[ID: Two tweets by Cedar. They read: “When Indigenous people say stolen land we don’t mean 500 years ago. In the late 1800s a lumber company had my g+ grandfather tell them stories & asked for an “autograph” on blank paper. They forged a land transfer. It’s a golf course today. This is typical Native family history. Another moment in typical Native family history: Colonizer wanted farmland, said my great+ Aunt’s [farm animal] gored him. Her tribe testified in court, she didn’t even own [that type of animal], no one did. She lost, had to pay fees, her home/land was valued at the exact amount.” End ID.]
In the dead of night in the late 1800s, free masons came to my family’s land and set fire to their crops, their animals, and their home. My family fled their land out of fear of being murdered and their land was stolen from them. These stories are so commonplace yet colonizers and settlers like to place us in mental museums so they don’t have to face their true colors.
Many Métis who had gotten land scripts from the government (that’s a whole other issue) were so poor after the rebellion and were having trouble making a living off of the very bad land slots we were given & having difficulty finding work because of racism. Banks took advantage of this and offered to buy the land back that was allotted to families but what they didn’t tell them was that they were paying them only 1/3-¼ of what it was worth. So Métis families continued to be stuck in poverty and living on the roadsides since we had no designated land. Thus the name, The Road Allowance people.
