“I am now 73 years old. I was at Indian residential school from age 11-15. I had to work in the infirmary, where there were many sick and hungry children. I’d steal food like peanut butter and bread to feed them. A lot of kids died there. I had to handle the dead children — wrapping them to be buried. Once I got caught speaking my native language. I wasn’t aware my language was different. My punishment was having four fingernails pulled out. At residential school we all received numbers. I was known as #702. But my name is Sphenia. It’s an Ojibwa name that means ‘on my way’. For many years now I’ve worked as an advocate for abused children. I started a school for indigenous kids in Vancouver called Spirit Rising Cultural Survival School.”
Assuming people having relatively benign conversations on things you deem unimportant (like how important it would’ve been to see Honey from the Incredibles on screen rather than as a disembodied voice) are not also doing things about “actual racism” is lazy because…we can multitask. In fact, I’d argue that tiering your activism is a good idea. I should give a TED Talk.
In another example of the extraordinary lengths Canadian immigration officials go to deport failed refugee claimants, the Canada Border Services Agency has been collecting DNA from migrants and using ancestry websites to find and contact their distant relatives and establish their nationality.
“I think it is a matter of public interest that border service agencies like the CBSA are able to obtain access to DNA results from sites like Familytreedna.com and Ancestry.com,” said Subodh Bharati, a lawyer who is representing a man who says he’s Liberian, but who the government is now trying to prove is actually Nigerian. “There are clear privacy concerns. How is the CBSA able to access this information and what measures are being put in place to ensure this information remains confidential?”
Bharati, who is representing his client through CLASP, the legal aid clinic at Osgoode Hall Law School, said he is aware of at least two individuals who used Familytreedna.com, one in the UK, who have been contacted by the CBSA seeking to deport someone from Canada.
“Individuals using these sites to look at their family tree should be aware that their confidential information is being made available to the government and that border agents may contact them to help facilitate the deportation of migrants,” he said.
holy shit, but also … the science on this is nowhere near good enough to support this use, even if it wasn’t horrible.
I’ve been saying not to use these sites for the longest. The science is still new and the professional ethics are non-existent.
Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org is Mormon owned and no offense to the cult I grew up in (actually, offense is meant) they are a bigoted bunch of cultists who already got involved with politics enough to be threatened with removal of tax exempt status for their fight against equality so I can see them being 100% friendly with the gestapo arms of the governments if they’re told it will remove black and brown people from their communities. Why people trusted their DNA and gross amounts of information about themselves and every member of their families to these cults is beyond me.
This explains a lot. I would not give that lot my information. These are the people who thought black people were cursed until the 70s. Don’t give these guys your information guys.
They also have continues their evangelical crusade to colonize the “savages” here and abroad. Trusting these people with your info is like handing over all your secrets and your family’s secrets to the devil.
wow. I tbh, never really considered how much racism affected little children. CHILDREN. TODDLERS. That are entrusted by parents to adults. This is… white supremacy, but also so irresponsible of the adults running the daycares. How could you do this children. Heartbreak all over.
I think leftblr is a little too quiet about sensible drug policy and that’s really telling 🤔
Access to clean needles should be free
Testing kits for fentyl and stricnine and other laces should be free
Narcan should be free (and is given out by a lot of opioid awareness groups thank god)
Access to methadone and suboxone should be free
And this is all like… really basic stuff. I personally want full repeal of the scheduling system and other measures regarding the prison system
Drug addiction is a direct result of suppression of certain populations and the pharmaceutical industry’s push for the normalization of opiate use.
Anti drug policy is almost entirely rooted in racism and it serves to build up our prison system, while simultaneously denying addicts access to safe withdrawal measures. The war on drugs never served to help the people as a whole, and always served to isolate people of color and divide the classes even further. There’s a reason mostly poor people and/or people of color face real time for drug charges.
OP, the original post is not exactly the best one to stick an informative post onto and that’s really telling🤔
Dude I don’t give a fuck how my information is presented. If you’re not automatically willing to review your politics when someone brings up a justice issue, despite how it’s initially directed, then you’re still a baby leftist.
The left has an absolute problem with ableism, especially racialized ableism. As a recovering addict I’m allowed to make posts that make you question if you’re doing enough for neurodivergent people.
all people in prison for possession should be freed and given the economic and therapeutic means to recover from their addictions. widespread programs to provide employment and housing and community to addicts should be implemented and free to use. ideally, leftists should support decriminalization of drugs, widespread information about hiv + fentanyl + infections/safe injection habits and basically all other effective harm reduction techniques.
harm reduction rhetoric has been coopted in a lot of ways to become a neoliberal biomedical prevention technique with the purpose of protecting “””the innocent””” (i.e the talking points are about preventing the spread of HIV rather than protecting the health of addicts, who are still deemed irresponsible and unworthy by the public health system, hence why harm reduction is not seen as often in prisons) and leftists have a duty to reassert harm reduction as an act of radical compassion and grassroots public health.
An Edmonton woman says she’s still in shock after being refused a cab ride when she asked a Duffy’s Taxi driver for help Monday night.
Angela Gladue, who was in Manitoba to perform at the Winnipeg Folk Festival last weekend, said she was being chased down Portage Avenue by a strange man when she hopped in a cab for refuge.
Gladue said she was taken aback when the driver asked for cash upfront.
“I said ‘Yes, I do have money, but you have to go now. I will pay you, just start driving — there is a man coming and I am really scared,’” said Gladue, a powwow dancer who dances with the Ottawa electronic music group A Tribe Called Red.
“He was, like, ‘Give me $10.’”
Gladue said she was in fear for her safety and couldn’t think of anything else but getting away.
She said she has been asked to pay upfront by Edmonton taxi drivers in the past and has done so, reluctantly.
The driver wouldn’t go, even when the man who was chasing her caught up and began pacing back and forth beside the cab, she said.
“I was, like, ‘Are you refusing me service right now? My life is in danger,’” she said.
“Then I brought up missing and murdered Indigenous women and what he was doing felt like racism toward me, and I told him that.”
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