VOICES of the Canadian Holocaust

http://www.hiddenfromhistory.org/
Telling the Untold Story of the Genocide of Aboriginal Peoples in Canada



http://www.olderthanamerica.com/




http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns/movie_natters/archive/2008/03/older_than_amer.shtml
Georgina Lightning doesn't mince words.

As writer, director and lead actress in "Older than America" she is unrepentant about wanting to tell the story of the Indian boarding schools in the US and Canada, and their lasting damage on generations of native people up till the present. The schools were designed to encourage assimilation, but critics says many children were abused and even killed. The last of the schools closed in the mid 70's, but Lightning says the psychological damage they left behind has badly damaged the very fabric of Indian society.

Shot in late 2006 around Cloquet "Older than America" is a drama set on the Fond du Lac reservation. It tells the story of a young woman (Lightning) who begins seeing visions of ghostly children. As she struggles to work out what these visions mean she begins to uncover the unsavory history of the now deserted boarding school.

Lightning says growing up on a Cree reservation in Canada, she didn't know that her own father, an abusive alcoholic, had been sent to a boarding school as a child. She only learned this after he committed suicide. Lightning says she came to see how many families around her were in a similar position.

The film will get a special screening on Friday as the opening night event for the Women with Vision festival at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. It will then get its official World Premiere at the South By Southwest Festival.

Lightning says she expects a strong emotional reaction from the Indian and non-Indian communities. She says what she hopes the film will do is start long overdue conversations

The residential schools were an atrocity, and I'm not convinced that they don't actually fall under the formal accepted definitions of genocide as far as international law goes.

OtM's gonna piss a lot of people off - and it should.

I knew many older Indians who had been forced into the Federal Indian School at Hayward, and heard their stories about being beaten for speaking their language, etc. I'm glad the story is finally being told on the big screen.

It's also genocide for these proselytizing asshats to go on their "missions" to Africa and the American streets. That's why those missionary types piss me off so much. They want to replace my culture with their own.

http://www.hrweb.org/legal/genocide.html

The residential schools are 2(b) through 2(e) inclusive, and probably a good chunk of 2(a) in places.

Claiming mere preaching is the same thing cheapens the hell out of the concept.

A lot of times missionaries will go into distressed areas and force people to accepts Jesus if they want food. Or here in the US recently they've been pushing hard to force Jesus if a kid wants an education and some sort of shot at success.

So no, preaching to equals on the street is hardly genocide. But forcing people to listen to preaching if they want the neccessities of life, is attempted genocide imo.

my Native Unity blog - http://nativeunity.blogspot.com

The Natives are restless and have every right to be. Some 50,000 First Nation children were sent to Residential and Christian boarding schools and never seen again.

Kudos to Georgina Lightning!!!!

Many of the stories never came to light (to white Candians, anyways) until about 20 years ago.

It was a vast conspiracy to eradicate aboriginal culture from our country by an unholy combination of churches and our own government. And from there, it just got worse.

You can read a dry acounting of the institutional side here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_residential_school_system

This happened mostly in far northern residential schools, FAR from the big cities in the south.

The revelations from the former aboriginal students trickled out during the 70's and 80's. Many of us were shocked at hearing some of the stories.

Canadians had always believed that we were a fair people, that we would NEVER treat anyone like all those blacks in the southern U.S. But we did.

It was an attempted "ethnic cleansing" that went on unremaked in mainstream Canadian life for almost 1/2 a century.

Even now, there are practically NO staff or administration members of those schools who have come forward to confirm or defend these policies.

I find that in itself very telling.

It's still acceptable to be pretty openly bigoted in chunks of Atlantic Canada, and people have been defending the schools as a good thing/etc. I know it started getting into court cases in the eighties around here, but there's simply not enough room in the Maritimes to put the residential schools out of the way of the cities or towns of any significant size. Perhaps the specific conditions in them were kept in the dark, but the fact that they were there to take the aboriginal-ness away from the aboriginals was official, known, and liked.

A lot of the schools started closing in the sixties; I wonder how many of the administrative folks from them (aside from "too many," the default answer regarding such people) are still around these days.

I see that you're from Nova Scotia. And yes, it was a case of "out of sight, out of mind" here in Ontario.

I don't know, maybe our parents sort of accepted this policy, but it was NEVER discussed openly back in the 60's or before.

At least not here in southern Ontario.

And the attitudes are tangibly different.

I love NS and plan to go back in the fall, but the population has some pretty accomplished xenophobes. It's kind of sad. ;P

But it should be known more generally.

lots to learn here!

:hi: