Systematic poisoning research
-by Meisen Hu
Discrimination and systematic poisoning of aboriginals in Canada
During my high school times in a small town called Fort Langley in British Columbia, Canada, I’ve befriended with several aboriginal students in town, and I was quite shocked by the way how the First Nations were discriminated since the colonial times. After the Indian Act was signed in 1876, the law enforcement would forcefully abduct childrens to attend residential schools-in which they tried to force these kids to believe in Catholicism. Kids were often abused and molested by these schools’ staffs and even the priests. Until the last residential school was closed in 1996, over 150,000 Indigenous children were placed in residential schools and the estimated school-related death was around 3,200 to 6,000.
North of Fort Langley, there’s the McMillan Island-an Indian resort by which all aboriginals were forced to live in. They were not allowed to live on any other part of town after the Indian Act, except this island in the middle of the Fraser river. The land by no chance is enough for any agricultural activities, however luckily, as it’s in the middle of a river, there’s plenty of clean, freshwater for the aboriginal community, many other resorts were not so lucky. Back then the Canadian government would remove the aboriginals from their land-because their lands are fertile or just in very good locations, the so called “resorts” given to those now homeless aboriginals were usually in very harsh locations with little to no agricultural value or heavily polluted by the mining and oil-refining industries. Their water sources usually contains high amount of minerals, heavy metal, and even chemicals used to treat fossil fuel products. After consuming the polluted water for long period of time, many have developed liver diseases, Gallstones, cancer and even birth defects because of the pollution. I’ve attached links to several articles about this poisonings in Canada:
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