More good discussion on Indigenous twitter about taking down racist statues or renaming schools (i.e. Schools named after John A Macdonald’s who started the Residential School system and many other genocidal policies).
Native parents from around the world held their very young children’s hands as they walked them to boarding schools and residential schools. Some Native parents were forced to completely sign away their guardianship to principals of these “schools”, or face jail time. Others were visited by policemen, who forcibly seized their children from them. A few were undermined by “Indian Agents” on reservations, who withheld their rations on ration days. Some children never saw their parents again.
Boarding schools were built to “assimilate” the Native population into a white society, targeting their children. It had been assumed that conversion to Christianity and assimilation was “for the best interests” of Native and Indigenous people in Australia, the US, and Canada. The Native children were not allowed to practice skills relevant and appreciated to their cultures, such as carving. They were disallowed to speak in their native tongues, and were often physically, sexually, and psychologically tormented for doing so.
A five year old Native boy is raised by his family to know his hair as an extension of his soul, and that people only cut their hair if they experienced a loss of a loved one, a loss of a relationship, or a loss of oneself. As a stranger cuts off the little boy’s hair in order to better assimilate the child into the sex-based roles of a white male, the Native child is left quietly wondering who it is that has died, where his family went, and why the other children are being beaten for speaking to one another.
Only a small portion of each day was spent learning academically at these “schools”. Most of the day the children were exploited for their labor.
How the labor was divided was based upon the Native child’s sex.
Native girls were expected to do the domestic labor that was expected of white girls and women, such as cooking and cleaning, and Native boys were expected to perform manual labor, such as farm work, blacksmithing, and shoemaking. The children would reach a point where they would be “phased out” of these boarding schools for a summer or year at a time and forced to perform labor for private white and wealthy families who did not want these jobs and duties themselves.
Many boarding schools and residential homes had an overwhelming death rate from Tuberculosis, which swept through these schools and homes. Tuberculosis kills it’s victim within ten days. Native children were forced to play and sleep alongside other Native children who had contracted tuberculosis so that they, too, would die. Boarding schools suffered a 50% or higher death rate because of this, effectively reducing the Native population in an attempt to eradicate them.
Maisie Shaw, age 14, was kicked down a flight of stairs by Alfred Caldwell, the principal of the residential school she was forced to stay in and killed.
Other small skeletons of Native children have been found in church basements, which served as residential homes and boarding schools.
Other children were forced into prostitution rings.
Over fifty thousand children in Canada’s First Nations residential schools were beaten, raped, suffered from electrocutions and electroshock therapy, were forcibly sterilized, often medically experimented on, starved, and murdered.
It wasn’t until 1978 in the US that Native parents won the rights to deny sending their children to boarding schools. This wasn’t that long ago. In 1978, my mother was 21 years old.
In Australia, the residential homes lasted until 1984.
In Canada, the last residential home was closed in 1996.
The Canadian Government is still fighting against making reparations to Native communities, and there are still monuments to people who instituted the residential school system. There are still monuments dedicated to people who offered bounties for scalps.
And despite being ordered multiple times by a Human Rights Tribunal to stop fucking around and stop discriminating against Native children, the Liberal government of Canada is still refusing to put any effort in to helping Native children and Native communities.
Our government is literally spending millions of our tax dollars fighting a legal battle because they don’t want to stop discriminating against children.
I grew up going to school in rural Alberta in the 1980′s and residential schools were mentioned in Social Studies class as something that happened a long time ago and weren’t that bad.
Imagine my horror when, as a 30-year-old adult, I learned that when I was learning this was ancient history, kids my own age were still being forced to live at these schools.
I’m 40 years old (nearly 41). People my age are dealing with the trauma and aftermath of this garbage, and white people in this country keep saying “it’s history, just get over it.”
Because we weren’t taught that it was current events, we were taught that it was history.
Native parents from around the world held their very young children’s hands as they walked them to boarding schools and residential schools. Some Native parents were forced to completely sign away their guardianship to principals of these “schools”, or face jail time. Others were visited by policemen, who forcibly seized their children from them. A few were undermined by “Indian Agents” on reservations, who withheld their rations on ration days. Some children never saw their parents again.
Boarding schools were built to “assimilate” the Native population into a white society, targeting their children. It had been assumed that conversion to Christianity and assimilation was “for the best interests” of Native and Indigenous people in Australia, the US, and Canada. The Native children were not allowed to practice skills relevant and appreciated to their cultures, such as carving. They were disallowed to speak in their native tongues, and were often physically, sexually, and psychologically tormented for doing so.
