Tag: indigenous

Opinion | There can be no reconciliation as long as Indigenous lives are expendable

allthecanadianpolitics:

Unspeakable rage. That’s what I, and Indigenous youth across the country, felt when the jury delivered a not guilty verdict in the case of Gerald Stanley, who killed 22-year-old Colten Boushie.

Then we felt unspeakable sadness for the verdict that allowed 15-year-old Tina Fontaine, whose body was weighted down with rocks and thrown into a river, to go without justice.

Canada has shown, twice within the last month, that Indigenous youth cannot expect a reasonable level of justice. We cannot expect that justice is blind, that juries are capable of rendering it.

Continue Reading.

Opinion | There can be no reconciliation as long as Indigenous lives are expendable

allthecanadianpolitics:

allthecanadianpolitics:

An excellent facebook post (by Saskatchewan Lawyer Rob Feist) laying out the absurdity of Gerald Stanley’s defence, and how ridiculous it is that he got acquitted of all charges in Colten Boushie’s death.

Read the full post here.

Transcript of the excerpt above:

“Gerald Stanley’s defence is the defence of accident. If you believe it, his defence explains all of the physical evidence, and most particularly a Tokarev casing found on the SUV dash and Colten’s DNA found on the Tokarev itself. But to believe it completely, you have to accept the following:

A. Gerald Stanley did not know how many rounds he put into the Tokarev;

B. Gerald Stanley, who believed he or his family were under threat, loaded his firearm with two shells, and then fired both shells in the air, leaving his firearm empty and useless for self-defence;

C. Gerald Stanley tried to make the Tokarev safe by repeatedly pulling its trigger into the air;

D. Gerald Stanley took the time, in this situation, to make the Tokarev safe before proceeding to the vehicle he believed had run over his wife;

E. Gerald Stanley believed the Boushie SUV had run over his wife, even though there was no explanation for his belief, other than his wife not being on the lawnmower;

F. Gerald Stanley went to the window of the vehicle to turn the vehicle off to immobilize it, even though the driver had exited the vehicle, and Colten Boushie, the person nearest the steering wheel, was asleep or passed out;

G. Gerald Stanley used his left hand to attempt to turn off the vehicle ignition, keeping the firearm in his right hand, even though he claimed the firearm was made safe, and using your left hand through a driver’s side window to turn off an ignition is incredibly awkward; and

H. Gerald Stanley experienced a hang-fire – an extremely rare occurrence in itself – with a duration of many seconds – an almost impossible length of time for a hang-fire – at the precise second his Tokarev was aimed at close range at Colten Boushie’s skull.

Points A, C, D, E, and F make Mr. Stanley’s story hard to believe. Points B and G simply make no logical sense whatsoever. Point H is beyond reason, and is a submission somewhere along the lines of the magic bullet that shot JFK. While the story raised by Mr. Stanley is not impossible – in the way that suggesting Colten Boushie having died of a heart attack ten seconds before he was shot is not, by way of example, impossible – in my opinion, it is an extreme stretch to suggest that a story of this level of credibility should raise a reasonable doubt as to Mr. Stanley’s intentions.”

Source: facebook.com

‘Canadians would be shocked’: Survivors describe treatment at Nanaimo Indian Hospital

allthecanadianpolitics:

Sharon Whonnock’s first childhood memory is being transferred from her home in northern Vancouver Island to Nanaimo Indian Hospital in the early 1950s, where she said she spent nearly a decade tied to a bed for almost 24 hours a day while being treated for tuberculosis.

The Kwakwaka’wakw woman spent about nine years there, and the remaining memories of what happened to her at the second-biggest Indian hospital in Canada are vivid. She said they haunt her still.

Through the glass partition between beds, she said she could see other children also being tied and untied.

“The only time we were untied was first thing in the morning to have a bath and then change our pajamas and go back to bed,” said Whonnock, who is now 72.

She said the ties were also taken off for meals they ate in the bed. If they needed to use the bathroom, they were brought a bedpan.

Whonnock recalled a time when she had chickenpox and was served turnips. The smell made her ill and she threw up on her plate. A nurse hit her with a rod and made her eat the vomit.

When Whonnock finally left the hospital, walking was difficult, because she hadn’t used her legs much all those years.

Continue Reading.

‘Canadians would be shocked’: Survivors describe treatment at Nanaimo Indian Hospital

yellowjuice:

socialjust-ish:

questions-within-questions:

chirotus:

constant-instigator:

ermefinedining:

This map should be included in every history book.

Oh wow! I’ve been wanting this for ages!

This needs to be in every history book along with a map showing where those nations have been pushed to now.

And on the wall of every geography class room in North America.

A few things about this map:

  1. It isn’t looking at traditional territory. It’s looking at major linguistic groups. This has a rough correlation to some territorial boundaries, but it’s a lot more about geography than territory (look at how the rocky mountains divide up the languages on the west coast). So this wouldn’t be good to use to show ‘where those groups were pushed now’ because it doesn’t show the original territory.
  2. It’s very broad in its definitions. British Columbia has something like…. I think it’s between 12 and 30 distinct languages within it. Here it puts those as like… 3 – 5.
  3. It doesn’t use the nation’s ‘own’ names. It does sometimes, but there are a few here that are definitely the colonial/English translation of the actual name. Does that ‘really’ matter for a map like this? Eh. But if you want a map that’s hung up in every school and the whole ‘decolonize’ thing, might be good to use a map that uses the groups’ preferred name.

interesting

What if people told European history like they told Native American history?

sofriel:

The first immigrants to Europe arrived thousands of years ago from central Asia. Most pre-contact Europeans lived together in small villages. Because the continent was very crowded, their lives were ruled by strict hierarchies within the family and outside it to control resources. Europe was highly multi-ethnic, and most tribes were ruled by hereditary leaders who commanded the majority “commoners.” These groups were engaged in near constant warfare.

Pre-contact Europeans wore clothing made of natural materials such as animal skin and plant and animal-based textiles. Women wore long dresses and covered their hair, and men wore tunics and leggings. Both men and women liked to wear jewelry made from precious stones and metals as a sign of status. Before contact, Europeans had very poor diets. Most people were farmers and grew wheat and vegetables and raised cows and sheep to eat. They rarely washed themselves, and had many diseases because they often let their animals live with them. Religion infused every part of Europeans’ lives.

Europeans believed in one supreme deity, a father figure, who they believed was made of three parts, and they particularly worshiped the deity’s son. They claimed that their god had given humans domination over the earth. They built elaborate temples to him and performed ceremonies in which they ate crackers and drank wine and believed it was the body and blood of their god, who would provide them with entrance into a wondrous afterlife called heaven when they died. Many wars were fought over disagreements about the details of this religion, each group believing their interpretation was the right one that should be spread across the land.

Now imagine that is part of a textbook that has entire chapters on the Mississippian polities of the 1200s and a detailed account of the diplomatic situation of the southeastern provinces in the 1400s and 1500s, an enormous section that goes through the history of the rise of the Triple Alliance in Mexico and goes through the rule of each tlatoani and their policies, the heritage of Teotihuacan and its legacy in later Mesoamerican politics, elaborate descriptions of the trade routes that connected and drove various nations in North America. Long explanations of the rise of various religious movements such as the calumet ceremony and Midewiwin, and how they affected political agendas and artistic trends. Pages and pages and pages going through the past thousand years of American history century by century.

And these three paragraphs are the only mention of European history before the year 1500.

What if people told European history like they told Native American history?