My first week As the journalist was the same week, the commission in truth and reconciliation published a brief presentation of its final report. I was twenty -two, a recent graduate of the university, named after Christopher Columbus. A Huffington Post He hired me to be their “native researcher”, in fact, the famous interns who works mainly from the table in New York. My The first titleWritten in this tabloid left center Huffpost Style: “Canada just faced the“ cultural genocide ”of local residents. Why can't the US do the same? ” Ten years later, I force amazingly similar questions about what it means to reckon with the history of genocide – to understand the story, but to come to various conclusions.
Now I spent a decade, reporting on the communities of indigenous peoples in Canada and the United States. I am a member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq'escel group in British Colombia, the Indian act of Canada in an Indian act. My father was born in the mission of St. Joseph, at the Indian residential school near Lake Williams, British Colombia, and found that a few minutes later he was thrown into a garbage engineering plant. He had a difficult upbringing, jumping from one house to another. He went out of the Reza, as soon as he could, found the way in Emily Carr College of Arts and Design in Vancouver and got a job in the studio for printing of fine art as far from Lake Kanam as he could imagine: New York. This is where he met my mother, a loud, fast Irish Jewish resident, in a bar near the city. According to Legend, dad took a golden holiday from his share, gave her mom, and that is how I became.
Having gone to the work of my mother – Minneapolis, Miami – my parents settled in Auckland, California, in a city with a large city Indian community. Soon after, mom and dad broke up from his father’s alcoholism.
After the loss of my dad, an Indian artist with a greater life, my mother did everything she could keep me in connection with her culture. She brought me home to the reserve -Indian Kanam Lake almost every Christmas and most summer. She took us to the Friendship House of Interitribal Friendship in Eastern Auckland, where every Thursday in the evening they practiced the Powwow drum and dance. When I expressed an interest in dancing, my mother learned beads so that I could have the right “going out” to the Pauvou circle. Before I became a journalist reporting on an Indian country, I traveled along the Pavow highway, dancing in competitions throughout the USA and Canada. Once, in the New Year's year in Lillooet Powwow in British Colombia, I even won the horse. Apache boyfriend, who was a kind of stand for my father, nicknamed “Champion”, as in the “championship dancer”.
Journalism, Pauvau path and my upbringing gave me a transnational view of the Indian country. Being an Indian from Canada, having risen and working in the USA, they often ask me about the differences between the two countries. In both local peoples, almost all of our lands lost. Our populations were reduced to the fraction of their previous power. Some were completely killed. Then our children were taken to segregated church schools, where they were deprived of language, culture and life paths. In Canada there was a loud process of truth and reconciliation to solve the mistakes of Indian schools of residential buildings. There was in the USA request In school -boarding schools of indigenous Americans. But he never received the same level of attention of the media and the public as his Canadian colleague. In the USA, Indians are mostly powerless and invisible. In Canada, the Indians are also mostly powerless, but we are at least visible, and therefore Canadians feel “sorry”. To the north of the border there is some desire to learn our story and correct things.
Like dancing, the story of stories has become for me to understand and restore who I am against this history of cultural genocide. Almost a decade after the final TRC report, I started Sugar caneThe Academy Award, nominated for a prize, about an ongoing investigation of abuse and children who went missing in the mission of St. Joseph, the Indian School of Residential Premises, where my family was sent, and my father was born. The forcing this film has changed how I understand the role of the narrator. Now I consider my responsibility not only to reveal the truths hidden from colonization, but also to return our traditions to life. That's why my first book We survived the nightWritten in the form of the “History of the Coyot”, a traditional story about a trick from my own culture. Because, in the story of the creator, destroyer, Deadbeat and Survivor, like Coyot, I came to see and understand a lot of my father, my people and me.
Ten years later, in this era of truth and reconciliation, I still ask the same questions about what will be required in order to correctly understand our stories and tell our truths. After almost complete cultural destruction, the indigenous peoples now return what was taken. Not only because our methods, such as stories about coyots, were almost destroyed by the face of the Earth. But because our traditions have always received the stories of this land.
