MAP’s In Focus presents: See the humans behind the trauma: Indigenous and asylum seeker experience

Indigenous populations in Canada have faced inter-generational assimilation that has been identified as having long-lasting effects on the physical and mental well-being of Indigenous populations in Canada. Assimilation is the social process of absorbing one cultural group into another. What does it mean to be affected and what were significant events that lead to it?

• Displacement
  Aboriginal peoples were displaced physically- they were denied access to their traditional territories and in many cases actually forced to move to new locations selected for them by colonial authorities. They were also displaced socially and culturally, subject to intensive missionary activity and the establishment of residential schools – which undermined their ability to pass on traditional values to their children, imposed male-oriented Victorian values, and attacked traditional activities such as significant dances and other ceremonies.1
• Trauma
  While attempts at forced assimilation have ultimately failed, it is apparent that they have nevertheless had profound effects at every level of individual identity and mental health, to the structure and integrity of families, communities, bands and nations. The concept of historical trauma suggests that the effects of these disruptive historical events are collective, affecting not only individual Survivors, but also their families down through generations, and communities.
• Residential Schools
  Beginning in 1849, the joint government and church residential school program removed children from almost every Aboriginal community -Indian, Métis and Inuit – across Canada.
  The program included boarding schools, built close to the reserves for children between the ages of 8-14, and industrial schools, placed near non-Aboriginal urban centres to train older children in a range of trades.
  The removal of children from their homes and the denial of their identity through attacks on their language and spiritual beliefs were cruel. But these practices were compounded by the far too frequent lack of basic care — the failure to provide adequate food, clothing, medical services and a healthy environment, and the failure to ensure that the children were safe from teachers and staff who abused them physically, sexually and emotionally.2
• Sixties Scoop
  Refers to the mass removal of Aboriginal children from their families into the child welfare system, in most cases without the consent of their families or bands. Although the practice of removing Aboriginal children from their families and into state care existed before the 1960s (with the residential school system, for example), the drastic overrepresentation of Aboriginal children in the child welfare system accelerated in the 1960s.3 The policy saw thousands of Indigenous children taken from their homes and families, placed in foster homes, and eventually adopted out to white families from across Canada and the United States.
• Missing and Murdered Indigneous Women and Girls
  Indigenous women and girls in Canada face greater risks of violence and homicide. In 2010, the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC) confirmed 582 cases over 20 years of missing or murdered Indigenous women and girls.
  The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) conducted a review in 2013, which confirmed 1,181 cases of “police-recorded incidents of Aboriginal female homicides and unresolved missing Aboriginal females” between 1980 and 2012. The RCMP report also stated that Indigenous women made up roughly 16% of all female homicides between 1980 and 2012, despite making up only 4% of the female population.
  According to Lisa Meeches, an acclaimed Anishinaabe filmmaker from Long Plain First Nation in Manitoba, indigenous women and girls are 12 times more likely to be murdered or missing than any other women in Canada, and 16 times more likely than Caucasian women.