Latest Post
Racism in our imagination manifests as racist violence: The case of Trayvon Martin and Rue of The Hunger Games
By – Cassandra Dang Nguyen
For those of you who haven’t heard of Trayvon Martin, he was an unarmed, 17 year old Black boy who was shot to death by George 
Zimmerman, a neighbourhood watchman of a gated community, on February 26th 2012. At the time of his death, Martin had in his possession a bag of skittles and a can of Iced Tea. Zimmerman claimed to have shot him because Martin seemed ‘suspicious’ and later claimed that this shooting was justified on account of Zimmerman acting in ‘self defence.’ After being questioned by the police, Zimmerman was released without charge. Six weeks later, after much protestation, Zimmerman has been arrested and will stand trial for second degree murder. The specifics of the case are quite murky and I am not here to debate them – I am here to speak to the broader problem of the dehumanization of People of Colour, and I will do that by connecting it to the recent racist flare up surrounding the apparent disappointment that Rue, a female character in Suzanne Collins’ acclaimed book series The Hunger Games now adapted into a film version, was played by a Black actress, even though Collins specifically described Rue as “a twelve-year-old girl from District 11. She has dark brown skin and eyes” (i.e a Black girl).
The reason why I am writing this, is because despite the sustained media attention surrounding Martin’s case – the overwhelming probability is that this flare up will eventually die down and we will forget. Unfortunately, this forgetting also steals from us the opportunity to have changed the system – the window for change is open and while it is open, we should engage in open dialogue. So I want to prevent this forgetting by connecting the very literal death of Trayvon Martin to the imaginative death of Rue. How will this help stop racist violence you ask?
Ultimately, this connection will remind us that the first point of change happens within our selves – within our own imaginations of ourselves and ‘the Other’. Your imagination, your perception of the world, is something that stays with you forever; though you are buffeted from all directions by external forces shaping these conceptions, with a little critical thinking – you can take back some agency in reshaping your own imagination. You can either continue to think racistly and therefore, contribute to the normalization of racist violence, “People of colour aren’t real people and so their deaths don’t mean much” – or you can start reversing this imaginative violence and thus, the literal effect.
For those of you who haven’t read The Hunger Games, in a manner of minutes I will be spoiling it somewhat for you. But, I promise, this is incredibly important. So here goes: Rue dies. More specifically, Rue dies in a futuristic post-apocalyptic dystopian America, now named Panem, where children are forced to enter a violent spectacle called the “The Hunger Games.” These games operate by forcing 24 contestants, 12 girls and boys, to fight each other to the death within an isolated arena for the entertainment of the privileged rich who preside in the “Capitol.” It is in these games that Rue dies – more specifically, she is killed. What was undoubtedly written as a heart wrenching scene in the novel failed to translate onto the big screen because shortly after the initial screenings of the movie, fans took to twitter in a racist frenzy.
“why does rue have to be black not gonna lie kinda ruined the movie.”
“why did the producer make all the good characters black.”
“Awkward moment when Rue is some black girl and not the little blonde innocent girl you pictured.”
*** These are only a few examples. You can find more at Hunger Games Tweets, a Tumbler account created to document these tweets.
Yet, perhaps the most disturbing sentiment was this, “Kk call me racist but when I found out Rue was black her death wasn’t as sad.” Now, there are two conclusions that we can draw from this. One, is that the authors of these tweets didn’t read the book correctly and these are merely the rantings and ravings of radicals. However, I’m going to advocate the second conclusion, that this points to a certain normative consciousness in our culture that allows us to disregard the very words of the author in order to construct our own image of innocence: a little blond girl (as mentioned by a previous tweet) and therefore, makes the death of this little Black girl, whose skin colour apparently negates innocence, that less tragic. Now I’m not suggesting that everyone ran out of the theatre, hands in the air, tossing hate at the directors for their decision to cast accordingly. But, I am suggesting that there is enough of this racist imagination present in our society in general, that the target audience of this movie, pre-teens, young adults and increasingly the adult population, would even have conceived of these racist thoughts and felt that others would have agreed with these sentiments as they clearly felt little to no qualms about sharing them on a widely accessible social network.
