to serve V.I.P.s who wanted to visit Chichén Itzá. But with the remains so close to a major archaeological site, the work had to be halted until the bones could be examined.Any hope for a quick resolution dissolved when archaeologists who were called to the scene uncovered a chultún — an underground rainwater-storage container that, in Maya mythology, was viewed as an entrance to the subterranean land of the dead. Connected to the cistern was a cave containing more than 100 sets of human remains, almost all belonging to children. In a push to finish the airport, researchers were given just two months to excavate and exhume the cache of bones.Nearly 60 years later, ancient DNA extracted from 64 of the children is offering new insights into the religious rituals of the ancient Maya and their ties to modern descendants. In a paper published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, an international cohort of researchers revealed that the children — sacrificial victims killed between 500 and 900 A.D. — were all local Maya boys that may have been specifically selected to be killed in sibling pairs.“These are the first ancient Maya genomes to be published,” said Johannes Krause, an archaeogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. The DNA work provided a previously unseen glimpse into the identities of the sacrificed children. “One feels quite moved by such a finding,” Dr. Krause said, noting that he himself has a young son.The search into the genome of the Maya boys did not start as an exercise in ancient Maya rituals. In the mid-2000s, Rodrigo Barquera — now an immunogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute — was hoping to discover the genetic legacy of Mesoamerica’s deadliest pandemic.In 1545, an outbreak of Salmonella enterica spread like wildfire across what is now Mexico. Over the next century, the disease killed up to 90 percent of the Indigenous population. Pandemics like these often leave their mark on the immune genes of survivors. To uncover this genetic legacy, Dr. Barquera and his colleagues needed to compare the DNA from the precolonial remains with that of people who were born after the calamity.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Robert Pickton, Notorious Canadian Serial Killer, Dies at 74

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      Convicted in the murder of six women (though he boasted of killing many more), he died of unspecified injuries after being assaulted in prison.Robert Pickton, one of Canada’s most notorious serial killers, whose crimes called attention to police and societal disregard for the violent deaths of Indigenous women, died on Friday after a fellow inmate attacked him in prison in Quebec, where he was serving a life sentence. He was 74.His death, in a hospital, was announced by Correctional Service Canada, which said he had been assaulted on May 19 at Port-Cartier Institution and had died of unspecified injuries. The announcement did not give a motive for the attack.In 2007, Mr. Pickton was convicted in the murders of six women, though he boasted to an undercover police officer that he had killed 49 in all.The remains of his victims were found at a ramshackle pig farm he owned outside Vancouver, where authorities conducted what at the time was the largest crime-scene investigation in Canadian history. After 18 months, they found the remains of 33 women.The victims were mainly members of Indigenous groups, and most were sex workers and drug addicts whom Mr. Pickton encountered in the Downtown Eastside, an underbelly of the scenic, affluent Vancouver.Mr. Pickton was able to continue killing for so long, according to an investigation by the provincial government of British Columbia, because of police bias toward the race and marginalized status of his victims.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Indigenous Artists Are the Heart of the Venice Biennale

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      Here are highlights of the range of work produced by Native artists in the pavilions and a central exhibition that proudly calls itself “Foreigners Everywhere.”Before visitors step into any gallery at the 2024 Venice Biennale, which opens April 20, Indigenous artists will have made their presence known.A collective of painters from the Brazilian Amazon, MAHKU (Movimento dos Artistas Huni Kuin), will cover the facade of the central exhibition hall with an intricate mural. Inuuteq Storch, the first Greenlandic and Inuk artist to represent Denmark at the international art festival, will erect a sign reading “Kalaallit Nunaat,” or “Greenland” above the pavilion’s entrance. (Greenland has been a self-governing country within the Danish Realm since 1979. )The Brazil Pavilion nearby has been renamed the Hãhãwpuá Pavilion — one of many terms that Indigenous people use to describe the territory that, after colonization, became Brazil. “There is a very political aspect to the Indigenous presence in an artistic space like the Venice Biennale,” said Denilson Baniwa, the Hãhãwpuá Pavilion’s co-curator. “Our aim is to rewrite history and add a new chapter to art history.”Beyond the United States Pavilion, which features the art of Jeffrey Gibson, the Venice Biennale offers a taste of the wide range of work produced by Indigenous, First Nations and Native artists around the globe. Here are some highlights.The Central ExhibitionMataaho Collective’s “Takapau” (2022), made of polyester tie-downs and stainless steel buckles. The first gallery at the Arsenale will host the monumental installation by a group of four Maori women known for making large fiber sculptures. Maarten Holl, via Te PapaIndigenous artists are at the heart of “Foreigners Everywhere,” the Venice Biennale’s central exhibition. As the Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa, artistic director of this year’s Biennale, sees it, the Indigenous artist is “frequently treated as a foreigner in his or her own land.” The first gallery at the Arsenale, Venice’s former shipyard complex, will host a monumental installation by the Mataaho Collective, a group of four Maori women known for making large-scale fiber sculptures. The 331-artist lineup also includes the Native American artists Kay WalkingStick and Emmi Whitehorse; the Brazilian Yanomani artists Joseca Mokahesi and André Taniki; Indigenous Australian artists Marlene Gilson and Naminapu Maymuru-White; and Maori artists Sandy Adsett and Selwyn Wilson, considered one of the founders of Maori Modernism, who died in 2002.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Lawmaker Presses Loro Piana on Reports of Exploiting Indigenous Workers in Peru

