When we talk about colonization and genocide in the Americas, we are often met with the same statement:
“This happened hundreds of years ago, get over it”.
Sure, it started centuries ago. But it didn’t end hundreds of years ago, or one hundred, or even 50.
When we talk about these issues, we don’t just mean small pox-infected blankets, or forced migration. We don’t just mean settlements, bounties on our heads, the physical attacks on our villages. We don’t just mean the residential schools, or the laws that banned our traditional languages and practices.
- The Sixties Scoop, when Indigenous children were ripped from their communities to be placed with white families.
- Residential schools, the last of which only closed in 1996, where children were forced to give up their languages, culture, identity, and were abused horribly.
- The Millennium Scoop. The child welfare system in Canada is still ripping children from Indigenous communities. Despite only making up about 8% of the age demographic, Indigenous youths under 14 account for more than half of the foster system. (x)
- 80% of reserves in Canada have median incomes that fall below the poverty line (x)
- A vast number of reserves in Canada do not have clean drinking water (x)
- Indigenous rights and land titles are routinely ignored in order to create pipelines and sell off resources. (x)
- According to Indigenous women’s groups, there are approximately 4,000 cases of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. The RCMP only acknowledge about 1200 of these. (x)
- “Between 1997 and 2000, the homicide rate for Indigenous women was nearly seven times higher than the rate for non-Indigenous women.” (x)
- A man literally confessed to the murder of Tina Fontaine, a 15 year old Indigenous girl, and he was acquitted. (x)
- Colten Boushie, a Cree man, was shot multiple times by a Saskatchewan farmer. A jury featuring no Indigenous people declared his murderer not guilty. (x)
- The Starlight Tours. Saskatoon Police routinely took intoxicated Indigenous men outside of the city in sub-zero temperatures and left them to find their way back. Several froze to death. The Saskatoon Police were caught deleting the article about this from Wikipedia. (x)
- Suicide and self injury are the leading cause of death for Indigenous men under 44. In addition, the rate of suicide in Indigenous women is seven times higher than that of non-Indigenous women, and the rate of suicide among Indigenous men is 5.25 times higher than that of non-Indigenous men. Suicide rates for Inuit youth are among the highest in the world, at 11 times the national average. (x) In certain communities, like Attawapiskat, suicides reach epidemic levels. (x)
These are just a few of the many legacies of colonization that impact us today.
This is colonialism. This is genocide.
(please add more to this list)
