| From | Rights Action <[email protected]> |
| Subject | Canada Day homework assignment: “Stealing Children To Steal The Land” |
| Date | July 5, 2021 2:44 PM |
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What kind of country do Canadians want Canada to be?
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July 1, 2021
Canada day
*******
Canada Day homework assignment: “Stealing Children To Steal The Land”
What kind of country do Canadians want Canada to be?
By Grahame Russell, Rights Action
[link removed]
July 1, 2021 is another good day for truth-telling about land theft, genocide and crimes against humanity, inside and beyond Canada’s borders. And “Stealing Children To Steal The Land”, a comprehensive report from The Intercept and hosted by Naomi Klein, should perhaps be required listening/reading for all Canadians.
* Listen/Read transcript: [link removed]
Memorial honoring mass grave of 215 Indigenous children at Kamloops Indian Residential School.
Photo: Elise Swain/The Intercept; Getty Images
“Industrial scale” violence
The report summarizes some of the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) that issued its final report in 2015. We hear from Senator Murray Sinclair, who headed the work of the TRC from 2008-2015.
“Over the time of our mandate, the commission heard statements from survivors, gathered documents, and worked to create a number of calls to action aimed at addressing the damage that was done. The calls to action are centered around a core challenge in Canadian society: a broad lack of understanding of the unjust and violent circumstances from which modern Canada has emerged, and how the legacy of residential schools is part of that history, and of our country today.”
Naomi Klein summarizes some findings:
“We heard about Indigenous children ripped from their parents, separated from siblings and relatives, beaten and whipped for speaking their language. We heard about priests and nuns who told children that their ceremonies, their art forms, their parents, their grandparents, their ways of knowing were not just wrong but satanic, a sure route to hell.”
“The TRC report told of young bodies, ravaged by starvation-level rations; of days filled with forced manual labor; of braids of hair chopped off on arrival; of thin school uniforms wholly inadequate for frigid Canadian winters. It told of TB and other infectious diseases left to rampage through the schools.”
“We heard about the systemic sexual violence — the rapes — by priests, Catholic brothers, and nuns. One school, St. Anne’s in Ontario, had a crank-operated electric chair.”
“Now this did not take place in a few dark corners where no one was looking. It took place on an industrial scale: 150,000 Indigenous children went through Canada’s residential school system over a century and half. And this was official state policy: enrollment in the schools became mandatory in 1920.”
“When the TRC issued that final report, it described this deliberate attempt by church and state to destroy Indigenous peoples’ culture and group coherence as “cultural genocide.”
Senator Murray Sinclair continues:
“The one aspect of residential schools that really proved to be quite shocking to me, personally, was the stories that we began to gather of the children who died in the schools — of the children who died, sometimes deliberately, at the hands of others who were there, and in such large numbers. Survivors talked about, during the time that they were there, about children who suddenly went missing. Some of the survivors talked about witnessing children being buried in large numbers into mass burial sites.”
More Churches in Flames as Outrage Against Residential Schools Grows
[link removed]
Stolen Children / Stolen Land
From there, Naomi takes the reader/listener to a discussion with residential school survivor Doreen Manuel and her niece Kanahus Manuel about “the horrors of residential schools and the relationship between stolen children and stolen land.”
“Doreen’s father, George Manuel, was a survivor of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, where unmarked graves of children as young as 3 years old were found. Kanahus’s father, Arthur Manuel, was also a survivor of the Kamloops residential school.”
“This intergenerational conversation goes deep on how the evils of the Kamloops school, and others like it, have reverberated through a century of Manuels, an experience shared by so many Indigenous families, and the Manuel family’s decades long fight to reclaim stolen land.”
Listening to “Stealing Children To Steal The Land”, it becomes ever clearer that the violent, criminal policies and programs being exposed in main stream media across Canada, as more and more mass graves are being identified at former Residential Schools, pre-date the creation of the settler colonialist country of Canada in 1867.
The root causes of these policies and crimes derive from Christian-led, racist, European (predominantly Spanish, Portuguese, British, French) imperialism and colonialism across what is now known as “the Americas”.
Canada is the off-spring of this imperialism and colonialism, the values and interests of which are in the DNA of what Canada was in 1867, and continues to be today in many harmful and unjust ways.
Land theft - getting control over resources under the land and on the land - was always one of the central (if not the central) driving force and rational of European imperialism and colonialism, continuing after the creation of “Canada” through to today.
