A very interesting article by Martin Lukacs on the attempt of Vancouver Winter Olympiad organisers to choreograph a multiculturally blissful image to the world, while the actual state of indigenous peoples tells a different story:http://www.counterpunch.org/luckas02172010.html QUOTE The evidence is hard to dispute. Roads into most Indigenous reservations, some close to the celebrated Olympic slopes, are dirt. Nearly a hundred communities are on boil alerts, their tap-water undrinkable, this in the country with the world's most fresh water. There is no government strategy to deal with the toxic mold that creeps up walls of cheaply constructed houses; even by the government's own estimates, half require renovation. Aboriginals comprise 4 per cent of the Canadian population, and almost 20 per cent of the inmates of the country's prisons. One of the acknowledged suicide capitals of the world? A small reservation in northern Ontario, where a group of girls once signed a collective suicide pact. And as I write, I am recovering from a debilitating case of the mumps, a viral souvenir from a recent visit to a Quebec community seized by an outbreak. The mumps have been practically eradicated in developed countries. Not so in the third-world pockets that exist throughout Canada.
