• otp@sh.itjust.works
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    3 months ago

    One helped found this country.

    Canadians don’t have a cult of personality around our first Prime Minister the way Americans do around George Washington.

    Canada was apparently founded on uniting white Europeans to eradicate the “savage” indigenous populations here.

    So… founding the country can be overlooked to an extent if the person was otherwise an asshole.

    • Mirshe@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      And Canada still continues that tradition today, don’t worry. Y’all might acknowledge your First Nations people better, but that doesn’t mean Canadian police and the RCMP especially hesitate when they see a chance to shoot some indigenous people.

      • otp@sh.itjust.works
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        3 months ago

        No doubt. Our police aren’t quite as gun happy as the US cops, but they still find their own ways to murder people they consider to be lesser than them if a gun might be too egregious for a given situation.

        • bizarroland@fedia.io
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          3 months ago

          I mean sometimes they would just arrest a native American on a freezing cold night, drive them miles out into the middle of nowhere and then kick them out.

          They gave it a beautiful name. They called it a “starlight tour”. And we have no official records of how many native Americans were murdered by Canadian police officers using this process.

          https://allthatsinteresting.com/starlight-tours

          This is one of the first things that comes to my mind, as a native american, every time somebody mentions that Canada is so great and wonderful and how much they wish we could move there.

          • gramie@lemmy.ca
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            3 months ago

            That’s interesting. I don’t think I have ever seen someone refer to an Aboriginal Canadian as a Native American. Native Canadian yes, but native Americans were always south of the border in my mind.

            • bizarroland@fedia.io
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              3 months ago

              A native American in the general is somebody that’s native to the Americas.

              There are native Americans in Mexico and in all South American countries as well.

              • gramie@lemmy.ca
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                3 months ago

                I understand the concept, but I have never heard the term Native American used for anyone except the indigenous people within the United States of america.