Systemic Injustice
Beyond Green recently received a grant from Cando-Edo to improve the presence of the Going Green to Save Green course online. I have separated my film work from the energy efficiency work. The Systemic Injustice course on the culture of Indigenous racism in Canada will be hosted on Beyond Green Productions and held apart from the energy efficiency work.
The Systemic Injustice Course examines the culture of Indigenous racism I encountered in my work to end mascots. I found that every level of Canadian culture participates. There is an intentional design to delineate two sets of rules. One for Canadians, as extended by the Charter of Rights, is supposedly universal.
The other is for Indigenous people who are denied the same protections as other Canadians. It can best be summarized by the garishly offensive language of the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s 2018 report on the dialogue with Indigenous groups. The writers identified that the best course for their career was to pronounce: that (Canada’s) individual rights-based system is not ideally set up to effectively deal with some of the biggest issues facing Indigenous communities.
For the chief defenders of human rights in Ontario to find conditionality in human rights to secure promotion to the Ontario Superior Court is a major perversion of her responsibilities. It signals the depth of depravity within Canada’s human rights system. So if you take the course, how can you be surprised when every level of Ontario’s government and the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal participate in the practice of making exceptions to deny Indigenous equality?
Taking the course will force Canadians to look at their collective actions towards Indigenous. It is not that most Canadians are unwilling to learn the truth about Canada’s genocidal treatment of Indigenous people. It is not that they can not handle the truth. Canadians are just not told. So Canadians attempt to reconcile without ever considering the sins of their past.
We must begin teaching Canadians about the criminal aspects of Canada’s past. What Canada has done to Indigenous people is significantly worse than Canadians acknowledge. Systemic Injustice is a pattern of events and cultural beliefs that has ingrained a cultural insensitivity to the plight of Indigenous people in Canada.
To explore this pattern of neglect of Canada’s Indigenous it is useful to look at Indigenous Mascots. Mascots are not the ultimate expression of racism but merely indicative of the culture of abuse tolerated towards Indigenous people. My documentary Systemic Injustice explores the links between the permissiveness towards Indigenous abuse represented by mascots and the deep-seated culture racism ingrained in Canadian culture. The Systemic Injustice course will make you question whether Canada is the country you think or hope, it is.
