John Clarke, former major organizer of Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), recently posted the following on Facebook:
Within 50 years of the arrival of Columbus in the ‘New World,’ the Catholic Church conducted a debate on whether or not Indigenous people of the Americas had immortal souls. Under the dominant belief system of the time, this constituted a discussion of whether they were really human beings.In Canada, at the present moment, it is considered acceptable to leave the bodies of Indigenous women on landfill sight, rather than devote the time and resources needed to search for them.Regardless of how many tears Trudeau sheds or how many earnest statements are issued from on high about reconciliation, the same denial of humanity is at work that emerged in the 1500s. The colonial ‘logic of elimination’ has changed only in secondary ways and the essential nature of the struggle against it remains.
When I lived in Winnipeg, not long before moving to Toronto, in front of the Manitoba Legislative Building, at a protest against the Winnipeg Child and Family Services, I read out, among other things, my experiences with that organization in relation to my daughter.
Most of those present were Aborginal–many of their children had been apprehended by Winnipeg Child and Family Services.
Oppression assumes many forms in a society dominated by a class of employers and the associated economic, political and social structures.
The Abolitionary 