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Monday 27 February 2023

1923: Must watch TV series for residential school brutality

 

Aminah Nieves as Teonna Rainwater


1923 is a game changing TV series. This popular series will be a major influence on viscerally implanting in the general public the understanding of the horrible genocidal treatment First Nations people received in North Amerika. Sadly this legacy still continues in the forms of poor housing, undrinkable water, generalized racism, police violence and murder.  

Of course it's fun for a boomer like me (74 and counting) to compare wrinkles and misfootings with Hollywood A-listers like Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren. There's the required beautiful scenery backgrounds for the series three main plotlines. There are the required love scenes between beautiful young people in these gorgeous settings. There are lots of people galloping about on horses, and gunfights for the bloody minded among us.

I'm sure most viewers wouldn't be tuning in if it weren't for the above standard Hollywood fare. But the kicker, the outlier plotline and the true heart of this series, is the story of a young Indigenous woman brutalized and hunted down by the North Amerikan residential school system. I seriously doubt this content would have been on mainstream TV a decade ago, before the discovery of all the graves of murdered young indigenous children were discovered on the grounds of many (most?) Kanadian residential schools.

Watch this series, in anger and pain.       


dead seeds
in the ground:
residential schools

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