Unreserved

Justin Delorme is Métis and an award-winning composer who has scored hundreds of television episodes like the true-crime series Taken, films like Finality of Dusk, and documentaries – including Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry It On. At just 29 years-old his career is only getting started.

Raven Chacon is a Diné composer from the Navajo Nation. In 2022, he became the first Native American composer to win the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his piece Voiceless Mass. The piece debuted in the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist during American Thanksgiving. It features no words or lyrics, but it harnesses the absence of voice to tell a powerful story about the harm of colonialism.

Deantha Edmunds grew up learning the classics like Handel’s Messiah. She never thought she would have the chance to sing it in Inuttitut, the language of her ancestors. As the world’s only professional Inuk opera singer, she is blazing a trail in the field of classical music.

Got land you want to give back? That may be harder than you think. Even when a group or individual is ready and willing to give land back to First Nations, there is no system in place to make this happen easily. Still, those who believe in land back are making it happen.

SISCENEM, formerly Halibut Island, is a small island in the Salish Sea. When it went up for sale, Tara Martin, professor in conservation science in the department of Forest and Conservation sciences at UBC, wanted to return the island to the WSANEC Nation. She says that their guardianship is how this ecological gem would flourish. She found a funder, purchased the land, had it held in trust, and now that the WSANEC Nation has created its own land trust, it officially can have the land transferred over.

If you got land - and want to return or gift it to a local First Nation or Indigenous group, how do you go about it? Lorraine Land, a lawyer who specializes in Indigenous rights and environmental law, knows the barriers in Canadian law that complicate the land back process. She outlines the existing ways land can be given back.

Cathy Armstrong is the executive director of the Land Conservancy of BC. After the purchase of the island they held it in trust. Cathy says land back must be part of reconciliation.

Eric Pelky is the community engagement coordinator of the WSANEC leadership council and the hereditary chief of Tsawout. He says the island is rich in traditional plants like camas and the presence of an ancient burial ground prove the WSANEC once lived there.

From the people searching on the frontlines, to those who hold Canadians to account and the women who know the solutions, we find power and place amidst the national crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and 2Spirit people.

Winnipeg’s North Point Douglas Women’s Resource Centre is the home of the Mama Bear Clan. The volunteer patrol walks three times a week in this neighbourhood, the poorest in Winnipeg and where many of the city’s most vulnerable have few places to get warm and even fewer places to get food. Walkers like Gina Smoke, Mitch Bourbonnaire and Morgan Fontaine hand out food, winter gear and plenty of love while searching for the missing.

There are roughly 1,200 missing or murdered Indigenous women in Canada, although the true number is thought to exceed 4,000. In 2016, Canada launched a national inquiry into the crisis and heard from three thousand family members, survivors of violence, experts and Knowledge Keepers. Its final report — Reclaiming Power and Place — lists 231 calls for justice. Karine Duhamel knows the report well. As the director of research for the National Inquiry which lasted nearly three years, she co-wrote it.

Women like Bernadette Smith and Lorelei Williams have been on the ground in their communities, organizing, marching and educating. But our sisters and relatives keep disappearing. So what is it going to take to finally bring this crisis to an end? Bernadette Smith is the co-founder of the Coalition of Families of Missing and Murdered Women in Manitoba, Drag the Red Initiative and No Stone Unturned, and she is an MLA in the Manitoba legislature. Lorelei Williams is the founder of the Vancouver-based dance group Butterflies in Spirit and member of the Skatin and Sts'ailes First Nations.

Three Indigenous nations along the Pacific coast of Turtle Island are working tirelessly to save the salmon because salmon is an integral part of who they are - spiritually, culturally, socially and economically.

Brook Thompson is a member of the Yurok and Kurok tribes in Northern California. She is a restoration engineer working to restore the Klamath River. In November 2022, her people successfully won a legal battle to have four dams removed from the Klamath River to help restore decimated salmon populations.

hiwus (Chief) Warren Paull helped to successfully negotiate the complete removal of commercial fish farms from shíshálh First Nation territory off the coast of the Salish Sea in British Columbia.

