This month we interviewed Dr. Cindy Blackstock, member of the Gitksan First Nation and Executive Director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada about her decade-long battle with the Canadian government for the rights of First Nations children and their families to have equal opportunities to succeed. In a landmark ruling in January 2016, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal held that government is racially discriminating against 163,000 First Nations children and their families by providing flawed and inequitable child welfare services and failing to implement Jordan's Principle to ensure equitable access to government services available to other children. Over two years later, Canada has yet to satisfy the orders issued by the tribunal, and just this past February, the tribunal issued a fourth non-compliance order against Canada.

In light of Canada's decision to buy the Trans Mountain pipeline from Kinder Morgan and spend untold billions in taxpayer dollars carrying out the expansion project, we also feature a segment from the mediaINDIGENA podcast hosted by Rick Harp with guests Brock Pitawanakwat and Ken Williams. In this segment they discuss how “mutual benefit agreements" (MBAs) are used to force the Trans Mountain oil pipeline expansions through indigenous territory, and whether the terms in these documents are actually representative of the Indigenous parties’ “free prior and informed consent.” You can subscribe to mediaINDIGENA via iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, among other podcast platforms, and you can learn more about their work on mediaindigena.com.