Stealing Children to Steal the Land

The Intercept Briefing

The Intercept

Politics, Unknown, Daily News, History, News

4.8 • 6.3K Ratings

🗓️ 16 June 2021

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Last month, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation uncovered a mass grave of 215 children on the grounds of a former residential school in British Columbia, Canada. This week on Intercepted: Naomi Klein speaks with residential school survivor Doreen Manuel and her niece Kanahus Manuel about the horrors of residential schools and the relationship between stolen children and stolen land. Doreen’s father, George Manuel, was a survivor of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, where unmarked graves of children as young as 3 years old were found. Kanahus’s father, Arthur Manuel, was also a survivor of the Kamloops residential school. This intergenerational conversation goes deep on how the evils of the Kamloops school, and others like it, have reverberated through a century of Manuels, an experience shared by so many Indigenous families, and the Manuel family’s decades long fight to reclaim stolen land.

Warning: This episode contains highly distressing details about the killing, rape, and torture of children. If you are a survivor and need to talk, there is contact information in the show notes.

If you are a former residential school student in distress, or have been affected by the residential school system and need help, you can contact the 24-hour Indian Residential Schools Crisis Line: 1-866-925-4419

Additional mental-health support and resources for Indigenous people are available here.

Show notes:

Doreen Manuel can be found @DoreenManuel1 and www.runningwolf.ca

Kanahus can be found at @kanahusfreedom and www.tinyhousewarriors.com

“Unsettling Canada: A National Wake Up Call,” by Arthur Manuel

“The Reconciliation Manifesto: Recovering the Land, Rebuilding the Economy,” by Arthur Manuel

“From Brotherhood to Nationhood: George Manuel and the Making of the Modern Indian Movement,” by Peter McFarlane with Doreen Manuel, afterword by Kanahus Manuel

“The Fourth World: An Indian Reality,” by George Manuel and Michael Posluns

“These Walls” directed by Doreen Manuel

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is intercepted.
0:30.0	Welcome to Intercepted. I'm Naomi Klein, guest hosting this special episode.
0:40.0	First, a warning. This episode contains highly distressing details about the killing, rape, and torture of children.
0:48.0	If you are a survivor and need to talk, there's contact information in the show notes.
0:56.0	I am speaking to you from unseated, co-salesh territory in what is now known as British Columbia.
1:03.0	The land where I live is the traditional territory of the She-Shut Nation.
1:09.0	These kinds of land acknowledgments are so common in Canada that they've become a kind of bureaucratic formality.
1:16.0	They're spoken at the start of pretty much every public gathering. They're the first words on the website of my son's elementary school.
1:25.0	They're affixed to email signatures of public officials and university professors.
1:31.0	And often these acknowledgments are heartfelt, but too rarely do we settler's think about what they actually mean.
1:41.0	If we are on indigenous land and those lands are unseated, that means they were never sold or surrendered under war or treaty.
1:51.0	Which means that the underlying title of these lands is still held by their original inhabitants.
1:58.0	Which begs the question, why am I not acknowledging that with more than words?
2:05.0	Why do I pay taxes to the municipal, provincial, and federal governments instead of the She-Shut Nation?
2:13.0	And even more troubling question might be, why was this land available to me and my family?
2:20.0	What cleared it of its original inhabitants? Move them on to reserve and in too many cases onto the streets?
2:28.0	What was the precise mechanism of land dispossession?
2:33.0	There's no one answer to that question. A labyrinth of laws and ordinances did much of the work, unilaterally adopted, and coercively enforced.
2:43.0	But that's not all it took. And part of the answer to the question of how this land was cleared arrived almost exactly two weeks ago.
2:52.0	When a few hours drive away, a mass grave was discovered.
2:57.0	The discovery is astounding and so too the anguish, leaving community members and much of Canada reeling.
3:04.0	The remains of 215 children.
	...

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