This week we got to take a roller coaster of emotions through the journey of one young students best and worst year possible. First off ill say again we have been very lucky that our profs have put together a well rounded set of readings they keep you off balanced and you never really know what to expect next but they all touch you in a different way. This story is a semi autobiography about a Spokane Indian named Arthur “Junior” Spirit who decides that if he doesn’t change schools to get of the reservation that he will die either physically or spiritually. This decision is met with a lot of pain and anger from the people on the reservation especially from his best friend Rowdy. During his transition at his new school he begins to learn different lessons about life on and off the reservation and starts to appreciate what he has in this opportunity away but also what he has left behind at home. The story takes has some incredible highs and the lowest of the lows and anyone that I am able to recommend this to I will.
Personally I only wish one day to be able to display the amount of strength that Junior was able too. Leaving the reservation knowing that it was going to make him and his family so hated was huge but none of that is possible without the support that he felt from his family to go out there and achieve to his full capacity. When I was in high school I also changed school because I believed that the environment I was in was holding me back, there was a lot of drug use and violence at my school and a lot of teachers that were me worried about their safety. The problem for me was the high school that I wanted to go too was 30 minutes away from where we lived and would only accepted me if I lived in the area and I remember sitting down with my mom to tell her what I wanted and even though we would have to pick up and move and displace my brothers and sisters she moved us into the area so I could switch schools. I felt very selfish My 3 youngest siblings also had to change schools and leave their friends behind that they had grown up with but everyone was supportive of me because no matter the cost she was going to put us in the best situation succeed and we understood as a unit that we all have to sacrifice for us to all be successful. There is a main message I took from this story that I hope that I can pass on to anyone I come across whether it be classmate, students, or any random person on the street. That message is that we do not have to be a victim of our situation we can always do better if we aspire to. We are capable of overcoming any situation if we learn the lesson that is being taught at that moment. Early on in the book Arthur says, “Poverty doesn’t give you strength or teach you lessons about perseverance. No poverty only teaches you how to be poor.” And for the longest time I believed that I believed that I was never destined to be anything I believed that I would never attend University or find a career that wasn’t sports related. I believed that because we had nothing that in turn I would have nothing and no matter how much my mom tried to stay positive her struggle was real trying to support all of us and I just saw it as a cycle. I learned from watching my mom bust her butt everyday that no matter how many jobs she had to work she wasn’t giving up till all 5 of us were successfully away at school and she never became a victim of her situation. Once I learned this the sky became the limit there was nothing or no one that was going to stop me and that has lead me here today. Once you let go of the feeling of helplessness you will able to achieve so much more that you ever thought you could. The struggle is real for everybody and for some people like Arthur the struggle is more real than most of us will ever experience but with the right support and the right mindset we are all powerful beyond measure.
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What a depressing week! This was my first real introduction to residential school and it left me feeling awful. For those that are not aware, in the 19th century, the Canadian government believed it was responsible for educating and caring for aboriginal people in Canada. It thought their best chance for success was to learn English and adopt Christianity and Canadian customs. Ideally, they would pass their adopted lifestyle on to their children, and native traditions would diminish, or be completely abolished in a few generations. The Canadian government developed a policy called "aggressive assimilation" to be taught at church-run, government-funded industrial schools, later called residential schools. The government felt children were easier to mold than adults, and the concept of a boarding school was the best way to prepare them for life in mainstream society. This went horribly wrong with the students suffering from emotional physical and sexual abuse at the hands of the church. Students were punished for speaking their own language and were kept from their families for the majority of the year. Even siblings attending the same schools were segregated based on gender. The readings and film this week exposed me to all of this for the very first time and it led me to few of questions. The first question I have is how is this much different than the Holocaust? Now I understand the holocaust had a massive death toll compared to residential schools but the premise and background behind them are very similar. Both governments believed a certain group of people were inferior to theirs. Both governments set out to eliminate a certain culture because it was inferior and both governments decided that extreme techniques were needed to achieve these goals. Hitler and the Nazis were vilified for being the worst group of people to ever grace the earth and rightfully so but after watching what I watched and reading what I read the Canadian government and the Christian church don’t look very good in comparison. They took these innocent children from their homes destroyed their lives abused them locked them up whatever you can imagine was done to these poor kids and the worst part for me was that it was government sanctioned. They knew exactly what was going on in those schools and they took over 100 years to shut all of them down. In our schooling and society class we watched a video discussing whether what happened in residential schools should be considered cultural genocide and if it is than there should be very severe penalties including jail time for those involved. The second question I had was why has this been buried from some of us as students. For me personally we didn’t learn anything about residential schools growing up the topic was never brought up once. Instead we focused on other international crimes such as The World Wars, The Holocaust, and even the genocides that were happening in Africa while were still in school. All of these topics were taught to us and painted our government and us as Canadians in a very positive light rather than facing the truth that we too had a very ugly past. I feel cheated as a student that until this week a couple months after my 27th birthday, the same week my cousin who is the same age just had his first child, and the week our new Prime Minister is making headlines for having common sense is the first time I am learning about residential schools. We need to let the story out and allow all those that were hurt by this awful decision heal, and I believe the best way for this to happen is for all these stories to be told so that the children who are now adults can regain their voice by letting their story be told in their own words.
