Midrange Weekly June 28th

YOUR WEEKLY ROUND UP ON WHAT’S GOT THE MIDRANGE STAFF’S ATTENTION

Welcome to another edition of the Midrange Weekly. Tristan and Mickey are off this week, which leaves yours truly, Jamie here, with the responsibility of trying to recap all things important (in my eyes at least) from this past week.

It was a weird one for sure. For starters, BC is currently in the throes of its hottest weekend ever. For the record, I’m not complaining, but it is strange to be living on the coast and feeling 40+ degree heat. Yeah global warming!

Positive things of note, the Montreal Canadians made it to the Stanley Cup Finals. I really don’t care, but I’m sure many of you do, so I figured I’d mention that. And Derek Chauvin was sentenced to 22.5 years in prison for the murder of George Floyd. A yes win for justice.

On the negative side, ugh…another Fast movie came out, F9, and it made over $70 million at the box office. Oh and Marylin Manson has volunteered to surrender himself to New Hampshire police for alleged assault charges on a videographer from 2019. Manson is also currently the defendant in multiple sexual assault lawsuits brought against him by past girlfriends, so I think it’s safe to say he’s just a bad guy overall.

Locally, The Diamond cocktail bar celebrated their 12th year in business. Congrats to their team for a well deserved milestone. And sadly, Dale Styner, the man behind Tocador on Main Street passed away from a long bout of cancer. He was a strong fixture in the hospitality trade here in Vancouver. He will be missed and may he RIP.

Okay, now let’s see what else got my attention this week…

 

What To Do About Canada Day?

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With the weather being as hot as it has been these past few days here in BC, you’d be remiss to not think it were mid July or mid August and not late Junuary as this month so often feels like. The rains have been minimal yes, but oh boy has the past month proven to be a hard hit one for this land and this country. First it was 215 unmarked graves in Kamloops. Then it was over 750 in Cowessess First Nation in southeast Saskatchewan. There’s no way to sugar coat this. Those numbers are startling. More will be found. This is only the beginning. 

These revelations lead to the dilemma we’re about to face in the coming days. On July 1st, it will be Canada’s 154th birthday. 

What should we do? 

Should we celebrate or not?

Before you prepare to take a stand on this issue, let’s take a closer look into a few things to see if we can make a clearer, more analytical decision. 

First a little history. 

What were Residential Schools?

From Hanson, Eric, et al.“The Residential School System.” Indigenous Foundations. First Nations and Indigenous Studies UBC, 2020: 

The term residential schools refers to an extensive school system set up by the Canadian government and administered by churches that had the nominal objective of educating Indigenous children but also the more damaging and equally explicit objectives of indoctrinating them into Euro-Canadian and Christian ways of living and assimilating them into mainstream white Canadian society. The residential school system officially operated from the 1880s into the closing decades of the 20th century. The system forcibly separated children from their families for extended periods of time and forbade them to acknowledge their Indigenous heritage and culture or to speak their own languages. Children were severely punished if these, among other, strict rules were broken. Former students of residential schools have spoken of horrendous abuse at the hands of residential school staff: physical, sexual, emotional, and psychological.

What led to their implementation? (emphasis mine)

Canadian Prime Minister John A. Macdonald commissioned journalist and politician Nicholas Flood Davin to study industrial schools for Indigenous children in the United States. Davin’s recommendation to follow the U.S. example of “aggressive civilization” led to public funding for the residential school system. “If anything is to be done with the Indian, we must catch him very young. The children must be kept constantly within the circle of civilized conditions,” Davin wrote in his 1879 Report on Industrial Schools for Indians and Half-Breeds (Davin’s report can be read here.)

How did they live and how were they taught? (emphasis mine)

The purpose of the residential schools was to eliminate all aspects of Indigenous culture. Students had their hair cut short, they were dressed in uniforms, they were often given numbers, and their days were strictly regimented by timetables. Boys and girls were kept separate, and even siblings rarely interacted, further weakening family ties.

