Deaths of indigenous women 'a Canadian genocide', leaked report says - Sensationalist Headlines

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-48481958

What the fuck Canada. You're supposed to be nice.

Indigenous women suffer kidnapping, rape, and murder way higher than average, and there has for a long time been what seemed to be a conveniently-insufficient response from the authorities. Racism doesn't fade away, it needs to be stamped out. You don't wait for cancer to just get bored and die off on its own unless you don't want to live anymore.

Canada seldom talks about its native peoples, and that's because our historical sins have not been sufficiently repented, and the way they are treated even today is a travesty in this country.

Highway of Tears comes to mind. One track of road, about fifty to one hundred killed. It never ends does it?

Unfortunately, we're not as nice as what the world think we are.,

It's stuff like this that makes me feel ashamed to be Canadian. We should be better than this, FFS.

Aboriginal men have awful too. My heart goes out to families stuck in a cycle of violence. I have a friend who teaches at an inner city school and I've heard horror stories about how children are raised in terrible conditions. Everyone here knows about it, but no one seems to know what to do about it.

We treat our Natives like shit, it’s this beyond blatant systemic issue here, and most people in power go above and beyond to borderline comical levels to dodge the issue when asked about it point blank

Nobody fucking cares about our natives. I've tried to bring up native issues to white liberal, and even leftist, friends of mine and the conversation usually goes to 'yeah but we bend over backwards for them' 'they dont have to pay taxes' 'we give the tribal bands money, its not our fault they dont spend it appropriately'. Do we treat black people better up here than America? Latino people? More or less yes, but we more than make up for it in our racism again our native peoples. Out west, like Manitoba and the provinces west of that, people do not bat an eye at the abuse and murder of natives. To them its just another dead Indian, who cares? The native genocide is alive and well in Canada, and by-and-large non native Canadians don't care whatsoever.

I've heard that the treatment of natives in Canada is even more of a travesty than in the States. Is there truth to this?

The problem is that nobody knows how to actually help them, not does the government want to actually solve the core issues. The Indian act was a comple success. The Canadian government managed to kill off an entire people without _technically_ doing mass slaughter. All they had to do was to psychologically "Kill the Indian within the child" as per the mandate. Nowadays, most native American children resent where they came from and the "successful" ones are tend to be... Very twisted. (Though this is a personal anecdote) the reserves are shit because the people are so broken, the so-called cheifs can be bribed with chump-changed compared to most politicians. Yes, there's a lot money being spent on native Americans, but that money never goes to the actual populous. It's corruption all the way down. Why do you think there are still housing crisises even though loads of money is being allocated to them? Side note: My dad, who's an architect, does his best to do good to the native American people. He's designed extremely affordable near-net-zero energy houses and a development plan which compliments Native American culture for a reserve. All they had to do was prepare the site. When he sent a guy out there to check progress on the site, he found that everything was just built _wrong_ the water piping was _way above_ the frost line and the fire hydrents were sticking over 4 feet up in the air. (because the underground pipes were above the frost line) but a friend of a chief did it so it was totally okay. Nobody gives a shit about Native Americans, not even themselves.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/a-history-of-residential-schools-in-canada-1.702280 Yes; Residential schools were established with the assumption that aboriginal culture was unable to adapt to a rapidly modernizing society. It was believed that native children could be successful if they assimilated into mainstream Canadian society by adopting Christianity and speaking English or French. Students were discouraged from speaking their first language or practising native traditions. If they were caught, they would experience severe punishment. Throughout the years, students lived in substandard conditions and endured physical and emotional abuse. There have also been convictions of sexual abuse. Students at residential schools rarely had opportunities to see examples of normal family life. Most were in school 10 months a year, away from their parents; some stayed all year round. All correspondence from the children was written in English, which many parents couldn't read. Brothers and sisters at the same school rarely saw each other, as all activities were segregated by gender. According to documents obtained by the CBC, some schools carried out nutritional experiments on malnourished students in the 1940s and '50s with the federal government's knowledge. When students returned to the reserve, they often found they didn't belong. They didn't have the skills to help their parents, and became ashamed of their native heritage. The skills taught at the schools were generally substandard; many found it hard to function in an urban setting. The aims of assimilation meant devastation for those who were subjected to years of abuse.

Eh, depends on whether or not you think "cultural genocide" is worse than "genocide".

This, I think, is the biggest problem. The chiefs are so corrupt that they never do anything to help their people, the police are scared to go on the reserves for fear of ending up on the national news over something to do with "racism," and those same accusations come whenever someone says we need to do something about how absolutely broken the reserve system is. Quite frankly, I think we should scrap the reserve system entirely, as well as any special considerations made for natives in law. There's inequal treatment in part because it's ingrained in our constitution to treat them inequally, and that can breed resentment and contempt among some, and cause issues when trying to address things like corruption in the reserves that sees the money spent there squandered and the people continuing to suffer. The shit conditions there also unfortunately breed crime, and that crime breeds further resentment from the people who live around the reserves when people from the reserves go rob their farms because there's literally nothing else for them to do, no way for them to make money, and they live in shit conditions. And when someone does manage to break free from that cycle, those still stuck in it resent them and ostracize them. There needs to be more accountability for what's being done on the reserves, and frankly I think eliminating the reserve system and converting them to standard municipalities, with elected officials and mandatory accountability, would be one of the best things we could do to help.

