Canada’s Indian Residential Schools tore families, communities, and nations apart in an effort to expunge Indigenous culture. They also facilitated land theft on an incredible scale. #OrangeShirtDay #landback 1/

When residential schools were made mandatory through and amendment to the Indian Act in 1920, Canada was in the middle of one of biggest land grabs in history. Done with treaty-making, the provinces passed law after law to reduce Indigenous people’s access to land. 2/

People were being confined to reserves, prevented in every way from pursuing traditional economies and stewardship. Thousands of IRS students were being raised away from the land, told they had no right to it, and no need for it. 3/

Indian agents, preists and police who rounded up children in the fall coerced families (with threats to licences, rations, and freedom) to abandon traplines and seasonal rounds to settle in reserve villages, where the kids could be collected more easily. 4/

All that “opened up” A LOT of land for the taking. Canada gave away vast tracts for rail and road, the provinces sold land they did not own to settlers for mere pennies, promising wealth. 5/

After 2 or 3 generations, kids came out of residential school to find their lands “taken up” by the settler colonial project, their rights abolished by reams of racist policy and law designed to enrich white people. 6/

While kids were in school and their parents denied use of their lands and resources, their landscape was transformed: parcelled out by surveyors, sold, renamed. Wiped of its Indigenous identity. 7/

Kids and families traumatized by the experience of residential schools had no places of healing to return to. No money or opportunity to rebuild lives. No chance to even or earn buy back what was taken. It was all just given away for Canadians’ exclusive benefit. 8/

It’s not enough to *acknowledge* what kids and families lost in residential schools and by our settlement here. We have to see and undo the immense, intentional racist systems this enabled, and that we maintained throughout the entire 20th—and 21st—century. 9/

When you put away the orange shirt today, think about what you’re going to do next. The work’s been done, there are solutions. Find the way YOU are going to help. #orangeshirtday 10/10