To make it perfectly clear, there are merits to the publication of these tweets because we now have solid evidence of the existence of racism in (shock!) 2012! I have a huge problem with the concept of “polite society”, I would argue that polite society has not eliminated racism, only caused it to go ‘underground’, as in unsaid but still thought and acted out (another issue for another day). Yet, again, we must return to the question of HOW our present society represents People of Colour and more importantly, dig deeper and come up with the answer to WHY their representation is generally based on stereotypes (that is, if some racial groups even get media representation at all). This interrogation is necessary because clearly it has resulted in a toxic atmosphere in which these Twitter users, most likely from the younger generation who are supposedly living in what many naive people claim to be a ‘post-racial’ society, have internalized racism to such an extent that seeing a Black actress play a favourite character in a book sufficiently “ruins the movie” because she isn’t the “innocent blond girl you expected” and so “her death wasn’t sad.”
I don’t strive to list all of the mechanisms of racism here, but I am sure you can guess some of them: mass media emphasis of the “Black Thug” in the news (‘reality’) and on TV shows (the imaginative), and even mass media’s selective attention to the deaths and disappearance of people (think of their lack of attention to Vancouver’s missing Aboriginal women before Robert Pickton). A Racist imagination that makes the killing of an imaginative Black child an event not worthy of sadness, ultimately translates into the dehumanization of real Children of colour and therefore, makes their very literal deaths that less sad. I ask you, why did Trayvon, unarmed and young, seem so ‘suspicious’ to Zimmerman? Was it perhaps because Trayvon was wondering around in a gated community? A space reserved for the wealthy and non-Black? Was it because Zimmerman, like so many of us, internalized the imaginative dominant representation of young black males (dangerous/suspicious/criminal) and then from these imaginative representations acted violently in the reality?
“But the Trayvon Martin case got so much attention” you say! Yes, it did. Yet, I have to ask, did the case get attention because the 
controllers of mass media (the privileged and in power) truly cared? Or did the case get attention because Zimmerman was released without charge, and the Black community as well as other People of Colour and anti-racist White activists denounced this clear injustice and their resistance, their dissent, and their justifiably angry voices demanded coverage? I put that to you. I also put this question to you, had the case been reversed, had a Black man shot a White child to death, would he have been let go without charge purely on the basis of a claim of ‘self defence’? Would it have taken nationwide dissent to prompt the police to investigate the case further before taking such rapid INaction in such a violent case? Again, I reiterate that the details of this case are quite murky. However, that must not draw our attention away from the fact that this case, from the very start, was negligently handled (or rather NOT handled) by the police and this is due to our society’s inherent beliefs of who does and does not deserve justice.
I’m choosing to write this now, because now is as good a time as any other moment. There is no ‘comfortable’ moment to talk about racism, there is no need for ‘comfortableness’ – racism is not comfortable: it appears in seemingly ‘benign’ forms such as racial jokes and skits, it appears in those forms so systematically entrenched that you don’t realize it’s racism whereby job discrimination isn’t ‘really job discrimination’, because People of Colour are simply more susceptible to poverty or lower wage jobs “because they are lazy”, and of course it appears in those violent forms of rape, mutilation, and murder. Therefore, the conversation should never be diluted of substance to such a point that it becomes ‘comfortable’, because then it only ends up being a conversation about how we accommodate the already privileged and not a conversation about racism. So with that, I encourage you to embrace how uncomfortable this conversation made you. The more uncomfortable you become – the more conscious you will be of how you, yourself, contribute to this racist system with your racist imagination. Know that the recognition of a racist imagination is the crucial FIRST step to the dismantling of the racist system. When we have UNlearned the normative racist discourse that is taught to us day in and out through unwavering critical analysis of the information that is fed to us, we stand a chance at creating truly equity minded legislation and social infrastructure.
Become conscious of how your imagination works, and realize that your thoughts translates into words, translates into actions.
For further reading check out this great article by Anna Holmes of The New Yorker White Until Proven Black: Imagining Race in Hunger Games
An addendum
Some have rightfully asked me to speak to the fact that Zimmerman’s ethnicity has been questioned. There has been an argument floating around that because Zimmerman is part (or full) Hispanic, that this somehow cancels out the fact that the murder was racially motivated since “Zimmerman is a racial minority himself.” This is my response to that argument:
Racist prejudice touches us all, how could it not when we live in a society that constantly offers up some groups as more worthy, more intelligent, more beautiful than others? Therefore, despite the fact that Zimmerman is part (or full) Hispanic this racially motivated attack is PROOF that a constant indoctrination of racist stereotype has the ability to seep into the minds of all bodies and manifests itself in physical violence. We cannot deny this, to deny this is to be complicit in a system that not only degrades the value of People of colour, but also PITS people of colour against each other, giving more privilege to some groups and less to others, so that we can continue to oppress ourselves on top of bring oppressed by a system that privileges White bodies. There is a need for ALL anti-racist people (People of colour and White) to ADMIT that this system exists. To my anti-racist White activists, aspiring anti-racist White activists and White people committed to living a racist free life, you must remember that to have white skin does not mean that one has to uphold White superiority. Just as my heterosexuality does not mean that I uphold heteronormativity and homophobia. Just as I willingly admit my privilege as a heterosexual woman, it is imperative that anti-racist White people admit that this society DOES privilege them for having White skin in order for them to work alongside (and not on top) of People of Colour in this fight to end racism.
