For anyone who doesn’t know what’s going on in Canada right now (which, let’s be real, is probably everyone who’s not in Canada):
This week, a mass grave was discovered at a former Indian Residential School, in Kamloops, BC. The grave contained the bodies of 215 Indigenous children.
For people outside of North America, residential schools were places that Indigenous children were sent to, to have their language and culture stripped away from them. They were literally stolen from their families, and scattered across Canada, to ensure that they would be surrounded by children who didn’t speak their language. They were given Christian names and forced to speak English. They were horrendously abused, and the survivors have been traumatized.
Hundreds of children never returned. The assumption has always been that they died. This has now been confirmed.
The school in Kamloops closed in 1978. They are now trying to identify bodies to inform family members. The last residential school closed in the 1990s. There is growing demand to search all of them, but the government hasn’t responded to that, as of yet. Ottawa JUST gave in to pressure to fly the Canada flag at half mast. They weren’t even going to do that.
This is the reality if anti-Indigenous racism in Canada. The residential schools may be closed, but that hasn’t stopped the abduction of Indigenous children, let alone the hundreds of missing and murdered Indigenous women.
TheHimba(singular:OmuHimba, plural: OvaHimba) are indigenous peoples with an estimated population of about 50,000 people living in northern Namibia, in the Kunene Region(formerlyKaokoland) and on the other side of the Kunene River in Angola. The OvaHimba are a semi-nomadic,pastoralist people, culturally distinguishable from the Herero people in northern Namibia and southern Angola, and speak OtjiHimba, a variety of Herero, which belongs to the Bantu familywithinNiger–Congo. The OvaHimba are considered the last (semi-) nomadic people of Namibia.
The Himba often cover themselves with otjize paste, a cosmetic mixture of butterfatandochre pigment, to cleanse the skin over long periods due to water scarcity and protect themselves from the extremely hot and dry climate of the Kaokoland as well as against mosquito insect bites. The cosmetic mixture, often perfumed with the aromatic resin of the omuzumbashrub, gives their skin and hair plaits a distinctive orange or red-tinge characteristic, as well as texture and style. Otjize is considered foremost a highly desirable aesthetic beauty cosmetic, symbolizing earth’s rich red color and blood the essence of life, and is consistent with the OvaHimba ideal of beauty. The OvaHimba are also accustomed to use wood ash for hair cleansing due to water scarcity.
Hairstyle and jewelry play a significant role among the OvaHimba, it indicates age and social status within their community. An infant or child will generally have his head kept shaven of hair or a small crop of hair on his head crown. This soon is sculptured to one braided hair plait extended to the rear of the head for young boys and young girls have two braided hair plaits extended forward towards the face often parallel to their eyes. This style is called ozondato, the form of wear being determined by the oruzo membership (patrilineal descent group). The style remains during preadolescence until reaching puberty. Some young girls, with exception, may also have one braided hair plait extended forwards, which means they are one of a pair of twins.
OvaHimba girl
OvaHimba girl dancing
OvaHimba boy
OvaHimba girl, one of a set of twins!
OvaHimba children, both boys and girls, removing ticks from goats.
From pubescence, boys continue to have one braided hair plait.
A young man wearing a braid known as ondatu. Namibia. Photo by Nigel Pavitt
Once they reach puberty, OvaHimba girls will have many otjize textured hair plaits, some arranged to veil the girl’s face.
This girl is going through puberty, a fact made plain by her hairstyle, which has been designed to cover her face and help her avoid male attention. The puffs at the bottom are either goat hair or synthetic.
(In daily practice, the hair plaits are often tied together and held parted back from the face.)
This girl’s braids are arranged to reveal her face, indicating that she’s ready to be married.
Women who have been married for about a year, or have had a child, wear an ornate headpiece called the Erembe, sculptured from sheepskin, with many streams of braided hair, coloured and put in shape with otjize paste.
Married women wearing erembe
Unmarried young men continue to wear one braided hair plait extended to the rear of the head. When Himba men marry, they start wearing turbans, which they never take off unless someone in the village dies. After a death, their heads are shaved. Because the turbans are never removed, things can get a little itchy underneath, so men carry pointed arrow-like instruments to scratch it with.
Married OvaHimba men. #s 1 and 3 wear a scratching implement in their turbans.
Widowed men will remove their cap or head-wrap and expose un-braided hair.
Himba widower. The habit of using a head-scratching implement is hard to break.
I don’t think a lot of people really understand that ecosystems in North America were purposefully maintained and altered by Native people.
