When we talk about colonization and genocide in the Americas, we are often met with the same statement:
“This happened hundreds of years ago, get over it”.
Sure, it started centuries ago. But it didn’t end hundreds of years ago, or one hundred, or even 50.
When we talk about these issues, we don’t just mean small pox-infected blankets, or forced migration. We don’t just mean settlements, bounties on our heads, the physical attacks on our villages. We don’t just mean the residential schools, or the laws that banned our traditional languages and practices.
We mean:
- The Sixties Scoop, when Indigenous children were ripped from their communities to be placed with white families.
- Residential schools, the last of which only closed in 1996, where children were forced to give up their languages, culture, identity, and were abused horribly.
- The Millennium Scoop. The child welfare system in Canada is still ripping children from Indigenous communities. Despite only making up about 8% of the age demographic, Indigenous youths under 14 account for more than half of the foster system. (x)
- 80% of reserves in Canada have median incomes that fall below the poverty line (x)
- A vast number of reserves in Canada do not have clean drinking water (x)
- Indigenous rights and land titles are routinely ignored in order to create pipelines and sell off resources. (x)
- According to Indigenous women’s groups, there are approximately 4,000 cases of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. The RCMP only acknowledge about 1200 of these. (x)
- “Between 1997 and 2000, the homicide rate for Indigenous women was nearly seven times higher than the rate for non-Indigenous women.” (x)
- A man literally confessed to the murder of Tina Fontaine, a 15 year old Indigenous girl, and he was acquitted. (x)
- Colten Boushie, a Cree man, was shot multiple times by a Saskatchewan farmer. A jury featuring no Indigenous people declared his murderer not guilty. (x)
- The Starlight Tours. Saskatoon Police routinely took intoxicated Indigenous men outside of the city in sub-zero temperatures and left them to find their way back. Several froze to death. The Saskatoon Police were caught deleting the article about this from Wikipedia. (x)
- Suicide and self injury are the leading cause of death for Indigenous men under 44. In addition, the rate of suicide in Indigenous women is seven times higher than that of non-Indigenous women, and the rate of suicide among Indigenous men is 5.25 times higher than that of non-Indigenous men. Suicide rates for Inuit youth are among the highest in the world, at 11 times the national average. (x) In certain communities, like Attawapiskat, suicides reach epidemic levels. (x)
These are just a few of the many legacies of colonization that impact us today.
This is colonialism. This is genocide.
It never stopped.
(please add more to this list)
Update:
- Starlight Tours have been recorded in Calgary as recently as mid-October 2018. Facebook posts about it have been vanishing from accounts soon after reposting.
Also: Indigenous women have come forward with their experiences of forced sterilization. Not just 50 years ago but 2017. And not just one or two. There are 60 women part of a recent class action lawsuit against Saskatoon’s Health Region.
Another update for those not following recent events:
- The Canadian government and RCMP carried out a heavily militarized attack on Wet’suwet’en people defending their unceded territory from an illegal pipeline this week.
This is land that does not belong to the goverment. It is land that according to the government’s own laws, and more importantly Wet’suwet’en laws, can’t be taken by Canada.
This is colonization in action.
Can we also talk about how the RCMP murdered sled-dogs en mass in the 60s to destroy the Inuit way of life and force them into cities. [X] The Canadian Film board even did a documentary about it.
Or when the RCMP raided the Listuguj Mi'kmaq First Nation in 1981. [X] While the Canadian Film Board reluctantly agreed to fund Abenaki filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin’s film about the raids, they wouldn’t let her interview “any white people” (which she did anyway, because fuck them).
Or when they brought in snipers, assault rifles, and dogs to “serve an injunction” again the Mi’kmaq anti-shale gas encampment protesting Texas-based SWN Resources “exploration” around Elsipogtog in 2013.
Aside from the two warriors who were jailed without charge for nine months, the province also sought out legal damages against others involved as a scare tactic. One of them was land defender Annie Clair.
Not to mention the fact that Boat Harbour is still a toxic stew that’s been killing the people Pictou Landing First Nation for decades. I attended an information session with some members of the reserve back in 2014, all the “strange and rare cancers” that people keep getting, witnesses breaking down crying as they talked about the slow but seemingly inevitable loss of loved ones.
I’m a settler myself, though people in my family through marriage are Mi’kmaq and I want to do what I can to help support them and the peoples of the coast. My father grew up poor in Pictou county, and said that when the wind turned you could smell the death coming from the mill.
I know this is systemic, and bigger than any one person, but when I express my particular repugnance for Trudeau, who posed in the teepees and wore the headdresses, and promised (like they always promise) that things will be better this time the predictable liberal response of “what!? so you want Canada to have it’s own TRuMp!?” feels vile.
If you’ve been listening, for many indigenous people in Canada, every prime minister has been a Trump to them, the only difference seems to be whether they smile or frown while they do it….