What went wrong in the relationship between Aboriginal people and other Canadians? Hear Wab Kinew run down 500 years of history in 2 minutes.
I love Wab Kinew.
(via africabumbada)
In Canada, February 14th is also Pink Triangle Day, a day of recognition for queers.
“Pink Triangle Day was never intended to be a gay/lesbian copy of Valentine’s Day. Rather its focus was to celebrate the wide ranging diversity of gay and lesbian relationships within our community. It was not only acceptable, it was encouraged, to extend good wishes to ALL of the significant people in your life. Your friends and your family (chosen and/or biological) as well as that very special someone should all receive Happy Pink Triangle Day greetings. While Valentine Day greetings are overwhelmingly focused on couple-dom, Pink Triangle Day provides us with an opportunity to acknowledge the value, the importance and the central role which non-sexual relationships play in most of our lives.”
The evidence – and source of the current anger and unrest – is hard to dispute. While Canada has the world’s largest supply of fresh water, more than 100 aboriginal communities have tapwater so foul they are under continual boil alert (pdf). Aboriginal peoples constitute 3% of Canada’s population; they make up 20% of its prisons’ inmates. In the far north, the rate of tuberculosis is a stunning 137 times that of the rest of the country. And the suicide rate capital of the world? A small reserve in Ontario, where a group of school-age girls once signed a pact to collectively take their lives.
Such realities have not stopped politicians and pundits from prattling on about the sums supposedly lavished on aboriginal peoples. The myth that aboriginals freeload off the state serves to conceal the real scandal: that most money pays for a sprawling government bureaucracy that keeps aboriginals poor, second-class, and dependent. The widespread notion that First Nations mismanage and squander what funds they do receive is simple prejudice: government reports acknowledge that communities are buried under a mountain of strict accounting; they are no more corrupt than non-native municipalities.
Tomorrow, thousands of Indigenous peoples and allies will protest in Ottawa through the Idle No More campaign. This campaign addresses the plethora of injustices faced by Indigenous peoples due to the Canadian government, which is an illegitimate institution founded on stolen land. Idle No More…
yeah i get the joke but actually it’s not like that in canada unless you have great coverage
i kind of hate how everyone idealizes canada’s healthcare like everyone gets everything for free no matter what. you get shit for free if you have a cushy job. if you’re poor you might get a discount on your medication and a free doctor’s visit but you’re sure as hell not getting extensive cancer treatment for free
This is not entirely true and I take exception to the “cushy job” comment. My union offers me additional health coverage, but my job is far from cushy. Getting additional insurance doesn’t mean you have it easy - it means you have a decent employer in that regard.
But for the non-Canucks, this is basically how it goes: We pay for health care every month (or every three) like any other bill. The coverage you get from Provincial Health Care does not include dental, prescriptions, or eyecare. Things like cancer treatments can be covered depending on the province you live in and all non-elective surgeries are covered, but the definition of elective changes from province to province. We don’t pay for doctor’s visits, but we wait for months to see specialists and for surgeries.
(Source: jonnovstheinternet)
rljd:
I am proud where I come from and so are the rest of the 2.5 Million Aboriginals across canada. We are stronger today, than we were 50 years ago. I have hope that everything harper is trying to do will be stopped.
Reblog this in support of your first nations people in Canada.
writing his name is so stirring.
it’s all these people coming together and saying - to power - “yeah buddy we’ve got our eye on you, so watch it.”
it takes something that could be seen as unfocused to a disinterested public, who doesn’t get Native perspectives from mainstream media, and shows unmistakably that it has a focus, and a purpose, and a goal, and it is political.
you treat these people right, HARPER.
BEAUTIFUL PROTEST
That’s a giant middle finger made of NDN’s.
This is shopped. What irks me about this is that there are quite a few things going on in Canada right now, that no one’s really paying any attention to, but people are reblogging a photoshopped image of a “protest” without any credit (where? when? what?). Wanna show support for Canada’s First Nations? Here are a few things to read up on.
Bill C-45 passes through Senate; to become law
Harper unlikely to meet hunger-striking Attawapiskat chief’s request for meeting
Canada, it’s time. We need to fix this in our generation.
Ian Mulgrew: Oppal’s report leaves the missing women forsaken once again
(via grrlyman)
20 minutes ago I shoveled the shit out of my sidewalk and steps (with a goddamn garden shovel, on account of someone stole my snow shovel!). I am soaked to the tits and now you can’t even tell I did anything. Fucking CANADA!!!
Missing Aboriginal Women: Canada’s Secret Shame
Angeline Eileen Pete, 28, reported missing from British Columbia in May. Roberta Dawn McIvor, 32, found murdered near Lake Winnipeg in July. Kimberley Nolin Napess, 15, last seen in Quebec City in August. And two Friday’s ago, Verna Simard, 50, dead after plunging from the sixth floor window of her residence in Vancouver.
These are not isolated, unconnected incidents. The women are all aboriginal, and their deaths and disappearances are the fruit of a rotten, unresolved Canadian legacy. In a country of deep pride but tolerance much shallower than acknowledged, these crimes are part of a secret shame: more than 600 aboriginal women missing or murdered in the last thirty years.
Killed in their homes and in the streets, on and off reservations, by acquaintances and by strangers, aboriginal women are the victims of an unmistakable epidemic of violence. They are five times more likely to die violently than their non-aboriginal counterparts. In northern BC, so many have disappeared on notorious highway 16 that it has been given a chilling name: the Highway of Tears. The Canadian government’s expressions of official feeling scarcely mask a truth written out in their policies and inaction: these women are disposable.
If 600 white middle class women went missing it would be treated like a national crisis. A single such disappearance triggers emergency advertisements on television and radio news. An aboriginal woman’s disappearance, on the other hand, receives no comparable attention…
It is not sexism or racism alone that is to blame. It is an entire system of inhumane relations with aboriginal peoples, upheld by a society that has swallowed the country’s forests, rivers, minerals and their original owners and spit them out as strangers in their own land. Dispossessed and subjected to wrenching poverty, culturally demeaned and lacking access to services and housing, aboriginal women are left exposed and vulnerable to all-too-ordinary predators. Predators who act assuming their victims will not be missed. Predators who believe they will escape with impunity.
Denied justice at every turn, it is little wonder these women’s families and their supporters have turned to public protest. Twenty years ago, the first demonstrations in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside [see video] — ground zero for stolen lives — drew only a handful of women. Objects were thrown at them from passing cars. Now, thousands are marching in cities across the country; a movement has been born. Its demands include a federal inquiry, anti-racist education for police officers, and funding for front-line organizations that offer culturally-appropriate shelter, support and counseling.
Survival, Strength, Sisterhood: Power of Women in the Downtown Eastside
Fastwurms