Like, we used to purposefully set fires in order to clear underbrush in forests, and to inhibit the growth of trees on the prairies. This land hasn’t existed in some primeval state for thousands of years. What Europeans saw when they came here was the result of -work-
the east coast was all mature and maintained food forests. decades if not centuries of nurturing and maintenance. when the british arrived they were amazed that there were paths through the forest just “naturally” lined with berries and edible plants, like a garden of eden. then they tore that shit down to grow wheat. dumbasses
My mom is an ethnobotanist and getting people to understand this is literally her life’s work. A lot of native tribes just had a whole different way of looking at agriculture. Instead of planting orchards in tidy rows near their villages, they went to where the trees were already growing and tended them there. They would girdle trees by stripping the bark in order to stop the spread of disease or thin out badly placed saplings. And they would encourage the companion plants they wanted and weed out the ones they didn’t, so that in the end the whole forest would be productive while remaining an ecosystem and not a monoculture. It is still agriculture, but it is a form of agriculture that is so much gentler on the landscape that, as OP says, the European settlers could not recognize what they were seeing. To them the natives must have seemed to magically live in abundance while they starved.
They did do controlled burns, but so-called slash and burn agriculture was never a primary farming strategy in North America. They were just way more subtle than that. They also made the amazing Mississippian mound structures so it’s not like they couldn’t do dramatic reshapings of the landscape when they wanted: but they changed their minds about that, walking away from Cahokia and the dense, farming-supported urban structure they had build there in the 13th century, well before any European contact.
My mom says it wasn’t a collapse, it wasn’t a war, it wasn’t a natural disaster; the farmers in Cahokia just voted with their feet. They just gradually left, dispersing in different directions but generally not very far, and it was probably because they’d gotten tired of men’s bullshit.
See, agriculture was a female domain in pretty much all the native American cultures. The specifics differed by tribe, but often they had gender-specific age-grade societies: for example, the Hidatsa Goose Society was composed of married women of childbearing age. Not only did they physically plant the fields, they also had responsibility for conducting the social and ritual events around ensuring the harvest. This included things like digging the storage pits, and organizing feasts in order to bring the whole community together to plant plots for families who were suffering illness or disability, and could not do it themselves.
So, as Cahokia urbanized (at its “height” it was a population center of between 10,200 and 15,300 people), it is very likely that the traditional, informal systems of land use-right allocations–again, always the women’s domain–became stressed by top down political pressures from the rulers (who were men). And as my mom puts it in her book Feeding Cahokia: “If rights to land ever became highly restricted as a result of a top-down, centralized process of allocation, the likelihood of poorly informed and unfair decision making is extremely high.”
So basically, the farmers took their families and they moved away. Not all at once, no mass exodus, just…gradually, they decided that they’d tried doing things the urban way, and they didn’t like it. They went back to living in smaller villages sustained, not by intensive farming, but by more garden-style plots and the traditional, sophisticated management of “wild” lands that they had never stopped practicing.
It takes a shift in thinking to recognize that was a deliberate choice on their part. Not a failure: Cahokia never collapsed, not dramatically–it just gradually wound down. They were perfectly capable of feeding themselves and they did for well more than a century. They went back to the old way because they liked it better.
And again, different tribes had different specific ways of doing it, but farming was always the women’s domain–and there are also important spiritual figures who occur under different names in different tribes. One of these is Grandmother/Old Woman Who Never Dies: giver of all plant food, protector of children, bringer of summer, and rejuvenator of living and dying things. I’m just gonna end by dropping this passage from my mom’s book because it’s amazing:
“I think it likely that the female flint-clay statues from BBB Motor and Sponemann represent an Earth Mother personage in a manifestation known to all early Cahokians, and that their Woodland ancestors had sought her powers and favors for centuries preceding the Mississippian period, just as Siouan speakers continued to protect her sacred bundles and conduct rituals focused around them long after Cahokia was abandoned. She never died. Several years ago, I accompanied a traditional Hidatsa farmer named Amy Mossett from New Town, North Dakota, to the Cahokia Mounds Interpretive Center [in Illinois]. When we came to the display case containing a cast reproduction of the Birger figurine, Mossett froze, took a step backward, put her hand on her chest, and said, ‘That’s Grandmother. And the snake is her husband.’“
“By 1492 Indian activity throughout the Americas had modified forest extent and composition, created and expanded grasslands, and rearranged microrelief via countless artificial earthworks. Agricultural fields were common, as were houses and towns and roads and trails. All of these had local impacts on soil, microclimate, hydrology, and wildlife.”
Cancelling Canada Day is literally the bare fucking minimum symbolic gesture of basic decency , not some extreme radical position of the far left.
We’ve uncovered over a thousand unmarked graves for children, with countless more to go. What the fuck is there to celebrate?
Celebrate the founding of Canada? That’s celebrating the colonialism & white supremacy that created the systems that lead to those children’s murder & abuse.
celebrate where we are now? How many indigenous people live without clean water? How many residential school survivors are still stuck in court battles with the gov? How many indigenous people are *still* being murdered by the RCMP today?
So yeah, cancel canada day. But also, remember that’s a bare minimum and just symbolic. Fight for material change & decolonialization. Support Land Back movements, Support protests to abolish the RCMP. Give money to indigenous mutual aid networks.