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      A freshman congressman is demanding answers from the fashion house Loro Piana, which sources wool from his native Peru and faces accusations of exploiting workers there. A $9,000 designer sweater made out of the ultrarare fur of a South American animal called a vicuña is not exactly a typical area of focus for a member of the U.S. Congress.But when Representative Robert Garcia, a first-term California Democrat and the first Peruvian-born person to serve in the House, saw reports that the luxury design house Loro Piana was not fairly compensating Indigenous workers in Peru who source the rare wool in some of its priciest knit clothing, he decided to use his position to make some noise.“As the first Peruvian American member of Congress and co-chair of the Congressional Peru Caucus, I write regarding concerning reports about the sourcing of vicuña wool by Loro Piana, a subsidiary of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton,” he wrote to company executives last month.He demanded that the fashion house — whose products including shirts, scarves and coats can cost anywhere from $500 to $30,000 — explain how it could raise its prices so steeply while steadily reducing the amount it was paying the people who harvest the raw materials for it.“While Loro Piana’s prices have increased, the price per kilo for fibers paid to the Lucanas community has fallen by one-third in just over a decade; and the villages’ revenue from the vicuña has fallen 80 percent,” Mr. Garcia wrote.A member of the Totoroma community in Puno, Peru, during a vicuña roundup and shearing in 2021.Carlos Mamani/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In Move to Protect Whales, Polynesian Indigenous Groups Give Them ‘Personhood’

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      Indigenous leaders of New Zealand, Tahiti and the Cook Islands signed a treaty that recognizes whales as legal persons. Conservationists hope it will lead to legal protections.For many Indigenous groups across Polynesia, whales hold an ancient sacredness and spirit that connects all life. Whales — or tohorā, as Māori call them — guided their ancestors across the Pacific Ocean. Today, those groups consider themselves to be guardians for the largest animals under the sea.But as of Wednesday, whales are not simply animals in this region.Indigenous leaders of New Zealand, Tahiti and the Cook Islands signed a historic treaty that recognizes whales as legal persons in a move conservationists believe will apply pressure to national governments to offer greater protections for the large mammals.“It’s fitting that the traditional guardians are initiating this,” said Mere Takoko, a Māori conservationist who leads Hinemoana Halo Ocean Initiative, the group that spearheaded the treaty. “For us, by restoring those world populations we also restore our communities.”Conservationists have good reason to believe they will succeed: In 2017, New Zealand passed a groundbreaking law that granted personhood status to the Whanganui River because of its importance to Māori, New Zealand’s Indigenous people.The treaty, or He Whakaputanga Moana, which translates to “declaration for the ocean,” was signed on Rarotonga, the largest of the Cook Islands, in a ceremony attended by Tūheitia Potatau te Wherowhero VII, the Māori king, and 15 paramount chiefs of Tahiti and the Cook Islands.Tūheitia Potatau te Wherowhero VII, the Māori king, was among the Indigenous leaders who signed the treaty recognizing whales as legal persons. The ceremony took place on Rarotonga, the largest of the Cook Islands.Josh Baker Films, via Conservation InternationalWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More