Family wants apology after pastor throws out shoes left on Catholic church steps to honour Indigenous children.
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Removal of the shoes sparked controversy on social media, and Sebastian said he only learned afterward why the shoes were left on the steps.
But Ne Hiyawak, who uses they/them pronouns, believes Sebastian was aware of the memorials around Canada. They added the condition of the shoes was symbolic “of what these children went through. They were put through hell.”
“Those children were treated like they were dirty.”
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On June 8, at least a dozen people showed up with shoes, toys and other mementos to create another memorial, which Sebastian approved — but he still threw out the original shoes Ne Hiyawak left the day before.
“Not even one shoe was good enough for anything … they were torn and good for no one, ” Sebastian said in an interview on Friday.
“If you are doing a memorial, you put nice shoes … when a person dies, you don’t put artificial flowers on top of a casket.”
…I was the first person to use the word genocide in the unmarked grave thread. But in my first post I provided clear context. I quoted from and provided a link to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s 2015 report. In that report they stated:
Cultural genocide is the destruction of those structures and practices that allow the group to continue as a group. States that engage in cultural genocide set out to destroy the political and social institutions of the targeted group. Land is seized, and populations are forcibly transferred and their movement is restricted. Languages are banned. Spiritual leaders are persecuted, spiritual practices are forbidden, and objects of spiritual value are confiscated and destroyed. And, most significantly to the issue at hand, families are disrupted to prevent the transmission of cultural values and identity from one generation to the next.
In its dealing with Aboriginal people, Canada did all these things.
Using the word genocide, in this specific context, didn’t seem to be particularly uncontroversial to me. But apparently not.
But it really doesn’t matter. Because it doesn’t matter what I say people aren’t going to listen to me. Because everyone has been debating this for days. But you are all missing the point.
In New Zealand.
Whānau Ora is calling out Oranga Tamariki for it’s “abuse of power and racial profiling” in a new report which details a baby uplift that involved “heavily armed cops and police dogs”.
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In a statement this morning, Whānau Ora said 14 armed police were used by the government agency to uplift a five-month-old Māori baby from a single mum.
“Police and Oranga Tamariki staff converged on the home of the single mum to execute an uplift order that had been green lighted by the Family Court without the whānau receiving any prior notification,” the statement says.
Today Newsroom launch a powerful new video story by investigations editor Melanie Reid into the attempted ‘uplift’ of a newborn baby from its mother at a maternity ward by the children’s agency Oranga Tamariki.
For the first time, the process involved in taking a baby from its mother is laid bare. The filming of a video by Newsroom , carried out in the hospital room, shows the pressure a young Māori mother is subjected to as she tries to keep her seven-day-old baby.
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Three Māori babies a week are being ‘uplifted’ from their mothers and of 283 babies taken into care last year, more than 70 percent were Māori or Pasifika.
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The documentary contains detailed footage from inside the mother’s hospital room as officials repeatedly attempt to persuade her to give up the child. At one point Oranga Tamariki officials arrived at night after her whānau had left her alone with her week-old baby in the room and did not relent until a 2am intervention by a tribal leader and police commander.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/113395638/new-zealands-own-stolen-generation-the-babies-taken-by-oranga-tamariki
In Canada.
In the 20th century, the U.S. and Canada carried out a quiet genocide against Indigenous women through coerced sterilization. In 2019, it’s still happening.
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The data is sparse but significant: Anywhere from 25 to 50 percent of the Indigenous women of reproductive age in the U.S. were sterilized in the 1970s. In Canada, over 1000 Indigenous women were sterilized between 1966 and 1976, according to Karen Stote, researcher and author of An Act of Genocide , one of the only books on the history of forced sterilization in Canada.
In the 1970s, both the U.S. and Canada stopped promoting pro-sterilization policies. But they didn’t outlaw them either.
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Now more than 100 Indigenous women from various nations in the region have come forward to say they were coerced or forced into a sterilization procedure as recently as 2018. Many are part of a class-action lawsuit led by Indigenous rights attorney Alisa Lombard, which has been developing since 2017. The women are calling for sweeping reform to the health system, and $7 million (CAD) each in damages.
But most importantly, perhaps, they are calling for a recognition of colonial and genocidal practices that never ended.
Investigation finds widespread racism and discrimination against Indigenous peoples in B.C. health-care system.
84% of Indigenous people who took part in investigation reported discrimination in system.
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“I am afraid to go to any hospital. When I do have to, I dress up like I’m going to church,” states a young Indigenous woman quoted in the report.
An Indigenous doctor is quoted as saying: “I have been asked to look after my ‘drunk relatives’ in the ER or have had Indigenous patients [who were considered difficult patients] reassigned to me on the wards when I was a resident.”
