Not in my country!
By: Hunter
Please note: Photo credit at end of article.
Most of us are aware of our indigenous population and only hear about the things they have done wrong and not how we have wronged them. All around you will hear stories of indigenous peoples parents abusing their kids, alcohol and drug abuse, them ending up in jail and we all think they are just bad people, not people who have gone through hell and back and have managed to survive.
I understand most people who feel this way don’t know our history with the indigenous population so here it is. One day a bunch of English, Spanish and French settlers showed up to a country and saw people living there. These people couldn’t speak English and have lived in THEIR country for as long as they could remember. The settlers decided they liked the land and they were just going to take it, so they pillaged, raped and stole their land and gave them back the land that constantly flooded and nobody wanted.
Years later after they have taken everything from these people, Canada had the great idea to send them to residential schools. Government sponsored schools that were made to convert indigenous people to Christianity and to make them speak English. I like to reference that the children sent to these schools had no choice.
As these aboriginal children played in their yards a police person would come to their home tell their parents that their kid is going off to school and that they have no say. The child is taken against their will and brought to a big school with priests and nuns. The kids were brought into the school stripped naked, scrubbed raw and had all their hair cut off, it didn’t matter what their gender was. They were then given a uniform and told they could not speak the only language they knew. They would sleep in beds lined up in a room inches apart and in the middle of the night children would be taken away by a priest and brought back crying, those children were being sexually abused. The last residential school was closed in 1996.
Now, these people are seen as alcoholics, drug abusers, child abusers because without help and therapy their problems and their parent's problems will not go away. They still don’t have clean water and safe houses, It's hard to get over being taken advantage of if it is still happening. These people should not be seen as villains or bad people but people who don’t know how to cope with the pain they are feeling. How would you react if everything you ever knew was taken away and you were forced to be something you're not and to do things you don’t want to do. I am not justifying their actions but I feel that even though their coping strategies are not the best, at least some of them are trying to cope others, unfortunately, do choose suicide as the only option.
We need to stop thinking of these people as bad and fragile and look at them as human beings. People should realize they don’t have the same resources as us to help them cope healthily. Personally, I feel from looking at what the indigenous population have gone through indigenous people are some of the strongest people.
Work cited
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/a9/4b/0f/a94b0fc2e8b8938c6dac051fb6616189--indian-residential-schools-code-talker.jpg (indigenous children praying)
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