This film is a documentary of the lives of two refugee teenagers that sought and received asylum in Canada, and the struggle they go through during this whole process. Watching this movie invoked a lot of emotions for me and it starts with sympathy for Joyce and Sallieu. Sympathy based on the fact that I experienced a lot of the hardships they did growing up. For context I grew up in Toronto so all the images in the film I am familiar with from the opening scene in the airport to the highway and CN tower shot. I grew up with my Mom and 4 brothers and sisters in the north end of Toronto about 7 minutes from the airport and the neighborhood I grew up in had a lot of poverty. Growing up we very rarely went without necessities till my mom lost her job, she was laid of from the law firm she worked at for as long as I could remember and that’s when I was introduced to our broken system. I was in gr 7 when things started to go south for us my mom tried her best to find other jobs that would allow her to support us but there was very little she could find. We had to cut back a lot even on the basic necessities our diet consisted of a cheese sandwich for breakfast a cheese sandwich for lunch and spaghetti for dinner and if you were still hungry you had to go to sleep because there was nothing else to eat. The worst year for us was when I was gr 9, that year we were still living in a house and my mom was out of a job and collecting welfare the problem was that she could not afford to pay for the heat in the house with the amount of money she was being given so she had to make a choice. We ended up having to all sleep in the same room that winter to stay warm with this little electric heater in the room. Every morning she would wake up put pots of water on the stove to boil so we could take warm baths and get ready for school we would eat our cheese sandwiches and I would very rarely see my mom eat anything because it was more important for her to make sure we were fed than that she was fed.
This story has a lot more to it that I wont get into right now but the point I am trying to make is this and I am sorry if this is selfish, how are we as a country supposed to help refugees if we can not even take care of our own citizens. My mom has lived in Canada since she was 7 has full citizenship went to York University, repaid her student loans, pays her taxes worked in a hospital for over 10 years than worked in a law firm for another 7, and when it cam time for the government services that she had been paying into to help her support her and her family we ended up sleeping in the same room and she ended up hungry. There are countless other Canadians who are suffering the same thing and much worse. The homelessness in our province is growing as well as the unemployment rate. I don’t believe it is possible for us to help refugees the way we want to because we have failed so miserably and helping our own citizens. The main problem I have about speaking about this subject is that I have no solution. I am a very solution oriented person and I hate to be negative but watching this film and watching the news and reading about the public outcry about donating to help refugees from this place and the next when those refugees that we are all worried about granting asylum we forget about when they are here and end up falling victim to the system. We as Canadians need to do a better job of fixing our country before we try to fix the world and that is the only way real change can happen, yes there will never be zero homeless people but that’s what we should strive for. We should put more time and effort into taking care of government housing and making entry-level jobs more accessible. Changing laws about making food available for people that need it and making those centers priorities with not just food from donations but the amount of restaurants that have food near expiration or that they cant re serve the next day can be donated for hungry people to eat but I am pretty sure there are laws against that. The bottom line is that to often as a society we are worried about what is happening in other places of the world and how we can help someone else when we have so many people that we see on a daily basis that we just walk by and don’t acknowledge that are just as much in need as the people we see on TV and read about online, they just are not getting the publicity they deserve. |
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