The 'great indigenous divide': Winnipeg stares into an ethnic chasm

[wickedplayer494]

[url]http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/oct/21/winnipeg-election-indigenous-divide-aboriginal[/url]

[quote=The Guardian]On 1 July 2014 – Canada Day – a 15-year-old Anishinaabe girl named Tina Fontaine left Sagkeeng First Nation to visit her estranged mother in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Five weeks later, on 8 August, Fontaine was picked up by police in a vehicle that had been pulled over for drunk driving. The police released her. Later the same day she was found passed out in a downtown Winnipeg alley. Paramedics took her to hospital, where she was handed over to a social worker. Fontaine escaped. The next day, 9 August, she was reported missing.

On 17 August, Fontaine’s body, wrapped in a plastic bag, was recovered on the muddy banks of the Red River, a meandering prairie waterway traversed by indigenous Canadians for thousands of years before the first European paddled up to what is now Winnipeg in 1738.

The death of a child anywhere provokes anger. In Winnipeg, home to Canada’s largest urban indigenous population and second in North America after Anchorage, it has sent the city into convulsions.

The same day Fontaine was found in the alley, unconscious but alive, mayoral candidate Gord Steeves made a bold announcement: he planned to rid downtown Winnipeg of public drunkenness. Hours later, a polemic from his wife Lorrie’s Facebook page in 2010 went viral. Her complaint that she was “really tired of getting harassed by the drunken native guys” in downtown Winnipeg skywalks – “We all donate enough money to keep their sorry asses on welfare, so shut the fuck up and don’t ask me for another handout!” – has forced Winnipeg to confront an ethnic chasm, one reminiscent of nothing so much as southern US cities before the civil rights movement.

Winnipeg votes on a new mayor tomorrow, and one issue has dominated the race. By any metric you choose – income, education, employment, health, life expectancy, access to housing, incarceration and above all exposure to violent crime •– Winnipeg’s roughly 80,000 First Nations, Métis or Inuit residents are worse off, on average, than the other 620,000 city dwellers. Closing this “great divide,” as it’s coming to be known in Winnipeg, has emerged as the city’s crucial obstacle.

Two of the candidates are indigenous: Brian Bowman, a Métis privacy lawyer who will become the first indigenous mayor in Winnipeg’s 140-year history if he can pull ahead (he’s in a statistical tie for first place) and Robert-Falcon Ouellette, a Cree university administrator polling in third. “Whoever is elected mayor has a responsibility to build bridges between the aboriginal and non-aboriginal community,” Bowman said at a fundraiser for the Winnipeg Art Gallery, which is planning on building a new structure to better display the world’s largest collection of Inuit art.[/quote]

It should be noted that Judy Wasylycia-Leis is the one tied with Bowman for first, with RFO at third place:

[t]http://i.imgur.com/dGNYATN.png[/t]

Without the undecided section:

[t]http://i.imgur.com/RVtkuC7.png[/t]

Technical info on the survey (the survey was originally out of 600 votes, but the votes were far too close and so another 202 were retrieved to reduce MoE):

[t]http://i.imgur.com/apJDPg6.png[/t]

[Karmah]

Hello there fellow Winnipegers

I have yet to ever vote here

I have no idea who anyone is, nor the time to find out

The only person I've heard of was Judy, but her and her posse blocked off the sidewalk outside of the cbc building when I was trying to get to the bus stop, forcing pedestrians onto the street
Now I have less reason to vote

[outlawpickle]

Native (though it says indigenous) Canadians, eh? I've gone my entire 23 years without ever having that phrase enter my head. In my head there is a weird no man's land between Native Americans and Eskimos.