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When one hurts or kills a women
one hurts or kills hummanity and is an antrocitie.
Gino d'Artali
and: My mother (1931-1997) always said to me <Mi
figlio, non esistono notizie <vecchie> perche puoi imparare qualcosa da
qualsiasi notizia.> Translated: <My son, there is no such thing as so
called 'old' news because you can learn something from any news.>
Gianna d'Artali
CLICK HERE ON HOW TO READ
ALL PARTS OF THIS SPECIAL
<The stench of death>
<Canada's murdered women and girls.>
Between 8 Nov 2021 and 17 Feb 2022 AL Jazeera published a serial of articles about femicides of Canadian Indigenous women and girls of which each word is so
heartbreaking that it takes a lot of courage to read the whole serial. Still I challenge you to do so! I divided it according to the
number of articles and quoted from them ending with a read more URL. All
articles were written by Brandi Morin (1 to 10) except the last one (11th.) written by an Al Jazeera team:
Related:
Note from Gino d'Artali:
Do understand that I cannot quote the whole article. That would be
stealing and breaching copyright laws. So I quoted the most im- portant
parts with inbetween ....
Al Jazeera
7 Apr 2022
By Brandi Morin
<<REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK
Features
Indigenous Rights
‘Walking to justice’: Canada’s residential school survivors
Reporter Brandi Morin accompanied Indigenous survivors of Canada’s
church-run residential schools as they went to the Vatican in search of
an apology.
Warning: The story below contains details of residential schools that
may be upsetting. Canada’s Indian Residential School Survivors and
Family Crisis Line is available 24 hours a day at 1-866-925-4419.
As I stepped off the plane on that March morning after a nine-hour
flight from Montreal, I felt an enormous burden descend upon my body.
Here I was on the land of the original colonisers and although I had
prepared for this historic assignment for months, I was unprepared for
just how heavy it would feel. I carried with me the countless stories of
survivors I had spoken to over more than 10 years of reporting. I was
with a delegation of First Nation, Metis and Inuit leaders and survivors
of Canada’s church and state-run residential schools – those
institutions which, between the 1870s and 1990s, tore Indigenous
children from their families and communities and subjected them to
physical, emotional, spiritual and sexual abuses which thousands of
children did not survive and from which many tens of thousands more
never recovered. Abuses that did not end with those who endured them but
which lived on in the form of intergenerational trauma. They had
travelled some 7,700km (4,800 miles) from Canada to Rome to participate
in a series of groundbreaking meetings over several days with the pope.
For many of these Indigenous chiefs, elders, youth representatives and
the family members who accompanied them, this was their first time
travelling so far from their homes. There was a sense of excitement but
also of apprehension – they had been let down so many times before and
they could not be sure that this time would be any different. For
decades, survivors had called on the Roman Catholic Church to apologise
for its role in the residential schools, more than 60 percent of which
it administered. For decades, they had been disappointed as the Church
failed to do so. Since the early 1990s, the Anglican Church of Canada,
the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the Presbyterian Church of
Canada and the United Church of Canada had all issued formal apologies
for their role in the schools – but there had been no formal apology
from the pope. Then, last summer, thousands of unmarked graves of
Indigenous children began to be found on the grounds of former
residential schools across Canada. As the heartbreak and trauma endured
by Indigenous communities for generations again filled news reports,
attention turned to Pope Francis. Would he be the pope to finally
apologise?
Soon after the first graves were found, meetings between the pope and
the Indigenous delegation were scheduled. They were originally due to
take place in December but were postponed over concerns about the
Omicron coronavirus variant. There was a sense among the delegates that
time was running out. As Wilton Littlechild, a residential school
survivor and one of the delegates, told me before we left for Rome, of
the approximately 150,000 children who attended the schools, just 40,000
are still alive and as many as four survivors may be dying each day. <Those
people went to their grave never having had an apology for what was done
to them as children,> he reflected.
‘Under the cloak of the Church’
The unprecedented gathering had attracted journalists from around the
world and all of them wanted to talk to the survivors. In order to
accommodate these endless requests, many of the survivors gave
back-to-back interviews – reliving their trauma over and over again. I
could see that it was draining and overwhelming for them. And, unused to
working in this way, I felt uncomfortable and out of place. But the
survivors I spoke to were gracious and poised. Throughout our time in
Rome, Norman Yakeleya, a Dene survivor of Grollier Hall residential
school in Inuvik, Northwest Territories, would chat and joke with people;
he remembered everyone’s name and made sure to shout out a greeting
whenever he saw them. When I caught up with him one day as he stepped
outside the hotel for a cigarette, he told me it felt freeing to speak
so openly about the evils he endured. <[Back then], we didn’t talk about
it. We didn’t feel and we certainly didn’t trust anybody,> he said, his
brow furrowed but his gentle brown eyes alight with faith. <Everything
was kept in secrecy under the cloak of the Roman Catholic Church because
those people [were not supposed to] do those things we were told. They
worked for God.
So, we lived in our own jails with our own hurts and not knowing what to
do and how to say things. When you’re hurt, especially by sexual abuse,
as a young boy, you don’t talk about it. There’s a lot of shame.
....
‘Bad things happened in the dark’
On our second day in Rome, I went to the Colosseum, where warriors once
fought to the death in front of thousands of spectators. I was with
inter-generational survivor Lorelei Williams, Salish/Coast Salish from
Skatin Nations/Sts’Alies, who had travelled to Italy on her own accord.
She had spent her own money to get there because she told me she “just
had to”. Both of her parents, now deceased, were survivors of St Mary’s
Indian Residential School in Mission, British Columbia.
Lorelei wore a stunning red hooded cape with a long train adorned with
black handprints representing the souls of Missing and Murdered
Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG). It was dusk by the time we began our
interview and the lights under the arches of the Colosseum cast an
orange hue behind her. It felt serendipitous – orange is the colour that
represents residential school survivors. As passersby stopped to stare
at Lorelei’s beautiful regalia, I knew I was in the presence of a
modern-day warrior. It felt surreal to be in Rome, she told me, but she
wanted to carry the message of the crisis facing Indigenous women and
girls with her because it is a part of the same violent colonialism as
the residential schools. Although her mother left her residential school
alive, Lorelei believes it killed her. She drank herself to death, she
explains, to stifle the pain of what happened to her there. When she
told me that her mother slept with the light on for her entire life
because <bad things happened in the dark>, I broke. My tears flowed as I
realised why my Kohkum (grandmother), a residential school survivor, had
slept with the lights on until her death at the age of 74. I thought of
my Kohkum often in Rome and carried the pain of my ancestors as well as
the excruciating stories I have heard from survivors over the years.
....
Dancing in celebration
On the final day of meetings, the pope held an open audience with the
delegates at the beautiful Sala Clementina Hall in the Apostolic Palace,
I watched via a live feed from the Vatican press office. I leaned in
close to my laptop to hear the English translation of what he was saying.
The delegates had invited the pope to Indigenous lands in Canada and
hoped to hear an apology there. The general consensus among them was
that he would not apologise in Rome. But then I heard the words that
took my breath away. <I have said this to you and now I say it again. I
feel shame – sorrow and shame – for the role that a number of Catholics,
particularly those with educational responsibilities, have had in all
these things that wounded you, in the abuses you suffered and in the
lack of respect shown for your identity, your culture and even your
spiritual values. All these things are contrary to the Gospel of Jesus
Christ. For the deplorable conduct of those members of the Catholic
Church, I ask for God’s forgiveness and I want to say to you with all my
heart: I am very sorry.> >>
Read the complete article here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2022/4/7/walking-to-justice-canadas-residential-school-survivors
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