Controlling land and resources inside Canadian borders, and beyond
With this growing attention on truth-telling about and demanding criminal investigations and trials for crimes against humanity and individual criminal trials committed by the Canadian government and Churches against First Nations peoples (including the Residential Schools program), it is not changing the subject to reflect also on policies and actions of the Canadian government and resources extraction companies around the world, like mining companies in places like Guatemala.
To focus on Canadian mining companies in Guatemala is simply to connect the dots between Canadian policies and interests – predominantly those of securing access to and control over lands and resources - inside and beyond our borders.
Canada day 2021: Another good day for truth-telling about Canadian mining companies doing business with the genocidal generals in Guatemala
In the 1970s and 80s, the U.S. supported the Guatemalan military, and political/economic elites in their war against the Guatemalan people, including campaigns of massacres and genocide carried out against Mayan Indigenous peoples.
While this was done – and ‘justified’ - in the name of “fighting communism”, what it was really about was maintaining in power in Guatemala an exploitative social-political-economic order that had been in place, more or less, since the onslaught of European imperialism and colonialism centuries before.
In October 2021, Between the Lines will publish
“TESTIMONIO: Canadian Mining in the Aftermath of Genocides in Guatemala” ([link removed])
It is this social-political-economic order that favors U.S. and Canadian (amongst other) global companies and investors … such as the Canadian-led mining industry.
In the 1990s, the majority population of Guatemala was barely beginning to overcome their trauma and silence after suffering decades of the U.S.-backed repression that left hundreds of thousands killed, tens of thousands “disappeared”, over a million violently displaced from their lands and communities.
Even as the Canadian government publicly stated its support for Guatemala’s “Peace Process” that culminated in 1996, the Canadian government was privately pushing for mining law reforms while numerous Canadian companies were illegally (as it turned out) acquiring mining licenses for vast extensions of mainly Mayan territories and lands.
With full Canadian government support, mining companies acquired their ill-gotten licenses from Guatemalan governments dominated (1996-2004) by the same military, political and economic sectors – including the genocidal Generals Efrain Rios Montt and Otto Perez Molina - that had planned and carried out the recent decades of massacres, disappearances and genocides against the mainly Mayan population.
Based on 15 years of direct support for and visits to predominantly Mayan mining-harmed communities, TESTIMONIO summarizes systemic harms and violence at four different mining operations, including forced evictions and land dispossession, burning of villages to the ground, killings of community defenders, shootings, gang-rapes of villagers, environmental destruction and health harms to human and animal life.
TESTIMONIO lays bare the context of impunity, corruption and a fundamental lack of democracy in which (mainly) Canadian mining companies chose to operate, supported fully by the Canadian government.
On the book cover is Diodora Hernandez, a Mayan Mam campesina woman who refused to sell her land to Goldcorp Inc.’s open-pit, cyanide-leaching mining operation. On July 7, 2010, two men – employees of Goldcorp at the time – walked to Diodora’s remote hut and tried to kill her, shooting her in the head. The bullet entered her right eye and exited by her right ear.
Unbelievably, she survived (blind in one eye, deaf in one ear) and did not budge in her resolve to not cave into Goldcorp’s illegal and violent pressures. No justice was done against the two men, though their names were known by the police and by Goldcorp. Diodora received no support or reparations from anyone, beyond small supports from solidarity organizations.
Refoundation of State and Society: The paths to follow
What kind of country to Canadians want Canada to be? The fair and just path forward, in the near future, is through much more truth-telling about the Residential Schools as part of hundreds of years of genocidal and ethnocidal policies.
The fair and just path forward is through criminal trials for individual crimes and crimes against humanity related to the Residential Schools and other government designed and implement policies and programs that, over generations, aimed ‘to take the Indian out of the Indians’, and that were actually aimed to take control of First Nations lands and resources.
With an honest understanding of the inequalities, violences and injustices inside our borders resulting from centuries of imperialism, colonialism and settler colonialism, this path leads, logically, to more understanding about and exposure of the inequalities, violences and injustices in how the global economic, political and military order operates today not only inside but also beyond our borders, and Canada’s wealthy, privileged place in this order.
Many groups and people in Canada – First Nations and non-First Nations - have been on this path for years, decades and generations.
If Canada wants to become a truly fair and just country, one that also fully respect and lives in balance with Mother Earth and all life forms, then these are the paths to follow.
* Listen/Read transcript: [link removed]
*******
Grahame Russell is director of Rights Action, a non-practising lawyer and adjunct professor at UNBC (University of Northern British Colombia).
Feel free to re-post, share and publish this article
[email protected] (mailto:[email protected]) / www.rightsaction.org ([link removed])
*******
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[link removed] Forward ([link removed])
July 1, 2021
Canada day
*******
Canada Day homework assignment: “Stealing Children To Steal The Land”
What kind of country do Canadians want Canada to be?