This is not to say that White people do not face oppression in regards to sexism (being a woman), cisgenerdism (not biologically born woman or man), homophobia (being non-heterosexual), ableism (being Disabled), classism (working class or poor), etc, but again I must reiterate that there is NO system in place that systematically discriminates a White person on the basis of them having White skin. While racist prejudice, the discriminating thought, can be possessed by ALL people, and even racist discrimination, the action motivated from that thought, can be enacted by some, the racist system is a set of institutions that make this discrimination an ongoing pattern, and this system is one that works predominantly for White people in this country despite Canada’s insistence that we are ‘multicultural.’ Again, while it systematically discriminates People of Colour on the basis of skin colour, is does NOT systematically discriminate White people on the basis of their white skin. This is CLEAR and to admit this does not in any way negate the oppression that White people do face for the other facets of their identity. To deny this is to remain complicit in the invisibilization of racism by asserting the falsehood that “we’re colourblind.” We don’t need to be “colourblind” – this is not the goal. We are of different colours and are beautiful in our difference – we are all to be respected and not merely ‘tolerated.’ The goal, is not to ‘erase colour’, but to stop attributing different human worth to different colour. Thus, despite the fact that race is a biologically false category, it has become a very real SOCIAL category in that mechanisms in this society has and continues to make certain racial groups more structurally vulnerable to poverty (job discrimination), disease (differential access to medicine because of lower income and more exposure to dangerous conditions because of lower paying jobs), and clearly VIOLENCE (the normalization of their deaths because of their dehumanization).
Finally, while some may decide to throw in the argument of affirmative action as “reverse-racism”, I need those people to take a step back and 1) realize that most of the time affirmative action is an ideal and not something that is practiced accordingly in actuality. In fact, most would say that White people have had affirmative action for a couple of centuries now and the affirmative action that should be afforded to People of Colour is simply a minimal attempt to level the playing field when People of Colour have been systematically disadvantaged for centuries and these disadvantages (just like the privileges of White settler society) have been passed down and continue to manifest themselves in the present. 2) That “Until whites are randomly searched and shot by police, until whites are followed in clothing stores and asked if they need help, until whites feel like they have to hide their pholourie, doubles and pelau in middle school because they didn’t have a PB & J sandwich, until white bodies are sterilized, until white bodies are paid less for equal work, until white bodies are seen as ugly and undesirable, until white bodies are intimidated when trying to cross the border, until white bodies don’t make the front pages of the Star or the Sun when they are murdered or missing, until white bodies are seen as worthless …. essentially, until white folks have to go through all the shit and more that we have gone through historically and presently can they call reverse racism.” So this whole “reverse-racism” thing needs to stop ASAP.
Latest Post
Unintended Consequences of Kony 2012
By: Yun Sik Shin
In less than a half a day, likes on Invisible Children’s (IC) Facebook page has doubled. The viral video “Kony 2012″ has become an instant Internet sensation. This 30-minute fast paced, entertaining and compelling “mini-documentary” shows the story of one man’s dream to help children of Uganda from fear of abduction and forced conscription to the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). Kony, being the general of the LRA has received the spotlight for being IC’s primary target for take down. One cannot help themselves being moved by the video, it triggers a lot of emotions and IC’s passion to achieve a resolution is inspiring. Waking up to the aftermath of the viral video, I can’t help but to realize that it has put the issue of Kony at the centre stage of discussions. However, Invisible Children has received a lot of criticisms.
And, I want to bring people’s attention to two criticisms of my own.
The Problem of African Imagery
This is a problem that a lot of western non-profit organizations have been committing over and over again; portraying African countries as struggling, backward, and pitiful continent, and only way African states could be saved is by educated westerners. When in fact, this is NOT true. Ugandan army has done, exceptionally well, fighting off the LRA without the help of ANY western countries.
