Vol. 79/No. 29 August 17, 2015
Their fight is part of the ongoing struggle by native peoples across Canada against discrimination.
Colton Crowshoe, 18, who had just finished high school and was pursuing welding training, was arrested and charged with trespassing and break and enter July 2, 2014, then released the same day. His family told the media Colton said he had been roughed up by the cops. A few days later, his family reported him missing. His body was found three weeks later in a city drainage pond.
In addition to Colton’s aunts, who helped raise him, his father, Jimmy Crowshoe, spoke at the event, condemning the government for not taking them seriously when they reported Colton missing.
“They judged him — he was just another native kid,” Tanya Crowshoe said. “They said, ‘He doesn’t want to be found.’” Police waited almost three weeks before issuing a missing persons report.
Jimmy Crowshoe told the Militant his father was a survivor of the residential schools that many aboriginal youth were subjected to for decades. He described the situation facing native youth today, noting, “There are no jobs on the reserves.” In 2011, only 35 percent of aboriginal reserve residents older than 15 were employed.
At least 60 percent of aboriginal people in Canada live off reserve, and face disproportionate unemployment. They were especially hard hit by massive job losses after the recession that began in 2008. In Alberta, where overall employment is high, one in two native youth are unemployed.
Systematic discrimination is evident in all aspects of life. Native people make up 4 percent of the total Canadian population, but more than 23 percent of the federal prison population. According to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, 1,017 aboriginal women and girls were murdered between 1980 and 2012 — roughly 4.5 times the homicide rate for all other women in Canada. So far the federal government has resisted widespread calls for an inquiry into this.
Residential school abuse
In June the Truth and Reconciliation Commission — set up in 2008 as required by the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, the largest class action settlement in Canadian history — issued a report calling the residential school system “an integral part of a conscious policy of cultural genocide.” The commission heard 6,750 submissions from residential school survivors, their families and school staff across the country. Roughly 150,000 aboriginal youth attended these schools between 1883 and 1996. At a conservative estimate, 6,000 died as a result of unhealthy conditions, neglect and abuse.Sam Kautainuk was 12 years old when he was taken to the residential school in what is now Nunavut. He told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that on his first day of school in Pangnirtung, when the teacher overheard him speaking to a friend in Inuktitut, “He took a ruler and grabbed my head like this and then smacked me in the mouth with the ruler four times.”
Many testified they didn’t get enough to eat at the schools. “I was always hungry,” Doris Young, who attended Anglican schools in the prairies, told the commission. “And we stole food. I remember stealing bread. And the pies that I remember stealing were lined up on a counter, and they weren’t for us to eat, they were for the staff.”
The fight that brought this history to light and ongoing struggles like that of the Crowshoe family strengthen the ability of working people to make progress against the rulers’ divisive and discriminatory policies.
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