DIR Return Create A Forum - Home
---------------------------------------------------------
True Left
HTML https://trueleft.createaforum.com
---------------------------------------------------------
*****************************************************
DIR Return to: Colonial Era
*****************************************************
#Post#: 7078--------------------------------------------------
Residential schools
By: 90sRetroFan Date: June 11, 2021, 3:40 am
---------------------------------------------------------
HTML https://www.yahoo.com/news/canadas-residential-schools-stole-childhoods-152832740.html
[quote]Tortured, beaten, and forced to live a regimented
lifestyle that denied their indigenous culture -- these three
siblings are survivors of Canadian residential schools.
...
Linda recalls how their long hair, which often had spiritual
significance, was cut upon arrival.
"And they cut my hair off, and I looked at my hair… and it was
so devastating. And then they washed us, put this DDT [chemical
insecticide] on us, and I had headaches for a long time, and
sometimes still have headaches."
...
I used to throw up, and my cousin would throw up too, and then
they'd make us eat our vomit. And for many years, I still have
ulcers because of that."
...
The schools operated between 1831 and 1996 and removed about
150,000 indigenous children from their families.
...
"Because I was young, so I got tortured, I got beaten up and you
name it as a young child."
...
Pope Francis said on Sunday he was pained by last month's
discovery, but he did not apologize.[/quote]
#Post#: 7250--------------------------------------------------
Re: Canada residential schools
By: 90sRetroFan Date: June 22, 2021, 12:02 am
---------------------------------------------------------
HTML https://www.yahoo.com/news/kamloops-indigenous-burial-children-215-national-indigenous-peoples-day-170421732.html
[quote]It was only recently, by mere chance, that Tori Cress
found documentation to prove what she had known for a long time:
that her mother had been forced to attend a day school in her
youth, where she experienced abuse from which she continues to
heal today.
Until then, Cress, an Anishnaabe and Pottawatome Kwe from
Beausoleil First Nation and the co-founder of Idle No
More-Ontario, had been dealing with feelings of “rage and anger”
after hearing the devastating news of 215 Indigenous children —
some as young as three years old — found in a mass grave in a
former residential school. In late May, the Tk'emlúps te
Secwépemc First Nation had announced the finding at the Kamloops
Indian Residential School, in British Columbia, during a survey
of its grounds, according to a CBC report.
Unable to bear the countless stories that people shared of
parents who’d fallen victims to Canada's Indian Residential
School system and the ongoing trauma that’s part of it, Cress
stayed off social media.
But something clicked the day she found her mother’s name in the
day school attendance records — “in black and white” — with a
note beside it, reading: “disciplined.” Cress says it was then
that she overcame her anger as she began to put a lot of things
about her “estranged” mother into perspective.
“What they call discipline...I know is abuse,” she said.
“All of these things in my life were making sense to me, and the
trauma that (my mother) grew up in. She was born into grief and
trauma and mourning, just like I was, and just like her mother
was.”
According to University of British Columbia research, “like
residential schools, (Indian Day Schools) were places (where)
students experienced many types of abuse, including but not
limited to physical, verbal, and sexual.” The main difference
was that they returned to their homes and communities at night.
A Queen’s University Gazette review of a historical biography
titled Spirit of the Grassroots People: Seeking Justice for
Indigenous Survivors of Canada’s Colonial Education System,
estimates there were 200,000 Indigenous children “forced” into
these schools from the “mid-1800s until 2000.”
The Kamloops residential school where the children were found
operated until 1969, at which time the federal government took
it over from the Catholic Church and turned it to a day school
until 1978.
...
The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation estimates more
than 150,000 children were forced into residential schools. And
the TRC itself had requested $1.5 million to uncover more mass
graves as early as 2009, which the federal government of Stephen
Harper denied.
...
According to Morgan, many undergrad and graduate students are
“well aware of the history of residential schools.” However,
there remains a strong generalized tendency among many to
dismiss it as “an awful aberration” rather than to understand it
as part of a “larger pattern of structural and systemic
colonialism and racism within our history.”
Thinking of residential schools as the “products of a few racist
politicians,” she insists, misses the forest for the trees.
“It’s good (that) people are questioning (John A.) MacDonald’s
legacy,” she said, referring to the ongoing movement to remove
statues of controversial colonial figures, including Canada’s
first prime minister.
“But to see it all as emanating from one person doesn’t take
into account the fact that there are larger structures and
processes that were put in place to dispossess people.”
...
Cress says the only way for these children’s deaths to bring
about concrete change is for Canadians to “lean into their
discomfort” of knowing the history of Canada and the ongoing
effects of settler-colonialism.
Wilful ignorance, she says, is no excuse.
...
After publicly expressing grief and heartbreak at the news just
days after the announcement from Kamloops, BC, Federal Liberal
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau vowed “concrete action.” He
promised “many, many discussions to be had in the coming days
and weeks about how we can best support these communities and
get to the truth.”
Schools and buildings are likewise flying flags at half-mast,
and candlelight vigils are being held. The government has also
established a National Indian Residential School Crisis Line for
people to call in, and more than 220,000 people are calling on
the government to declare a national day of mourning, according
to a petition on change.org.
But after being on the frontlines all this time, Cress sees it
all as “showmanship, not action.” The conversations and
discussions have been had, reports have been produced and calls
to action have been made to no avail, she says.
What is needed is action.
“And that equals dollars. That equals resources.
Stop...(extracting) our resources and go extract our children
from their unmarked graves. That’s the healing we need,” she
said.[/quote]
I agree that what is needed is action. I disagree that action
equals dollars. Serious action equals eliminating all
colonialist bloodlines from Canada. No matter how many dollars
you have, you will not be able to pay racists to voluntarily
stop reproducing. Only state control over reproduction can
achieve this.
(But if you have dollars, spend them on:
HTML https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-false-left/firearms/<br
/>
which at least have the potential to do some attrition.)
#Post#: 7346--------------------------------------------------
Re: Canada residential schools
By: 90sRetroFan Date: June 30, 2021, 10:25 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
HTML https://www.yahoo.com/news/relatives-went-catholic-school-native-102336503.html
[quote]My relatives went to a Catholic school for Native
children. It was a place of horrors
There is so much mourning Native people have yet to do. The full
magnitude of Native suffering has yet to be entirely understood,
especially when it comes to the nightmarish legacies of American
Indian boarding schools. The purpose of the schools was
“civilization”, but, as I have written elsewhere, boarding
schools served to provide access to Native land, by breaking up
Native families and holding children hostage so their nations
would cede more territory. And one of the primary benefactors of
the boarding school system is the Catholic church, which is
today the world’s largest non-governmental landowner, with
roughly 177 million acres of property throughout the globe. Part
of the evidence of how exactly the church acquired its wealth in
North America is literally being unearthed, and it exists in
stories of the Native children whose lives it stole, which
includes my own family.
Last month, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation made a
grisly discovery of 215 children’s remains at a burial site next
to the former Kamloops Indian residential school in British
Columbia. The news sent shockwaves through Indian Country. On
Tuesday, the US interior secretary, Deb Haaland, announced that
her department would lead an investigation into “the loss of
human life and lasting consequences” of federal Indian boarding
schools. Although it’s unclear whether the scope of the
investigation will include church-run schools, it should because
many of the Catholic-run schools received federal trust money
set aside for Native education.
On Thursday morning, a relative calls me as more terrible news
breaks: the Cowessess First Nation has discovered 751 unmarked
graves at the site of the former Marieval Indian residential
school in Saskatchewan, Canada. Both Marieval and Kamloops began
as Catholic-run schools.
For my relative (who wishes to remain anonymous) the death and
grief came after he left St Joseph’s Indian school in
Chamberlain, South Dakota, which he attended from 1968 to 1977.
“A lot of people ended up killing themselves,” he says of
friends and classmates who attended the Catholic-run school. My
uncle, also a survivor of St Joseph’s, took his own life at the
age of 23 in 1987, when I was just two.
