Dear Editor,
On Sept. 30, Orange Shirt Day will take place. This federal holiday was legislated to honour the survivors of Canada’s residential school system and raise awareness of the horrific acts committed against children forced to attend them. The impacts of intergenerational trauma are ubiquitous across First Nations communities, many of which lack clean water, adequate housing, and equal access to education, medical care and mental health services.
“Every child matters” is the call to action ensuring that all children may grow up in a safe and loving environment, with equal rights and access to their cultural identities. It also invites non-Indigenous Canadians to take part in the process of truth and reconciliation by first acknowledging this dark chapter in our nation’s history.
Unfortunately, the next chapter hasn’t much improved. Meaningful action has yet to be taken to address many of the systemic issues affecting our First Nations brothers and sisters and as I write this, Canada is supporting another nation engaged in colonization of an indigenous people. It is there, in Palestine, that children are brutally victimized, like those in Canada’s residential schools, where mortality rates reached up to 50 per cent.
Their military court system is unique in that it imprisons children as young as 12 years old. Thousands of children spend years in “administrative detention” prisons where they have no contact with family while suffering physical, psychological and sexual abuse.
Just as the First Nations lost vast territories through broken treaties and forced relocations, the Palestinian people have been forced off of their ancestral lands by settlement expansion and military occupation. Permission by a Canadian Indian Agent was once required and often denied to simply leave the reserve, cutting off vital food sources. West Bank farmers face armed checkpoints that restrict their movement on their own farmland and fishermen in Gaza are shot for venturing away from shore.
Both Canada and its ally in the Middle East have a history of making human test subjects of their indigenous populations. Children in residential schools were forced to endure nutritional and medical experiments. Civilians in Gaza are the guinea pigs for new surveillance and weapons technology, before it receives the “battle tested” stamp and is exported to countries like Canada.
Dehumanization is always the first step of a colonization project, where any act of resistance is a reprehensible and unprovoked act of aggression caused by savages or terrorists. It is difficult for the state to justify their own atrocities if the victims are viewed as human.
Maybe there will be a new special shirt to remember the indigenous population whose genocide Canada has been helping to facilitate, while future generations in Israel give land acknowledgments from where Gaza once stood.
If Orange Shirt Day is to mean anything, we must demand our government stop perpetuating the same injustices abroad that it claims to reconcile with at home. We must demand a better world where every human life holds more value than the expansion of empire or the capital of real estate developers and defence contractors.
Gareth Hamilton, Waltham
