https://www.yahoo.com/news/native-children-didn-t-lose-102025259.htmlNative children didn’t ‘lose’ their lives at residential schools. Their lives were stolen
Yes! And by which civilization?
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.
See also:
https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-false-left/childcare-issues/msg6188/#msg6188I 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
And Western civilization will be dead. But talking alone will not achieve this. Therefore make sure every victim of colonialism owns:
https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-false-left/firearms/