Latest / Upcoming Trial of Nathan Chasing Horse April 14, 2025 / the challenges & impact of systemic racism
Transcript
- Marina Crane: Well, thank you very much. I'm also well with respect that I received coming through the door. I'm originally, I actually am from Sioux, Tinnah, which is located in the southwest quadrant of the city. I've gone to school my entire life here. And in order to sort of make you feel comfortable or to make myself feel comfortable. My grandfather was David Crowchild, named after Crowchild Trail, and I'm 74 years old. So 74 years ago, they started putting up fences around Sioux Falls. We had many of the agents and we couldn't leave the reserves. Now, part of the discussion that they asked me to talk about was why is it important to understand Indigenous history? And the challenges that Indigenous people have faced through people not being empathetic or even wanting to understand when they come into Canada. I think a lot of times when you all come into Canada, you have preconceived notions of us probably living in igloos and teepees and that we're very uneducated and that we rely on welfare. You're going to hear a lot of that on social media by various Yemen nation as people because there's a lot of anger in terms of systemic racism. I'm what they call the knowledge keeper. And I wanted to just let you know that when I was 10 years old, well, first of all, the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, Rajmohan Gandhi, came to me from India when I was like about eight to 10 years old. And I was looking for a lover in BC. and he met my grandfather, who was chief at the time, and ⁓ he was impressed with my father. My father's name was Leonard Crane, and he had served in World War II. He invited him to South America and India, and so my father and mother both traveled at that time when I was eight and ten. And because of that, the stories that they brought back of the world, you have to understand that ⁓ Indigenous people here, we only we did like I saw my first white person when I was five years old. I mean to understand like the city of Calgary is over a million people in the 70s in the Sioux Falls, the cultural shock of people coming into the city and the way they were treating our men. go with race and you have to understand too my father and my uncles were cowboys. and but they took a lot of really hard jobs in the city and a lot of there's a lot of alcohol and drug abuse because the majority of my parents with my mother which was five years old was from the residential school and my father as well and also my grandmother so in punishment they ⁓ my father ran away and in punishment as a child they caught him and they put him into an addict in the cold sleep with the dead bodies of Indigenous children. My mother could read and write the Dakota language because we originally came from the United States of America and she was part of the mass execution of Dakota people from Abraham Lincoln. They followed 38 Sioux people and they chased the Sioux to Canada. So in Canada you have nine Sioux tribes that are exiled from the United States. Now, I'd you to understand too that 500 years ago, when the settlers first came in here, there were millions of Indigenous people. They estimated that for the first 100 years, they killed five generations of Indigenous children. That's 125 million children that were killed by the colonizers and the Americans. And that's the Portuguese, the French, the Dutch, the English, and the French. Now, again, What was the contribution of Native Americans in society here? Well, we contribute at least 60 to 70 % of the vegetables that you consume today. Corn, ⁓ beans, like you can Google it, you'll find it there. So my parents went to South America when I was eight and they went to the Los Angeles Machu Picchu and they saw these huge monuments that Native Americans had built. And just to understand now, Only in this past 20, 30 years have they started to talk about the contributions of Native Americans in the society here. A lot of the times there was no curriculum in schools. So for me, a lot of the things that I've learned and a lot of the responsibility I had to show my own self, my own self-respect, my own identity was because of the stories my parents brought back from South American India. the thousands of people they saw. When my father and mother were in India, ⁓ John F. Kennedy was assassinated. And she said that there was a huge crowd in the market. And she said the Indians just fell to the ground and started praying because they thought it was the end of the world. So the impact that the United States has had on the world in itself is phenomenal. Now, that being the case too, understand this. For generations, they've been trying to kill indigenous people, especially women. In South Dakota, the United States, there is a town that was created just by settlers to hide Dakota Sioux women were pregnant. And they would track them down and gut them and take out their unborn babies and take their scalps as well as the bones. When you see a Sioux woman dancing in the powwow, you will see her wear a knife. and you'll see mom since the little babies. When I worked on the movie, said very my heart and needed me and the whites and Salts were asking about the oral history of the Dakotas and people. I had to tell them how my parents, my great grandparents, my great grandmother was like five years old and her parents were in their mid thirties. When they came across through Montana up until Alberta, into northern California, into Saskatchewan, down into Manitoba. They took all the Sioux people out of the state of Minnesota. There were bounty scalps on their heads. Now, when people ask me about customs and traditions and the loss of identity, we ⁓ as matriarchs, I was raised a matriarch because I lived in Western Canada. The majority of Indigenous people who live in the Eastern Canada have 100 years more experience with systemic racism. So when we say in Western Canada, we're very family oriented, it's because we still believe in community. We still believe that we're not individuals, we're holistic and collective. And because of that, we have a chief and council. And because of that, we try as a community to heal ourselves. And through all the genocide and through all the propaganda to make us ashamed of who we are, we've healed ourselves. We continue healing ourselves. much of the practices that I do talk about, ⁓ I could create like a really nice fairy tale story, but see, Disneyland has already done