We owe a lot to the Partis Quebecois actually for keeping the St. Lawrence river valley the Whitest populated region in Canada because they're French ethno-nationalists.
IDK why people ITT keep saying things like this. Growing up in Ontario I rarely saw people that werent white. The odd asian/indian running a convenience store or whatever. Even Toronto was vast majority White, outside chinatown or regent park.
Quebec never cared about that shit, they were mass importing french speaking blacks. During the same time period as I mentioned above, you could be in the mall in toronto and maybe see a few minorities, I went to montreal and it was full of haitians and algerians or whatever.
I was surprised it looked like that in a major city in Quebec. I don't have much experience in Quebec, so maybe that was an just the cities. I do know that growing up during the 80-90's in mid-sized town in Southern Ontario, I had no visible minorities (other than Natives) in my primary classroom pictures.
I had one sikh in my high school, and 2.5 black kids (one was mixed Native/black). Some blonde chick in my HS dated a asian kid from another school, and everyone talked about it. Other kids said she was being trafficked by the triads lmao
Im more so referring to the sixties scoop not these anti truancy laws but you did educate me on this.
The guy I'm referring to here in this quote, definitely would've been in the residential school around the 1960's. Back in the 1990's I was close to a few people who had been to them, parents or grandparents of friends. This was the height of the anti-government militant native movement around here, around the time of
Oka &
Ipperwash. Everyone on the rez flew a warrior society flag & lot's of
AIM flags, and I knew a few who meant it. I'd never heard anything negative about the schools until after about 2015 or so. That might be because the local schools were an anomaly, IDK.
In about 1989 or 1990 I went on a class trip to an ex-residential school in my neighborhood which was later turned into a native museum. It was really nice inside, hardwood and tall decorated ceilings, like a fancy old library. The property was turned over to the natives to run and was staffed by them. They brought in a speaker to talk about how great the school was, and how it improved their lives. IIRC he was a lawyer or something. They talked about the disparate conditions between their home life and how nice it was to eat and have plumbing. I knew 2 kids who lived on the reserve and still didnt have indoor plumbing at that time. I'm guessing that if they didn't have the schools to go to most of them would've died from dysentery anyway.
In my experience, the older natives I knew were quite religious and anti-gov, but the ones I heard talk about the schools didn't seem to have a negative experience. There was an arson at the church on the site of the residential school in my hometown about 20 years ago, and the elderly natives were straight-up pissed off about it. I saw a old lady cry.
They believed in a mish-mash of Christianity and traditional native stuff. They would do smudges and sweat lodges and go to church on Sunday. I'd imagine if you had asked them, they would've told you they were Christian back then. Nowadays, I don't know too many indians that would count themselves as Christian. I'm going to say the propaganda worked.
(Thank you for humoring my old guy topical anecdotes, hopefully you find them relevant).
Most regular indigenous people from what I've seen are conservative or conservative-leaning, while their activists and chiefs are liberals.
This is my exact experience, and they hate their politicians, just like we do. I did meet some Natives who were all about that shit when I lived in the cities for a time, but they were city people who were long removed from the reserve, and they benefited greatly from it, unlike most of the folks around here. What the people who I grew up with would call an "Apple" (red outside, white inside).
x 12
or simply a decision that sucks less.
