There's just no end to the cultural genocide

[morgan_dhu]

A Thunder Bay woman is demanding an explanation after a teacher's aide at her son's school cut his long hair — an action her lawyer says is clearly assault while the Crown insists there are no grounds for charges....

The seven-year-old boy had chin-length hair before the incident last month. His mother said staff at McKellar Park Central Public School were aware her son was letting his hair grow so that he could take part in traditional First Nations dancing.

I've heard more detail on this in TV reports. The boy reported that the teacher's aide took hold of him bodily, placed him on a stool, cut off his bangs, then took him down and made him walk to a mirror and look at what she had done. In what world is that not a physical assault - to say nothing of an act powerfully and revoltingly evocative of the way that Aboriginal children were shorn of their hair when they were taken to residential schools.

Oh, I forgot - the boy is First Nations, and that means it's just fine for a fucking teacher's aide to grab him and do anything he/she wants to him to make him look "acceptable" to white eyes.

TV reports are also saying that the same person has done this before, cutting the hair of an older First Nations boy becasue his hair was too "feminine."

Gah. Not just physical assault, but continuation of cultural genocide - imposing white North American cultural assumptions and standards on Aboriginal people. Forced assimilation all over again.

And all the school had to say was that it was a "regrettable incident." And the Crown says this isn't assault.

Fuck that. I hope the family's lawyer takes this as far as they have to, to get recognition of just what was done to both of these boys (and I wonder how many others at this school, and others, have been treated the same way).

Comments

[aquaeri]

It's not impossible she thought she was being helpful - poor dear obviously isn't being cared for properly at home, let me bring him up to (my culture's) standards of masculinity.

There are some similar issues wrt to Aboriginal culture that looks like poverty to white eyes. And when the people in question often are poor at the same time, it gets messy.

(Not defending the action, more demonstrating how important it is for white people to have some basic understanding of the cultures of the other people around them.)

[morgan_dhu]

Oh, I wouldn't be surprised if that were in fact what was going on in the aide's mind - probably combined with the racial assumption often held by white people of Aboriginal peoples in Canada (don't know if it's similar in Australia) that aboriginal people are "dirty" - thus making it a "good" thing to "clean the boy up a little."

But in Canada - and I think there is something similar in Australia - there is a history of white people at the residential schools doing everything possible to destroy all sense of cultural connection between the children in their "care" and the communities they were taken from (to say nothing of all sorts of physical and sexual abuse that, taken together with forced assimilation and attempts at cultural genocide, has almost destroyed two to three generations of Aboriginal people in this country) - and this has been a huge topic in the media for several years now, as former residents of these schools have come forward with their stories and demamded reparations from the churches that ran the schools and the governemnts that gave them the power to essentially kidnap these children and do whatever they e=wanted to them.

So anyone teaching in Canada today, particularly anyone teaching in an area where there is a large population of Aboriginal people (and Thunder Bay is such a place), should be aware of the ramifications of an action like this. And even if the aide didn't understand, the school administration should. And the government should - but the Crown says there's no grounds for pressing charges, either.

It shouldn't still be happening, but it is, and that's a big steaming pile of fail on a number of levels.

[aquaeri]

Yes, I think I'm more shocked at the "higher up" levels not being alert to this, and not seeming very sympathetic to what was done to the boy.

Mind you, considering the level of condescending bullsh!t we're getting from the (actually apologising) government about Aboriginals, maybe I shouldn't be surprised.