The raising of the Six Nations flag Thursday outside of City Hall in the City of Niagara Falls signified the beginning of Indigenous Peoples Weekend. Niagara Falls recently passed a resolution announcing the period of Oct. 7-11 as Indigenous Peoples Weekend, with the last day coming on Indigenous Peoples Day.
Aside from the celebrations planned for the weekend, the continuing coverage of the bodies being found on former residential school lands in Canada and the United States is not lost Iroquois Federation Educator Randy Green who said the forced erasure of indigenous culture is why this upcoming weekend is so important.
“The boarding schools would take in children by force to teach them Christianity to teach them to be a hard working, taxpaying citizen and would beat them for using their own language from beat them from practicing their own ways,” he said.
For Seneca Nation member Jocelyn Jones the horrors of what her ancestors went through at the residential schools is reason to re-immerse younger generations in the Seneca language which she said holds a system of ethics and is key to a certain way of thinking.
“You immerse somebody into American culture, English language,” she said. “It can also be reversed in that way as well. So that is the huge movement around the globe in language revitalization. And so the next step is that we found our own schools and we reeducate our children from the perspective of our own people in our own ancestors.”
Jones says the language is being taught already in the school districts of Allegany and Cattaraugus Counties.