The Invisible Children failed to show the resilience of the Ugandan people, their will to carry on with their lives and strive to live happily, even with the presence of the LRA. Instead, they portrayed Ugandan people as “hopeless before but now they see hope” because the IC drove the LRA off the country. This is a serious misconception and it is a dangerous misconception because this type of imagery reinforces people to believe that African continent is problematic and it is up to the western people to solve them.
Invisible Children: A Host of New Problems
The Invisible Children claims that by their efforts, Kony was able to get international attention, and because of this LRA was forced to go on the run. And, they showed pictures and videos of people cheering, crying because the states have decided to support the Ugandan army fend off the LRA. But, there is one thing the IC failed to emphasize, the fact that IC’s actions have made problems worse! Kony did not disappear, he just moved west, to the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the LRA has been causing a host of problems there. In 2008, LRA’s operations in the northern part of the DRC have resulted in the abduction of 120 children.
The Lord’s Resistance Army is now more dispersed, Kony is harder to track down, and they have extended their operation to other countries. If the IC and the U.S. was really serious about removing Kony, they would’ve made their operations secretive. Secretly containing the LRA’s operations to one area, and slowly moving in closer and making their area of operations smaller. However, they did not. They HAD to announce that U.S. is coming to support the Ugandan army because of publicity, the IC and the US wanted to be noticed for their efforts. Unfortunately, the IC and US chose publicity over the real solution of the problem and I can’t help but to question IC’s true intentions of their organization.
To be fair, the IC did a tremendous job of bringing this issue into light and Kony must be tried under the International Criminal Court and the LRA must be dismantled. However, I cannot help but to dissatisfied with their thoughtlessness of the unintended consequences of their movement.
Latest Post
Invisible Children
Submitted by Samantha Preddie
KONY 2012 from INVISIBLE CHILDREN on Vimeo.
Also, check out this blog post on the topic – very interesting perspective. Click here to see full post:
Invisible Children (IC) swept the university campuses of America last year. The group wanted to mobilize college students to be aware of what happened in Uganda in recent years, the atrocious acts of Joseph Kony and his rebel group, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). I heard about Invisible Children for the first time when I was researching Uganda. I was immediately fascinated by their website. It’s very well done, but I noticed one thing. It lacked real information. If you haven’t seen the film or know nothing about their purpose, let me catch you up to speed with my version. Three clueless college kids head to Sudan with no plans and no idea about what they’re going to find. They’re looking for a “story”. They leave Sudan and make their way into Uganda. They find some bad stuff going on there. So they made a MTV-esque DVD about what was happening there. They wanted to draw attention to what they found.
So far, this sounds good. However, there is a major, major problem. I’m going to compare what IC is doing to an analogy that I thought of this past summer when I was Uganda thinking about this issue. Imagine that today you heard about what happened in NYC and Washington DC on September 11, 2001 for the first time. You were shown a video of footage from that day. You saw the planes hit the towers, you heard President Bush’s address, you saw the Pentagon wreckage, you watch in horror as you see people plunge to their death, jumping from the burning towers. Now imagine that you are inspired by this disaster. You want to something to help. What if you went to NYC today, expecting to see piles of rubble to clean up? What if you went, expecting that there would be thousands of people in the streets crying, looking for loved ones? But what would happen when you arrived and discovered that there was none of this, but a whole host of other problems?
Latest Post
Majority Rule, Minority Rights? Same Sex Marriage and Washington State
By Goldie Poll
On February 1st, Washington State voted to start granting marriages to same sex couples starting June 2nd 2012. This decision will make Washington the seventh U.S. state to approve same-sex marriages (plus Washington, D.C., and two Native American tribes). In addition, the Maryland senate has approved a gay marriage bill, which Governor O’Malley is set to sign on March 1st, 2012.
Washington Governor Christine Gregoire, who signed the bill that will legalize same-sex marriages on February 13th, has said in the past that she did not believe the state to be ‘ready’ for gay marriage. Current polls show that a majority of Americans support gay marriage, but even if that were not true, why would it matter? Rights should not be voted on by the majority; all people should be afforded the same rights regardless of gender, race, religion, and sexual orientation.