Residential school students did not receive the same education as the general population in the public school system, and the schools were sorely underfunded. Teachings focused primarily on practical skills. Girls were primed for domestic service and taught to do laundry, sew, cook, and clean. Boys were taught carpentry, tin smithing, and farming. Many students attended class part-time and worked for the school the rest of the time: girls did the housekeeping; boys, general maintenance and agriculture. This work, which was involuntary and unpaid, was presented as practical training for the students, but many of the residential schools could not run without it. With so little time spent in class, most students had only reached grade five by the time they were 18. At this point, students were sent away. Many were discouraged from pursuing further education.

Abuse at the schools was widespread: emotional and psychological abuse was constant, physical abuse was metred out as punishment, and sexual abuse was also common. Survivors recall being beaten and strapped; some students were shackled to their beds; some had needles shoved in their tongues for speaking their native languages. These abuses, along with overcrowding, poor sanitation, and severely inadequate food and health care, resulted in a shockingly high death toll. In 1907, government medical inspector P.H. Bryce reported that 24 percent of previously healthy Indigenous children across Canada were dying in residential schools. This figure does not include children who died at home, where they were frequently sent when critically ill. Bryce reported that anywhere from 47 percent (on the Peigan Reserve in Alberta) to 75 percent (from File Hills Boarding School in Saskatchewan) of students discharged from residential schools died shortly after returning home.

Lastly, what is the legacy of the Residential School System?

The historic, intergenerational, and collective oppression of Indigenous Peoples continues to this day in the form of land disputes, over-incarceration, lack of housing, child apprehension, systemic poverty, marginalization and violence against Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA peoples, and other critical issues which neither began nor ended with residential schools. Generations of oppressive government policies attempted to strip Indigenous Peoples of their identities not only through residential schools but also through other policies including but not limited to: the implementation and subsequent changes to the Indian Act; the mass removal of Indigenous children from their families into the child welfare system known as the Sixties Scoop; and legislations allowing forced sterilizations of Indigenous Peoples in certain provinces, a practice that has continued to be reported by Indigenous women in Canada as recently as 2018; and currently, through the modern child welfare systems which continue to disproportionately apprehend Indigenous children into foster care in what Raven Sinclair has called the Millennium Scoop.6

In 2019, BC ended its practice of “birth alerts” in child welfare cases, which allowed child welfare agencies and hospitals to flag mothers deemed “high risk” without their consent -a practice which disproportionately targeted Indigenous mothers and was found to be “racist and discriminatory” and a “gross violation of the rights of the child, the mother, and the community”.7 One of the findings of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls Report (MMIWG) asserts that the Canadian State “has used child welfare laws and agencies as a tool to oppress, displace, disrupt, and destroy Indigenous families, communities, and Nations. It is a tool in the genocide of Indigenous Peoples.”8 Child welfare laws and agencies, like the residential schools, effectively aided in the removal of Indigenous children from their families and continue to aid in the genocide of Indigenous Peoples.

Okay so there’s plenty to unpack here. 

For almost as long as this country has been around, there have been residential schools. They began in the 1880s and ended only 25 years ago in 1996. The scars are still fresh. Survivors still exists. We’re only beginning to understand the depths of this genocide. Yes, this was a form of genocide by the Federal and Provincial governments here in Canada. We tried to wipe out an entire culture and we did it with children. Young kids who are pure and free, we forced from their families into schools where they received little to none of the love they should have received from their parents and families. Imagine yourself right now, you and your partner are pregnant or you have a toddler. You love your child more than anything. You want to raise it and give it the best life you can. Then all of a sudden one day the Canadian government mandates that they take your child from you forever. A forced assimilation. You have no say in the matter. Now tell me how you’d feel? What that would do to you and your life? Your family? 

Now imagine this happening for generations?

We wonder why First Nations peoples struggle in Canada. Try growing up with all of that before you and tell me you wouldn’t be screwed up? 

As Canadians, we are finally waking up to this genocide. We’re learning of its horrors. We’re appalled. Ashamed. Furious. We should be. Celebrating Canada Day this year is wrong. All Canadian flags should fly half mast. We should demand accountability. Justice. Reparations. Inclusivity. Growth. Compassion. Understanding. 

