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Global Research Wants to Hear From You!
***
It happens to be the way
History has been made
Don’t go play with a toy gun
Or change lanes without signaling
Don’t comply, don’t resist
‘Cause it don’t make no difference”
– Propagandhi, from the song Comply/Resist [1]
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Imagine, if you can, your culture, your way of life, your language, even your very personal identity was trampled, discredited, eradicated, and tossed to the gutter, as the newcomers to this land made the rules that benefited them.
This is the sad story facing Indigenous people all over North and South America. The dark counter-point to the joyous verse of Christopher Columbus ‘discovering America.’ It is also part of the savage opera of millions of Africans losing their trust from the Motherland and replacing it with the constructed new life and vision of the slave. [2][3]
Shortly after becoming a country, the Canadian government, aided by racist policies and racist mentalities, put in place a railroad which affected the native dwellers directly. They instituted the Indian Act, a policy subsumed by colonial laws aimed at eradicating First Nations culture and replacing it with policies of assimilation into the Euro-Canadian culture. The vicious record of Indian residential schools, which involved ripping young native children from their parents and indoctrinating them into a foreign (White Christian) culture is a result of the Indian Act. [4][5]
The inter-generational impacts see the traumas of the past being passed on from parent to child. So recent trends within our society expressing grief, and an apology from our governmental masters does not mean we have achieved full, or even any decolonization.[6]
As we mentioned in an earlier episode of this series, colonization can continue in a targeted country even after it achieves “liberation.” When a country is dominated by a foreign power, it penetrates the people on levels one cannot completely appreciate. And living for generations as a colonial power wipes away an understanding of conducting affairs in any other way.[7]
In the case of Canada’s Indigenous people, while an elaborate and diverse land containing multiple medical, hunting, language, and other treasures of a people were ravaged by settlers, similar in a way to clear-cutting rain-forests and replacing them with single crops, their understanding of their own way of life were not extinguished.[8]
This episode of the Global Research News Hour tends to be a kind of survivor’s tale. A story of an Elder generation handed down to a young man trying to regain the peace and the balance that has eluded him. It is hosted by White Thunderbird in conversation with Anishinaabeg knowledge keeper Wally Chartrand. The two discuss multiple instances of colonization and assimilation and ways to escape it through ceremony, through establishing relations with the natural world, and with each other.
This episode is also a salute to National Indigenous Peoples Day.
Wally Chartrand is a knowledge Keeper originally from Mallard, Manitoba.
(Global Research News Hour episode 437)
LISTEN TO THE SHOW
Click to download the audio (MP3 format)
The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM out of the University of Winnipeg.
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The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca .
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Notes:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nneZ5jgrXlA
- Andrew Woolford, Jeff Benvenuto, and Alexander Laban Hinton (2014), ‘Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America’,
Durham: Duke University Press; https://academic.oup.com/jah/article-abstract/103/3/739/2647597?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false
- https://www.britannica.com/topic/slavery-sociology/Slave-culture
- https://www.nationalobserver.com/2020/12/21/opinion/bloody-legacy-canadas-railways-indigenous-peoples
- https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/indian-act
- https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/intergenerational-trauma-and-residential-schools
- https://www.globalresearch.ca/rooting-the-periphery-not-the-core-white-supremacist-domination-in-the-caribbean/5850963
- https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/aboriginal-rights