Not allowing same-sex couples to marry designates all LGBT individuals to second-class citizens. It cheats them out of insurance benefits, the right to see hospitalized loved ones, and a million other things. Domestic partnerships are not a replacement for the rights that marriage affords a couple. There is no such thing as ‘separate but equal’, a policy that also failed during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. It also allows others to perceive them as lesser than themselves, and stops them from being fully accepted into society. It allows children to bully other children about their perceived “gayness” so badly they kill themselves. In Michelle Bachmann’s congressional district, nine students have killed themselves in under two years (Most of whom were bullied for being LGBT, regardless of whether they were or weren’t). When a problem is pushing twelve year olds to kill themselves, it stops being a question of whether America is “ready”. It stops being a states’ rights issue. It becomes a human rights issue. This marginalization of a group of people is a huge issue, especially because it is not seen as one. Action desperately needs to be taken, both by individual states and the federal government.
Latest Post
Reconciliation: “Turning the page” to a new relationship between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian government?
By: Deanna Henderson
Reconciliation is a concept that offers an image that seems to fit with Canadian ideals of diversity and multiculturalism: an image of a new, progressive relationship between Indigenous peoples, non-Indigenous peoples, and the Canadian government.
In his lecture, The Psychic Landscape and Contemporary Colonialism, delivered on February 16, 2012, at the UofT Multi Faith Centre, Dr. Taiaiake Alfred, renowned Indigenous scholar and activist of the Mohawk Bear Clan, contested this image, challenging us to view the context and connotations of “reconciliation” with a critical lens. This lens should not only focus on the future, Alfred says, but also scrutinize and magnify the connection between “reconciliation” to historic and prevailing relationships between Indigenous peoples and their lands.
Alfred describes how, in general terms, reconciliation is a procedure through which colonial policies and processes change. Alfred characterizes this process as “a page turned,” in which there is a sense of progression and evolving equality. However, he cautions, viewed in isolation reconciliation can easily be misused as a tool of manipulation, in which a “compelling narrative that is difficult to resist” is placed in the foreground, with little attention to prevailing issues.
Alfred turns to the Royal Commission of Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) to illustrate many of the nuances surrounding the concept of “reconciliation”. Commissioned in 1991, RCAP sought to examine and address Indigenous people’s right to self-governance. In 1996, a 4000 page report was published with 440 recommendations for the federal government. Like the idea of “reconciliation,” RCAP promised the possibility of a “new era”, “a page turned.” But, says Alfred (drawing on the critical response of Indigenous communities’ elders to the report), RCAP’s mistake was to imply the development of Indigenous peoples’ self-governance also meant they should stop looking at and calling on history. “Self-governance” meant forgetting Indigenous teachings and beliefs.
Remembrance, instead of an amnesiac relationship to history, is necessary because “turning the page” overlooks a crucial detail: Indigenous land was stolen. “It’s not reconciliation,” Alfred asserts, “but recolonization because there’s no restitution.” Alfred describes the detrimental effects of removing Indigenous peoples from their lands: a form of alienation that causes a dispossession of languages and cultures and disrupts the “profoundly balanced and enriched relation to the land and people.”
Alfred recognizes that this is a difficult reality for Canada’s settler population to accept. This population has an emotional attachment to Canada that it is not willing to yield – because, as Alfred asks rhetorically, “If not Canada, what else?” Settler society does not have the same historic, ethical or legal claims as Indigenous peoples. This means that cultural and historical artifacts like the Canadian flag and constitution serve as symbols to create and reaffirm the settler society’s connection to the land. But – and Alfred is adamant on this point – other “cultures evolve…Canadians should too.”
Implicit in Dr. Alfred’s lecture is the idea that this affirmation of settler identity, which at times comes at the cost of the identities of Indigenous peoples, is reflected in the way the Canadian government approaches Indigenous communities. Alfred sees the Canadian government’s history of addressing issues involving Indigenous peoples as simply an ongoing effort to “manage a problem.” He draws attention to legislation like Bill C-31. Alfred describes Bill C-31 as a “half way solution.” Even though the bill restored status to Indigenous women who had lost their status under the Indian Act for marrying a man who was not Indigenous or non-status, it did not automatically entail band membership for these women. Bill C-31 also did not change the fact that, under the Indian Act, Indigenous identities have been legislated: a gross infringement on the right to self-determination. Alfred also comments on the “reverberating” and multi-generational effects of residential schools are incalculable and notes that the monetary compensation given to residential school survivors has created other forms of victimization like elder abuse. In the end, Alfred argues, “Indian Affairs is not concerned with Indians…but how to manage them to stay on reserves and out of development.”
