steve abbott

Way to completely misinterpret what I said. SOME of these schools were havens – not all of them where horrible places, and not all the kids were torn from their families as described. I was pointing out that the generalized belief that all residential schools were dens of torture and abuse is not true. There were actually good people who cared for their students running some of these schools, and they don’t deserve to be painted with the same brush as the one who were abusive. Likewise, there are a lot of people claiming that they were abused that weren’t even in the residential school system at all, on top of the ones that did go, but were not abused. Aside from the general dishonesty, this fraud is just another form of abuse against the people who really did suffer.

“Havens!” HAVENS?!?!?!? I suspect that these tiny children, essentially forcibly dragged away from their mothers and fathers, were not looking at the chance for all that free medical and dental treatment with the same enthusiasm you profess.

As a mother myself, I can’t even imagine the horror and grief of having your five-year old torn out of your arms by ‘the government’, and then being told that this heartbreak is somehow for the child’s own good.

A child who loses his/her entire family in one terrifying moment does not need to be beaten or raped to qualify as an abuse victim, and the fact that comments like yours are still being made (despite everything we now know about this kidnapping practice of Indian Affairs agents)is offensive.

As much as I felt a great sense of pride seeing our Indigenous cultures represented in the Sydney opening ceremony, it was tinged with the skepticism of the knowledge of so much cultural appropriation. I am aware that Indigenous Australians contributed to the Sydney Olympic festival in some meaningful ways (for example, creating and managing the Festival of the Dreaming at the same time as the Olympics which included Indigenous people from around the world) however I still get the feeling that Australia was so publicly interested in it simply because we were being globally scrutinised.

An interesting snippet of history of the Indigenous contribution to the Sydney Olympics is found on this page http://www.migrationheritage.nsw.gov.au/exhibition/objectsthroughtime/olympics/ – it mentions political protest and rallies at the same time and acknowledges “The friendship stick interprets the survival and celebration stories of the Aboriginal people and their role in the 2000 Sydney Olympics. The issue of dispossession, settlement, genocide and survival are issues that still inhabit the indigenous debate in Australian society and politics. These tensions are still evident in Australian culture today.”

The inunguak structure historically represented a human figure (the word means ‘imitation of a person’) but then so did the inuksuk structure (the word comes from the words ‘inuk’ = man and ‘suk’ = substitute) – so you can see it’s confusing. It’s also true that because regional and cultural differences between Arctic people were quite distinct, what we called something in Inuvik (in the Western Arctic) may be completely opposite to what the exact same thing is called in the Eastern Arctic, yet both are considered correct.

I have heard however that the Olympics logo designer Elena Rivera based her design on the “inukshuk” located at Vancouver’s English Bay, which was originally created by Alvin Kanak of Rankin Inlet (in the Eastern Arctic).

Maybe we should ask Alvin . . .