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A new $10 banknote featuring Viola Desmond’s portrait will go into circulation in a week, just over 72 years after she was ousted from the whites-only section of a movie theatre in New Glasgow, N.S.
The civil rights pioneer and businesswoman is the first Canadian woman to be featured on a regularly circulating banknote, which will also show a map of Halifax’s historic north end, home to one of Canada’s oldest black communities and the site where Desmond opened her first salon.
On Nov. 8, 1946 _ nearly a decade before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Alabama _ Desmond was dragged out of the Roseland Theatre by police, arrested, thrown in jail for 12 hours and fined.
It would take 63 years for Nova Scotia to issue Desmond, who died in 1965, a posthumous apology and pardon.

The leader of Canada’s first Indigenous group to win title to its territory says an updated agreement it’s negotiating with the federal government is part of a new model of relations between Ottawa and First Nations.
Chief Joe Alphonse, tribal council chairman for the Tsilhqot’in National Government, said the agreement is due to be signed by spring, and it will outline a financial relationship between Canada and the six First Nations his council represents in British Columbia’s central Interior.
Alphonse said previous funding models, which he described as “marginal,” no longer apply now that the Tsilhqot’in’s title land claims have been formally recognized by the courts.

Lawyers for a dozen environmental groups in the US are fighting back against President Donald Trumps executive order reversing ban on offshore drilling in US Arctic territories.
A new lawsuit says Trump acted without the authority of Congress or the Constitution when he reversed former US President Barak Obama’s drilling ban in the same area.
The 2015 drilling ban was a part of Obama’s environmental legacy to protect polar bears, walrus, seals and Alaska’s indigenous villages that depend on surrounding wildlife.
Obama also banned oil exploration of underwater canyons in the Atlantic Ocean as part of protections for marine life, corals and migratory whales.
Trump reversed those bans in April 2017.

Indigneous nations in Alaska are holding a summit this week to bring together the last remaining speakers of the state’s three indigenous languages.
Nearly 70 speakers are expected to attend the three day event. Organizers estimate there are only about 133 remaining language speakers in the state.
The summit is part of language revitalization action being taken by Alaskas governor who declared an emergency for Alaskas native languages. Official projected the languages could become extinct by the end of the century.