#Cultural genocide

[agwitow]

"From the mid nineteenth century to the mid twentieth century" might be a little vague for some people, so let me be specific.

The last residential school in Canada closed in 1996.

This is not an act that happened long ago. It's not something that only happened to your grandparents and great-grandparents. There are people in their 30s who attended that school.

And there are still institutions, regulations, and policies that have carried over from that period to affect the way non-Christian people are treated. A lot of it has to do with the fact that almost all of our policy makers have been some form of Christian since day 1. But that's not the fault of the church or it's policies over the last several hundred years /s

Love seeing something from TikTok and going “girlie that is literally what led to the downfall of the Papal States”

[cbs-scorpion-coffee-shop]

The People of Israel Live, "Finish Them"

A popular sticker calling for a genocide spotted all over occupied Palestine.

Israeli civilians are not innocent

[metamorphesque]

[allthecanadianpolitics]

In a packed room at the Powell River Public Library, Frances Widdowson is warning about “wokeism.” She accuses two city councillors of destroying democracy in the town, proclaims that trans people don’t actually exist and complains that no one except linguists knows how to pronounce Indigenous names.

Widdowson is a contributor to a book called Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth about Residential Schools) that calls into question whether graves of Indigenous children actually have been found at residential schools.

The book makes the incorrect claim that survivors’ stories about residential schools are “either totally false or grossly exaggerated.” The schools were federal institutions that Indigenous children were forced to attend, separated from their families and culture. Children were abused and died at high rates as a result of overcrowding, malnutrition and disease.

Widdowson is a former professor in the department of economics, justice and policy studies at Mount Royal University in Calgary.

She was fired in 2022, in part because of her comments praising the educational value of residential school. She is challenging her firing. [...]

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Tagging: @newsfromstolenland, @vague-humanoid

Notes from the poster @el-shab-hussein: this filth is what was teaching economics and justice courses in a University.

[aci25]

About the dehumanization of oppressed people to justify their oppression

By: Bianca Graulau

[wiisagi-maiingan]

The ICWA is not a hypothetical. So many Native people have lost aunts, uncles, cousins, and siblings to the foster system. So many people Native people are disconnected from their cultures and tribes because their parents or grandparents were stolen from their families. So many Native people, even under the ICWA, were removed from their families and placed into foster care.

So many children today, right now, are being removed from their families, tribes, and cultures.

All it takes is one generation to kill a community, to kill a culture. We've lived through this before. We're still living through this now. We know firsthand what it means to lose our children and we know what will happen to us, to our families and our tribes and our cultures and our bonds with each other, if the removal of indigenous children from their families becomes the law of the land again.

[alinahdee]

NEW VIDEO: STERILIZATION : Choice, Guilt and Necessity

Reproductive rights, generational trauma, and a history of violence against Indigenous women in Canada and the United States.

[odinsblog]

Since 2014, millions of Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other minorities have been locked up in China and subjected to torture and forced labour. Some of those freed talk about trying to rebuild their lives in neighbouring Kazakhstan.

Photography by Robin Tutenges

A Chinese course book

Saliman Yesbolat used to live in Ghulja county, Xinjiang. After she refused to denounce her Uyghur neighbours to the police, she was forced to perform the raising of the Chinese flag every Monday at dawn, and to attend Chinese lessons twice a week in the basement of her building, where she would learn the Chinese language, patriotic songs and Xi Jinping's discourses by heart. This is her exercise book.

Forced to leave China

At 65, Imam Madi Toleukhan is one of the oldest refugees in Bekbolat, Kazakhstan, where more than 100 families took shelter after fleeing the Chinese regime. 'We were richer back there. I owned a herd, but I was too afraid for my sons, my grandchildren and their future: I came to Kazakhstan to save them. I didn't want them to be the fourth generation to suffer at the hands of the Chinese government, he says.

