"Fighting to get a school" sounds absurd and impossible in this day and age, but it's been 8 years since these kids were promised a school and they're still waiting. What kind of bullshit is that!? It's the kind that happens when people get put on the back burner by governments who don't give a shit. The kind with which FNs have more than a passing familiarity.
Building these kids a real school, a small thing in the overall scheme, would be a huge thing for the kids and their community. But it won't happen without some noise and support. Please sign their petition, write your MP and Chuck Strahl, Minister of Indian and Northern Affairs. Denying kids a decent education in a healthy environment is wrong. When such wrongs are allowed to go on, apologies for past wrongs ring a little hollow.
A couple of weeks ago the horrific news that 3 children were murdered in Merritt BC was the object of frenzied media attention. While the suspect ran, the MSM clung onto the story with pitbullish tenacity, exhausting every detail from the background of the family, to the manhunt, to the private citizen who finally brought the suspect in. The story captured widespread attention and why not? It was unthinkable, that innocents would be viciously cut down in childhood. And yet...
Just a short hop up the road from Merritt, Kamloops is the site of another story of innocent children murdered, not in the heat of some psychotic passion, but systematically and in far greater numbers. Children that just disappeared from residential schools into the anonymous earth. From the list of residential school mass graves published by stageleft last week:
And Kamloops is just one of many such gravesites announced last week by First Nations representatives determined to investigate the list of mass graves of murdered aboriginal children that spans several towns and cities across the country.
Where is the media frenzy? Why is this story not on the front page of every newspaper in Canada, with our Fourth Estate doing their job and demanding answers?
Consider the repercussions of this story had the "disappeared" been WASPy little kids from Branksome Hall. Even if there was only the faintest shadow of suspicion that their gravesites might have been discovered, it would be headline news with the media howling for investigations. But for the graves of residential school victims? Silence.
Is there a conspiracy of media silence about the victims of residential schools? Why?
Commenter "FRD" (of hiddenfromhistory.org) left a link to this video of the news conference where the investigation and locations of schoolchildrens' mass graves were announced:
They are desperately trying to give this issue some traction. Let's help.
Something everyone needs to see, if you haven't already, is the list of locations of mass graves of residential schoolchildren that was made public earlier this week -- stageleft published it.
To be honest, I was so shocked and so disturbed by the magnitude of this list that it took me a few read-overs to fully absorb it. The number of victims, the fact that they were kids, little kids, the causes of some of their deaths, the complete disrespect in their final resting places left hidden and uncared for to conceal the crimes that killed them... all so unbelievably horrific.
When confronted with such horrors, it's human nature to automatically try and turn away as a kind of defense mechanism. But that's how things like residential school atrocities went on -- because it was so much easier not to confront the ugliness and one's own part in it, however distant. The list of mass graves makes it impossible not to do so, which is why it's so important to read it, read it slowly and carefully and let it sink in, read it 3 or 4 times if you have to. Read it and weep, literally. Then let the grief become resolve to work towards better understanding.
(Note: This post was originally supposed to run on Saturday, International Womens' Day.)
The week heading into Saturday's International Womens Day was rich with irony from our political representatives in the form of the passage on to committee of the nefarious Bill-484. But as if a potential assault on abortion rights wasn't enough, First Nations women were singled out for a special insult as they were used to facilitate a Trojan horse of a bill that would push forward the Conservative agenda of Aboriginal assimilation.
Last week, Balbulican at stageleft posted about some new and odious legislation recently introduced by the Conservative government -- the extension of Matrimonial Property Rights to First Nations women living on-reserve. Like so many Conservative initiatives, it sounds good, but that's all -- it would actually do more harm than good to the women it's supposed to help.
In the guise of addressing the long-standing inequity of on-reserve property rights, the Harper government went through the motions of consultation with First Nations women on the issue. The FN's advice was then promptly ignored as the government pressed on with their own agenda. The resulting legislation, opposed by First Nations womens' groups, is clearly about assimilation -- all wrapped up in the pretty package of Aboriginal Womens' property rights. The Native Womens' Association of Canada says:
"Property on reserve is not held in the same way as it is held in the rest of the country. This is a reflection of the unique status of Aboriginal peoples in this country, which in 1982 was enshrined in Canada's Constitution. Providing the same right as other Canadian women hold does not take account of our unique situation and actually creates inequality rather than protecting against it."
The legislation is largely useless because it doesn't take into account the special status of Aboriginals or the systemic solutions needed to address issues around property rights, like poverty and violence against women. Most ominously, it sets the precedent of the Canadian government overriding FN's own governments, which could be a threat to larger FN society, self-governance, and even treaty rights.
Aboriginal women are mistreated with depressing regularity -- our society's tacit acceptance of such abuse is Canada's dirty little racist secret. First Nations women routinely disappear in numbers that would cause deafening public outcry if they were white. Now the government, the government no less, goes through the motions of consultation with Aboriginal women, pretends to be doing something good for them, then proceeds to heap one more abuse atop a long series that FN women have endured.
Balbulican's post has more details. Read it, then contact your MP and Chuck Strahl, Aboriginal Affairs Minister, and tell them that FN women deserve a voice in the property rights issue, not a token acknowledgment by a government more focused on assimilation than the righting of a long-standing wrong.
Since it's something that's been blogged extensively already, you no doubt know the story of the Attawapiskat First Nation kids who are fighting to get a school. 
