Whatever the Hel this is, it's yours to peruse

“I had time to run home and pack a bag and get to the beach where the boats were waiting,” said a member of Namaygoosisagagun First Nation (Collins). “We literally had minutes to get on the boats and flee before it took our town. “Once we left my house finally after packing what I could in a pack sack, the fire was right behind our place. We had to run to the beach and once we got there, it was only moments before the fire had jumped over the (train) track and was coming for us.”

it has since been confirmed that namaygoosisagagun first nation has completely burnt to the ground. if you would like to help the community navigate an ongoing crisis, i urge you to donate to the anishinabek nation 7th generation, a registered charity seeking to improve the lives of first nations people. donations are going directly to members of namaygoosisagagun first nation.

Their page on CanadaHelps / CanaDon:

Namaygoosisagagun First Nation/Collins has burned to the ground. The entire community is nothing but ashes after being quickly consumed by wildfires. They did not have any support from emergency services, and no one offered aid. The community saved themselves by escaping into boats because no one came.

Mishkeegogamang and Cat Lake have lost power. Families are ending up in shelters with nothing. Armstrong, Lac La Croix, Whitesand, Gull Bay, Lac des Mille Lacs are currently in the fires path and all members are being evacuated.

All this loss, all this devastation, and it was entirely preventable.

After steadily underfunding wildland firefighting and purposefully excluding Indigenous wildland firefighters and Indigenous wildfire organizations from wildfire operations, firefighter training, decisionmaking, and resource exchanges, in 2025, Doug Ford slashed the forest firefighting budget.

It's hard to ignore his decision to cut funding and leave us out of adequate fire training (even though we've lived with forest fires for thousands of years—far longer than settlers have been in Canada—and made sure fires like the ones we're all seeing today were prevented through kinisitotēn) when, despite making up less than 5% of the population, we account for 42% percent of all wildfire evacuations in Canada.

And when we are successfully evacuated, we face discrimination and racism—like Kashechewan—because it's always been easier to blame us than it is to blame the true culprit: denialism, corportate greed, and colonization.

The people of Collins and every other impacted community deserve better.

Right now, the AFN is currently accepting donations to help Collins First Nation. If you're able to, please consider donating.

ONWA (Ontario Native Women's Association) is another great place to donate to. They have outreach vans going to motels and inns and offering food, water, resources, and cultural support to those impacted by the wildfires.

Other places to consider donating to are Mikinakoos Emergency Fund, Red Cross, True North Aid, Indigenous Climate Action. You can also send donations directly to Whitesand First Nation via e-transfer ([email protected]) and they request that you add your full name in the e-transfer comment section to receive a tax receipt.

*Before sending money, verify that the appeal appears on an official First Nation, Tribal Council or registered charity channel.

If you can't offer financial support, please consider donating items of need. Moontime Connections is currently accepting drop-off donations. If you live in the Thunder Bay area, Namaygoosisagagun Health Office is also taking in donations! They can also bemailed to Superior Inn Hotel & Conference Centre at 555 West Arthur Street, Thunder Bay, ON, P7E 5P8.

items needed are: food, diapers, medical masks, men’s and women’s joggers (all sizes), children’s clothing (newborn to size 14), children’s shoes, summer clothing, men’s clothing, toiletries (lotion, Vaseline, toothpaste, toothbrushes, shampoo, conditioner, soap, deodorant, etc.), strollers, adult depends-all sizes, dog & cat food

2019 tries to explain this by saying each cat is rehearsing, but no other production wings it like that as far as I'm aware. In most productions, Deuteronomy only witnesses four Cat Songs between being absent and being kidnapped, and those are

Pekes (which is probably about an in-universe fictional character)

Gus

Skimble

Memory

That said. The vast majority of people who are homeschooling their kids are doing it in an effort to indoctrinate them at best and isolate and abuse them at worst. At the very least, homeschooling is a way for adults to ensure complete control over their kids' lives, who they interact with, the media they interact with, the things their kids are exposed to and that is not a good thing. It's pathological in the grandest scheme of things and it all but ensures your kids are unprepared for when they enter actual society and have to interact with people who don't hold extremist, cultish views.

I was an Army brat and because we moved all the time we were familiar with a lot of homeschooled kids (when you move so much homeschooling starts to seem like the better option, my parents even considered it for us at one point in time because of how disjointed our education was over our childhoods) and as a kid I could always tell which kids were homeschooled. They are weird, they have no social skills, they have no ability to talk about things outside of their family, they don't understand common things kids talk about. It's like trying to interact with someone who has been living in a bunker their entire life because that's kind of what it is. Even as an adult, I can tell which adults I interact with were probably homeschooled. Being homeschooled significantly impacts a child's ability to connect and relate to others and those struggles continue into adulthood.

Kids need socialization and they need to know there are safe adults out there and when kids are homeschooled they are so incredibly isolated. Even if they have a shit ton of siblings (as they usually do) that is not enough socialization. Getting to know other kids their own age who aren't members of their family gives them a better understanding of what's normal, what's not, and how to navigate those things in a normal way.

And that's not me saying it, if any of you follow people who talk about their previous homeschooling experiences the stories these people tell are horrifying. Teaching girls how to do household chores t serve future husbands, having kids spending hours a day reading scripture and praying, spending the majority of the day acting as a slave to the household, raising younger siblings, being beaten, all being counted as "education" in these unregulated programs. And those are some of the more uplifting stories here at least the parents involved were pretending they were providing their kids an education. Other people talk about how they couldn't even fucking read, were taught racist/white supremacist ideals, etc.

But at the end of the day homeschooling is ultimately a way for parents to ensure they can neglect their children without any annoying involvement from state officials or CPS. Not only does homeschooling ensure emotional neglect and a complete lack of socialization, it also allows parents to never bring their kids to doctors, to dentists, to ignore whether their children are growing and have enough to eat, to ignore vaccinations, annual physicals, etc.. And when they become adults they lack the education to function in society or even have marketable skills to obtain work and that's in the best case scenario because it means they survived that exceedingly neglectful childhood.

And now, there's a social media trend where a lot of parents who homeschool their kids are becoming influencers and using their children to make money on a lifestyle they only show the tip of on websites their kids are never allowed to use or interact with on their own terms. A field trip to the Noah's Ark museum with another Evangelical homesteading family is not fucking educational, it's not socialization, and it's not preparing these kids for shit. If they are even able to go to college they're gonna talk about how the dinosaurs lived with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and everyone is gonna laugh at them and think they're weird and they aren't gonna have the social skills to deal with that in an appropriate way.