Thread by @MRUAntiRacism

"Union members were involved in the building, the maintenance and the horrors that took place in Indian Residential Schools, Indian Day Schools and Indian Hospitals in Canada from 1828 to 2000." #OrangeShirtDay2022
ourtimes.ca/article/speak-…

"There were 139 Indian Residential Schools listed in the Truth and Reconciliation report released in 2015. The last of these institutions, Grollier Hall, closed in 1997."

"There were at least 699 Indian Day Schools throughout Canada from 1863 until the last one closed in Kanesatake, Quebec, on September 1st, 2000. If you’re reading this, I’m pretty confident that you were alive when institutions that purported to be schools and had graveyards..."

"Operating and maintaining over 850 separate institutions throughout the country is an enormous undertaking. This system, which includes present-day Indigenous child “welfare,” has likely involved tens of thousands of staff over the 194 years of its existence."

"The Sixties Scoop was a depraved system where children were kidnapped from their parents and given or sold to other families that were deemed more suitable for them. The children were advertised in newspapers across this country."

"One shocking 2016 CBC report notes that, beginning in 2005, as part of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement agreement, 17 private investigations firms contracted by the federal government located 5,315 alleged abusers.... Fewer than 50 people total have been convicted."

"I’m also not simply talking about workers who worked in and administered the institutions themselves I’m talking about the ones who flew the planes, drove the trucks, operated the trains that took kids away from their parents and delivered them directly to these houses of horror

"I hear a lot of talk about decolonizing unions. I don’t see a lot of concrete action. At the very least we must ask some questions. Was the union that you belong to complicit?"

"Use the collective bargaining power we have built up to negotiate things that specifically benefit First Nations, Métis and Inuit members (I guarantee that in the long run the entire membership will benefit)."