They stopped using guns to subjugate and placate, now its words to dehumanize…
Each time I hear another story about the matter dealing with the issue of race and racism, ethnicity, the manifestations and ramifications all I can think of is here we go again.
About a week-and-a half or so that I first heard about a group of First Nations kids in Quebec City for a hockey tournament. I refer to it as another ‘here-we-go-again’ incident.
Then watching the news a day later I was able to see footage of the incident: First Nations kids were being subjected to all kinds of “racist taunts, slurs…” and other things hateful by some superior human beings in the arena for a game.
One could clearly see and hear someone in the arena, a man, shouting his racist bile at the young people: “Gang de sauvages…” “Gang of savages…”
Boy oh boy, some things never change. Or as the old adage goes, “the more things change…”
There are white people out there who think the best way to get under none-white peoples’ skin is to resort to the old hackneyed insults… T
My dear First Nations youth, I’m in solidarity with you. That QC man and others of his racist ilk have probably already spent much of their abundant hatefulness on Black people; we’re in their line of fire.
One thing must be stated without equivocation, his ancestors certainly have, and the proverbial racist fruit “doesn’t fall far from the tree…”
For example, and in that racist vein, one bad fruit of a human being, Roseanne, recently let fly a statement that was rife with racist bile. She referred to Valerie Jarrett, a former top aide to then President Barack Obama this way, quote: “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby…” She compared the woman to a primate.
That same despicable woman, Roseanne, also referred to President Obama’s National Security Advisor Susan Rice of the day in similar unflattering terms.
What a piece of work! That woman.
Yes, First Nations hockey players, we too have been called all kinds of names, and been referred to as “[…] savages…” to. It’s how tried and true racists do it, and will continue to.
They perceive us as weak and vulnerable. But…
It boggles my mind to think that some people remain so mentally bogged down in their history of rightness, and if you will, whiteness, essentially nourishing and perpetuating their myth (by virtue of their inherited entitlement, carved out of their forebears predatory colonial history) of that superiority complex.
Meanwhile, I’m never surprised; I’ve become accustomed to hearing recurring stories of vile incidents across the nation targeting Canada’s First Nations peoples.
In fact, those anti-native incidents, to use that en vogue vernacular, have become normalized; it’s the way dominant colonial cultures tend to exert… in the majority-minority, ‘boss and the best’ power dynamic.
So I can’t help wandering if they can’t pull themselves out of that specious superiority mindset and see the world for what it is.
And as long as the status quo is in effect, there always will be pushback, and incremental forward motion.
“Gang de sauvages… Go home? Where, to Ontario, Canada?”
Whenever I hear of another incident like the one in Quebec City involving those 13 and 14-year-olds, rife with racism, I imagine meeting First Nations leaders and seeing them step up to a microphone and remind the offspring of the colonial migrants who came hundreds of years ago (without documents, just trinkets, infested blankets, alcohol and whatnot…), then proceeded to usurp power – land and people… then established their [colonial] systems, overwhelming and marginalizing… the welcoming hosts in the process.
As the old saying goes, “the rest is history…”
Centuries and generations on the welcomed, cum ‘unwelcome guests’, continue to treat the generational procreation of Turtle Island with derision… The only thing they cannot be told is “Go back where you came from…”
But given centuries of dehumanization, cultural destruction and appropriation, the inverse would not be out of order.
Unfortunately, given the socio-political, and institutionalized power dynamic, that is a moot point.
That initial meeting hundreds of years ago and your perceived niceness have resulted in territorial usurpation and your marginalization, at times verging on cultural destruction – almost separation from your birthright. But in the twenty-first century and continuing there’s pushback…
Forget about apologies… We, too, have been called savages…
Lessons learned for present and future generations and lifetimes…
