Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life | 
pickA shocking, devastating work of history. Author James Daschuk began with the question: why is the health of Indigenous Canadians so much worse than that of other Canadians? The answers go all the way back to first contact between Europeans and the peoples of North America, and then later on, with the collapse of the bison population, the deliberate use of starvation as a political tool. I listened to a new audiobook edition published in 2022.
Friday Reads May 19: living as your most authentic self & other aspirations #readinglife #LGBTQ
https://youtu.be/7AJlmnnjz8s
A few weeks ago somehow or other I stumbled upon this 2013 article (https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/when-canada-used-hunger-to-clear-the-west/article13316877/), a rude awakening for me personally about the degree to which Canada starved and massacred its aboriginal peoples to clear the prairies for settlement. So now I have the book to delve further. Happy 150 Canada indeed. Ethnic cleansing is something to atone for, not celebrate...
pickEvery Canadian should read this book. It deals with the way diseases like small pox and tuberculosis killed many of the indigenous people on the Canadian plains, as well as the way the Canadian gov't used starvation as a tool to subjugate these people and move them onto reserves, once the buffalo hunt came to an end. Shocking, infuriating and tragic. #canada150
Persistence hunting: "involves the pursuit of prey, on foot, until the hunter overtakes the animal, which has been immobilized by exhaustion and hyperthermia."
Ladies and gentlemen, may I present insane feats of human endurance that were once commonplace? I became exhausted just reading that sentence. #read4reconciliation #canada150
Ecological studies have shown that [these traditions] purposefully abstained from beaver hunting as a means of managing the amount of available water.
I can already tell that this book is going to blow my mind. Here we get a bit of foreshadowing about the beaver hunt. #read4reconciliation #canada150
Picked this up for my #library's #Read4Reconciliation challenge. #canada150