that for you. And probably when you came into Canada, they weren't that much. many people who could educate you about the Indigenous peoples in Canada. There are hundreds of us, thousands of us, and we have different languages, and again, different ways that we were raised. Now... ⁓ The problems as Indigenous women for what I've grown up in ⁓ is called misogyny, is called gender apartheid. Indigenous women couldn't marry who they wanted to marry. They would have to lose their status. Because we're tribal people, when the women married white men or any other man that wasn't Indigenous, we would lose connection to our communities. So when I talk to a white man, and in my Sioux language it became a wasichu. When I talk to a wasichu, and I say to them, do you know the history of Indigenous women? I said, do you know in Canada, the Indigenous woman couldn't marry who she wanted if she married a white man? And if he was racist, she had to put up with him? I said, and she'd have children with him? And then if she wanted a divorce, he'd take her children. She'd have no community, no family, because she was disowned. The government set this up to destroy our family units. And so when I talk to a white man and I say to him, those children, mixed blood children, they grow up being ashamed of being indigenous. And some of them will admit that their fathers are racist. And some of them will admit that their fathers will be racist until the day they die. Now those young people are advocates today and they try to connect to their Indigenous communities. So a lot of times when you see Indigenous people in Calgary, most of the time you'll probably see them downtown homeless. Understand this, the largest population of Indigenous people in North America is in southern Alberta. You don't see us because we go back to our communities, like at Sixth of Cup, Sudina, Stoney's. and then take it like down south with blood research. The majority of us who come into the city come in to work where they go home at night. Those 40,000 or 50,000 indigenous people who live in Calgary or across Canada are the people that you see. They're not from within the community of the land from here. They've come into the city just like you. Now the majority of times when You meet Indigenous people, you have to understand that they come from different backgrounds, different languages and different customs. ⁓ I just finished coming back from the United States last week, two weeks ago. I had for 20 years, I had written on a blog and warned somebody about a medicine man who had come into our communities who was sexually assaulting our girls. We traveled through Alberta, BC, Saskatchewan, North Dakota, South Dakota, Ontario, California, and it did these horrific things to our children. And because there were a lot of people, Indigenous people who live in the cities who had no connection to their communities, he prayed on them. So they wanted to know whether it was Indigenous. That means our Indigenous children lost their identity and wanted to know who they were. And you will see that I grew up in Sudan and there were a lot of mixed blood people who were ashamed to be indigenous. It wasn't until like until the 60s, couldn't, indigenous people couldn't And indigenous women couldn't marry who they wanted to marry. I think until the 1990s, the 1980s, that women could start. making applications to move back home onto their reserves. This gender apartheid is still entrenched in our communities. It's called ⁓ infantilization, but the Indian agents, the white people who came into our communities and monitored us, we couldn't leave our communities unless we had asked to leave. the denial of all the children that they killed in those residential schools is still there. Now, I'm a survivor in residential school, but I'm also a survivor of day school, Indian hospitals. You have to understand the segregation that took place in Canada. I may sound like I'm well-educated, but I've been in places and I have been there. But sometimes... A lot of people who are my age as elders will not speak up. And so you will very rarely find someone who's Indigenous around my age who has this knowledge that I'm talking about. But because of that, I'm really honoured and grateful to have been invited here to talk because as people who have a whole country of your own, who have a rich background of where you lived, the villages and communities and towns that you came from. You understand your culture, you understand your language, you have families, you have connection, you have something. And for you to understand how fragmented Indigenous people have been for the past 500 years. Like, understand this, this country was based on stolen land. And it was taken from us. at a very big price. Do you know, with an Indigenous moment, because we don't have sovereignty over our children, our programs for child and family are based on provincial standards. So in our communities, we don't have sovereignty. So when a mom, a single mom, who has five kids, she dies, all of her children are put into the social services system and are brought into the City of Calgary. for foster parents to raise who aren't Indigenous themselves. The average age for Indigenous children to be trafficked in the city and in Canada is 14 years old. They target our Indigenous children, they target our girls because the people who are trafficking, and it's mostly women who help traffic our girls, and they're not Indigenous, and some are. The reason they do that is because we are able to dress up as Mexican, Chinese, you know, any ethnic background, Indigenous people can be ⁓ dressed up to play in trafficking. The horrors and the understanding of what it is to be like a process of Rooming and trafficking is horrific. I know there are children here, so I won't describe that process. But I will tell you that we're not allowed, we don't have money to have group homes or shelters for our children when they're apprehended. So the majority of the things that we try to do and what you hear on the news in terms of people say our children are falling through the cracks. That's because of systemic racism. The government has set this up and even though you may think that, well, they're getting educated, ⁓ a lot of times when our children come into communities, they learn Vietnamese, they learn Italian, they any other language the cost of parent has. And so when they want to come back to our communities, it's really hard for them. So even though you're in a free country and you believe in the Disneyland or the Hollywood Wild Wild West, it's very hard ⁓ for me to sit down and talk to someone when they're asking me questions about privilege because I know what white privilege looks like. I know what it is to try and find a white ally. The majority of times any stories Indigenous people have to say means nothing if it's coming from other Indigenous people supporting us. The story I'm talking about happened three years ago. The show, CBC did a program talk where they arrested ⁓ Medicine Man and they put it on the Fifth Estate, which was a national TV. And I was featured in that. Twenty years I had warned people in Canada and the United States. They took a white organization like CBC to put on the news before people listened. That's what you call systemic racism. If a Native program, APT, were to broadcast that same story, it wouldn't have the same impact. So for me, as an Indigenous woman and a person of colour, when it comes for me to make a point across, I have to go to a person who's white-trigliged for them to validate my story and for them to get something moving. My entire life, like I said, my grandfather was David Crochall after the Crochall Trail. My father worked with the mayor of Calvary. My uncles and them took part in the Calvary Stadpede. You know, when the Calvary Stadpede came in and when they first started, they used to dress me up. I was like a zoo animal. In the Indian village, they'd take pictures of me. It took a long time for me to even want to my photograph taken. the oil rigors in northern Alberta. Understand, Alberta is the third largest oil producer in the world. So when we had oil workers coming in from northern Alberta to come to the Kelmish Stair to rest and relaxation, they came in to be with our indigenous girls. So prostitution has been quite historical. because we did not have social services. We didn't have anything to feed our children. And so whatever means we could to make sure our children were protected, we did it. So every time when you have a Calgary stampede, think out of every doll that's being spent during the year, 75 cents of it is made from tourism that comes into the city to celebrate that Wild West show. produced by oil companies and those oil companies understand to the Indian residential schools, when they first started to do this was in the 1860s on the cloud trail of Dearfoot, you'll have an industrial school where they recruited young boys to educate them into farming, husbandry, anything. Then they realized, ⁓ they're gonna go home and they're gonna marry indigenous girls and those girls are gonna turn them back to savages. So they said in parliament, it's written in parliament that we're going to educate Indigenous girls who will start in residential schools. So in southern Alberta and Alberta has the largest Indian residential schools in Canada. You've got to understand big business and big oil. They did this to us. My late uncle died 50, no, 49 years ago and he was quite radical and quite proactive. He says the white men created this problem, let them solve it. So a lot of the things that you see in Indigenous people on the streets in Calgary is only a fraction of what we're living with. For me as an Indigenous woman, I've never married, I've never had children. The majority of the women that I've grown up with I've had to bury, either from drug abuse or on the streets. The systemic racism and the gender apartheid is still alive. The majority of our women are missing and murdered. Last year, the Suchina police opened a sting operation and they went online saying they were 15 year old girls, 15 year old native girls. Within a span of 24 hours, they had 5,000 hits. Can you imagine that? 5,000 VIN. went online trying to buy sex from a 15 year old indigenous girl. And out of that they arrested 10 men. So however you think, however you see indigenous women and however you think that our lives are not worth it, believe me. We are matriarchs. We are matriarchs and we are respected. Whether you come into my community and you ask people who I am, they will tell you. Why? Because they know I have a voice. They know I've been advocating my whole life. I try and educate people. I grew up my whole life with white people. You know, it wasn't easy being called a squaw, like, and burner. Wasn't easy, you know, getting good grades and then jealous of being because they thought I was too stupid to be intelligent. I did a presentation in front of some academics at the University of Cal. And I was saying when my mother was having children, she was having a litter of puppies. And one of the white academics started laughing in the audience. And I said to her, you know what, my mother thought that? She because she was raised by white people in those Indian residential schools. They never hugged her, never praised her. They treated her lower than a dog. A dog was treated better than a dog. They treated my mother like a father. When my grandmother used to try and visit my mom when she was just a child, she used to braid her hair. She says, it broke my heart when they took my grandmother into the basement and had her sleep on the bed of straw. You know, throughout my whole life, the systemic racism and you'll feel it and you'll sense it. You've probably already experienced in the hospitals, the police system in Calgary. I'm really grateful. That that you've come into Calgary. When I was growing up in Calgary, I said just wait. There'll be people with dark skin people coming in to the city who will hear and feel the way I felt. And it makes white people, they call it fragility because they feel uncomfortable because they're not the minorities. And in order to educate people that cause a ripple effect of what systemic racism does, I'm grateful to have been invited and to talk about the history. The history that you probably have never heard. And unless you Google it or you meet somebody like myself who, ⁓ I'm going to lie about it. I'm just going to tell you the truth. Because I'm a matriarch. My, the whole system, the whole system of a woman and how we raise our children has been handed down for thousands and thousands of years. You know, we're whatever colonizers of patriarchy in the European culture has, it's not as valuable as being matriarchs and being tribal. I just wanted to say that message to you again, I'm very grateful and humbled to be in your presence. ⁓ I don't know where they got my name to come and talk, but thank you very much. And if you have any questions, I'll be glad to answer.