Amidst unabating public anger in Canada over the discovery last month of a mass grave of indigenous children, a coalition of countries, including China and Russia, has called for a “thorough and impartial” probe into the tragedy.
A couple of years ago I went to Vancouver, B.C. on my honeymoon. My impression was that Canada is making a good faith effort to acknowledge the rich history of the First Nations and the sins of Canada’s past, and making amends where it can. It isn’t perfect by any stretch of the word and everything’s a work in progress, but this is just faux outrage.
What kind of amends have they made? As far as I know natives still disproportionately overrepresented in stats such as homelessness and prison population.
I’m Canadian, and I can say that what Canada is doing is mostly lip service and simple actions that don’t require much money or giving up actual control of the land they stole.
Example: My university, UBC, in Vancouver, is built on “unceded” Coast Salish land. So instead of giving them back any meaningful control of the land, they just “consult” them every now and then, and have “we acknowledge we’re on unceded land” plastered all over their website and say it at the start of every school year. It’s literally become a meme because students can tell that it has no real meaning behind it. But hey, they name some dorm buildings after the local tribes so they must care, right? All the while the area around the campus (which is still unceded land) is dominated by rich people’s houses.
Another example that was taught to me just this summer in my environmental science class: A large portion of Indigineous communities still have to boil their tap water before it’s considered safe to drink, despite Canada boasting about having some of the highest quality water in the world (and it definitely does, just not for those people I guess).
Final example to show the actual attitudes about these things: people everywhere were saying how they feel for the victims that they recently discovered, and how horrible this is, but when a campaign arose to cancel this year’s Canadian independence day celebrations and turn it into a day of mourning (just this year, just a few months after the discovery, mind you, they’re not even saying to mourn every year), people lost their goddamn minds at the prospect.
At University of Toronto, we were told.nothing about indigenous people during our orientation or anything like that. I guess for Canadian people it wouldn’t be needed as much, though I think even that is debatable, but as an international student I would have liked to learn about it a bit sooner. All the indigenous related stuff I came to know much later by accident.
@yogthos@lemmy.ml, you’re in Eastern Canada, right? How are things going with Indigenous peoples over there? I only know about what is happening on the west side.
I’m in Toronto, from what I understand Indigenous communities are rightly shocked by this in Ontario. These graves show that residential schools were far more horrific than has been publicly acknowledged previously.
A couple of years ago I went to Vancouver, B.C. on my honeymoon. My impression was that Canada is making a good faith effort to acknowledge the rich history of the First Nations and the sins of Canada’s past, and making amends where it can. It isn’t perfect by any stretch of the word and everything’s a work in progress, but this is just faux outrage.
What kind of amends have they made? As far as I know natives still disproportionately overrepresented in stats such as homelessness and prison population.
I’m Canadian, and I can say that what Canada is doing is mostly lip service and simple actions that don’t require much money or giving up actual control of the land they stole.
Example: My university, UBC, in Vancouver, is built on “unceded” Coast Salish land. So instead of giving them back any meaningful control of the land, they just “consult” them every now and then, and have “we acknowledge we’re on unceded land” plastered all over their website and say it at the start of every school year. It’s literally become a meme because students can tell that it has no real meaning behind it. But hey, they name some dorm buildings after the local tribes so they must care, right? All the while the area around the campus (which is still unceded land) is dominated by rich people’s houses.
Another example that was taught to me just this summer in my environmental science class: A large portion of Indigineous communities still have to boil their tap water before it’s considered safe to drink, despite Canada boasting about having some of the highest quality water in the world (and it definitely does, just not for those people I guess).
Final example to show the actual attitudes about these things: people everywhere were saying how they feel for the victims that they recently discovered, and how horrible this is, but when a campaign arose to cancel this year’s Canadian independence day celebrations and turn it into a day of mourning (just this year, just a few months after the discovery, mind you, they’re not even saying to mourn every year), people lost their goddamn minds at the prospect.
At University of Toronto, we were told.nothing about indigenous people during our orientation or anything like that. I guess for Canadian people it wouldn’t be needed as much, though I think even that is debatable, but as an international student I would have liked to learn about it a bit sooner. All the indigenous related stuff I came to know much later by accident.
@yogthos@lemmy.ml, you’re in Eastern Canada, right? How are things going with Indigenous peoples over there? I only know about what is happening on the west side.
I’m in Toronto, from what I understand Indigenous communities are rightly shocked by this in Ontario. These graves show that residential schools were far more horrific than has been publicly acknowledged previously.