Kerrie Charnley was part of a habitat restoration project for salmon in the Upper Pitt River on mainland BC. The river is the home of her ancestors, the Katzie people, whose creation story involves the marriage of a Katzie man and a sockeye woman. The restoration project was a profound experience that deepened her sense of connection with her ancestors.

Fur has become a fashion faux pas in some circles. Aggressive anti-fur campaigns with graphic images and slogans have made furs, feathers and hides increasingly unpopular in popular culture. Animal rights groups say fur farms are cruel, wild animals are trapped inhumanely, and fur just isn’t necessary. It has brought international attention to a move to ban it all together.

But for these Indigenous trappers and artisans who use fur, it’s a way of life:

Since 1971, the Manitoba Trappers Association, currently led by President Kenneth Woitowicz, has hosted the Thompson Fur Table. Trappers from all over the north come to this two-day event to sell their furs and even compete for who has the best furs. Trappers like Jeff Laliberty and Terry McLellan. Or youth like Robin Donaldson and Deja Tait, who has been trapping since she was 12 years old. While fewer people come each year, trappers try to stay optimistic about a way of life that has sustained generations, a way of life they still pass on.

We head north from Manitoba to the Northwest Territories. Nathan Kogiak is the Fur Marketing and Sales Coordinator for the Government of the Northwest Territories. He helps artisans access affordable materials for their crafts. But Nathan isn’t just a public servant. As an Inuvialuk, he also spends a lot of his life out on the trap lines. He knows how challenging – and rewarding – the hunting and trapping way of life can be.

Taalrumiq is an Inuvialuit artist, fashion designer, and content creator from Tuktoyaktuk. She also sees herself as an educator. Whether through her online videos or her travels south to sell her work, Taalrumiq takes the opportunity to challenge anti-fur sentiment and offer a different perspective that comes from a long line of fur fashion.

This episode of Unreserved shines a light on Indigenous people who are culturally-adapting and reclaiming wellness practices.

Michael Yellow Bird, is a citizen of the Three Affiliated Tribes in North Dakota and he is the dean of the faculty of social work at the University of Manitoba. He’s been practicing mindfulness for decades and he researches the effects of Indigenous ceremony and mindfulness on the brain. He says mindfulness can decolonize the brain.

Smudging - burning herbs like sage - is becoming increasingly popular in some wellness circles. But is it cultural appropriation? Tareyn Johnson is Anishinaabe and a member of Georgina Island First Nation. She's been practicing yoga for many years and has seen sacred medicines like sage being misused or improperly handled in a growing number of yoga studios.

Jessica Barudin is Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw and a member of the Namgis First Nation on Vancouver Island and founder of the First Nations Women’s Yoga Initiative. As a yoga teacher, Jessica works with Elders and knowledge keepers to bring culturally adapted yoga to communities and help heal intergenerational trauma.

Indigenous lands back into Indigenous hands: that is the aim of the Landback movement.

In Gillam, Manitoba, treaty promises clash with hydro development. As the people of Fox Lake Cree Nation continue to push for land from the government, leaders like Conway Arthurson try to find middle ground with an industry that has historically tried to push them out. In the 1960s, Manitoba Hydro moved into this area - building dams and flooding the land that once held the people of Fox Lake. Arthurson has acted as a negotiator in the community’s decades-long fight for a place to call home - a fight that gets more complicated with every dam Manitoba Hydro builds. And right now they’re building the biggest one of all.

In South Dakota, there is no place more sacred than He Sapa, or the Black Hills, to the Lakota. Also known as Mount Rushmore, the site is famous for its massive carvings of U.S. presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. On July 3, 2020, Nick Tilsen was arrested there as part of a protest against former President Trump's fireworks rally on what is traditionally and legally Lakota land. Tilsen is a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation and the founder of NDN Collective. The group recently created Landback Magazine, as a means to connect and exchange knowledge with other Indigenous nations.

