On our collective aboriginal ignorance.
Most of us know more about the Middle East crisis, the Rwandan genocide, the earthquake in Haiti, the struggles of Syrian refugees, the Eurozone crisis and Taylor Swift’s love life than we do about aboriginal anything.
At the last WeDoSomething Montreal fun-raiser for the Native Women’s Shelter, we admitted that we were until recently, ignorant of the cultural genocide (the official term used in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report) committed by our government against indigenous people for over 150 years. What is most shocking is that it took us and perhaps many of you to realize just how ignorant we’ve been.
Our government practiced outright racism amounting to what is now agreed to be cultural genocide, and we didn’t learn about it in school — amazingly, we still don’t. Can you name one well-known indigenous figure? Do most people realize that Carey Price is an indigenous hockey player?
It took headlines like Nine more suicide attempts by Attawapiskat residents since Tuesday, chief says to clog my Facebook feed for me to start paying attention to what is happening to the indigenous community. The rates of suicide crisis faced by Inuit and native communities is unheard of anywhere else in the world. Yet somehow my child’s school curriculum requires that she learn the names of her computer’s components, but close to nothing about aboriginal history — and certainly nothing that explains how things got so bad - such a residential schools, or the Sixties Scoop.
“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”
― George Orwell, 1984
What our children don’t learn about, they simply won’t care about. If something is not on their radar then it’s almost as though it never happened. That means they won’t work to make things better, because our kids have no clue how bad they are in the first place. It’s historical negationism — another form of cultural genocide. In Germany, denying the Holocaust is punishable by law. In Canada, we don’t need to deny our darkest atrocities, we simply aren’t taught them, and fixing that problem is one of the central tenets of the beautifully written Truth and Reconciliation Commission report:
“Reconciliation requires that a new vision, based on a commitment to mutual respect, be developed. It also requires an understanding that the most harmful impacts of residential schools have been the loss of pride and self-respect of Aboriginal people, and the lack of respect that non-Aboriginal people have been raised to have for their Aboriginal neighbours. Reconciliation is not an Aboriginal problem; it is a Canadian one. Virtually all aspects of Canadian society may need to be reconsidered.”
We want our children to be educated better than we were, and better than our founder’s former classmate and now PM Justin Trudeau was, when he admitted that the history teacher at their private school skipped aboriginal history completely, because it was “boring’’.
Today the news is horrifically bad: headline after headline announces sometimes dozens of suicide attempts in the furthest corners of this country, where past governments have shoved indigenous nations like dirty laundry.
Many of us care and want to help, but feel powerless. We are anything but powerless. Our power is visible in those tragic headlines. The last residential school was closed as recently as 1995, when we were watching Braveheart and singing to Seal.
‘’The system was designed as an immersion program: in many schools, children were prohibited from (and sometimes punished for) speaking their own languages or practising their own faiths. In the 20th century, former students of the schools have claimed that officials and teachers had practised cultural genocide and ethnocide. Because of the relatively isolated nature of the schools, there was an elevated rate of physical and sexual abuse. Corporal punishment was often justified by a belief that it was the only way to “save souls”, “civilize” the savage, or punish runaways who, if they became injured or died in their efforts to return home, would leave the school legally responsible for whatever befell them. Overcrowding, poor sanitation, inadequate heating, and a lack of medical care led to high rates of influenza and tuberculosis; in one school, death rates reached 69%.’’ — Wikipedia
Now we know what we didn’t know. Now we know what we need to learn. So saying that we are powerless is whatever the Cree word is for cow dung: ᐊᒐᐦᑯᐢ (according to the online Cree dictionary). We start by learning, and listening, and connecting.
And to our new indigenous friends who rightly say, let us solve this ourselves, we know how to heal ourselves better than you non-natives ever could, we say yes, you do. But with all due respect: use us to rebuild what our government tried to destroy.
All the suicides, the alcoholism, the sexual and domestic abuse — they are not the end of the indigenous communities. They are the signs that the sense of self is still there, that there is enough of a spirit left to suffer: all these afflictions are your fever, and they demand attention — yours, and ours. Together.
The next WeDoSomething fun-raiser will be held on Monday, May 30th at Lawrence Restaurant, and will raise money for Dialogue for Life, an indigenous-run organization that organizes a 6-day conference every year to train first line responders in suicide prevention, and to offer support and workshops to those whose loved ones have taken their lives. The money we raise will allow aboriginal youth to fly in from their communities and attend the conference, and hopefully, prevent them from making the same dark choice. Tickets will be posted on our Facebook page as of May 10th.
