Culture And Removal Of Culture

Colonization efforts that were overtly racist against indigenous individuals majorly disrupted traditional indigenous communities in an almost inexhaustible list of ways. This resulted in a sustained long-term trauma that affected generations of indigenous people in Canada and, with current policy, will continue to affect future generations. Academics largely

Cultural assimilation is the process by which a person or a group’s culture comes to resemble those of another group. As the each participant throughout the film narrate their harsh experiences, it is evident that this process was brutally enforced and implemented by the Canadian government. The system separates the children from their families at a young age, and forbade them to practice their Aboriginal rituals or speak their own language, and were taught that these ways are primitive and uncivilized. (Hanson, n.d) This process can be analyzed through the concept of socialization agents, which is defined by the people and institutions that influence ones attitude and behaviour. Families are considered to be primary agents of socialization, since they are the earliest source of learning and emotional connections. They play a critical role in forming individual behaviour and passing on culture from one generation to the next through language and rituals. (Tepperman, Albanese & Curtis 2012. pg. 57) However since the children were separated from their families at an early age, they became alienated from their roots, and the ties through which aboriginal culture can be passed

Canada ­as a nation is known to the world for being loving, courteous, and typically very welcoming of all ethnicities. Nevertheless, the treatment of Canada’s Indigenous population over the past decades, appears to suggest otherwise. Indigenous people have been tormented and oppressed by the Canadian society for hundreds of years and remain to live under discrimination resulting in cultural brutality. This, and more, has caused severe negative cultural consequences, psychological and sociological effects. The history of the seclusion of Indigenous people has played a prominent aspect in the development and impact of how Indigenous people are treated and perceived in today’s society. Unfortunately, our history with respect to the treatment of Indigenous communities is not something in which we should take pride in. The Indian Act of 1876 is an excellent model of how the behavior of racial and cultural superiority attributed to the destruction of Indigenous culture and beliefs. The Indian Act established by the Canadian government is a policy of Aboriginal assimilation which compels Indigenous parents under threat of prosecution to integrate their children into Residential Schools. As a nation, we are reminded by past actions that has prompted the weakening of the identity of Indigenous peoples. Residential schools has also contributed to the annihilation of Indigenous culture which was to kill the Indian in the child by isolating them from the influence of their parents and

The Sixties Scoop was a horrendous time in Canadian history. It was a catastrophic failure in terms of Aboriginal children's welfare. The Sixties Scoop compromised the welfare of Indigenous children in three major ways: the victims were subject to abuse in foster families, the victim's lost their sense of identity and their success was inhibited.

Throughout Canada’s 150 years of being a country, Indigenous people were oppressed. The children were forced into residential schools, and eventually, over decades, the entire culture was lost. Looking back on it now, it is clear that what had happened was a “cultural genocide.” Cultural genocide is defined as, “the destruction of structures and practices that allow a group to continue as a group” (Moffit, Brown, 2017).

The current outcome of the Sixties Scoop is still unresolved; it was only in 2010 that a class action suit was brought to the courts in Ontario and 2011 from survivors in British Columbia. Restitution for this is far from over. According to John Beaucage the former Grand Chief of the Union of Ontario Indians, we have now entered a new stage in the assimilation of aboriginals called the “Millennium Scoop”. In his report commissioned by the Ministry Children and Youth Services he states “Although Aboriginal people make up about 2 per cent of the province’s population (2006 Census); we make up a far greater percentage of the children in care (estimates are from 10 to 20 per cent)” (Beaucage, 2011). While this is information is based on one report it does produce viable solutions and a basis for additional research.

These stereotypical binaries of the childlike and savage Indian are directly linked to the narratives of white settler society and colonization. Essentially, by classifying all First Nation cultures under a monolith of a few stereotypes the white setter society claimed dominance over the First Nation peoples as they created the lens through which the First Nation’s history and identity would be read. The influence of the press and government policies lead to the acceptance of these stereotypes as defining truths about First Nations people which aided the settler societies in solving the Indian problem by destroying what it meant to be Indian. In this way, the stereotypes not only developed the idea of assimilation to save the Indian, but they

The American government and society has played a substantial role in the decline of both the Native American and Inupiat culture. They created inhumane boarding schools and oppressing laws that inhibited those of a different culture from being themselves and partook in the urbanization of cultured communities. The following practices need to be stopped and never forgotten so that such ethnocide doesn't happen again.

For years the indigenous people were targeted negatively by the Canadian government. They were forced to change, forget their identity, and leave their rich culture and customs behind to disappear into thin air. To this day, the people of this culture are still treated poorly. One of the many horrific events that were targeted amongst the indigenous community was the Sixties Scoop. This event in, particular, was really devastating and in fact, it has been considered to be a genocide in many ways because the Canadian government took the “children of Indigenous people in Canada from their families for placing in foster homes or adoption”. The sixties scoop negatively impacted the families, culture and customs, and overall the country's reputation.