Remembering Uyghur culture in exile

Two members of the Dolan Ensemble, a Uyghur dance troupe based in Kazakhstan, get ready before performing a traditional dance to mark 40 days since the birth of a baby. Founded in 2016, the troupe performs at festivals or private events that bring together members of the Uyghur community, some of whom have had to leave Xinjiang.

Torture, infertility and damaged genitalia

In Kazakhstan, medical care for camp survivors is poor. Most victims can barely afford to see a family doctor. Anara*, an endocrinologist in a Kazakh hospital who has examined about 50 camp survivors since 2020, noticed recurrent infertility problems among her patients. 'Men or women, many have damaged genitalia. Some told me they'd been given drugs, others said they'd been raped. As they didn't come to us right after being released from the camps, it's impossible to know what kind of drugs they were administered in Xinjiang, she says. *Not her real name

The tiger chair

Ospan* spent a year in a re-education camp. He says his mind and body were crushed by the tortures he experienced in a tiger chair - a steel apparatus with handcuffs that restrains the body in painful positions. Aged about 50, this former shepherd, who took refuge with his family in eastern Kazakhstan, is no longer fit for work. Physically wrecked and prone to headaches, he mourns the loss of his memory above all. 'I used to know a lot of songs and I loved to sing; I also knew poems by heart ... Now, I can't sing any more, I can't remember the words,' he says. *Not his real name

Broken families and imprisonment

Aikamal Rashibek saw the dreadful efficiency of the CCP's brainwashing on her husband, Kerimbek Bakytali, after he was released from a Chinese psychiatric hospital. 'He disappeared for a year. When he came back, he didn't tell me anything about what happened to him. He was highly unhinged, always nervous, and got angry whenever I asked questions. He couldn't stop repeating that he hated Kazakhstan now, and that he wanted to go back to China with the kids to give them a Chinese education, says Aikamal. They are now separated.

Missing loved ones in China’s camps

In March 2017, Miyessar Muhedamu, left, a Uyghur woman, was arrested in Xinjiang under the pretext that she had studied Arabic in Egypt when she was young. Her husband, Sadirzhan Ayupov, right, and her three children have not seen her since. Now that Miyessar has left the camp, Sadirzhan receives a short call every few months. He suspects she might have suffered abuse, yet Miyessar can’t speak freely. ‘She told me she’d been in a re-education camp, and that she’d been released. When I ask her what she went through there, she doesn’t answer,’ says Sadirzhan.

Life after fleeing China

Sent to a re-education camp in 2018 at the age of 64, Yerke* saw her health quickly deteriorate. Locked a tiny cell with dozens of other women, she almost lost the use of her legs due to the cold floor she had to lie on. She was in the camp when she learned of her son’s death: pressured by the Chinese authorities, he took his own life. After her release, Yerke fled to Kazakhstan with some family members, but two of her children remain in China. *Not her real name

Forced labour and confessions

Dina Nurdybay, 32, was arrested in Nilka county, Xinjiang, because her traditional Kazakh clothing business made her a separatist, according to the Chinese authorities. She spent 11 months between two re-education camps, a CCP school and a forced-labour sewing factory. After proving she was capable of being ‘well behaved’ and having performed a self-criticism in front of the whole village, Dina was released and managed to escape when she obtained a week’s leave to visit her ailing father in Kazakhstan.

Cultural genocide

China’s repression of ethnic minorities also involves cultural genocide. As Muslim rituals are forbidden in Xinjiang, people are trying to keep their traditions alive across borders. Here, a family is praying together in Kazakhstan after the death of one of their relatives in Xinjiang. They could not repatriate the body because the border between the two countries was closed at the time.

(continue reading)

[eretzyisrael]

[protoslacker]

I formally apologize — (applause) — as president of the United States of America, for what we did.  I formally apologize.  And it’s long overdue. At the Tribal school — at a Tribal school in Arizona, a community full of tradition and culture, and joined by survivors and descendants to do just that: apologize, apologize, apolo- — rewrite the history book correctly. 

