Dear Marie-Claude Côté-Villeneuve: We are 13-year-old children from the Attawapiskat Cree First Nation. We live on the isolated, sub-Arctic lands of the James Bay coast in Ontario. Our first language is Cree. The nearest road to our community is 400 kms away. We are writing to request that the failure of the federal government to follow up on its repeated promises to the children of Attawapiskat to replace a school contaminated by a diesel leak with a safe school that supports learning be included in Canada’s report to the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) regarding Canada’s implementation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). We intend to follow up this letter with a Shadow Report to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child that will outline the systemic discrimination and negligence that we have suffered at the hands of the Federal government, through the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs (INAC). We will be working on this report with our partners in the provincial and national education and child rights fields. These allies include but are not limited to: the Attawapiskat Education Authority, the Mushkegowuk Tribal Council, the Ontario Public School Boards Association, (members of the) Ontario Catholic School Board Association, Ontario English Catholic Teachers Association (OECTA), Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation (OSSTF), Canadian Teachers Federation (CTF), various NGOs, plus students, principals and teachers from schools across Canada who have joined the fight to ensure that children in our community should have comparable rights to proper schooling and funding as are guaranteed by Canadian and provincial/ territorial laws to Non-Native children and ensured under the Convention on the Rights of the Child. These organizations fully understand the legal responsibilities that exist for ensuring that governments provide adequate education resources in Canada. They will work with us to identify how we, as First Nation children, have been denied the basic rights taken for granted by other students in Canada. As we are within the jurisdiction of Ontario, we will make direct comparisons to the rights enjoyed by students under provincial school board authorities. Our shadow report will look at the obligations of Canada under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and contrast these commitments with the massive and unnecessary inequities that are faced by Aboriginal children born on reserves due to federal government policies and decisions. This report will come at a later date. For now, we felt it was important to send this introductory letter to let you know who we are and why we have made appeal to you. We are known in Canada as “the Forgotten Children of Attawapiskat.” We are a generation of children that have never seen a real school. For nearly 30 years the school grounds and building of J.R. Nakogee Grade School has been poisoned by the largest diesel contamination leak in Ontario. This leak was caused when the Federal government was operating our school. By the time the leak was discovered, nearly 50,000 litres of diesel contamination had seeped into the earth under the school building and playground. Between 1979 and 1990, the leak continued as the federal government did nothing to stop it. Children were getting sick. Teachers suffered headaches and some quit midway through the year. Numerous attempts were made to get INAC to take action. No money was put aside to clean up the school even though children as young as five were breathing carcinogen-laden benzene fumes on a daily basis. We were very young then and didn’t understand what was happening to us. Now …