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Turpel-Lafond was asked to lead the investigation after it was revealed that hospital emergency staff were allegedly playing a “game” where they would guess the blood-alcohol content of Indigenous patients.
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Assumptions about substance use were among the many stereotypes the report found were commonly ascribed to Indigenous patients. The investigation then linked how stereotypes can lead to discriminatory care and how this can harm one’s health.
“Those stereotypes kill,” said Tania Dick, a nurse practitioner and member of the First Nations Health Council.
She recounted the death of her aunt as one such example.
She said her aunt was taken to an emergency room after falling and hitting her head. But when she arrived, Dick said health-care staff assumed she was intoxicated.
By the time they realized something serious was going on, Dick said it was too late. She said her aunt — who was experiencing a brain bleed — died while being transferred to a major regional hospital.
Racism, stereotyping and discrimination against Indigenous peoples in the B.C. health-care system are widespread and can be deadly, according to the findings of an independent investigative report released Monday.
Twenty-four hours after it began, it came down to this: Some 30 members of the Sipekne’katik First Nation, protecting a lobster storage space Wednesday, suspiciously eyeing the 200 non-Indigenous fishermen whose trucks lined the narrow road along St. Mary’s Bay as far as the eye could see.
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The previous night, somebody had severely damaged the water-filtration system in the warehouse, and torched a van in the parking lot.
In another incident on Tuesday, a Sipekne’katik fisherman found himself trapped in another lobster storage facility in nearby West Pubnico, as a mob of about 200 men gathered, some hurling rocks and racist insults, and refusing to disperse when police arrived. They had come for the lobster the fisherman had caught that day, and when he was finally able to leave the building the catch was plundered.
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“I can’t believe how they are getting away with these terrorist, hate-crime acts, and the police are there.”
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Then the angry crowd showed up.
“You could hear them kicking the doors, busting the side of the building with rocks,” Marr said. “Once the RCMP showed up, I thought we would be able to get out of there, but the RCMP just stood there.”
Marr said he stayed in the pound, dodging rocks thrown by members of the crowd, until things calmed down and he could leave.
In Australia.
Almost three years on from the royal commission into Don Dale, every single child in detention in the Northern Territory is Aboriginal, the NT social policy scrutiny committee has been told.
But as one committee member said the system was “broken”, Territory Families said it was still “not ready” to implement some of the royal commission’s key recommendations, including raising the age of criminal responsibility to 12 years old, and the age of detention to 14.
Department officials told the committee, which held public hearings into proposed changes to youth justice laws on Thursday, there are 24 children – 22 boys and two girls – in detention in the NT and they are all Aboriginal.
Next time you’re urged to ponder how far we’ve come as a nation, remember the 474 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who have died in custody.
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The true history, of course, was slowly being written. A shocking history of Indigenous repression involving the attempted genocide through frontier murders of tens of thousands of Indigenous people and the stealing of the children, the cruelty of the missions and the “protectors”, the rapes, the dispossession, the disease and the chain gangs.
Now, draw a line from the generational trauma and disadvantage stemming from this colonial and postcolonial crime scene to the massive disparity in imprisonment rates of Indigenous Australians , often for crimes that most white people would never be jailed for. Non-payment of fines. Driving offences. Public drunkenness. Vagrancy.
Identify the problem. Ignore the recommended solutions in the full national knowledge that to do so would lead to more Indigenous deaths in custody. Forget about it. Move on.
In that context, it is chilling to read aloud a couple of numbers.
The first is 474.
The second: five.
The 474 is the number of individual Indigenous people who have died in custody since the royal commission report, delivered 30 years ago this Thursday. Five, the number of those individuals who have died in custody since the beginning of March 2021.
For greater context: Indigenous Australians are 3% of the population, but are 29% of the prison population.
I could go on. There are many stories that hit the headlines. But countless more that do not.
Here’s the point.
This never stopped.
This isn’t history.
You are still stealing our children.
You are still burning down our buildings, our businesses.
You are still locking us away.
You are still killing us.
I’m sure this intellectual discussion on what is and isn’t genocide is important to many.
But I’d much rather you just stopped looking away.
Thank you MrDibble for seeing me, and for hearing me. The thread in ATMB made me feel heard for the first time I think on these boards. I can’t tell you how hurtful it was to be cast in the role of the “angry brown person”, that apparently my anger make me blow all of this out of proportion, that I am taking things the wrong way. I’ve been here since 2002. I’ve posted as passionately here about misogyny on the boards, on transphobia, and never been treated like this.
There is a reason why it is important that you listen. There is a reason why our voices should be heard. And there is a reason why people like me stop posting here.
