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“After vowing to take the summer months to meet with Indigenous people after a series of controversial remarks, Conservative Sen. Lynn Beyak says she now believes First Nations should give up their Indigenous rights and integrate into Canadian society.
“Trade your status card for a Canadian citizenship, with a fair and negotiated payout to each Indigenous man, woman and child in Canada, to settle all the outstanding land claims and treaties, and move forward together just like the leaders already do in Ottawa,” she said in an open letter published Sept. 1 on her Senate website.
(Indigenous people born in this country are Canadian citizens, and were given full voting rights in 1960.)
“None of us are leaving, so let’s stop the guilt and blame and find a way to live together and share,” she wrote. “All Canadians are then free to preserve their cultures in their own communities, on their own time, with their own dime.”
Beyak made headlines in the spring after CBC News first reported her defence of the Indian residential school system in the Senate. The northwestern Ontario senator later expanded on her remarks before being removed from the Red Chamber’s Aboriginal Peoples committee by interim Conservative Leader Rona Ambrose.”
– CBC News, Senator Lynn Beyak says First Nations should give up status cards.
“Beyak issued a letter earlier this month calling for First Nations people to give up their status cards in exchange for a one-time cash payment and said they could then practise their culture “on their own dime.”
She was removed from the Senate aboriginal affairs committee by former party leader Rona Ambrose in the spring after she said more good than bad happened at residential schools and that people were focusing too much on the abuse rather than the positive impact the schools had.”
– Global News, Lynn Beyak kicked out of all Senate committees after First Nations remarks.
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Download the 18″x24″ poster (.pdf), Indian Country 52 #37 – Rescind Your White Privilege (Lynn Beyak).
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Indian Country 52
Indian Country 52 is a weekly project by David Bernie that uses the medium of posters that promote issues and stories in Indian Country.
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This work by David Bernie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. You may download, share, and post the images under the condition that the works are attributed to the artist.
