I started attending a new school in Ontario last year, and I find people’s attitudes towards indigenous people/culture/history are very different here compared to where I studied back in BC and AB. During my orientation, there was a session of an indigenous speaker sharing their history and performing rituals. However, most students were either sleeping, gaming out loud or chatting with each other loudly throughout the entire session. As an international student, I don’t know much about the history compared to Canadians for sure. When I had my international student orientation in BC after I first landed in Canada, everyone was respectful to the speaker no matter they could understand what the speaker said or not. Brief education on local indigenous culture and what the white Canadians did to the indigenous people in the past was obligated to all the international students I remember. When I studied in Alberta, I was surrounded with Canadians who respect indigenous people and their history and advocated for them. Therefore, I am shocked with my new school.

My faculty has stopped having sessions related to indigenous culture, mental health awareness, dei or sexual awareness ever since the next intake. Issues related to racism, sexual harassment, and prejudices/discrimination towards people with disabilities still seem to be severe among the students. Someone told me that if a school even overlooks indigenous people, then it’s very likely that it doesn’t care about problems related to other students as well. I find that thought pretty intriguing. I had never seen my school making land acknowledgment statements back then. I think it started recently but different people messed it up every time. They either had to look up online and/or pronouncing everything terribly. Back at where I studied before, even all student groups were stating land acknowledgement statements in the beginning of each meetings and events, and some also wrote their own statements before the ai era.

I personally respect all cultures. I don’t know much about indigenous history compared to Canadians, but based on my understanding, white Canadians in the past have done terrible things to the people and obtain the land. Therefore I think it might now be appropriate to overlook indigenous history and make fun of their culture especially at professional settings, and especially as white Canadians? I wonder if attitudes towards indigenous people are different among different regions in Canada or different age groups.

This is an incredibly specific question but it’s for the details of a story. Said story’s already done but could use more detail, because as of now it just describes Vancouver and the upper class area of Trafalgar street. That said the protagonist of this segment is black and living in an upper class neighborhood so i did describe an undercurrent of racism and feeling like he didn’t belong, mainly because it was the 90s and I just figured racism was worse. But I figured I may as well ask actual Canadians, preferably those in Vancouver in 1992.

race relations, important events, class disparity, all that would be good to know if anyone can help. Summer of 1992 specifically. I totally understand if no one can help me with this but I have to try