A five year old Native boy is raised by his family to know his hair as an extension of his soul, and that people only cut their hair if they experienced a loss of a loved one, a loss of a relationship, or a loss of oneself. As a stranger cuts off the little boy’s hair in order to better assimilate the child into the sex-based roles of a white male, the Native child is left quietly wondering who it is that has died, where his family went, and why the other children are being beaten for speaking to one another.
Only a small portion of each day was spent learning academically at these “schools”. Most of the day the children were exploited for their labor.
How the labor was divided was based upon the Native child’s sex.
Native girls were expected to do the domestic labor that was expected of white girls and women, such as cooking and cleaning, and Native boys were expected to perform manual labor, such as farm work, blacksmithing, and shoemaking. The children would reach a point where they would be “phased out” of these boarding schools for a summer or year at a time and forced to perform labor for private white and wealthy families who did not want these jobs and duties themselves.
Many boarding schools and residential homes had an overwhelming death rate from Tuberculosis, which swept through these schools and homes. Tuberculosis kills it’s victim within ten days. Native children were forced to play and sleep alongside other Native children who had contracted tuberculosis so that they, too, would die. Boarding schools suffered a 50% or higher death rate because of this, effectively reducing the Native population in an attempt to eradicate them.
Maisie Shaw, age 14, was kicked down a flight of stairs by Alfred Caldwell, the principal of the residential school she was forced to stay in and killed.
Other small skeletons of Native children have been found in church basements, which served as residential homes and boarding schools.
Other children were forced into prostitution rings.
Over fifty thousand children in Canada’s First Nations residential schools were beaten, raped, suffered from electrocutions and electroshock therapy, were forcibly sterilized, often medically experimented on, starved, and murdered.
It wasn’t until 1978 in the US that Native parents won the rights to deny sending their children to boarding schools. This wasn’t that long ago. In 1978, my mother was 21 years old.
In Australia, the residential homes lasted until 1984.
In Canada, the last residential home was closed in 1996.
There are people who are still alive today who worked as teachers in Residential Schools. People who will probably never face any kind of punishment. It makes me so sick.
TIL that an indian who saw his homeland go barren due to deforestation, took to planting trees himself and 37 years later , he is responsible for the formation of a tropical paradise which not only has trees but different wildlife species such as rhinos,tigers,elephants etc too.
This is one of the many examples of material deprivation of Indigenous communities in the US, who also suffer from high rates of lack of electricity, no or substandard housing, violence from non-Native communities, etc.
Things like this are why I don’t trust the UN, where the US, a racist Settler colonialist state that continues to perpetrate genocide against and deny the land rights of Native peoples, and which has broken every single treaty it has ever made with Native nations, has a permanent seat on the security council. The UN has also willingly come along with US genocides and colonialism abroad as well. I don’t think it will do anything effective, other than pointing out problems to the public it is totally toothless when it comes to actual enforcement due to its very structure.
The Colorado River, one of the longest rivers in the United States, is gradually shrinking. This is partly a result of overuse by municipalities and seasonal drought. The other reason is global warming.
The decline in the river reservoir will have serious implications for large U.S. cities, such as Los Angeles, that depend on the Colorado River as their water source. In addition, this will also have an impact on the Native American tribes who view the Colorado River as sacred to their religions.
As Ka-Voka Jackson, a member of the Hualapai tribe and a graduate student working to address climate change on the Colorado River and restoring native plant species along its banks, stated, “The Colorado River is so sacred not just to my tribe, but to so many others.”
As a scholar of Native American religions and the environment, I understand how Indigenous people’s religions and sacred places are closely tied to their landscape. For the past 100 years, Indigenous peoples have been forced to adapt to changes in their environments and modify their religious rituals in the United States. The U.S. government made certain Native American religious practices illegal in the 19th and early 20th century. Although these policies have since been rescinded, they led to changes in many Indigenous practices.
Global warming, however, is different. The question is whether Indigenous people will be able to adapt their beliefs all over again due to the impact of global warming on the natural world.
Adapting to change
The Blackfeet tribe in Montana brought changes in their relationship with the natural world as a result of the policies of the U.S. government from the 1880s to the 1930s.
For example, the Blackfeet purposefully moved religious ceremonies from one time on their liturgical calendar to completely different times to avoid the U.S. government penalizing native people for dancing or participating in religious ceremonies.
The Blackfeet moved their annual O’kan, or sundance festival, from late summer (usually held at the end of August) to the Fourth of July celebration. They avoided U.S. government punishment by masking their ceremonies within state-sanctioned public events.
Policies related to the mining of natural resources and damming of rivers on Indigenous lands have also led to changes in Native Americans’ religious practices.
Historian David R. M. Beckinterviewed elders and researched how the Menominee tribe in Wisconsin adapted to the loss of their sacred fish, the sturgeon, after a paper mill built a dam across the Wolf River.