In the Kingdom of Hawaii, Mauna Kea is revered by the people. So much so that their Kapuna - or elders - put their bodies on the line to protect this sacred mountain from a thirty meter telescope or TMT. Since the 1960s, the University of Hawaii has built 13 giant telescopes on the summit, each time promising it would be the last. For decades, Hawaiians have pushed back to protect Mauna Kea from any future developments. Noe Noe Wong-Wilson was born and raised on the island of Oʻahu. She is one of the first board members of the newly established Mauna Kea Stewardship and Oversight Authority. Pua Case was born and raised on the Island of Hawai’i. She’s the program director of Mauna Kea Education and Awareness.

For thousands of years and up until a few generations ago, Indigenous babies were born on the land. They were born in their communities, surrounded by culture, with the help of expert birth workers – women who knew just what to do when the water broke.

Colonization and the western medical system nearly destroyed Indigenous birthing traditions, but people like Ellen Blais are bringing birth home. Ellen is from the Oneida Nation of the Thames. She’s a trained midwife and currently serves as the Director of Indigenous Midwifery for the Association of Ontario Midwives.

Ellen’s vision to see birth returned to Indigenous communities will certainly become reality if young doulas and birth workers have anything to say about it. We find out what a doula does and why Tagwanibisan Armitage-Smith, Gina Loodit and Madison White want to help bring our babies into the world surrounded by culture.

Opolahsomuwehs - also known by her English name as Imelda Mary Perley - is a Wolastoquey elder, knowledge keeper, and doula from St. Mary’s First Nation in New Brunswick. She says a doula’s job isn’t only to support the person about to give birth; they must also prepare the community for the arrival of its newest member.

The Cree Health Board in northern Quebec is another group that’s bringing birth back into Indigenous communities. In 2017, the board re-established birthing services in the village of Chisasibi. In 2021, its midwifery team opened a temporary birthing home there with the goal of eventually opening three permanent birthing homes in the region. The health board also intends to launch a midwifery education program in June 2023 so that future Cree midwives don’t have to travel south for their education. Denise Perusse was the interim birth home coordinator in Chisasibi. One she day hopes to become a midwife.

Unreserved is getting in the festive mood with an episode about gifts — material items you can give to family and friends, as well as the intangible gifts of community and culture.

We take a tour of an Indigenous-led market in Ottawa that doesn't accept money — and instead is going back to old ways of trading and exchanging. The marketplace is run by the Assembly of Seven Generations. Co-founder Gabrielle Fayant and A7G volunteer Madeleine Kelly reflect on what makes this market such a gift for Indigenous people — especially youth — in Ottawa.

Falynn Baptiste says her gift is song. The teacher from the Red Pheasant Cree Nation translates popular holiday music into the Cree language. You'll hear her story and her songs.

Are you looking for something good to watch, a great read to dive into or a good book to give to someone you love? Unreserved's resident pop culture uncle, Dene author Richard Van Camp, joins host Rosanna Deerchild to share his recommendations of what to watch and read over the holidays.

Davis Inlet is on an island on the north coast of Labrador. But no one has lived there for 20 years. In the early 1990s, video of children sniffing gas in a cold shack made headlines, forcing the government to relocate the Innu to Natuashish. Davis Inlet will soon be decommissioned and the people who once called this place home must decide what story they will tell their children. This past summer, Innu Nation Deputy Grand Chief Mary Ann Nui invited CBC reporter John Gaudi to return to Davis Inlet with her. He takes us along with them in his documentary "I Still Live Here."

Jodie Ashini grew up learning from her dad about the land, animals, Innu and how they all fit together. Her father, Daniel Ashini, was president of the Innu Nation and a tireless advocate for Innu land claims and cultural preservation. Today, Jodie is a cultural guardian. Her whole job is to safeguard Innu culture, including repatriating Innu Nation materials and providing input on government policy. Peter Armitage is an anthropologist who worked with the Innu of Labrador since 1981 and a longtime family friend of the Ashini family. Recently, Peter gifted back an extraordinary archive - three decades worth of irreplaceable Innu history.