Hey Divas,
Today is the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, also known as, Orange Shirt Day. Every year on September 30th, we honor the children, survivors, families and communities impacted by Indian boarding schools. We wear orange to honor the children who didn't make it back home.
Residential schools were specifically created to isolate Indigenous children from their families and culture in order to force the colonial religious views onto them. This is how the colonizers forcefully assimilated Indigenous children and communities. They would forcefully remove Indigenous children from their homes and take them to these schools to erase any cultural identity they had. A quote that would forever stick with me is "Kill the Indian in him, and save the man" -Captain Richard Henry Pratt. This shows how they viewed Indigenous people and how they wanted to erase their cultural identity and "save the man". So many lives were taken and affected at the cost of this ideology.
Indigenous people everywhere are still affected by this because these boarding schools caused thousands of tribal culture and language to be forgotten and the trauma to get passed down. These schools were traumatic and abusive for Indigenous people because your child was taken and some didn't even make it back home because of the abuse. Today, they are still finding children's bones that were left at these schools and honoring them and sending them back home if they can.
This day of remembrance and honor is for all the lives lost and survivors of this devastating part of history.
xoxo,
Indigenous Diva
Thank you for spreading the information for those who don't know. As an immigrant in Canada, when I first came here as a kid I was really confused when we first learnt about Orange Shirt Day at the start. Not because I was stupid but because there was such little knowledge I had of residential and day schools. It is unfortunately such a well hidden event, when it is something that should be spoken about as a major topic in schools. Even though it took Canada long enough I'm grateful that it is something being talked about now.
ReplyDeleteWow, I really had no idea about this! Of course, I know about all the horrible things that happened to indigenous people in the U.S. As an Afro-descendant Colombian, we have experienced similar things here, but I truly believe it's very important to know this information. Thank you for sharing it—remembering is the key so we don't repeat history.
ReplyDeleteHere in Colombia, something very similar happens to our indigenous communities, like the Wayuus. They are an indigenous group from La Guajira, and I'm actually from that town, Maicao. Just like the communities you mentioned, the Wayuu have suffered massive losses in their language due to historical indoctrination—such as nuns forcing assimilation through abuse.
Today, the oppression and racism rooted in that past act as generational traumas, causing the language to fade away poco a poco in the new generations. I am not Wayuu myself, but my little siblings are, and all of us from La Guajira are very involved in the culture; in fact, it's very common for our slang to include Wayuunaiki words. Even so, seeing these pieces of identity slowly disappear is heartbreaking