My relative calls St Joseph’s “a smorgasbord” for pedophiles and
rapists who preyed on and terrorized Native children. He
describes beatings and nights of terror as priests took their
pick of the children as they slept. The abuse was worse for the
girls, who were sometimes impregnated by their rapists, he tells
me. His experience was not unique and has been documented
elsewhere by journalists and scholars.
Despite the evidence, there is an active conspiracy to silence
survivors and whitewash history. South Dakota passed laws to
prevent survivors from seeking damages against the church.
Eight plaintiffs sued the Sioux Falls diocese in 2010 for
alleged rape and sexual abuse they had experienced in the 1970s
at the hands of multiple members of the clergy and one staff
member. (The photograph of one of the men still hangs on the
wall of St Joseph’s in the hallway of its school museum, visible
to the children and visitors who pass it.)
Just days before the survivors were set to go to court in 2010,
the then Republican governor of South Dakota, Mike Rounds (now a
US senator), signed a bill into law prohibiting anyone 40 years
or older from recovering damages from institutions responsible
for their abuse, except from individual perpetrators themselves.
The act crushed the lawsuit, effectively shielding the Catholic
church from any responsibility or accountability.
The bill was written and proposed by Steven Smith, a Chamberlain
attorney who, according to the Argus Leader, was representing
the Priests of the Sacred Heart, the founders of St Joseph’s
Indian school, in several sexual abuse cases at the time. Smith
accused the survivors of being motivated by money and costing
the church undue expenses in legal fees. The lawsuits were a
“ticket out of squalor” for the survivors, Smith told the
Huffington Post in 2011.
...
I ask my my relative if money motivated him to take up the
lawsuit against the church. He lets out a sigh and tells me how
his lifelong friend who was a survivor of St Joseph’s recently
died. He hints the death was related to addiction. “No one cares
about Indians,” he tells me. “That’s why they got away with what
they did.” It’s also easy to dismiss the survivors of abuse who
live with the lifelong impacts. A church tactic is hoping the
Native survivors will just vanish.
The last time I visited St Joseph’s was in 2019. Pictures of the
clergy and staff accused of rape and sexual abuse still hung on
the walls of the school’s museum, as if the institution were
either proud or in denial of its history – I couldn’t quite
tell. I tried to imagine the school from the perspective of my
relative as a young child, and all I felt was a deep, silent
anger.
Nowhere was there an acknowledgment of the stories like my
relative’s. It was as if he and other children like him were
just ghosts haunting the hallways.
I ask my relative what justice would look like. There’s a pause.
He tells me he’s not interested in apologies. The school, he
says, was a “child brothel” when he was there, and it deserves
to be remembered for such atrocities. He would like to see St
Joseph’s “turned into a school run for and by Native people” not
for the profit of the church.[/quote]
NEVER FORGIVE. NEVER FORGET.
What justice would look like? This done to all Catholic
colonialists (including Francis) would be a good start:
HTML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captives_in_American_Indian_Wars
[quote]Common torture techniques included burning the captive,
which was done one hot coal at a time, rather than on firewood
pyres; beatings with switches or sticks, jabs from sharp sticks
as well as genital mutilation and flaying while still alive.
Captives' fingernails were ripped out. Their fingers were
broken, then twisted and yanked by children. Captives were made
to eat pieces of their own flesh, and were scalped and skinned
alive. Such was the fate of Jamestown Governor John Ratcliffe.
The genitalia of male captives were the focus of considerable
attention, culminating with the dissection of the genitals one
slice at a time. To make the torture last longer, the Native
Americans and the First Nations would revive captives with rest
periods during which time they were given food and water.
