Why Are Aboriginal People One Of The Fastest Growing Populations For HIV Infection In Canada?

Transcription

1 Why Are Aboriginal People One Of The Fastest Growing Populations For HIV Infection In Canada?

2 According to the Laboratory Centre for Disease Control: AIDS cases are younger than non-aboriginal AIDS cases (29.8% vs. 18.6% were diagnosed at less than 30 years of age). The proportion of women among adult Aboriginal AIDS cases is higher than among adult non-aboriginal AIDS cases (15.9% vs. 7.0%). In 2003, women made up 51% of new HIV infections through heterosexual contact and 18% through injection drug use. available evidence suggests that Aboriginal people are infected earlier than non-aboriginal people, that injection drug use is an important mode of transmission, and that the HIV epidemic among Aboriginal people shows no sign of abating. Furthermore, the high degree of movement of Aboriginal people between inner cities and rural areas may bring the risk of HIV to even the most remote Aboriginal communities. NOTE: Ontario and Quebec do not keep data on ethnicity so it is harder to estimate true percentages of HIV infection among Aboriginal people. These numbers also represent only people who tested for HIV and were found to be positive for HIV. How many people who are HIV positive have never been tested????

3 One Aboriginal Person a day in Canada is becoming infected with HIV

4 So why is this happening?

5 Disruption of Our Peace

6 Prior to European Contact We had the land and all of creation to sustain us. We were not dominating the land but sharing it with the rest of creation We had our clans, family systems and own forms of government to guide us and lead us We had our own creation stories and teachings to sustain our spirit The languages kept that alive. We had our ceremonies to keep us whole. Everyone had equally important roles in society. It was called survival. The people lived in peace and harmony without judging each other and in the spirit of non-interference

7 1340s Norsemen from Iceland and Greenland are believed to have voyaged to what is now called Newfoundland. There is archeological evidence of a settlement at L Anse aux Meadows on the northern peninsula of Newfoundland. It is believed that the settlement was abandoned after conflict with the Beothuk

8 1453 Constantinople falls to the Turks and the Europeans no longer have land access to the Orient. They search for another passage West

9 1497 John Cabot set into a bay and named the area Terra Nova or New Found Land

10 Who were these people who arrived on Turtle Island?

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12 1615 Three Recollet Friars were brought over for missionary work. A Friar, Gabriel Sagard writes: The boys and young men of Canada and those particularly from the land of the Huron, have always had the capability of turning to evil as soon as they could, and the young to prostitution as soon as they were able to; even mothers and fathers often act as pimps to their own daughters. One can attribute this partly due to their nudity, and partly due to the lack of spices and wine, and another part to their use of tobacco, the smoke of which stupefies them and goes straight to the brain.

13 1781 Smallpox epidemic in northern regions of North America kill countless Aboriginal peoples and leave them vulnerable to missionaries and trappers for survival. It is estimated that 90% of the original population of the continent died from diseases that Europeans brought with them.

14 1829 The Beothuk were the original inhabitants of Newfoundland when European settlers first arrived. The total Beothuk population at any one time is thought by present day archaeologists to have numbered between 500 and 1000 individuals. Following contact with the Europeans, disease, malnutrition, conflict with settlers and disruption of traditional Beothuk fishing sites by settlers resulted in the extinction of the Beothuk people by 1829.

15 1867 The British Parliament passes the British North America Act. Aboriginal peoples become wards of the Crown. And whereas it is just and reasonable, and essential to Our Interest and the Security of Our Colonies, that the several Nations or Tribes of Indians, with whom We are connected, and who live under Our Protection, should not be molested or disturbed in the Possession of such parts of Our Dominions and Territories as, not having been ceded to, or purchased by Us, are reserved to them, or any of them, as their hunting grounds

16 1876 The Indian Act was passed, detailing the Canadian government s system for controlling and assimilating Indians.

17 In 1879, Sir John A. MacDonald s government created church run boarding (residential) schools to assimilate Aboriginal children into white culture. 1879

18 1884 Bowing to pressure from churches, Ottawa passes an amendment to the Indian Act making attendance for Aboriginal children aged 7-15 years mandatory at the schools.

