United Nations Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Issues James will have the opportunity to get a first-hand look at some of the areas Metis people are trying to gain traction on when he visits Canada next month.

James Anaya will be sitting down for a meeting with Metis National Council President Clem Chartier on October 12.

Chartier says there are a number of issues he plans to raise with the UN official.

“I think we’re going to give him a good snapshot of the Metis people,” he says. “We will talk about our challenges, as I mentioned, especially exclusion, the lack of the federal government accepting responsibility to deal with the Metis people, our dispossession from the lands by the Manitoba Act and by the scrip process which is why we’re in the courts here in northwest Saskatchewan.”

Chartier and Anaya are personal friends and the UN Special Rapporteur wrote the forward to the MNC President’s 2010 book, Witness to Resistance: Under Fire in Nicaragua, a document of Indigenous struggle in the Central American country.

Anaya will be meeting with Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations Chief Perry Bellegarde on October 13.