Text
August 11, 2021
7,041 notes

dyskomike:

theuntoaster:

mon-t-real:

thespacephantom:

goldhornsandblackwool:

oohhh my god

so you know how the DV caloric reqs on food are like notoriously low? Well…turns out settlers in Canada starved Native children in their ‘boarding schools’ to find out what the minimum requirement to sustain life was during their ‘nutrition experiments’

this is so filthy. this is so absolutely soulless like it’s already so bad but if anything people absolutely need to know these children’s stories bc this is real colonial history.

holy shit.

Canada used hungry indigenous children to study malnutrition

@allthecanadianpolitics @politicsofcanada

To me, the term settlers carries the implication of “this happened a long time ago, in the 1800s”.

I want to clarify that this was a lot more recent than that. We’re talking the 1940s and 1950s. People from this time are still alive.

It’s absolutely horrific and something they definitely need to teach in schools more, so we can understand exactly WHY Indigenous people’s rights are such an important topic in Canadian politics

The Legacy of the Bloody British Empire and its racist Commonwealth

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Tags: tw genocide tw racism

Text
July 17, 2021
1,992 notes

residential schools

marywhal:

as a cree person who worked in residential school research for multiple years, i want to emphasize to non-indigenous people that educating yourself about residential schools is better than relying on your indigenous friends/coworkers/colleagues/classmates to do the educating for you.

it is also important that you don’t get all of your information from social media. i see non-indigenous people, particularly canadians, reblogging and retweeting a lot of posts about residential schools and it always makes me wonder “are you doing anything else?” if you want somewhere else to get information and you’re not sure where to start, read the truth and reconcilation reports. even the executive summary is going to provide you with a lot of additional information and education.

you can find all of the trc’s reports, including the report on missing children and unmarked burials, online, for free, here: http://www.trc.ca/about-us/trc-findings.html.

if it’s easier for you to listen to the report, there is a video series of people reading the executive summary that was created in 2015, when the reports first came out here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCffE1UIqX23NvDpVXipSVVA.

the news coming out about unmarked burials at residential schools is tragic, but i don’t know any indigenous people who are surprised by it, particularly those of us who have family members who attended residential school or for survivors themselves. there is a reason we use the word survivor. i’ve been to the cemetery on the site of the school my family attended. i’ve seen graves that are only marked because our communities marked them, graves with no names attached because the church and government officials working at the school didn’t think these children were important enough to have their names recorded.

if you are non-indigenous and you’re upset/angry/horrified by the number of unmarked burials coming out at these schools, i am begging you to do more than share social media posts. we have been talking about this for decades. we have always known. educate yourself, because the resources are free and they’re out there.

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Tags: tw genocide tw residential schools

Link
July 15, 2021
368 notes
This entire country is haunted

allthecanadianpolitics:

Alicia Elliott is a Mohawk writer and author of the award-winning book A Mind Spread Out on the Ground.

A mere 15-minute drive from where I now type this in Brantford, Ont., is the Mohawk Institute, one of the oldest residential schools in Canada. It’s a building whose purpose—which, in Sir John A. Macdonald’s words, was to withdraw Indigenous children “as much as possible from parental influence” so they could “acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men”—had been established for 36 more years than Canada as an independent nation had even existed. Remember this.

In 2016, I went to an art and performance installation on the grounds of the Mohawk Institute, otherwise known to the hundreds of Indigenous students who were trapped within its walls over its 139 years as “the Mush Hole.” They called it such because, despite the students working on nearby farms without pay as soon as school was done, thus furnishing the staff dining table with fresh, delicious produce, the children themselves had nothing more to eat than mush. Sometimes the mush had worms crawling in it. It didn’t matter. That was what they were fed. Remember this, too.

The art exhibit was called The Mush Hole Project. Survivors of the school acted as tour guides, leading us through the still-standing building—the places where the children bunked, the places where they were “taught.” Our tour guide was a woman from my reserve, Six Nations of the Grand River. Her daughter and granddaughter were on the tour with us. This was the first time either of them had heard their mother/grandmother speak of her experiences. She spoke in few words about the physical and emotional pain of having her language beaten out of her. Her daughter later spoke of how she and her own daughter were learning Kanien’kéha. The woman who had attended the school said nothing. It was as if, along with English, she had been taught the Christian tradition of silence. These days, I’m recognizing it’s also a Canadian tradition.

As soon as the tour took us into the boiler room, I felt physically sick. My stomach dropped and my head started to hurt and I focused on the words coming from our tour guide’s mouth: that this was where many Indigenous children were taken by staff to be abused, because the sound of the boiler would better mask their screams. Don’t even bother trying to forget this.

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Tags: tw residential schools tw harm to children tw genocide

Link
June 24, 2021
66 notes
Ottawa will boost funding for residential school burial searches, says Indigenous Services minister

allthecanadianpolitics:

The federal government will substantially increase funding to permit Indigenous communities to search former residential school sites for unmarked graves, Indigenous Services Minister Marc Miller said today.

Miller said the $27.1 million already committed for searches was an initial figure and will grow.

“We know it will be a lot,” Miller told CBC News.

“Clearly, given the demands that are coming in, have come in, and knowing what may be out there, there will be a need for more financial backing and we’ll obviously be there.”

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Tags: tw residential schools tw genocide tw harm to children

Photoset
May 30, 2021
13,764 notes

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Tags: tw genocide the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there