19 Non- Aboriginal values were thought of as superior to Aboriginal values

20 Male Role as prescribed by the Church

21 Female Role as prescribed by the Church

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24 1890 On December 29, 1890, the U.S. Army slaughtered 300 Lakota men, women, and children at Sand Creek, South Dakota. 75% of Big Foot s Lakota community.

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26 1907 The Montreal Star reports that 42% of children attending residential schools die before the age of 16 and calls the situation a national disgrace.

27 1921 Duncan Campbell Scott, the Deputy Superintendent General of the Department of Indian Affairs, writes to the Indian Agent in Brocket, Alberta urging him to dissuade Indians from dancing.

28 1942 The Canadian government invokes the War Measures Act and removes the Stoney Point people to nearby Kettle Point to create a military base.

29 1943 R. Hoey, the DIA superintendent of welfare and training, on receiving from the principal of St. George s school (located on the Fraser River just north of Lyttons, BC) a set of shackles that had been used routinely to chain runaways to the bed and reports other abuses at school, wrote, I can understand how why there appears to be such a widespread prejudice on the part of the Indians against residential schools. Such memories do not fade out of the human consciousness very rapidly.

30 1960 s Thousands of Aboriginal children were taken out of their homes, families, communities and cultures and raised in non-aboriginal middle class homes. Many wound up in the United States and some as far away as Europe.

31 1960 Indians finally receive the right to vote in Canada. They first get to exercise this right in 1962.

32 The Disruption of Our Peace has resulted in a painful legacy High rates of disease including, but not limited to, HIV/AIDS, Diabetes, TB etc. (one Aboriginal person per day is infected by HIV) While Aboriginal people make up 2.8% of the Canadian population they represent 18% of the federally incarcerated population Aboriginal people make up a large percentage of street involved people and those involved in the sex trade Aboriginal women and children suffer from emotional, sexual and physical abuse at alarming rates The life expectancy of Aboriginal people is less than the Canadian public.

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34 1985 Bill C-31 is passed into law in Canada

35 1990 The Oka Crisis: The Kanesatake Mohawks take a stand after 270 years of land encroachment by governmental, religious and secular non-aboriginal people.

36 1995 Dudley George was shot by police on the night of September 6, 1995 when more than forty OPP officers equipped with riot gear attacked a group of unarmed Aboriginal people occupying Ipperwash Provincial Park. After police withdrew without providing medical assistance to George. His family rushed him to the hospital themselves. He died that night. The group was protesting the failure of the federal government to return land adjacent to the park that had been temporarily expropriated more than 50 years earlier.

37 1998 The Aboriginal Healing Foundation was created to promote healing from residential school trauma following discussions with residential school survivors. Through the AHF it comes to light that the secret of sexual abuse has occurred to two generations of men in one Southern Ontario Aboriginal community. One priest was responsible for this assault on an entire community.

38 2000 The Assembly of First Nations reports that there is no recent information on suicide rates of First Nations people at the national level. Most recently published data for the period of shows that suicide rates among First Nations men are 2.6 times higher than for Canadian men in general and 4 times higher than average for First Nations women. First Nations youth aged were 4 to 8 times higher than the national average.

39 2002 Sarah devries, is among an estimated 500 aboriginal women slain or missing in Canada over the past 15 years, according to the Native Women's Association of Canada, as well as other indigenous groups, academic reports and several Web sites dedicated to this crisis. These are Canada's Vanishing Women, the mothers, sisters and daughters whose bodies are found frozen in the snow, by railway tracks, in fleabag hotels, along the "Highway of Tears'' in British Columbia, or, like Sarah, dead at 28, nothing more than a piece of DNA found on a B.C. pig farm.

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41 Canadian Society

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43 Ontario Aboriginal HIV/AIDS Strategy Hayden Street Toronto, ON M4Y 2P2 Denise Baldwin (416) Heather Chierici (705) Working to keep our Circle strong