Nearly half of
Ontario's Indigenous communities have a boil water advisory at any given time.
For nearly a
century, the Manitoba city of Winnipeg has used an aqueduct to suck away water
from the Northwestern Ontario Indigenous community of Shoal Lake 40 to provide
the city of nearly 700,000 people with drinking water. Meanwhile, the water left for the residents
of Shoal Lake 40 is laced with bacteria and a boil water advisory has been in
place for nearly twenty years.
The Indian Act has
been described as a form of apartheid, a piece of legislation designed to
control and tame the Indigenous population.
The act has historically outlined every aspect of life for an Indigenous
person in Canada.
The Crown used the
treaties not only to take land from the Indigenous people, but also to absorb
the next generation into Canadian society.
Again, the numbers
of kids who were sexually and physically abused will never be truly known. Only now are survivors coming forward. As of the end of January 2015, the Independent
Assessment Process, created under the Indian Residential Schools Settlement
Agreement, received 37,951 abuse complaints.
By the end of 2014, 30,939 cases had been settled and $2.69 billion paid
out in compensation.
In 1996, the last
residential school was finally shut down. About 150,000 children had been sent
to these schools, passing down the horror and trauma of the experience to their
children, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews.
In traditional
Indigenous culture, it was rare for people to take their own lives -- and it
was especially rare for children to do so.
From 1986 to 2016, there have been more than five hundred suicides in
the Nishnawbe Aski Nation territory alone.
A staggering seventy of these suicides were of children between the ages
of ten and fourteen and more than two hundred were youth between the ages of
fifteen and twenty.