By Grahame Russell, Rights Action
[link removed]
July 1, 2021 is another good day for truth-telling about land theft, genocide and crimes against humanity, inside and beyond Canada’s borders. And “Stealing Children To Steal The Land”, a comprehensive report from The Intercept and hosted by Naomi Klein, should perhaps be required listening/reading for all Canadians.
* Listen/Read transcript: [link removed]
Memorial honoring mass grave of 215 Indigenous children at Kamloops Indian Residential School.
Photo: Elise Swain/The Intercept; Getty Images
“Industrial scale” violence
The report summarizes some of the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) that issued its final report in 2015. We hear from Senator Murray Sinclair, who headed the work of the TRC from 2008-2015.
“Over the time of our mandate, the commission heard statements from survivors, gathered documents, and worked to create a number of calls to action aimed at addressing the damage that was done. The calls to action are centered around a core challenge in Canadian society: a broad lack of understanding of the unjust and violent circumstances from which modern Canada has emerged, and how the legacy of residential schools is part of that history, and of our country today.”
Naomi Klein summarizes some findings:
“We heard about Indigenous children ripped from their parents, separated from siblings and relatives, beaten and whipped for speaking their language. We heard about priests and nuns who told children that their ceremonies, their art forms, their parents, their grandparents, their ways of knowing were not just wrong but satanic, a sure route to hell.”
“The TRC report told of young bodies, ravaged by starvation-level rations; of days filled with forced manual labor; of braids of hair chopped off on arrival; of thin school uniforms wholly inadequate for frigid Canadian winters. It told of TB and other infectious diseases left to rampage through the schools.”
“We heard about the systemic sexual violence — the rapes — by priests, Catholic brothers, and nuns. One school, St. Anne’s in Ontario, had a crank-operated electric chair.”
“Now this did not take place in a few dark corners where no one was looking. It took place on an industrial scale: 150,000 Indigenous children went through Canada’s residential school system over a century and half. And this was official state policy: enrollment in the schools became mandatory in 1920.”
“When the TRC issued that final report, it described this deliberate attempt by church and state to destroy Indigenous peoples’ culture and group coherence as “cultural genocide.”
Senator Murray Sinclair continues:
“The one aspect of residential schools that really proved to be quite shocking to me, personally, was the stories that we began to gather of the children who died in the schools — of the children who died, sometimes deliberately, at the hands of others who were there, and in such large numbers. Survivors talked about, during the time that they were there, about children who suddenly went missing. Some of the survivors talked about witnessing children being buried in large numbers into mass burial sites.”
More Churches in Flames as Outrage Against Residential Schools Grows
[link removed]
Stolen Children / Stolen Land
From there, Naomi takes the reader/listener to a discussion with residential school survivor Doreen Manuel and her niece Kanahus Manuel about “the horrors of residential schools and the relationship between stolen children and stolen land.”
“Doreen’s father, George Manuel, was a survivor of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, where unmarked graves of children as young as 3 years old were found. Kanahus’s father, Arthur Manuel, was also a survivor of the Kamloops residential school.”
“This intergenerational conversation goes deep on how the evils of the Kamloops school, and others like it, have reverberated through a century of Manuels, an experience shared by so many Indigenous families, and the Manuel family’s decades long fight to reclaim stolen land.”
Listening to “Stealing Children To Steal The Land”, it becomes ever clearer that the violent, criminal policies and programs being exposed in main stream media across Canada, as more and more mass graves are being identified at former Residential Schools, pre-date the creation of the settler colonialist country of Canada in 1867.
The root causes of these policies and crimes derive from Christian-led, racist, European (predominantly Spanish, Portuguese, British, French) imperialism and colonialism across what is now known as “the Americas”.
Canada is the off-spring of this imperialism and colonialism, the values and interests of which are in the DNA of what Canada was in 1867, and continues to be today in many harmful and unjust ways.
Land theft - getting control over resources under the land and on the land - was always one of the central (if not the central) driving force and rational of European imperialism and colonialism, continuing after the creation of “Canada” through to today.
Controlling land and resources inside Canadian borders, and beyond
With this growing attention on truth-telling about and demanding criminal investigations and trials for crimes against humanity and individual criminal trials committed by the Canadian government and Churches against First Nations peoples (including the Residential Schools program), it is not changing the subject to reflect also on policies and actions of the Canadian government and resources extraction companies around the world, like mining companies in places like Guatemala.
