Month: March, 2010

News Release: Women sit-in at Minister’s office, demand restored funds to Aboriginal Healing Foundation

News Release: Women sit-in at Minister’s office, demand restored funds to Aboriginal Healing Foundation
By ADMIN | Published: MARCH 29, 2010
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Monday, March 29, 2010

Six women sit in at Indian Affairs Minister’s office: pledge to stay until Conservatives restore funding to Aboriginal Healing Foundation

OTTAWA – Today at noon six women began a peaceful sit-in in the Minister of Indian Affairs’ Chuck Strahl’s Ottawa office in the Confederation Building to protest the Conservatives’ cuts to the Aboriginal Healing Foundation (AHF) and to demand restoration of the funding. Supporters are holding a rally outside. The Aboriginal Healing Foundation is a non-profit, Aboriginal-managed agency which supports community-based healing efforts addressing the intergenerational legacy of abuses from the residential school system.

“It’s been less than two years since Prime Minister Harper’s apology to survivors of the residential schools, yet the Conservative government is ready to shut down programs specifically aimed at helping the healing the Prime Minister spoke about,” says Maya Rolbin-Ghanie, a member of Missing Justice, a Montreal-based grassroots organization.

The Conservative budget did not renew funding to the 134 AHF-supported healing projects across the country, forcing many organizations to shut down as of March 31, 2010, when the cuts take effect.

“Strahl says the government will support residential school survivors in other ways, but these cuts will jeopardize many vital programs and interrupt all the progress being made towards health and well-being,” says Nakuset, the Executive Director of the Native Women’s Shelter in Montreal, which will lose a third of its funding and be forced to cut three employes, including a sexual assault counselor.

An evaluation commissioned by the federal government in December 2009 found that no other existing programs could match the AHF’s rate of success. They also applauded the organization’s fiscal management.[1]

“The Conservative government is letting down thousands of survivors and their children and grandchildren suffering inter-generational trauma,” says Bianca Mugyenyi, a member of Missing Justice. “The situation is urgent enough to call for a peaceful sit-in, since open letters, petitions, lobbying and a resolution passed by the Nunavut government have not succeeded in restoring the funding.”

The Aboriginal Healing Foundation is prohibited from engaging in advocacy by its Funding Agreement.

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workshop and film screening with Gwen Haworth

WSSA & the 2110 Centre for Gender
Advocacy present a double dose of filmmaker Gwen Haworth! Both events
are free, in accessible spaces and there is childcare available, just
let us know! wssa.concordia@gmail.com

*Workshop – The Importance
of trans self-representations, auto-ethnographies and DIY film-making
6pmTuesday March 30th, 2010 @ 2110
Centre For Gender Advocacy 2110 McKay

This workshop will deal
with the importance of self-representation through media tools like DIY
film-making and auto-ethnographies. Gwen
will discuss her process of film-making, as well as offer a critical
review of the construct of objective filmmaking. Haworth
embraces a point of view approach that strives for empathy and
collective
storytelling. This workshop will be both informative and interactive!

*FILM SCREENING – She’s A Boy I Knew 6pm Wednesday March 31st, 2010 @ room
VA 114, 1395 René Lavesque – in
association with Queer Cinema

Guaranteed to be the most
compelling DIY, gender bending, feel good film directed by a transsexual
lesbian you’ve seen all year!

Using
archival family footage, interviews, phone messages, and animation,
Haworth’s documentary She’s a Boy I Knew begins in 2000 with Steven
Haworth’s decision to come out to his family about his life-long female
gender identity.
The resulting auto-ethnography is not only an
exploration into the filmmaker’s process of transition from biological
male to female, from Steven to Gwen, but also an emotionally charged
account of the individual experiences, struggles, and stakes that her
two sisters, mother, father, best friend and wife brought to Gwen’s
transition.
As her transition progresses, Gwen is forced to reckon
with the end of her marriage and the loss of her status as son and
brother. But in doing so, she also discovers that while the nature of
personal relationships may change, the love and support present within
those relationships can remain just as powerful and sometimes even more
so.
At turns painful, funny, and awkward, She’s A Boy I Knew explores the
frustrations, fears, questions, and hopes experienced by Gwen and
her family as they struggle to understand and embrace her newly revealed
identity.

*We will have director Gwen Haworth in attendance, so
join us for a Q&A after the screening!

BUILDING ABOLITION FUTURES Feminist Troubles with Protection in a Prison Nation- a panel & discussion

BUILDING ABOLITION FUTURES
Feminist Troubles with Protection in a Prison Nation
a panel & discussion featuring Erica Meiners followed by a presentation by
the Prisoner Correspondence Project

THURSDAY, MARCH 18th, 2010
4:30-6:30pm
H-760 (7th floor, Hall Building, 1455 De Maisonneuve Blvd. West)

Using recent work by anti-prison theorists and community-based activists who
are working against prison industrial complex in the US, this talk links
prison abolition to feminist frameworks to question escalating sex offender
registries and community notification laws that are the state’s response to
sexual violence against children and women. This will be followed by a
discussion on the queer history of sex offender registries in the United
States and their growth in the last two decades, the foundation of
current shifts in the U.S. juvenile justice system, and using abolition
as a possible framework to shift public dialogues about safety as well as
conceptions of childhood and family.

This event is wheelchair accessible; elevators are located on the ground
floor of the Hall Building, accessible via de Maisonneuve or Bishop street
entrances. If you require childcare for this event, please contact us 48
hours before the event.
*
The Prisoner Correspondence Project is a working group of the Quebec Public
Interest Research Group (QPIRG) at Concordia University and an affiliate
group of the 2110 Centre for Gender Advocacy.
This event is presented by the Simone de Beauvoir Institute*.

_________________________________
www.prisonercorrespondenceproject.com
The Prisoner Correspondence Project is a collectively-run initiative based
out of Montreal, Quebec. It coordinates a direct-correspondence program for
gay, lesbian, transsexual, transgender, gendervariant, two-spirit, intersex,
bisexual and queer inmates in Canada and the United States, linking these
inmates with people a part of these same communities outside of prison. In
addition, it coordinates a resource library of information regarding harm
reduction practice, HIV and Hep C prevention, and gay and trans survival
inside prisons. The project also aims to make prisoner justice and prisoner
solidarity a priority within queer movements on the outside through events
like film screenings, workshops, and panel discussions which touch on the
broader issues relating to criminalization and incarceration of queers and
trans folks.