The sturgeon disappeared after the dam was built in 1892, because they could no longer swim upstream to spawn. For over 100 years, the Menominee tribal members continued to pray and conduct their annual “returning of the sturgeon” ceremony in the spring – even though there were no more sturgeon in the river. The Menominee ultimately won the right to return the sturgeon to the Wolf River in 1992 and the tribe revitalized the full ceremony and celebration of their sacred fish.
In all these situations, Native American tribes learned to adapt to the challenges placed before them, modify their religious practice and embrace a different relationship with the natural world.
Global warming and religion
When it comes to global climate change, it affects everyone, not just specific groups in specific places. But for many Indigenous peoples, natural resources are closely linked to religious beliefs and practices.
Historically, Indigenous peoples used the natural seasonal cycles of weather, plants and animals as part of their liturgical or religious calendar. The Blackfeet held their annual “beaver bundle ceremony” in the early spring as ice melted off rivers and beavers returned to the open waters. In Blackfeet mythology, a beaver served as a deity who taught humans how to cultivate tobacco, which the tribe used for important religious ceremonies and as a peace offering to their enemies.
There are signs, though, that beavers are now moving north due to global warming. Biologists are currently studying both beavers and the birch and alder shrubs that beavers eat, as both move north into new regions. Scientists worry that as a keystone species, the movement of beavers will change the northern ecosystems as they cut off waterways and build beaver dams. And shrubs will change the local waterways that they grow by. This will affect local animal species.
What will happen when there are no more beaver in Blackfeet territory? Will their religious traditions adapt similar to the Menominee when they faced the loss of their sacred sturgeon?
Religion and resiliency
From the arctic tundra to the American desert Southwest, and places worldwide, Indigenous peoples will be facing the impact of global climate change.
Regarding the shrinking of the Colorado River, researchers Brad Udall and Jonathan Overpeckhave concluded that, “Failing to act on climate change means accepting the very high risk that the Colorado River basin will continue to dry up into the future.”
If this river faces a drier future, it will likely affect the Mojave, a people indigenous to the Colorado River basin, who believe the river was created by their ancient deity Mastamho as part of their sacred landscape.
As the G-20 convenes in Germany this week to discuss global issues including climate change, Indigenous scholars, such as myself, are wondering what the future holds for Indigenous peoples, their environments and their religions.
Indigenous communities can be resilient and adapt their internal religious beliefs to outside challenges, as Native American tribes from the turn of the 20th century have proven. Climate change presents yet another challenge.
For The Buffalo that could not dream, German photographer Felix von der Osten chronicles life on Montana’s the Fort Belknap Reservation, where since 1888, the Gros Ventre and Assiniboine Native American tribes have raised their families and continued to foster a deeply-felt respect for the land.
You know what, I have gotten my life limit of looking at pictures of natives that white people have taken. Hell, we still gotta deal with Curtis and his baggage he left. Also, the photographer was there for a month and suddenly can shoot photos with feeling that a Native couldn’t have done with an eye far more clear for having experienced it their whole life?
No, my friends and family, you want to see some amazing work, look into the book, “Shooting Back From the Reservation”, where Native children were given cameras to capture their lives and did so with grace and laughter and leave this German bozo alone.
All right, Fam, I got some pretty horrible hate mail for this opinion of mine so now I’m going to expand on my LOVE for “Shooting Back from the Reservation”, and why I dislike this German man’s photos of Natives.
If you have seen Edward Curtis photos (and who hasn’t?) these were taken in the same vein and tell about as much about Natives as Curtis’ did (which is not a lot).
Posed, un-smiling, dressed in regalia – heck, not one picture that this Felix guy took has anyone who is smiling! Not even the children! All posed and stern, with serious faces – this is not the full reality and isn’t the most important part of our communities! Even in the landscape pictures he conveyed isolation and emptiness when it’s not really like that. How can the land be empty when my grandpa taught me how to speak to it?
Shooting Back was made by Native children who were sharing and exploring different aspects of their LIVES. It shows how life really is within a Native community by young Native people. It’s not someone who showed up on a reservation for a month because his girlfriend had extended family there and took pictures. This is a glimpse of a moment out of their day and holds so many aspects of their life that you cannot view from an outsider’s pictures.
It shows you that there is no one way a Native is suppose to look,
It has chubby babies with big heads and intelligent eyes,
And shows that often our places are run down, and held together with more than a little duct tape, WITHOUT it being poverty porn,
It shows the love of rez dogs and rez cars,
And dads that make funny faces just because he likes to hear you laugh,
It shows a cemetery with too many graves,
And those medicine wheels that your aunt makes when you get a new to you car,
It shows kids playing, goofing around, and laughing!