Tortures typically began on the lower limbs, then gradually
spread to the arms, then the torso. The Native Americans and the
First Nations spoke of "caressing" the captives gently at first,
which meant that the initial tortures were designed to cause
pain, but only minimal bodily harm. By these means, the
execution of a captive, especially an adult male, could take
several days and nights.[13][/quote]
#Post#: 7382--------------------------------------------------
Re: Canada residential schools
By: 90sRetroFan Date: July 2, 2021, 10:22 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
HTML https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/01/this-canada-day-lets-remember-this-country-was-built-on-genocide
[quote]People across the country are waking up to the reality
that Canada is a country built on the violent dispossession of
Indigenous peoples. The horrifying reports of unmarked graves of
children at residential “schools” in Kamloops, British Columbia,
Brandon, Manitoba, and most recently Cowessess First Nation in
Saskatchewan have shocked many Canadians and others around the
world. However, these were not discoveries, but confirmations of
what we knew all along: Canada was built on genocide.
...
This isn’t ancient history. Nowhere is this more true than in
Nunavut, the territory I represent in Canada’s parliament. Until
around the 1950s, Inuit lived as they had for thousands of
years. Then the Canadian state expanded its presence in the
north and colonized the Arctic as part of their drive for
natural resources and to claim sovereignty over lands and
waters. We were forced into squalid settlements, sled dogs were
shot by the Mounties, and children were sent to residential
schools that were meant to eradicate Indigenous culture. These
joint projects of church and state were hotspots for child abuse
and sexual assault carried out by priests and school
administrators, most of whom have escaped justice for their
crimes.
...
These are the things I think of when I think of Canada Day. A
history of violence that is not over. This is why I can’t
imagine celebrating this country until so many things change.
Indigenous people can come to their own conclusions about how
they mark this date, but for those of you who are settlers on
these lands I am urging you to take this day to learn, to
reflect and most importantly to act.
Before I was elected as an MP, I gave a speech in the House of
Commons as part of a mock parliament for young women. I spoke of
the toll that the suicide crisis has taken on my community and
of my lost friends, classmates and teammates and asked, “where
are our non-Indigenous allies?” As I ask that question again
today, I see more of you and more Canadians from all walks of
life waking up and showing up. This is a good shift. Indigenous
peoples cannot and should not shoulder these burdens alone. They
were imposed on us by Canada, and we need Canadians to play an
active role in dismantling them. That means staying angry and
standing alongside us to amplify our voices. Above all else, it
means listening to us and actually changing things when we tell
you that we are hurting.
A good place to start is by getting familiar with the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission and the Qikiqtani Truth Commission.
Talk to your friends and neighbours about the need for real
Indigenous justice in Canada. When Indigenous groups organize
protests and marches, show up and support them. And make sure
your elected representatives know that they will never be
re-elected if they are silent in the face of injustice. Sooner
or later, when we have an election in this country, refuse to
vote for political leaders who talk the talk without walking the
walk.[/quote]
Where are your allies? Many of them are trying to immigrate to
Canada from other former Western colonies around the world. Let
them in so they can start helping you!
#Post#: 7434--------------------------------------------------
Re: Canada residential schools
By: 90sRetroFan Date: July 6, 2021, 10:21 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
HTML https://www.yahoo.com/news/native-children-didn-t-lose-102025259.html
[quote]Native children didn’t ‘lose’ their lives at residential
schools. Their lives were stolen[/quote]
Yes! And by which civilization?
[quote]Many of us understand everyday Canadian schools
themselves to be violent institutions of assimilation and
colonization. In my predominantly Indigenous urban elementary
school in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, I grew up singing O Canada
and God Save the Queen at assemblies. In the lunchroom, Johnny
Appleseed, a biblical song about a Christian god’s benevolence,
was to be recited before we were allowed to eat our
school-provided meals. Still, the terms “residential school” –
and the US equivalent, “boarding school” – are deeply
inadequate. These “residential schools”, “day schools”, and
“boarding schools” were prisons. These were forced labour
camps.[/quote]
See also:
HTML https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-false-left/childcare-issues/msg6188/#msg6188
[quote]I recall hearing of Cree people, including small
children, forced to work on sugar beet farms in brutal summer
heat. This was a common practice from the 1940s to at least the
1980s: farmers lured dispossessed and hungry Indigenous people
into seasonal labor with false promises, then forced the workers
to labor 12-14 hour days with little or no pay. They slept in
trucks, tents or empty grain bins. If they ventured into nearby
towns, they were chased away with bats. If they tried to leave,
their children might be taken away.
