Those dirty days of Colonialism, a backwards time

A blog on the August 17th CBC web story
Backwards, I agree. I can only quote from my friend d colleague Gitxsan Writer, playwright and poet Neil Benson who I worked with in British Columbia after our film and video training program was completed at the Chief Dan George Film Video training program in 1986. Life took us down a different path till 1989, when the late Ahasiw Kitocigan Maskegon-iskwew (Donald Ghostkeeper) asked me to do a performance piece for the International Pitt Gallery. Having finished my degree at SFU, life was not a bed of roses in the employment department.

Working from Ahasiw request, I decided to track Neil down and visit. He received a Canada Council Exploration grant for his new works & as I read his work I noticed how his writing style was considerably different than my writings. He read his poems out to me, very visceral, cutting images of colonialism affecting the language & culture of the north west people who lived off the salmon for thousands of years. I asked him about his work & style. It was a matter of translations, his mind, & tongue is Gitxsan, so he had to translate his mother tongue to English, & then work the foreign language to suit his culture his voice. Instead of allowing the colonial trappings of British Royal imperialism to destroy the mother tongue in Canada's First People through assimilation policies & residential schools, he kept his mothers tongue. Whereas the words that formed the poems & plays I wrote were very westernized, colonially correct in its narrative structure and development. Indians & Dogs (90, 92, & 94, & now on the net) was the result of juxtaposing his & my words together into a scripted, multi-media and oral traditional performance piece. Neil wrote, "colonialism is the dirtiest word in the English Language"

Re CBC story: First Nations children still taken from parents

Story at: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2011/08/02/pol-first-nations-kids.html

As a survivor of the 60s Scoop, and a Métis aboriginal, I am still stereotyped as an NDN due to the historical conditions that form the structure and mindset of dominant society. As an indigenous performer who toured aboriginal communities in BC as a modern dancer and actor with different companies, I have seen the problems of some of these communities and talked to the inhabitants there. All around good people, with strengths and failures like the rest of us, we are no different from the urban people living in and around the cities in this country. Family is important to us. We are breaking the cycle of dysfunctionalism that took over our communities, when the European Settlers came to live on this land and push the original inhabitants further and further away from mainstream society. After all this was a couple hundred years since Squanto and Pocahontas were commercialized, and after paintings of some of the original inhabitants drinking rum off the ground, the image of who we were stuck in the minds of the high and low brow new immigrants who arrived off rat infested ships reading dime novels and Ferdinand Cooper Novels about "wild savages" running off with the white man's daughter. So it carries on in history as you people came coming over here in droves and droves of opportunists looking for your pot of gold in the new world. You guys killed most of the buffalo, what else can you destroy? hum? That's a good idea, kill the Indian in the child, and the Indian problem will be resolved! As long as the historical conditions continue to signify the Indians as worthless and unworthy of being, we will still have individuals within families struggling with their self-esteem, raising children. We need healing programs and support programs, not welfare police. Hy hy