To focus on Canadian mining companies in Guatemala is simply to connect the dots between Canadian policies and interests – predominantly those of securing access to and control over lands and resources - inside and beyond our borders.
Canada day 2021: Another good day for truth-telling about Canadian mining companies doing business with the genocidal generals in Guatemala
In the 1970s and 80s, the U.S. supported the Guatemalan military, and political/economic elites in their war against the Guatemalan people, including campaigns of massacres and genocide carried out against Mayan Indigenous peoples.
While this was done – and ‘justified’ - in the name of “fighting communism”, what it was really about was maintaining in power in Guatemala an exploitative social-political-economic order that had been in place, more or less, since the onslaught of European imperialism and colonialism centuries before.
In October 2021, Between the Lines will publish
“TESTIMONIO: Canadian Mining in the Aftermath of Genocides in Guatemala” ([link removed])
It is this social-political-economic order that favors U.S. and Canadian (amongst other) global companies and investors … such as the Canadian-led mining industry.
In the 1990s, the majority population of Guatemala was barely beginning to overcome their trauma and silence after suffering decades of the U.S.-backed repression that left hundreds of thousands killed, tens of thousands “disappeared”, over a million violently displaced from their lands and communities.
Even as the Canadian government publicly stated its support for Guatemala’s “Peace Process” that culminated in 1996, the Canadian government was privately pushing for mining law reforms while numerous Canadian companies were illegally (as it turned out) acquiring mining licenses for vast extensions of mainly Mayan territories and lands.
With full Canadian government support, mining companies acquired their ill-gotten licenses from Guatemalan governments dominated (1996-2004) by the same military, political and economic sectors – including the genocidal Generals Efrain Rios Montt and Otto Perez Molina - that had planned and carried out the recent decades of massacres, disappearances and genocides against the mainly Mayan population.
Based on 15 years of direct support for and visits to predominantly Mayan mining-harmed communities, TESTIMONIO summarizes systemic harms and violence at four different mining operations, including forced evictions and land dispossession, burning of villages to the ground, killings of community defenders, shootings, gang-rapes of villagers, environmental destruction and health harms to human and animal life.
TESTIMONIO lays bare the context of impunity, corruption and a fundamental lack of democracy in which (mainly) Canadian mining companies chose to operate, supported fully by the Canadian government.
On the book cover is Diodora Hernandez, a Mayan Mam campesina woman who refused to sell her land to Goldcorp Inc.’s open-pit, cyanide-leaching mining operation. On July 7, 2010, two men – employees of Goldcorp at the time – walked to Diodora’s remote hut and tried to kill her, shooting her in the head. The bullet entered her right eye and exited by her right ear.
Unbelievably, she survived (blind in one eye, deaf in one ear) and did not budge in her resolve to not cave into Goldcorp’s illegal and violent pressures. No justice was done against the two men, though their names were known by the police and by Goldcorp. Diodora received no support or reparations from anyone, beyond small supports from solidarity organizations.
Refoundation of State and Society: The paths to follow
What kind of country to Canadians want Canada to be? The fair and just path forward, in the near future, is through much more truth-telling about the Residential Schools as part of hundreds of years of genocidal and ethnocidal policies.
The fair and just path forward is through criminal trials for individual crimes and crimes against humanity related to the Residential Schools and other government designed and implement policies and programs that, over generations, aimed ‘to take the Indian out of the Indians’, and that were actually aimed to take control of First Nations lands and resources.
With an honest understanding of the inequalities, violences and injustices inside our borders resulting from centuries of imperialism, colonialism and settler colonialism, this path leads, logically, to more understanding about and exposure of the inequalities, violences and injustices in how the global economic, political and military order operates today not only inside but also beyond our borders, and Canada’s wealthy, privileged place in this order.
Many groups and people in Canada – First Nations and non-First Nations - have been on this path for years, decades and generations.
If Canada wants to become a truly fair and just country, one that also fully respect and lives in balance with Mother Earth and all life forms, then these are the paths to follow.
* Listen/Read transcript: [link removed]
*******
Grahame Russell is director of Rights Action, a non-practising lawyer and adjunct professor at UNBC (University of Northern British Colombia).
Feel free to re-post, share and publish this article
[email protected] (mailto:[email protected]) / www.rightsaction.org ([link removed])
*******
[link removed] Facebook ([link removed])
[link removed] Twitter ([link removed])
[link removed] Website ([link removed])
============================================================
Copyright © 2021 Rights Action, All rights reserved.
You are receiving this email because you are one of our subscriptor
Our mailing address is:
Rights Action
Box 50887
20091-0887
Washington, DC 0
USA
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