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.
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.
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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