Native Fat Cats get Fatter
by Gilbert Oskaboose

Mainline newspapers are beginning to say exactly what I said two years ago about native fat cats growing fatter on the Aboriginal Healing Foundation funds - while real survivors of residential schools don't get a lousy penny for their pain and humiliation! Is there an echo in here?

Check it out for yourself at www.firstnations.com The titles of the articles are "Surviving the Cure" written December 13, 1998 and "Money...I wants more Money" written July 21, 1999. See for yourself.

I wrote about native fat cats who had never set foot in a residential school jumping into the fray and grabbing off all the cushy jobs and fat honorariums with the Foundation and feathering their own nests first. This is exactly what has happened.

Of the $3.6 million spent last year by the Aboriginal Healing Foundation (OHF) , most went towards honoraria, salaries and travel. Mike Degagne, the executive director of the OHF was paid $141,692 in salary. Documents obtained by the Hamilton Spectator show the 17 volunteer board members each receive an honorarium of $2,000 per year, for which they are required to attend at least two of four scheduled meetings. If they cannot attend the meetings, the members can still claim the honoraria by attending a "public relations event." But if they do make it to one of the three day board meetings they are each given $500 for each day they attend. One such meeting that was held in Vancouver in December 1998 cost the Foundation $426,964, not including honoraria, the documents show. In addition, each board member is permitted to claim $75 per day in living expenses while working on Foundation business. And if they participate in a conference call that lasts less than 2.5 hours they are given $250 When those calls go over 2.5 hours they are paid $500 dollars. In total the Foundation paid its board members $787,066 for honoraria and travel in the 1998-99 fiscal year, not counting the money they were given to help with programs.

In my articles written a few years ago I said the proposal forms were vague and unreadable even to an English major. Native communities would have an impossible job putting together acceptable proposals. Guess what! The Foundation spent an additional $3.2 million on a special three person department that "provided assistance writing the applications ( read translating bureaucratic gobblety gook." You can bet your bottom dollar that there were no residential school survivors in that little department either.

How many bucks will go towards honoraria, travel, wages and expenses in the 1999-2000 fiscal year? Aboriginal Healing Foundation staff has increased considerably since 1998 and now numbers around 60 fat cats. Figures are due to be released next month. You figure it out for yourself.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. I have yet to hear of a single residential school survivor who has been helped in any way, shape or form - by any $350 million dollars allegedly turned over by the Canadian government to help victims of abuse who survived native residential schools.

Leona Makokis, president of the Blue Quills First Nations College in Alberta, told the Edmonton Journal that "for me, it's (the OHF) has been the creation of a bureaucracy as bad as the federal Department of Indian Affairs ever was."