“And the process is helped along by alcohol and other mind-altering substances. It is all traceable to the separation of these people from their way of living. Instead, he says: “I think things are likely to get considerably worse.”Both men offer similar diagnoses for what ails these people. True, they have been moved into new homes with roads and all the conveniences.

Mr Jenkinson, who is married to an Innu, reaches a similarly distressing conclusion Things have not improved. He is doing so for one compelling reason: since the publication of the 1999 report, little has happened to improve the prospects of his people. “I am beginning to think that we don’t have any future at all,” he says. “That we are just stuck here.”His close friend and a partner in trying to find solutions for the tribe is an Englishman, Anthony Jenkinson, who has lived among the Innu for more than 25 years.

Today, Mr Ashini, 43, is preparing to return to London to see again if, with Survival’s help, he can remind outsiders of the Innu struggle. “These indigenous people suffer the highest suicide rate on Earth as one of the world’s most powerful nations occupies their land, takes the resources and seems hell-bent on transforming them into Euro-Canadians.”Survival’s report noted that between 1990 and 1998, the Innu suffered a suicide rate of 178 per 100,000, nearly 13 times the rate for the rest of Canada. The same year, Survival International, one of the three charities which are the beneficiaries of this year’s Independent Christmas Appeal, published a scathing report called Canada’s Tibet – the Killing of the Innu.”In the tundra of the Labrador peninsula, a tragedy is being played out,” the report said. Today, they have houses with running water and there are toys for their children at Christmas.
Thanks for this change in circumstance are due to Catholic missionaries who, in the Fifties and Sixties, concluded that the Innu should join the mainstream of society, and to the Canadian government which has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into settling them. But the Innu are not giving thanks.Something seems to have terribly wrong in the process of assimilating the Innu, who number 20,000 and whose homeland, known to them as Nitassinan, is a massive and remote territory of sub-arctic spruce, lakes, rivers and rocky barrens in Labrador and Quebec. Theirs is a community racked by violence, addiction to alcohol and glue-sniffing and one of the worst suicide rates in the world.Only in the past few years has the plight of the Innu, who are unrelated to the Inuit Eskimos farther north, come to the attention of the international community. In 1999, the UN Human Rights Committee described their plight as the “most pressing issue facing Canadians”.

Life is surely as comfortable as it has ever been for the Innu Indians of Labrador province in eastern Canada. Only a few decades ago, they were still living in tents and roaming their lands year-round living off caribou and fish. He said: ‘Smell – does it smell good enough for you in there?’ “Mr Jackson protested his innocence, saying the allegations of abuse against a cancer-stricken 12-year-old guest at his Neverland ranch in central California were the product of dirty minds. He showed his interviewer, from CBS’s Sixty Minutes programme, a photograph of an angry welt on his right wrist, which he said was caused by the police.”They manhandled me very roughly,” Mr Jackson said “My shoulder is dislocated, literally. It’s hurting me very badly.”The Santa Barbara district attorney’s office, which has filed nine felony counts of child molestation and administration of an “intoxicating agent” to a minor against the 45-year-old singer, did not respond to Mr Jackson’s specific allegations but said before Christmas that all reports of mistreatment were “untrue”.Of the lavatory incident, Mr Jackson said: “Once I went in the restroom, they locked me in there for, like, 45 minutes.There was doo-doo, faeces thrown all over the walls, the floor, the ceiling And it stunk so bad Then one of the policemen came by the window And he made a sarcastic remark. With three weeks to go before his formal arraignment on child molestation charges, Michael Jackson has gone on the offensive, accusing police of manhandling him and locking him in a filthy bathroom for 45 minutes when he gave himself up for arrest last month.
In a long television interview aired on Sunday night, Mr Jackson said the Santa Barbara sheriff’s deputies who handcuffed him at the county jail had yanked his arms “too tight behind my back” and dislocated his shoulder.