A thread

Today is #OrangeShirtDay2020. I think one of the things non-Natives don’t fully comprehend is the sheer magnitude of the devastation residential schools, the 60s scoop, and the ongoing over representation of Indigenous youth in the child welfare system.

I have yet to meet a Native person whose family hasn’t been directly affected by these institutions and as a result the fallout and intergenerational trauma that comes with them. We are left with generations of traumatized individuals that aren’t given the support they need to

cope with what they experienced. People who have not learned proper coping mechanisms are going to either live in denial, find alternative and oftentimes unhealthy ways to cope, or in some instances, continue the cycle of abuse they were victims of in these systems.

I think non-Natives don’t fully comprehend what occurred in those schools and how much intergenerational trauma can be tied to these institutions. Children have been subjected to abuse, sexual assault, murder, neglect, and starvation while being severed from their community.

People like to think that Canada has grown and changed and improved since the time the last school closed, but a country built upon the genocide of Indigenous people that has taught its citizens to deny this fact cannot improve while it continues to target us.

As I write this, land defenders in Land Back Lane (Caledonia, Ontario) are being arrested and there is a warrant out for the arrest of one of the spokespeople, just for trying to reclaim land that was stolen from them and protect it from housing development.

Just yesterday, Joyce Echaquan was murdered by two nurses in Montreal, while recording herself yelling for help as they overmedicated her and called her slurs, said she’d be better off dead, and that she was only good for “f*cking”.

In Nova Scotia, Mi’kmaq treaty rights are being threatened by non-Native commercial fishermen who are attacking them just for practicing their right to fish.

Canada taught it’s citizens we are the expendable casualties of colonization, and that ideology has infiltrated the minds of non-Natives on our land. People attack us, condemn us, and murder us, and they don’t see an issue with it because it’s what Canada has always done.