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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 two written by an Al Jazeera team:
Related:
Al Jazeera
27 Apr 2022
By Brandi Morin
<<A warrior for Indigenous women and girls.
As the sun set over Rome, Lorelei Williams calmly observed the steady
stream of tourists who flocked into the Colosseum, where warriors once
fought to the death before tens of thousands of spectators.
Wrapped in a blood-red silk cape and with her black hair neatly braided,
she was in Italy to witness a historic event - one she had come all the
way from Canada to be part of. Lorelei is Salish/Coast Salish from the
Skatin Nations/Sts’Ailes, near Vancouver, British Columbia. When a
delegation of First Nations, Inuit and Metis representatives were
invited to Rome to meet with Pope Francis, Lorelei knew she had to be
there, too. So she took time off work and paid for the trip herself. For
Lorelei, it was a way to honour her late parents. The delegates were
there to ask the pope to apologise for the Catholic Church’s role in
Canada’s residential schools - the federally funded, church-run
institutions that operated from the late 1800s until 1996 with the goal
of forcibly assimilating Indigenous children. More than 150,000
Indigenous children from across Canada were torn from their families and
communities and forced to attend the schools where physical, sexual,
emotional and spiritual abuse was rife. Lorelei’s parents were among
them. Thousands of children died at the schools, and while Lorelei’s
parents survived, she believes the trauma her mother endured at her
residential school eventually killed her.
That is why being in Rome was so important to her.
<This is something I needed to see with my own eyes,> she said, softly.
<For the children, for the missing and murdered and for my parents, I
just felt like I needed to be here.> Lorelei’s father was George
Pennier, a celebrated artist from the Sts’Ailes Nation known for
painting intricate, colourful animals and carving masks, bowls, plaques
and totem poles out of wood. He was 57 when he died in 2014.
Lorelei says he never talked about his time at residential school. <I
think he was just bottling it down,> she said. <I think his way of
dealing with it was [through] his artwork, and I think that's why he
became very famous because he not only did amazing artwork, but he would
give it away. And that's what our people do is give things. So, I think
his name became well-known for that.> But Lorelei’s mother, Corrine
Williams, of Skatin Nations, could not conceal the trauma residential
school had inflicted upon her. She was terrified of the dark and refused
to sleep with the lights off. <This was normalised for me, to grow up
with a mom who’d wake up in the middle of the night screaming or would
not sleep on a regular bed. She always slept on the couch in the living
room … because in residential school bad things happened to her in the
dark, in the bed,> Lorelei explained. There is one memory that
particularly stands out for Lorelei. A friend of hers was sleeping over
at her house and turned the lights off in a room where Corrine had
fallen asleep after a night of drinking. <She drank a lot that night and
she passed out from drinking,> Lorelei recalled with a pained expression.
<But once that light went out she jumped up screaming her head off. We
were all like, ‘What’s going on?’ Our friend didn’t know not to turn the
light off and she felt so bad. But that’s how traumatised my mom was, to
be passed out drunk and to have that happen.> When her mother died of
liver failure in 2012 after decades of abusing alcohol, Lorelei was
filled with anger towards the government and the churches that ran the
residential schools. <I one hundred percent feel like the government
killed her - I even wanted to sue them,> she said. <The government has
killed all our people that have died [before their time]. My mom was
trying to numb that pain, that’s what killed her.> She took a deep
breath and lifted the hood of her cape, designed to draw attention to
the crisis of Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG),
over her head. In Canada, Indigenous females are 12 times more likely to
go missing or be murdered than non-Indigenous females. In 2019, a
federally-funded National Inquiry declared the crisis a genocide. Its
final report outlined 231 Calls for Justice for the public, private and
governmental sectors to help end the crisis. But Canada has since taken
little to no action and Indigenous women and girls continue to face high
rates of violence and murder.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/longform/2022/4/27/a-warrior-for-indigenous-women-and-girls
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