Missing
and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls – Part Two
I guess one of the reasons
Mennonites empathize with Indigenous people to the degree they do is the
similarities of their respective situations from the past. Me an’ the Missus
visited the Mennonite Heritage Center a while back an’ on the way home she says
to me, “Holy crackers, there’s Mennonites everywhere!” She was talkin’ about
the Mennonite Central Committee and all its involvements in every corner of
society.
Well, it’s true. Them buggers are
everywhere. They’re in government, in industry, in agriculture – you name it
an’ you’ll find ‘em. The reason I bring this up is that given their treatment
in the old South Russia, they should have pretty well been wiped out – but they
weren’t. There are many parallels in the story of the Mennonites and the
Indigenous nations, the difference being that it was the men and older boys who
were taken away instead of the children. That left the women and younger
children to look after the farms and businesses.
What would happen was that in the
evening or at night several armed authorities would show up at a given house
and demand entry. Using their authority they would search through the house,
looking for letters or papers jewelry or wealth of some sort to incriminate the
resident. They would then give the head of the house about five minutes to pack
a few clothes, a little food to eat and pack him off to a courthouse in another
town, promising the mother and the children that he would return in a day or
two. That of course was a lie since many of them never returned. It got to the
point where every household had a package prepared to give to the head of the
family for his journey to court.
Well that’s a bit of an over
simplification, but generally pretty close to what happened. There is a book
with lists of people who were shot, or deported to northern Siberia or
imprisoned for long terms, some of my own relatives among them. It’s a gruesome
record.
Now this is the point I’m trying to
make. One of the women waiting to tell her story to the commission for Missing
and Murdered Women and Girls is extremely frustrated with the commission and
its activities. The hoops these people have to jump through to get at the
commission overwhelms her and she is afraid she’ll never get to tell her tale. That
is what confuses me. I totally agree with her in that every time you get to
tell your story, you heal a little bit. So the stories must be told – all of
them!
The question is, must they be told
to the commission being run by the government? No, they must be told to someone
who will listen. To my way of thinking, the system is entirely backwards. Indigenous
peoples have been telling stories for ever. They have good memories and a
penchant for the truth. We see that over and over.
So now we have a group of white
people who were and are the enemy setting the terms of when and how the
affected people can speak, subordinating the indigenous people once again.
And who are these people setting the
agenda? Oh yeah, they’re government people and bureaucrats who have no
experience in being bullied by their own kind. They have no idea of what goes
on in the minds of the people affected by these losses.
Just sayin’.
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