And standing kinda awkwardly next to a white guy,
And elders that make silly faces too!
But my favorite part of this book is that in a society where our Native youth have some of the highest suicide rates, where they are silenced twofold because not only are they Native but they are also children and apparently that means that you’re not a full person yet, this book gives them a platform for their voice.
And I. I just really love this book. So if you want to see what Native life is, not just the poverty porn and the Edward Curtis wannabes, please check this book out. That is all.
Just bought the book, thanks for the rec!
OMG!!! So excited about that! Please let me know how you like it!
Barbara Kentner was murdered. She died July 4, 2017. We’re still (contacting, pushing and) waiting for Thunder Bay police to upgrade the charges from aggravated assault to murder. The Ontario Provincial Police later charged Thunder Bay Chief of Police, J.P. Levesque, in unrelated crimes. Senator Murray Sinclair now leads the investigation into Thunder Bay Police Service Board. Too many indigenous brothers and sisters disappear and die without appropriate follow up in Thunder Bay.
Jocelyn Wabano-Iahtail shuts down disrespectful white journalists over a question asking if Justin Trudeau is responsible for Missing Indigenous Teens in Northern Ontario.
And that headline on the linked article is a shameful example of exactly what Ms. Wabano-Ishtail was talking about! White fragility at its finest. Out of all the important things she said, reporters think her use of the term “white lady” is the most news worthy.
She is putting herself on the line to educate white people about issues our ignorance and privilege stops us from understanding. We should fucking thank her, not compound the disrespect and harm like that.
So here is a better headline: “Jocelyn Wabano-Iahtail educates disrespectful white journalists.”
[ Captions ]
Person in background: Stop right now.
Jocelyn Wabano-Iahtail: Don’t speak to us that way. You’re a guest here, and you don’t even know how to speak to us. You don’t even recognize the tone in your voice in your delivery. No you’re done. You’re done. Next question.
Reporter: I’ll-I’ll re-ask what [ inaudible ] question, how do you think
Person off screen: You want to re-ask?
Reporter: Yes.
Jocelyn Wabano-Iahtail: You better be respectful.
[ inaudible chattering in background ]
Reporter: I’m being totally respectful. I’m asking how Justin Trudeau record, compared to Stephen Harper’s record, do you think he’s improved the situation. I think that is what Julie was asking.
[ inaudible chattering off camera ]
Jocelyn Wabano-Iahtail: We have a holistic genocide happening here.
Female Reporter: I can speak for myself
Jocelyn Wabano-Iahtail: And I can speak for myself. You know what white people? You’ve had your voice here for 524 years. 524 years you’ve been visible, white lady. You’ve been visible for 524 years. Look how fast your white man stands up for you. Where is everybody else who will come and stand up for us? I have a right to my voice, I’m still fighting for my voice, and my visibility.
Reporter: We asked a question about what you–
Jocelyn Wabano-Iahtail: And I’m telling you! And I’m telling you right now. There has been 524 years of holistic genocide on Turtle Island. We’re the ones that are dying, it is not you that is dying. As far as Justin Trudeau is doing? One of the things that we need to keep in mind is that we’re asking the United Nations to help us of charges of genocide, a war against humanity, war crimes, and a crime of aggression be laid. Because your liberal party, was also responsible; every party, every governments that has been in power. None of your governments have clean hands. All of your governments…all of your governments have blood on their hands. None of you are different, you haven’t changed. The moment we have our voice, and back bone you want to shut us down. And you think you have your privilege to disrespect us the moment we tell you, because of your colonial mindset, and your colonial way of being. Your white privilege, your white fragility, you can’t take our truth. Look how many people came to bat for you, white lady. And you’re a guest here. Without us, you’d be homeless. This is over.
what the fuck is she fucking talking about? how is this about white fragility and white privilege have anything to do with the question she was asked? what did the journalist tell her to stop doing? maybe she told her to stop rambling about identity politics bullshit? seriously, how about just answering the question as to whether or not they think Trudeau is doing a better job figuring out whats happening to these missing native people rather then going off on a tangent about bullshit. we can’t solve the problem of her butt hurt over the colonization of canada, we have to do something about the highway of tears and all the missing and dead people, most of which are native. this is just whining about bullshit thats not relevent to anything. what the fuck is holistic genocide? what the fuck?
Shes saying the government hasnt helped native people. This problem of native people being targeted isnt new and its been a problem since white people came here but no one listens. Do you think that reporter really cares about the native people? Because if she did shed know the answer to her question. Shes practically answering her own question by disrespecting that woman because white people have been disrespecting natives since they came here and they pretend to care but still dont.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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