PUBLISHED ON JUNE 10, 2021 BY HILLARY LEBLANC
We visited this topic recently in terms of Acadians supporting the Black Lives Matter movement and other minorities who are struggle specifically in the East Coast communities. Given the news developments I think revisiting this topic in terms of the Indigenous and Islamic communities and how they are struggling this week. I have always been very loud about Indigenous rights and issues and how they need more than “Truth and Reconciliation”. My family is also Muslim, so both tragedies approximately a week apart have really hit home for me.
I will reiterate my sentiment from the article about Acadians which is that we all need to be coming together to fight oppression, racism, terrorism and hatred. What I would add now, is that I feel the atrocities against the Indigenous have been occurring for so long that it is a bigger dilemma. Now, we should not compare racist acts or trauma. Violence is violence, hatred is hatred. That being said, being called the N word is not the same as living in the middle of nowhere with no running water in 2021. These people have been ostracized. A genocide continues to happen to them but in different ways so it is not seen as outright violence against them, but the Canadian government continues to make the life of the Indigenous more difficult and allow stereotypes about them to propagate so those in power do not help them. I am sure that the Indigenous people in Kamloops knew their children had not come home, and to us this mass grave is shocking, but the Indigenous communities have been trying to open our eyes for years to these atrocities. We all have reckoning to do. In 2020 the globe stood together because of the violent murder of George Floyd and said there would be no more police brutality and Black people killed by the hands of the police. Did the police stop? Not really, but Derek Chauvin was found guilty, and it felt like hope. As a country we have yet to treat the atrocities against the Indigenous with the same passion. Maybe it’s because these murders happened years ago, but that is no excuse. Most generations of Indigenous alive today are constantly battling intergenerational trauma caused by these residential schools and the hand the police and government had in trying to eradicate an entire group of people.
While this discourse has been happening, a white 20 year old man killed four members of a family of five because they were Islamic in London, Ontario. Someone said “how can this happen in Canada” and to that I say, that this is on par for a country that has thousands of children in unmarked grades buried in its soil. We are no better than America is, though we try to use kindness as propaganda to make our country seem great. It is not. There is hatred because of language in the East Coast, there is rampant racism coast to coast, the colonization and genocide of the Indigenous has not stopped hundreds of years later. We need to come together and make the government uncomfortable, make the churches uncomfortable, make our white enemies, friends, family, and allies uncomfortable with the truth behind the systemic racism that has allowed white people to get away with terrorism and mass murder on this country’s soil.
I truly think if we minorities, came together we would be stronger than the white people in our nation. And I’m not saying let’s fight the whites, or hate them. My momma is white. But maybe together we could fight our government for electoral reform, for clean water for the Indigenous, for the other residential schools to be searched, for the members of the catholic church who are comfortably dying who committed these atrocities to be exiled. The current government only works in favour of elite white men at the moment and makes it very difficult for anyone other than that group to have any success or power in the country they reside. I hope that we see effective change (speaking of change, how long until the Racism Commissioner gets appointed by Racist Blaine Higgs)? In the same way I implore you to listen to Black stories, listen to Islamic stories and Indigenous stories from their own mouths. Do not believe that all Islamics are terrorists or that Allah wants all other people dead. They have as much love in their religion as any other…To be fair, they have never put any people in residential schools so they may be a better religion than some other ones. Let’s fight for reconciliation for the Indigenous. This is our home, on NATIVE land.
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