In April 1995 Pamela George, an Ojibway women, was brutally murdered in Saskatchewan. Her murderers Steven Kummerfield and Alex Ternowetsky, young middle-class white men, were convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to merely six and a half years in prison. George’s story is one of the many Indigenous women who have been murdered or missing over the past years. There are over 580 cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women, close to half are put aside and left unsolved. Only 53% of these cases have lead to charges of homicide (Klement 8). Drastically, statistics indicate that Aboriginals are faced with more hardships throughout their life compared to the average Canadian. Indigenous groups, particularly women, suffer from a lower rate of education, higher suicide rates and an array of health risks. This paper will examine the role settler colonization history has played in perpetuating conditions for violence to indigenous women, many of which are still experienced today. This will be accomplished by first assessing the history of settler colonization and its negative repercussions. Secondly, it will use Sherene Razak’s concept of “spatial segregation,” to illustrate how state institutions have facilitated violence through space, race and the law. Lastly, this paper will use evidence from the film “Finding Dawn” to further demonstrate how violence towards indigenous women is institutionally produced.

There are thousands of horrific stories about the conniving assimilation of Natives by the Europeans, using their own children to stop the spread of Native culture and to lead future aboriginal generations into European culture. In the poem I Lost My Talk by Rita Joe is one of many perspectives in the way the Canadian government forcefully assimilated the Native groups through Residential Schools in Canada. Firstly, the culture of native groups in Canada severely diminished because of the forced assimilation by Canadians. The narrator in the poem “lost” her “talk”, which the staff at residential schools “took away” (Joe 1, 2, 4). Many were forced to forget their hereditary culture, through government taking them as a child and teaching them

The thinking of a dominant white society and the savageness of Native culture is the background of the on-going struggle against cultural genocide of First Nations people all across Canada. The first European settlers in Canada viewed the inhabiting First Nations people as uncivilized, and they felt that they needed to be educated in their “civilized” ways. This thinking started the cultural genocide of the Native culture. This paper will focus on the ways in which Native people have been pushed towards the dominating Euro-Canadian ways through the 60s scoop, residential schools, reproduction rights for Native women, and the Indian Act.

Also, the early legal systems of the North American settlers authorized attacks on Native Americans to secure land for the white settlers (2013), and these attacks which began the near genocide of Native Americans, the indigenous people of the Americas (Roppolo, 2013). Thus, the racism associated with Native Americans is ingrained in American society and is often overlooked or removed from society, because America would have to face its colonial guilt of robbing the Native Americans of their land (Roppolo, 2013). Additionally, the experience of Gansworth (2013), who is a Native American and mistaken for other nationalities, illustrates society has a stereotypical image of Native Americans perpetrated by white society and does not know the features of Native Americans (Roppolo, 2013). Therefore, it is important to note that genocide is a necessary component of white supremacy, because indigenous people must disappear “in order to allow non-indigenous [or white people] rightful claim over this land” (Smith, 2013, p.

On June 11th, 2008 former Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized to the Aboriginals saying “today, we recognize that this policy of assimilation was wrong, has caused great harm and has no place in our country” (CBC news). The Aboriginals, waiting for this moment to occur in Canadian history responded with sorry is not enough. Assimilation is defined as absorbing a culture or adapting to a nation. The wrong in what happened in the historical past was assimilation was attempted in very wrongful unforgiving way, actions indeed do speak louder than words. The real question could be why was assimilation such a key goal? Did it play a part into why Aboriginals culture slowly is eroding? Some may say that the lack of Aboriginal Culture in our days, today was caused by a reason that had nothing to do with the Government of that time. With the White Paper being rejected, it lead to Canadians thinking that Aboriginals denied a “great offer”. But none of the canadians came to realize how unfair the terms the Aboriginals received were. The Indian Act was a way the government used to be successful in assimilation in a lot more secretive manner. Whereas the Residential Schools practically were screaming out “assimilation”, their goal was made a lot more clear after the Residential Schools came out. This essay will argue that Indian Act, Residential Schools, and the White Paper was an assault to their culture and an erosion of their values/practice .

The identities that each person possesses is influenced according to their attitudes, values and beliefs embedded in their culture. When people hear the word cult, the images of satan worshipping, animal sacrifices and evil, pagan rituals automatically come to mind. However, in reality, the majority of cults do not involve these things and are in fact simply a religious system with alternate beliefs. The word though refers to an unorthodox sect whose members distort the original doctrines of the religion. Heaven’s Gate is a cult that is centred in California, founded by Marshall Herff Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles in 1993. They are a UFO based ‘destructive doomsday’ cult who believed that evil space aliens called ‘Luciferians’ had kept