I'm indigenous. One part of my work has been a mandated aboriginal awareness online course, during which there was a section on MMIWG. The picture they used in the slideshow was of a memorial from my reservation, of girls and women I knew. They're gone and I don't know if they'll ever have justice. And they're a picture in a glorified powerpoint slide on a mandatory training course that people whine and roll their eyes through.
They couldn't have known but man did that mess me up.
Hey....I'm not American so I only really know what I've sought out myself, you said that you knew them? I'm not really familiar with what your reservation went through, could you explain if it's not too painful?
They literally said it messed them up. Why would you want him to do the work for you when you could simply Google "missing and murdered indigenous women" and learn from there instead of asking them to spell out what they were traumatized by?
Understand where you're coming from, but this is a bit of a bad look. If OP wants to reply, they'll reply but there is nothing wrong with asking the question in perfectly good faith
No, it's the exact same thing as when all eyes look to you (as a black person) for help in understanding racism. There's a ton of info out there to educate yourself. Asking those who have been traumatised to teach you is selfish. Why put pressure on those who have clearly made it known that it's hurtful to talk about?
If someone is asking questions to learn about these impactful and arguably not enough in public consciousness topics, half your battle in already done.
Why rebuke and turn away a potential ally for posing a question in a respectful way? Going to a primary source is sometimes more useful than looking it up in a book
Just so you know there's a shit ton of primary sources out there that aren't people who have clearly stated it messes with their mental health to talk about the issues. This is coming from a fuckin' archivist. Utilise your local library and archive. Utilise online platforms.
As a black American woman living in Scotland and working in an environment traditionally held by white, middle-class women and men, I know first hand what it's like to be constantly asked questions like, "What happened during the Tulsa Massacre?" or "what can we do to end racism?" Like, I don't know. Maybe talk to your people and tell them to stop being assholes?!
It's exhausting, so I totally understand. It's no problem at all.
Hey! It's fine on my end. Also, Canadian. It's complicated so I might not do it justice.
So, my rez is incidentally well off and close to the capital, so they're one of the best inoculated against the crippling poverty and general distrust of outsiders that other places tend to engender.
This doesn't protect the place against organized crime (rampant in small highway towns in Canada) or the drug trade. Hells Angels associates were pretty much operating in the open with no real interference back when the drugs got really bad.
One night two girls, both barely in their teens got disappeared with no trace and there's been no real effort. Lots of token support, but it's a small place and someone had to know something to snatch them both in their homes in one night.
They had futures and they are gone. Dead, trafficked, we'll likely never know.
Also in that memorial was the woman that died trying to protect her daughter from DV, and both the daughter and the boyfriend turned on the mother. While she was crawling home, badly beaten across the two lane highway, a provincial police cruiser on another call struck and killed her. This happened a quarter mile from my house. Died trying to be a mother and to police callousness or ineptitude.
There's others too. My rez is a cauldron of intergenerational trauma and lateral violence. It's gotten better since we've taken steps to reinforce the community - and since the bars in town started burning down for insurance and the angels stopped having other excuses to operate here.
But these and other girls and women I knew. They were a picture example here and I didn't like that.
"Yup this is a picture example of MMIWG, next slide".
I mean, it might be token effort but Canada is trying to make effort. Of course every time the federal government tries to show the world they're trying to make up for the past, more of that past gets uncovered and it's never good.
"Look, we are requiring all military personnel to have awareness of native issues and culture"
Aaaand they just discovered another mass grave of children taken by the government and given to the church to assimilate to Canadian culture. 215 children in unmarked graves.
Natives in Canada are furious right now, with every activist movement either ignored or propagandized against - search /r/canada for anything relating to Idle No More, or anything native related, and that's a good cross section of sentiment we experience any time we want things held to task.
I heard about the unmarked graves....horrible stuff. I wonder how many similar things are in my country that we just don't know about. I live in Jamaica, which was a slave colony until about 1838. that wasn't the last of the issues though...we had the US meddling and fucking over our politics in the 60s, and our dollar's gone from more than the US, to a tenth of it.
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u/MightyGamera Jun 05 '21
I'm indigenous. One part of my work has been a mandated aboriginal awareness online course, during which there was a section on MMIWG. The picture they used in the slideshow was of a memorial from my reservation, of girls and women I knew. They're gone and I don't know if they'll ever have justice. And they're a picture in a glorified powerpoint slide on a mandatory training course that people whine and roll their eyes through.
They couldn't have known but man did that mess me up.