President Joe Biden via The White House. Remarks by President Biden on the Biden-⁠Harris Administration’s Record of Delivering for Tribal Communities, Including Keeping His Promise to Make this Historic Visit to Indian Country | Laveen Village, AZ

[lobotomologist]

watching the finale of under the bridge and god. cam's confrontation of her dad over the adoption papers is heartbreaking. not just the realization that her whole life, her birth family was a short distance away - but her final statement. "but maybe i was meant to be something different."

god that cuts me so deep.

for those interested in reading more, AIM (adopt indian metis) was a real organization and took part in what's called the sixties scoop in canada, which was a mass effort to remove indigenous children from their families and be placed with white adoptive parents, effectively severing the ties of the children to their culture. cam's statement really gets at the heart of the way this robbed those children of any agency in their identity, any choice of it.

i suppose this is my soapbox moment as a canadian to say that canadian history is fucked and rife with racism. since the start, it has been an unceasing effort to eradicate the indigenous peoples from this land. there are those who have experienced this first hand in residential schools and forced adoptions. i am not one of them, but even the barest part of it that i, as a white canadian, can comprehend makes me genuinely sick to my stomach.

we talk constantly about raising awareness about the cultural (and literal) genocide of indigenous people in canada, but we get so detatched from it, viewing it as so far from current day. i hope that if anything, cam's storyline goes to show that it's not far from us - residential schools persisted into the 1980s and indigenous children are still removed from their communities at a disproportionate rate by social services.

there's no eloquent end to this post except to say that cam's story is one of so, so many here in canada.

[palestinegenocide]

‘We are the masters of the house’: Israeli channels air snuff videos featuring systematic torture of Palestinians

Israeli TV channels aired a number of reports showing the torture and humiliation of Palestinians in Israeli prisons. The videos are consumed by the Israeli public as entertainment, revealing the sadism of Israeli society.

[link]

[torillatavataan]

Nothing new indeed. Here are just some russified Finnish place names from the Karelian Isthmus:

Antrea -> Kamennogorsk Enso -> Svetogorsk * Heinjoki -> Veshchevo Johannes -> Sovetsky Jääski -> Lesogorsky Kanneljärvi -> Pobeda Kaukjärvi -> Kamenka Kirvu -> Svobodnoye Kivennapa -> Pervomayskoye Koivisto -> Primorsk Koivistonsaari -> Bolshoy Beryozovy Kuolemajärvi -> Pionerskoye Kähäri -> Goncharovo Käkisalmi -> Priozersk Lavansaari -> Moshchny Metsäpirtti -> Zaporozhskoye Raivola -> Roshchino Rautu -> Sosnovo Räisälä -> Melnikovo Säkkijärvi -> Kondratyevo ** Terijoki -> Zelenogorsk Uuras -> Vysotsk Uusikirkko -> Polyany Vahviala -> Yashino Valkjärvi -> Michurinskoye Vuoksenranta -> Ozyorskoye Ylä-Urpala -> Torfyanovka

* The name lives on in the name of the company Stora Enso ** You may recognise the name from the song Säkkijärven polkka

Place names in the ceded Petsamo, Salla, and Ladoga Karelia, have largely been left alone.

The population of the ceded Finnish territories was also completely replaced.

Please feel free to list more russified places from other countries.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

The lawyer for a residential school survivor leading a proposed class-action defamation lawsuit against the Catholic Church over residential schools says the court action is a last resort.

Maxime Faille, the lawyer for Sphenia Jones, says the goal is understanding — not money.

"Sphenia is 80 years old. She doesn't care about money for herself," Faille said in an interview from Vancouver.

"She wants to see healing happen, and this is an opportunity for healing and reconciliation.

"But it takes two willing partners to do that. To me, [the lawsuit] is the fallback if the other side isn't willing to come to the table." [...]

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @newsfromstolenland, @abpoli