Colonial legislation and institutions are, Alfred explains, examples of why the government needs to revise its concepts of justice and reconciliation. “Colonization is complete,” says Alfred, “when an Indigenous person is convinced to despise themselves and forget themselves.” Alfred draws on the four part TV series 8th Fire to illustrate his point. While there were many good and insightful qualities to the production, it also implied that colonization is inevitable and co-existence between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples relies on progress, development and, in some cases, industrialization – the “new” era. Alfred agrees that coexistence means negotiation, but the idea of negotiation must be viewed critically. For example, the 1997 Indigenous land claims case Delgamuukw v. British Columbia is often lauded as a progressive step forward, because the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that oral histories must be considered equal to written evidence. However, Alfred points out, the Supreme Court did not rule on the actual claim – and the burden of proof remains on Indigenous peoples.
“Managing the problem” remains a government tactic. Alfred notes how it is difficult to ignore the fact that the federal government’s meeting with First Nations Chiefs closely followed mainstream media coverage of the housing crisis in Attawapiskat and the government’s less than active response. This example is one of many Alfred applies in his lecture, The Psychic Landscape of Contemporary Colonialism, to accentuate the historical and contemporary nuances and complexities that surround “reconciliation.” These issues strongly suggest that even a compelling image such as offered by “reconciliation” must always be critically challenged and examined. Change cannot happen if histories are ignored and forgotten.
Latest Post
Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed: The Case of MSF
Latest Post
200 Indian girls refused to be called “Unwanted”
Contributed by Samantha Preddie
In India, many children are named Nakusa or Nakoshi which means ‘Unwanted’ in their local language. Their culture discourages the birth of girls in favour of boys, resulting in choosing a name demonstrating their lack of value in the society. However, on October 22, 2011, 200 young girls were given the opportunity to officially change their names to one of their choice. Many girls chose their favourite actresses, whereas others chose names with meanings such as powerful, wealth, or worship, changing the negative perceptions against them.
Source: http://www.thenational.ae/news/world/south-asia/indias-unwanted-girls-change-their-names?pageCount=0
Latest Post
Empowerment by and for Aboriginal Women
By: Deanna Henderson
Toronto’s streets bend, turn, and loop with the rhythm of its neighbourhoods and communities. Step off the 506 streetcar, stroll past Allen Gardens, turn the corner and there’s the Native Women’s Resource Centre (NWRC), settled in a newly renovated yellow brick Gothic house. Open the door and, no matter where you come from, there’s the warmth of home and the pulse of community. “A lot of women come here because they have been coming here for years and years,” explains Stephanie Haishie, of Ginoogaming First Nations and the Youth Coordinatior for the Centre, “And they see it as their home and being in a building that’s a house has a lot do with that…People feel at home here.”
NWRC is a non-profit organization that focuses exclusively on meeting the needs of Aboriginal women in the GTA. “We have the fastest growing population in Toronto, in Ontario, in Canada, and it’s like nobody knows we’re around. It’s like half the people think Native people don’t exist anymore,” says Haishie. The Aboriginal population in Toronto is growing and young with a 31% increase between 2001 and 2006. A 2006 census reports Aboriginal women make up 54% of Aboriginal residents in Toronto. Even though the Aboriginal communities of Toronto may generally not be on the public’s radar, the foundations of resource centres like NWRC are a testament to these communities’ steadfastness and resilience.
At its inception in 1985, the NWRC was located in a basement, but it was first and foremost an idea and a voice. A group of Aboriginal women met regularly to discuss their concerns and seek a solution for the lack of resources, holistic support, and safe space for Aboriginal women in Toronto. 1985 was also the year Bill C-31, An Act to Amend the Indian Act, received Royal Assent. Bill C-31 sought to end sexual discrimination in the 1876 Indian Act, under which Aboriginal women lost status if they married a man who was non-status or not Aboriginal. However, according to an Issue Paper titled Aboriginal Women and Bill C-31, prepared by the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC) in 2007, Bill C-31 has not abolished discrimination. It has created, as stated by NWAC, “a chaotic situation” in which law hinders Aboriginal peoples’ abilities to pass status onto their children; status continues to be determined through paternity; and it generates division between individuals and communities.
In this environment, NWRC’s message was strong and clear: Aboriginal women must be empowered through their voices and their actions. This legacy prevails today.
