Solemn Truth and Reconciliation Day
Hello Dreamers
Lets take a moment to remember the dark chapter within Canadian History involving the residential school system. An institution designed to destroy Indigenous culture that ran from 1867 to 1996. It worked by having the children of Indigenous people taken to a series of boarding schools, run by Christian Churches and sponsored by the Canadian Government, to indoctrinate them into being proper white people.
Considering about 45-50% of these schools were ran by the Catholic Church, a group known for screwing alter boys, consider this your trigger warning.
Genocide the Canadian Way
Others might get guns, machettes, and blankets covered in pox to wipe out the local natives. Canada, being the patient, passive-aggressive soft-spoken lumberjacks built to last, takes your kids away and brainwashes them such that you can't even carry a sentence with them anymore because they forgot the language you taught them from birth - or holes were poked in their tongue to make it hurt to try.
That's the TLDR of it. These children would be taken away from their parents, families, communities, and made to live in a boarding school until they come of age... if they make it that far. Upon which priests, nuns, ministers and teachers taught all the worst parts of Christianity alongside their ABCs and arithmetic. All while dealing with routine beatings, tortures including that tongue piercing, and priests doing what they do best: raping and sodomising children.
All in the name of removing their 'savage,' 'barbaric,' and 'primitive,' ways and making them into proper white Christians! Raping the red out of them and making them into little red-velvet cupcakes is the will of God after all!
Now, remember where I said 'if they get that far?' It should come as no surprise to anyone that many of these kids died in the schools. To show how much these Churches and the Government cared, documentation of where these kids were was so scant that children disappeared - no one knew where they were.
Now, right-wingers, being into genocide, insist that these schools were for the good of the Indigenous, and claim the beatings and sexual assaults are exaggerations. Since many residential school sites have had ground penetrating radar find at least 4000 unmarked graves of children, anyone claiming this was a good thing stopped being welcome in polite society.
Why September 30th, and why Orange?
As with many days of both celebration and rememberance, the date has a meaning.
While the schools were in full swing September 30 would be when the Indian Agent and their people would go into communities and round up the kids for the next intake to keep beds warm and add to the machine to churn more traumatized Christians to the factorires dammit!
As for why its customary to wear an orange shirt, as much as its customary to wear poppies on Remembrance Day, there is a story behind this. Phyllis Webstad from the Stswecem’c Xgat’tem First Nation got dragged out of her home at age 6, as many kids would have been, to start school. Her grandmother put her in a pretty orange shirt to celebrate her first day at school. When taken into the school, as part of dehumanization and destroying the children's sense of self in the name of God and Country, the school administration took any personal belonging they had, including the clothes on their back. So Webstad was distraught when they took her fancy orange shirt, to make her wear the uniform all kids were made to wear as she was thrown into the machine.
Every Child Matters
Thank you for getting this far. Its hard to face, but we need to know about the skeletons within our closet less we become the very barbaric savages we hoped to purge. There are lessens to unpack if we want to truly, with a straight face, call ourselves 'civilised.'
While there won't be easy answers to how to heal these wounds within the Indigenous forced to survive, and their descendent raised by broken people, and what the institutions of both faith and government need to do to make amends, if that is even possible, we still need to remember our history. Not just the stuff about Brock and Tecumseh kicking American ass, or that one time in World War 1 when Canada yoinked a hill from the Germans that the other militarises somehow couldn't get. We need to also know about the dark stuff, the residential schools and the deal the government had with the church to send them kids to abuse.
Part of healing from trauma is accepting what happened. Part of reparations is acknowledging the damage done and accepting punishment. Part of justice is punishing wrongdoers, whether they wish for forgiveness or not. If Canada is to move on from this, and be better for it, her people need to know this, if at a minimum to not do it again.
Here are some links if you want to read more about it: https://www.theindigenousfoundation.org/articles/what-is-the-national-day-for-truth-and-reconciliation
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