Indigenous elder gives moving speech on intergenerational trauma at Newmarket forum – York Region
Growing up on a reserve, where adults protected children from the years of colonization Indigenous communities have endured for generations, Hilton King’s first years were filled with joy.
But then, he and other children were taken from their community as part of Canada’s deplorable policies aimed at wiping out Indigenous culture.
“They wanted us to be like them. They wanted us to lose our way,” King said. The elder gave a moving keynote address on intergenerational trauma and colonization at a forum in Newmarket March 29.
Indigenous Peoples of Canada had welcomed Europeans, offering kinship, teachings about medicines and more.
“When the settlers came, when the missionaries came, they didn’t look at this, they didn’t think about how did you live here, how did you get along? We had a governing system, we had a child welfare system … We had a kinship. We had everything we needed to survive here,” he said.
