Treatment of national chief and her headdress by Air Canada ‘scary’, ‘humiliating’, Woodhouse Nepinak says

By Odette Auger  Local Journalism Initiative Reporter ​When Assembly of First Nations National Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak was checking in for her Air Canada flight from Montreal to Fredericton, N.B April 24, the ceremonial headdress she was carrying in its case was not a problem. It wasn’t a problem when she boarded the flight, either. “Then I put my headdress under the chair in front of me, as usual. Just standard stuff, right?” It became a problem when a flight attendant made it a problem. “That’s when it escalated,” she told Windspeaker.com. Another flight attendant joined in and tried to tell Woodhouse Nepinak that she needed to put the sacred item into checked luggage in the underbelly of the plane with the cargo. The headdress had been bestowed on the…

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