“We’ve all been working to help Aboriginal women in the GTA,” says Haishie. “Women come here for non-judgemental programming, they come here to eat, they come here for laundry, for any kind of reason and from all walks of life. You can have an architect sitting with someone who has been living on the streets…coming together; we’re all working towards having Aboriginal women have good housing, healthy self-esteem, and confidence.”
NWRC offers diverse services that range from education, health care and healthy living, and employment advice, to special events like Winter Solstice and the Youth and Elders Conference. These programs are founded on Aboriginal teachings like the Ojibway teachings of the Seven Grandfathers, which guides a person to show compassion, courage, respect, love, and wisdom. NWRC programs also emphasize and promote healing. Haishie explains the necessity for healing, especially for Aboriginal women, “Native women have been shamed our entire existence – since colonization. Women in our community, in particular, are thrown to the wayside. I think our focus on healing is important because our community has been so affected by colonization and residential schools. You don’t realize how much it is until you think back.”
The first residential schools were established in the 1840s; the last federally run residential school in Canada was only closed in 1996. That’s more than 180 years of systematically removing children from their families and communities, destroying their identity through dispossession of language and culture, and implanting shame and alienation. This sowed a deep rooted trauma that is not isolated to the individuals who attended residential schools, but is passed from one generation to the next.
“My grandma was in residential school for twelve years,” Haishie relays, “Her being there led to her not feeling like she had to give emotional support to her children because it wasn’t given to her there, so in that sense it was passed onto our mother who didn’t really give it to us.” Healing is a continuous process and not simply an ‘end-product.’ Whether through counselling, ceremony, or simply a place to eat lunch, NWRC facilitates the healing process by offering a space and community that instils self-confidence through envisioning what it is to be healed and restoring the sense of agency needed to initiate that process. Haishie says, “We’re at the point where we want to start getting help…Healing is most important because we’re all in need of it.”
Haishie hopes to see NWRC continue to grow; becoming stronger in its programs in both funding and and outreach, and be seen as an integral part of the non-Aboriginal community. “We’re here and we’re wanting to help,” asserts Haishie. “I hope the Centre gets bigger and better and I hope I can come back in ten years and say, ‘Yeah. I was a part of that.’ “
Latest Post
The Power of Stories for Activism
By: Cassandra Dang Nguyen
As our team finished hosting the HOLLERDAY event: jhr’s flagship event dedicated to raising awareness about the pervasive sexual violence that children, women, and men experience in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, I started thinking about how to get more people involved.
It seems to me, that the key element for the success of this campaign and for any human rights campaign is to connect the dots between the helpers and those we are trying to help. The key question being: why should I really care.
Let us start with the basics.
USA Today estimates that around 420 000 women get raped per year. The Guardian reports that this essentially accounts to 48 women being raped every single hour. Yet, what do these numbers mean? For most of us, entrenched in an information age, we get numbers like this coming at us from all angles. Though, there is no denying the importance of numbers to allow us to get a sense of the severity of the violence – when we rely exclusively on numbers we desensitize ourselves because people, living breathing and feeling, are turned into digits. Suddenly, 400 000 looks the same as 700 000, and more dangerously a rhetoric of “this conflict is more deserving of attention because 1 million as opposed to 400 000 people are suffering” has the potential to proliferate.
If I asked you to imagine that nine members of your family were mutilated and shot – could you? Is that even possible? But, what if I asked you to imagine just your parent or your child being slapped, chocked, beaten in the ribs, lacerated in the face, raped by a knife, bleeding, and screaming out in pain as the prepetrators laughed and taunted them. This task is easier, because you have seen a face rather than a number. The connection is much more visceral.
Indeed, these statistics are often so astronomical, so completely out of our experiental universe that we don’t understand what they mean. That is why Human Rights Media, is so astoundingly important. It reminds us that for every number, there is a person who has a story, a face, a dream. They are lovers, they are parents, they are children. They feel love and they most certainly feel pain.
I want to very briefly share Masika’s story with you.
Masika is a Congolese woman who was happily married before 1999. On the morning of October 29, 1999, Masika’s village was raided by soldiers. They entered her home and looted all the money and possessions that Masika and her husband earned from their boutique. After it was over, one soldier turned to Masika and said “Although we have taken everything we are now going to kill you but we are not going to shoot you.”
