08/23/2025
When you are Indigenous you must walk in 2 worlds..
In fact many families were forced with difficult decisions and many left home from reservations for a life unknown. Many had to decide if they were white or Indian.
But there was never a safe choice.
Being accepted into white communities meant you followed the 'program'. You quiet your ancestry, you change the family names, you dress, act, talk and style your hair differently. Your boys play hockey.
Staying on reservation meant you lacked resources-dealt with food scarcity, the threat of your children being taken and forced religion.
It started slowly with a missionary here and there, an explorer wanting to trade fur, then we can't forget the Filles du Roi!!!!!, to make a new France you must populate it.
800 young French women immigrated to New France between 1663 and 1673 as part of a program sponsored by King Louis XIV. The program was designed to boost New France's population both by encouraging Frenchmen to move to the New World, and by promoting marriage, family formation, and the birth of French children in the colony. But this colony was never your colony never your community to inhabit, you were guests.
Yet, the ulterior motive emerges- It is always about getting with the program don't you know.
The first Jesuits, didn't come for peace, they came with the intention of conversion. Samuel de Champlain came to exploit resources. The 'Kings' of colonization were in competition with eachother and their ego's.
Unfortunately for the French and English colonizers many Nations had always planned for seven generations of intention. It wasn't a program it was a community -a way of life, a lifestyle.
You can take the land and resources, the children, you can pillage through communities, but you cannot take the blood of our ancestors out of our DNA.
The government and organized religious attempts to 'white wash' our skin for more 450 years just made us chameleons- Wise, White passing , Warriors.
-Tiawenhk .
