I just finished watching Crash and it was a reminder of how racism is still very prevalent. It wasn't one of those happy ending movies where blacks and whites become friends at the end but it showed the subtle ways racism seeps into American culture.
We Canadian's see these U.S. movies and think 'man not another movie on racism haven't they gotten it right?'. But apparently they haven't..... but niether have Canadians, I'll get to that later. Johanna, my faithful blog reader told me about a Afro Canadian friend who is attending a reputable educational institution in the U.S.. If I get the story right, (Joh forgive me if I don't) he has started seeing a white girl. Apparently this is still considered some what of a fopa(sp?) because people have made comments to them both about how it........isn't quite right. Now in Canada I do not think that this would be as big of a deal. But in the states their are still the black segregated ghettos, not purposefully seperated by the government but because of prejudice....prejudge between both races, a disdain for each other. Okay I do not claim to know a lot about this so I'm not going to speak about this much more.
On to what I did want to talk about. I want to talk about racism that exists in Canada. Racism between Native Canadians and white Canadians. We have government enforced native segregated reserves, laws that say if a native women marries a none native man then she looses (sp? loses) her native rights, and we have very poor conditions for our natives on a lot of the reserves. We learn very little about the atrocities natives have endured in the past. The horrible disease infected Hudson Bay blankets that were traded for the beautiful beaver pelts, the horrendous native brothels, the sickening abuse that happened in the mandatory native schools (Catholic no less) and the use of alcohol to cheat the natives out of land by feading their addiction(we intoduced them to liquour) for the liquour. I'm sure that their is more but I do not know about it. I have a friend who said that when he was in a hockey league they were told to hit the native teams extra hard. That was probably only about 8-10 years ago! My whole life I have been told how slothful and alcoholic natives were. How they just used the government. Yes, some of them might be but why are they?
This is why! Our government has been an enabler, they have used money as a band-aid to try and fix the problems. Money to help kill the pain at having lost their cultural heritage, the abused have become abusers within their communities. Natives continue to abuse alcohol to numb the pain they have and to fill the sedative life style some of them live because they do not need to work because....... the government enables them not to. Money will not fill the void! They are slaves to Canada, they're 'native land', slaves to a government that chooses to push them aside realizing the hole they have dug for these beautiful people and for themselves has become deeper and deeper. My heart hurts for this people group because they are a lost group that do not belong to they're own country. They have no native land to try and return to for comfort.
So what can we do? Well.... we could learn from our trigger happy American nieghbors that entertainment is a source of education. They have movies that educate people about the history of racism yet they end the movies with hope for a resolution through exceptance of culture and heritage. If anyone out here on the internet sees this post and you are in the film industry I strongly urge you to find a screenplay to make a major motion picture about natives. And if you do take my advice do not make the hero some white guy who was adopted by some warrior tribe AKA last of the Mohican's. Oh, and make lots of different movies because racism dies very slowly!
Special thanks goes to my second year professor of Canadian Youth Culture, she enlightened me to these current problems within our government. It was a class that made me more aware of what it meant to be Canadian and less like an American.
