That’s an image representing the canadian gov’t pulling first nation’s children away from their family, in order to send them to residential schools.
I dunno if they actually pulled them apart like that, probably not? But what they did do, is threaten to starve the families. They moved the first nations onto reserves, which removed the ability for folks to feed themselves as they did traditionally. Then they replaced that with food from the gov’t - leaving people on the reserves 100% dependent on the gov’t to eat. When it came time to round the kids up for ‘school’, if you didn’t send the kids along then the gov’t removed your food.
I’m no expert on this stuff, but I’m likely a bit more knowledgeable than the average white rural 4th generation canadian. We had a kerfluffle here some time ago over some stuff interacting with first nations and I had some reasonable opinions, but was aware that I had no firsthand knowledge. So I did a fair bit of reading and took some courses, got a certification on this stuff.
My opinions on some things were like, 100% incorrect, there was a lot of stuff I had no idea about, and a few things, yep, my ignorant opinions were correct. In any event, it was enlightening even if there’s nothing I can do to solve anything.
I know this much though, a ton of the stuff online and in the media is borderline propoganda, on both sides. Like the media doesn’t even do their research ffs. And then everyone parrots what they read in the newspaper. The stuff I read was produced by first nations folks and I think they were very careful to remain factual. “This happened, both sides negotiated from this ideology, this was the result, and today FN’s hold this opinion for these reasons”. Me: Ooooooooh. Huh. That makes sense now.
Here’s an example. FN’s folks in Canada get a lot of benefits towards education (probably free, IDK). Unattended, one would think this is a freebie, a benefit that others don’t get.
Turns out, that’s not the case. The orginal land agreements, the intent was that the fn’s folks would participate in the economy resulting from the agreement - and they wanted access to education to be able reap the benefits of that economy. So the agreements from way back when included specific terminology that they would have free education - permanently.
So I think most Canadians see the free education thing as a ‘why are they complaining, they get free education’, when the reality is, uh, we signed an agreement saying we would give them that, in exchange for land, and that was permanent.
To be fair whenever we agreed to give them something in the past that we ended up wanting we just wrote a new agreement. Having to actually honour our agreements is a pretty new concept.
Many Canadian reserves have third world poverty.
I have no idea how to fix it.
Possibly worse, when they talk about unceded territory, theres entire provinces that have no agreements at all. We just be living there.i suppose one could argue that today no agreement is needed, but its probably trickier than that.
The US is the same.
Many reservations in New Mexico (NM), and the only real commonality they all have now is extremely high levels of alcoholism.
My own view of this is that when you fence people into an area without the ability to grow long-term, a large portion of them will simply give up. Existing is not enough. You need the capacity to be able to thrive for humans (of any ethnicity or background) to feel like life matters.
In academia in NM they are trying to preserve some Native American languages (dialects) that now only have a few dozen living speakers. Many of these languages will become dead languages given the current situation as their history and language is spread orally from generation to generation.
I ended up asking my grandmother to show up for my university graduation a few days early.
A friend of mine at that time was a grad student in linguistics. My grandmother was fluent in a dying indigenous language, and the friend wanted to get some recordings of her talking and telling a few stories into the archives.
Most Canadian reserves have boil water advisories, i.e. they don’t have safe drinking water.
People act this exact same thing did not happen in the states, too.
Of course, the states have done an even better job of hiding these types of atrocities.
A landmark report
In the report released Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Interior identified 408 boarding schools that operated from 1819 to 1969 with federal support, across 37 states. It listed at least 53 burial sites at those schools.The boarding schools aimed to assimilate Native children into white culture, and typically banned them from speaking their language. Rules “were often enforced through punishment,” the Interior report said, “including corporal punishment such as solitary confinement; flogging; withholding food; whipping; slapping; and cuffing.”
Can be, depending on whom you ask/are talking about
