Not
only did it take violence to create Canada, but it takes violence to stay Canada,”
said Jessica Yee during a lecture she gave at SFU on Jan 27. “I do not believe that
the people who caused this in the first place will be able to fix it.”
Yee,
a member of the Mohawk nation of Askwesasne,
and also the founder of the Native Youth Sexual Health Network, was there to
give a lecture entitled “Marginalization Doesn’t Happen by Accident:
Colonialism and Violence from the State”. This lecture, part of the Ruth Wynn
Woodward chair lecture and workshop series for Spring 2012, gave listeners an
up-close look at the struggles that many First Nations peoples in Canada are
still experiencing to this day.
Yee
developed an interest in the relationship between her people and the Canadian
State at a young age, when her Aunt Patricia Monture, a well-known Mohawk
scholar, began to make her question why she wasn’t taught more about her heritage
at school. She was forced to realize that her teachers might not want her to
know some of the realities.
As
she grew older, Yee was able to understand the realities that came along with
being an Indigenous woman living in Canada: “The laws surrounding matrimonial
real property [say] that … in the event your husband dies, women are not allowed
to solely own property on the reserve, as well as the fact that if an Indian
woman married a non-Indian she would lose her Indian Status,” she says. “[This]
shows us that the State has the ability to control personhood and is taking
away the ability to pass on anything.”
Yee
continued by discussing the State’s involvement in the residential school
system, noting that the State’s claims to “help and save them” were basically a
way to assimilate Aboriginal children into the appropriate gender roles of the
settler’s society on the claim that Aboriginal women were not fit for
child-rearing. Although the days of residential schools are in the (recent)
past, the pain of being taken from their families at a young age and, in some
cases, dealing with sexual exploitation is still a heavy burden for many.
Yee
also noted that simply because the term “residential school” is no longer in
use doesn’t mean that the government has given up housing Indigenous peoples in
a specific area: “Prisons are the new residential schools,” she says.
What
Yee is referring to with that provocative statement is the disproportionately
high number of Indigenous people among the prison population. As of the 2006
Census, some provinces in Canada had up to 30 times the amount of Aboriginal
inmates than their counterparts. In terms of Aboriginal women specifically, a 2008/2009
Stats Can report showed that over one in five women incarcerated in Canada are of
Aboriginal descent, though Aboriginal people make up only three per cent of the
entire Canadian population. Yee`s own research has uncovered that “ 75 per cent
of sex crime victims in Native communities are girls, and the suicide rate for
young Aboriginal girls is eight times higher than the national average for
non-Aboriginal adolescent girls”
The
negative stereotypes that surround Aboriginal women are only intensified by
media outlets covering the story of the missing women from the Downtown
Eastside and court cases such as the trial of Robert Pickton. Yee stressed, “The
mistreatment of Aboriginal women is not new, and women have been missing since Canada
was made. People believe that this is a new problem because these media outlets
have only taken interest in the past 20 years. People need to realize that the
reason we have privileges is due to the oppression of others."
As
the end of the lecture was in sight, Yee explained, “If you feel raw, empty,
and uncomfortable, that is a good thing.” Yee’s self-proclaimed take home
message was a simple one: “Check yourself before you wreck yourself. Nobody wants
to be the bad guy. Think about how you treat people and what you will do with
the information given to you tonight.”
/Lindsay Howe, writer
//Graphics by Jason Jeon
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