COIL Final Presentation

KC
by Krystyn Christiansen-Vogt11 views·Updated Oct 19, 2021
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My part of our project discussing the colonization and decolonization of Canada and the Dominican Republic

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  1. Hi, my name is Kristen.
  2. I'm in my first year of the CsD program in
  3. dr wipers class.
  4. I'm in group number four.
  5. And our first question for a final project is how
  6. have the colonial processes in Canada and the Dominican republic
  7. been similar and how have they been different?
  8. So we made a Venn diagram to discuss our findings.
  9. Um Firstly, um, the colonizers labeled the indigenous people in
  10. Canada, you got Indian status in you its status or
  11. if you were a mixture of indigenous and European, um
  12. 80 in the greater antilles, you were either the noble
  13. indios or the savage caribs.
  14. And if you were a mixture, you were mestizo and
  15. they did this so that they could make people feel
  16. bad about themselves so that they could force them to
  17. join the colonizers culture.
  18. Their methods of doing this in Canada where the reservations
  19. where they put indigenous peoples on small, terrible plots of
  20. land where you couldn't do the proper agriculture to survive
  21. and then residential schools where they took the Children away
  22. from their communities and raised them in the colonizers language
  23. and the colonizers religion and they didn't know their family
  24. when they finally escaped or came home.
  25. If they survived.
  26. Um, in the Dominican republic, it was slavery.
  27. They just stole people right up out of their villages
  28. or the income and a system where they displaced entire
  29. villages and had the people work essentially slavery Anyway, while
  30. they were learning the language and the religion of the
  31. colonizers and when they were able to displace the people
  32. off the land like this, they could then appropriate the
  33. land in the culture.
  34. Um They started mining the land.
  35. They started um exploiting the existing resources such as the
  36. sugar plantations, um fisheries and the pearl fisheries.
  37. And they also brought their own form of agriculture that
  38. wasn't meant for the land.
  39. They brought over invasive plants, invasive animals.
  40. And these disrupted the native organisms and the indigenous ways
  41. of life.
  42. Um And these invasive organisms also included diseases which the
  43. people, the plants and the animals were not prepared for.
  44. And it wiped some some species out completely.
  45. So if the indigenous people managed to escape and tried
  46. to go back to their way of life, they couldn't
  47. because the knowledge wasn't there to go back to and
  48. well first the resources weren't there.
  49. So then they lost the knowledge and the knowledge was
  50. gone. Um And that was the case in the final
  51. of the Dominican republic and also the cynics, first nation
  52. on the east coast of Canada uh right near the
  53. Micmac territory.
  54. Um their language and culture was completely lost.
  55. And there are at least 70 other languages and cultures
  56. in Canada that are in danger of being lost because
  57. the knowledge isn't there anymore.
  58. And this loss of identity makes us feel this internalized
  59. oppression, like we don't know our culture.
  60. So we're not good enough and then we make other
  61. people feel that way through lateral violence.
  62. Like you're not indigenous enough.
  63. You don't look indigenous enough or you don't know the
  64. culture enough, the culture isn't yours to reclaim the language
  65. isn't yours to reclaim.
  66. So then who gets to reclaim it?
  67. So it just gets lost.
  68. And so then our second question is how can we
  69. read the histories of the indigenous peoples in our countries
  70. using a d colonial approach?
  71. And um that's because the history has the roots of
  72. the problems that we're seeing today of racism and loss
  73. of identity and diseases like diabetes and like all the
  74. other things that are wrong with society right now are
  75. because of colonization.
  76. Um And we need to recognize that indigenous peoples weren't
  77. ignorant, savages.
  78. They had complex and sustainable socio economic systems and trade
  79. networks. Um And we see evidence of this uh in
  80. Canada on the east coast, there's this animal who creates
  81. the shell that everybody smudges will not everybody but many
  82. people used to smudge.
  83. Um and these animals don't exist on the west coast,
  84. but we see these shells on the west coast because
  85. of the trade systems in Canada that got them from
  86. one coast to the other.
  87. Um And I'm sure there are evidence of similar things
  88. in the um Dominican republic.
  89. Um but because of the violent imposition of opposing ideologies
  90. like this extraction economy of the colonizers.
  91. Um Instead of the cross cultural partnerships, animals and plants
  92. and people were massacred.
  93. Um And the plains tribes like all the buffalo were
  94. purposely wiped out just to confine indigenous people to their
  95. reserves. Um, and now we're seeing evidence of these types
  96. of things, like we're seeing evidence of the residential school
  97. system and how awful it actually was because these unmarked
  98. graves of Children are re servicing and in the Dominican
  99. republic, they're finding, um, they've got these are key archaeological
  100. sites that are telling them how badly these people were
  101. treated. And um, we didn't know these things before because
  102. we were only hearing history from one point of view,
  103. the colonizers point of view.
  104. And so what we need to do is deconstruct through
  105. a lens of justice, equity, diversity and inclusion and we
  106. need to look at who was silenced and why and
  107. what would they have said?
  108. Because if we don't look at these things were not
  109. going to see it from any other point of view.
  110. Um, and that's the end of my presentation.
  111. Thank you