All countries have skeletons in their closets. Our biggest has come out. Now’s the time we deal and reckon with it. First order of business. We cancel Canada Day this year. Why? Because it’s the right thing to do. Period. — Jamie

 

The Women’s 400m Hurdles World Record is Broken At The US Olympic Trials

Track and Field was my first love growing up. This is awesome. What a run by Sydney McLaughlin in clocking a staggering 51.90. She’s the first woman ever to run sub 52 seconds. For context, my best in the 400m was 50.41. She ran 51.90 while hurdling. Remarkable. Yeah women’s athletics.

I’m promoting this because the Olympics are coming up. Let’s get excited even though they will still be weird with the pandemic still lingering. These athletes work hard. Let’s make sure we support them. Just look at her face when she finishes. Very cool.

For clarity. Go Canada!

 

Women Are Having Fewer Babies - Two Reports Out This Week Discuss The Positive And Negative Ramifications Of This Topic

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Out two days apart, a guest essay from The New York Times by Jill Filipovic titled, Women Are Having Fewer Babies Because They Have More Choices and a video from The Economist titled, China’s economy: what’s its weak spot? delve into this topic from two similar but separate points of view, both of which I found fascinating.

For China it centres around capitalism and overtaking the US as the global economic superpower. With fewer Chinese adults having children, their population is aging and this is causing grave concern over their viability for continued growth. With over 1.6 billion citizens, it seems strange a country this size is worried about population size, but ironically, it is. The Economist video details many of the reasons of note, a lot of which are touched on in Filipovic’s article.

Here are a few excerpts I’d like you to read.

From The NYT:

Thanks to feminist cultural shifts, and better access to contraceptives, more women now approach childbearing the same way we approach other major life decisions: as a choice weighed against other desires, assessed in context. Without compulsory childbearing, this assessment continues throughout women’s childbearing years. The 24-year-old who says she wants children someday but is focusing on her career can easily turn into the 30-year-old who says she wants children but with the right partner. Later, she can easily become the 45-year-old who has a meaningful career, a community of people she feels connected to and a life rich in pleasure and novelty that she doesn’t want to surrender. Likewise, a mother sold in theory on three children might discover her family is complete with two, or one. Is that a woman who had fewer children than she intended? Or is she someone whose intentions were largely abstract in the first place, and they shifted as she did?

At the heart of declining birthrates in the world’s most prosperous countries might be the matter of meaning. Historically, men dominated the realms of paid work, politics, economics and world affairs, while motherhood was the clearest and most acceptable path to adulthood, community respect and purpose for women. As more women either find jobs that bring in a paycheck and the attendant power of independence, or maybe even a sense of satisfaction and purpose, fewer women use motherhood as a conduit to respect and adulthood. This makes parenthood better, too: Women lucky enough to have a choice see parenthood as its own distinct path, and intentionally walking down it brings unique life experience, deep meaning, expanded potential and a relationship unlike any other — and also trades some opportunities for others.

Maybe the truth is that, given a wider range of options for finding love, respect and a full life, women will choose many different paths of which motherhood or mothering a large brood are but two. Maybe the choices made by some of the luckiest and best-resourced women in the world shouldn’t scare us, but should inform us that when women have more options and opportunities, women’s desires become far more varied.

We should spend less time worrying about birthrates, and more time developing policies to support families of all kinds — because it’s simply the right thing to do. We should couple that with an intentional shift in culture that doesn’t require women to cede so much of themselves (and give up so much of their potential and so many of their other wants) when they have children. That might not result in a baby boom, but it would serve a more worthy goal: healthier families and happier citizens, each a little freer to decide for themselves what makes a good life.

 

Bill Maher Shares His Thoughts In His Latest New Rules On Why America Has A Drinking Problem

I’m posting this for several reasons. I recently did a podcast with UBC Professor Edward Slingerland on his newest book, Drunk: How We Sipped, Dance And Stumbled Our Way To Civilization. This is the book which is referenced in the Atlantic column Maher talks about. Hate him or love him, what Maher proposes and discusses is severely on point and something we all should take heed of. I’m not alone is this by the way. Slingerland’s book helped me understand and learn the history and significance of our lust to imbibe as well as its overall importance to our way of life. However, Slingerland, like Maher detail the many struggles associated with our love of alcohol. The book is worth reading and this video is too.