I'm unsure if whether or not rebranding them as municipalities would be a solution for the following reasons: * It probably wouldn't have stopped (the community with the name I can't remember, I'm sure you know the one)'s water supply from being polluted from a mining/refining operation upstream * It would be seen as further assimilation * It doesn't do anything to encourage the people to be economically independent; there are some shitty non-native small-towns in the middle of nowhere. * Accountability is a neat buzzword, but it doesn't stop the "new" "mayors" from being corrupt.

Genocide is an extremely loaded term. Do they have proof that inaction was motivated by genocidal intent? Not just prejudice, but actual intent to wipe a race out?

There has been a systemic effort to culturally assimilate the native populations in Canada for like two hundred and fifty years. Not caring as they get raped and murdered at a substantially higher rate than the general population is part of the package. And it's disgusting. The conditions First Nations live in are revolting and often barely-sufficient. And the far north is the worst, because the Canadian government devastated their traditional way of life and replaced it with... nothing, so the adults are dysfunctional alcoholics and the youth huff paint fumes to get high as the only means of escaping the misery of living there.

Part of the problem is anything that's suggested in regards to fixing the problems other than throwing money at their corrupt village elders is decried as racist colonialism.

Well, that's the question. Are they saying that they have proof that this is a deliberate attempt at cultural assimilation (specifically issues of inaction in regards to disappearances and murders, not other policies that may be culturally assimilative).

My mother worked for an environmental engineering office before she retired, and among the projects they did within the last five years or so was setting up a proper water treatment and pumping plant on a reserve so it had a reliable supply of clean water, on contract from the province. Unfortunately, while I'm sure the engineers did a great job and delivered exactly what the province and band wanted and intended for the project, I have a feeling that the actual situation on the ground at the reserve was probably more like Garden Hill First Nation, where they have a state of the art water system but only half the homes have plumbing to even connect to the grid. And the problem there is it's a lot easier to spend the moderate amount of money to build a water system than to spend the big bucks on a water system and then digging up the whole damn place to plumb it. And even then without renovations to homes you'd have at best an outdoor bathroom and water pump on many properties, because chances are maybe the chief and his buddies will actually have the cash to afford plumbing an unplumbed house. The idea of giving chiefs and bands relatively strong autonomy within their reserves is a good one, but in practice it was never going to work -- thanks to the efforts of the authorities to basically ruin multiple generations through the residential schools and the other forms of cultural suppression and elimination practiced. The logic of taking someone who's survived all this shit and putting them in charge of their people, who by and large are all suffering from the same dysfunctional kinds of broken backgrounds, is practically VaultTec-tier. Who'd have guessed that if you give the alcoholic abusive father custody of the kids they keep getting beat, and who'd have guessed that if you put broken people in charge of broken situations things stay broken? The reserves need a massive amount of money and supplies dropped onto them, but that inflow must come with supervision and direction from the federal/provincial government for infrastructure. Reserves need to be brought up to code, and if the government's paying it damn well should be able to make sure the job is done to code. Anyone who screams that it's patronizing and colonial can suck my dick because Canada has already taken responsibility for natives, and then utterly failed that responsibility, and it's not racist to start to pick up the pieces we should've never let fall. Reservations and bands should be self-determining but they need to be brought closer to the baseline for standards of living before they can be healthy in their self-determination.

Canada's been still committing basically genocidal acts against their natives even as fresh as the 90's it's just that like US natives, no one apparently gives a shit about them.

Here in Manitoba we talk about it all the time, its always on the news, unfortunately because it is happening here regularly. We have a very high indigenous population in our capital city and people still go missing and end up dead. There is stuff happening at high level and at local level, but it never seems quick enough.

I swear, every time I hear about this, it just makes me think of Canada as this really nice kind warm hearted white guy who secretly murders and cuts up black people for his "collection" in his basement, except it's Native Americans instead.

A part of this thread has devolved into the discussion I was criticizing in my earlier post. 'We give the band chiefs money, its not our fault they're corrupt.' Not every native person lives on reservations. Are we just going to ignore the pain of the natives that live everywhere else? What about the communities up north where their goods are provided by federally subsidized private companies that charge 300% and up markup on everyday supermarket goods? Where do the band chiefs come into that equation? I'm sick of this fucking cop out that's entirely made of memes about how we bend over backwards for them. It's complete bullshit. We came in and stole their fucking land, and 7 out of 10 native children up north go hungry. We should be fucking ashamed.

They live in a remote location with lack of access, that is why the prices are higher from what I've read. It's not an economically feasible place to live unless you're self-sufficient.

That's irrelevant?

Why? I feel as though it's relevant.

How???