Some of the stories we are told about residential schooling
prisons involve Native children digging graves for other
children. Rarely did our ancestors receive proper burials or
grave markers. The soils of these lands have always known our
hands, as gardeners, as workers; these lands hold our bodies and
the bodies of our ancestors. The soil that lies underneath
so-called Canada has been hell and it has been refuge.
One thing is clear: Native children’s lives are never “lost”;
they are deliberately and violently stolen. Similarly, the lands
of Indigenous people – from Canada to the US and beyond – are
never “lost”; they have been and continue to be forcibly
colonized. The words we use matter for Native life because these
words define the past, the present, and the possible. Reckoning
with the gentle language Canadians have been taught to use to
describe the violence of empire is one part of the process of
undoing colonization.
In our communities, the accounting of Indigenous death feels
relentless. We hear and see and feel the growing toll of graves
uncovered: ever-higher numbers recited seemingly hundreds of
times daily on nearly every Canadian news network. Endless
repetitions of the phone numbers of Residential Schooling Crisis
lines to connect the grieving with mental health counselors.
None of it is enough.
I refuse to play the numbers game. Our grief and our lives are
not reducible to numbers or statistics. As the Twitter user
@awahihte put it, “Kamloops is not a unit of measurement.” And
to whose gaze are we appealing when we repeat these numbers over
and over and over, hoping to evoke empathy from a settler state
that cannot feel?[/quote]
No, you are appealing to the gaze of OTHER COLONIZED PEOPLES
FROM AROUND THE WORLD who experienced the same (if not worse) at
the hands of the same Western colonial empires. Only together
can we kill Western civilization.
[quote]Meanwhile, as Indigenous people, we are struck in the
heart by those numbers, every single time. There is simply no
calculus that can account for the lives of each child stolen by
colonialism’s violence – all the moments of joy, curiosity, play
and learning that make childhood such a wondrous time; these
things are immeasurable and immaterial. The lived experience of
Indigenous childhood is irreducible to any European notion of
property, and this is precisely why it is a threat to the
colonial order.[/quote]
Exactly, which is why demanding financial reparations is the
wrong approach, one that degrades the victims by implying that
they can be violated so long as the price is right. Our only
demand should be for elimination of colonialist bloodlines and
of Western civilization itself.
[quote]Since time immemorial, many Indigenous peoples around the
world have used fire to rejuvenate the land and restore order to
the natural world. The lesson is that sometimes, things must
burn for the soil to heal and become healthy once more. As
monuments and statues to colonial figures are toppled, and as
Black and Indigenous communities continue to resist and heal,
another world is becoming possible. In the next world that we
are building on these lands our ancestors knew so well, no child
will have their formative years violently stolen away by
colonialism. They will be free. We will be free.[/quote]
And Western civilization will be dead. But talking alone will
not achieve this. Therefore make sure every victim of
colonialism owns:
HTML https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-false-left/firearms/
#Post#: 7610--------------------------------------------------
Re: Canada residential schools
By: Zea_mays Date: July 20, 2021, 8:59 am
---------------------------------------------------------
[quote] 'Burn it all down': Head of B.C. civil liberties group
resigns over tweet about church fires
The head of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association —
one of the most significant civil rights groups in the country —
has left her job following an uproar after a social media post
that seemed to celebrate the burning of Catholic churches.
In late June, Harsha Walia quote-tweeted a Vice news report
regarding Catholic churches that had been burned, following the
discoveries of hundreds of unmarked graves near the sites of
former residential schools.
“Burn it all down,” Walia wrote. [/quote]
HTML https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/canada/burn-it-all-down-head-of-bc-civil-liberties-group-resigns-over-tweet-about-church-fires/ar-AAMjKmb
[quote]Ten churches have been vandalised in Alberta, Canada, in
attacks that police have linked to anger over historic
injustices against indigenous people.[/quote]
HTML https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57690737.amp
HTML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_school_gravesites
[quote]“It is readily acknowledged that Indian children lose
their natural resistance to illness by habitating so closely in
these schools, and that they die at a much higher rate than in
their villages. But this alone does not justify a change in the
policy of this Department, which is being geared towards the
final solution of our Indian Problem." -Duncan Campbell Scott,
former Superintendent of Indian Education (1909-1913) and Deputy
Superintendent General of Indian Affairs (1913-1932)[/quote]
I wonder what the SJWs vandalizing and burning these churches
think about the SJWs who vandalized and burned synagogues 90
years ago.
#Post#: 9133--------------------------------------------------
Re: Colonial Crimes
By: guest55 Date: September 30, 2021, 12:19 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
Thousands of Kids Died in Residential Schools, Now They're Being
Found
[quote]The discovery of more than 200 unmarked graves of
Indigenous children at a former residential school in Canada
exposed the horrific scale of abuses that took place inside the
country’s residential school system. Now, the country is
experiencing a reckoning.[/quote]
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVogX0-5RLk
#Post#: 9294--------------------------------------------------
Re: Canada residential schools
By: 90sRetroFan Date: October 8, 2021, 10:23 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
[img]
HTML https://decolonialatlas.files.wordpress.com/2021/09/residential-schools-who-when-and-where.png?w=1024[/img]
HTML https://decolonialatlas.wordpress.com/2021/10/06/canadas-residential-schools-who-when-and-where/
#Post#: 12331--------------------------------------------------
Re: Diplomatic decolonization
By: guest55 Date: March 28, 2022, 8:33 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
Métis delegates hold news conference in Rome following meeting
with Pope Francis – March 28, 2022
[quote]Métis National Council delegates speak with reporters in
Rome, Italy, following their meeting with Pope Francis at the
Vatican. Speaking with reporters are Cassidy Caron (president of
the Métis National Council), Mitchell Case (Region 4 councillor
with the Metis Nation of Ontario), Pixie Wells (president of the
Fraser Valley Métis Association). Also taking part are
Archbishop Donald J. Bolen (archdiocese of Regina) and Reverend
Raymond Poisson (president of the Canadian Conference of
Catholic Bishops). First Nations, Métis, and Inuit delegations
that include elders, knowledge keepers, and residential school
survivors are participating in a series of meetings with the
Pope this week as part of an effort to secure a papal apology
for the Catholic Church’s role in Canada’s residential school
system.[/quote]
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgvPuA3EBgI
#Post#: 12751--------------------------------------------------
Re: Canada residential schools
By: 90sRetroFan Date: April 12, 2022, 3:31 am
---------------------------------------------------------
HTML https://us.yahoo.com/news/apology-fell-short-pope-francis-135333684.html
[quote]The Apology that Fell Short: Pope Francis Did Not Go Far
Enough
...
The pope’s apology actually specifies those responsible for all
the abuse to say “a number of Catholics.”
A few paragraphs later, he actually defends the “good and decent
believers, who in the name of the faith, and with respect, love
and kindness, have enriched your history with the Gospel.”
The apology did not go far enough and fell short of admission by
the Catholic Church of wrongdoing on its part.
While condemning a number of Catholics, he suggests the good
that the “good and decent believers” somehow placates the
evil—that included physical, emotional, sexual abuse—done by
others.
“To be honest the apology by #Pontifex reads more like a
carefully worded statement made by the CEO of a major
corporation after announcing the settlement of a class-action
lawsuit in which the company paid a fine and admitted bad things
happened but claimed zero institutional responsibility,” Native
American author and activist Mark Charles (Navajo) wrote on his
Facebook page.
The apology was lacking. It would have been more meaningful had
Pope Francis said he was apologizing for the entire Catholic
Church on behalf of all Catholics.[/quote]
I agree. Nothing has changed:
HTML https://trueleft.createaforum.com/colonial-era/colonialism-as-viewed-by-westerners/msg12408/#msg12408
So when do we destroy the Vatican?
*****************************************************
DIR Next Page