In Masika’s own words:
They took my husband and started to cut him with a knife. We were in the bedroom and my children were in the other room. He was talking as they cut his feet off, he was still talking as they started to cut though his stomach. He stopped talking when they got to his heart. Then they cut off his penis and put it aside.
I begged and pleaded with them, one turned to me and said ‘Mama, have you ever eaten chewing gum?”. I was confused, I thought, of course I’ve eaten chewing gum. He took my husbands penis and chopped it into pieces and forced me to eat it and chew it slowly. When i refused, they slashed my face – i have now got so many scars all over my body.
They told me if i did not finish they would chop me up and kill me the same way they killed my husband. When I finished, they threw me on top of my husbands body and started to rape me. I had counted up to 22 men when I heard my two girls scream from the other room.
I had seen what they done to my husband, but when I heard my little girls scream I could not bare it any more. I knew they were being raped. I blacked out.
After relaying this story to several friends, the common response was “This is too violent, the violence is unnecessary and should not be used as a shock tactic for attention.” The critical flaw in this logic is that these details are true and are thus, not merely cheap tactics used to garner attention. Indeed, this logic is insulting to those people who have lived through this violence, or know of others who have lived through this violence. We must ask ourselves why we are more comfortable segregating our emotions than facing the truth.
Conversely, you may be deeply affected by this story – you feel sympathy but you ask: What does this have to do with me? I live here and Masika and those people who suffer from sexual violence live half way across the world. What can I do?
There are two things that can happen upon hearing these stories, one road taken is a subscription to eugenic logic. Instead of succumbing to simplistic assumptions such as “All Congolese are naturally morally degenerate, repugnant, and backwards” we must seek a deeper understanding. The idiom “Not everything is black and white” applies here. I personally believe that every event is driven by a matrix of motivations. Sometimes that motivation is for love, sometimes for money, sometimes for basic survival. Indeed, our wants and needs are manipulated by social processes and institutions outside of us, making some things achievable by certain means – sometimes these means are violent.
Masika speaks of soldiers committing these crimes – why? Did you know that the Congo is worth more than 24 trillion US dollars? It is extremely rich in natural resources and some of those highly extracted resources are gold, tin, tungsten and tantalum – minerals used in every single electronic we consume. Apple, Nokia, Sony, you name it.
There are 21 different armed groups in the DRC that compete with each other to control the mines and profit from these resources . These resources are then smuggled out of the DRC into neighbouring Rwanda and Uganda. They are then trafficked out of Africa into China, India, Thailand where they are mixed in with the other minerals from around the world. They are then sold as components to electronic companies around the world.
As a way to break Congolese communities apart, to force people to up and leave their homes, mining sites, rape and murder is the weapon of choice. In order to physically and psychologically terrorize communities armed groups ransack villages and force men and boys to rape, mutilate, and kill their mothers and sisters so that they have no one to return home to – these men are forcibly enlisted into the army.
So now that you are conscious of how rape is directly connected your consumer appetite what can you do? The first thing we can do is use our consumer power to pressure electronic companies who are fuelling this war to make their products Conflict Free. We have to pressure them to:
A) Trace the supply chain for these resources to verify their mines of origin.
B) Conduct independently verifiable supply chain audits to document the routes taken, intermediaries involved, and transactions made from mine of origin to final product making sure that they don’t profit Armed groups.
** Click here to sign a petition urging the European Union to “to take decisive action to ensure that European companies trading in, or using minerals from, the African Great Lakes region publish details of their supply chains and carry out due diligence in line with the standards set out by the UN and OECD.”
The second thing we can do is use our communication tools, Facebook, Twitter, Blog, our voices, to engage ourselves and our peers through the telling of stories because: the more who know about this, the more anger will be gathered, and the more pressure will be applied.
Stories have the power to evoke not only sympathy but empathy – a feeling of deep understanding and connectedness. This feeling of connectedness gives birth to action – to activism. When we mobilize because of a sense of connectedness, in this particular case a sense of responsibility, we counteract the tedious picking and choosing of social justice initiatives because they are no longer “generous charitable acts” – they are obligatory and mandatory actions that we are compelled to take unless we wish to remain complicit in rape, mutilation, displacement, and murder.
For Masika’s full story click this link: http://www.unwatchable.cc/the-true-story/masikas-story/
For the controversial short film inspired by Masika’s story click here: http://www.unwatchable.cc/thefilm/ ** Warning: This film contains sexual violence that some viewers and mobile phone manufacturers may find disturbing.
Social Network
