On March 30, Frances Widdowson will be travelling to Powell River to give a presentation entitled “Uncovering the Grave Error at Kamloops”.
Diane Sparks tried to advertise Widdowson’s talk in The Powell River Peak, but the publisher, Kelly Keil declined to accept the advertisement.
This led Conrad Black to write an article about it in the National Post.
The slides for Widdowson’s presentation are posted below.
I’ve just perused your slides here, and the one featuring Nicole Schabus and “Indigenous trauma” brought to mind a Facebook post I shared on Michael Melanson’s Substack about a year ago. The young woman I’m quoting isn’t a former student (and may not even be an intergenerational “survivor”), but she sure as heck has been traumatized by the current narrative. In my original sharing of this I called her a 20-something, but I think she’s more likely in her 30s, as she’s the mother of at least one teenager. Melanson, at the time, characterized her unconventional spelling as “gangsta.” Here’s a copy of my May 2024 comment:
What continues to strike me as bizarre is the notion – or at least, the contention – that all of this searching and storytelling is going to somehow lead to “healing.” More and more indigenous people of all ages are aspiring to become therapists and healers, where the primary modes of therapy are “ceremony” and encouragement to attribute everything negative in one’s life to events that occurred outside one’s lifetime. Easy; just listen, empathize, smudge, collect payment from government, repeat. Clients may go away unhealed, and will likely ruminate on negatives as part of their healing practice, but the “therapists” can feel that they are helping people and doing meaningful work (but keep those wounded souls coming, please). I do acknowledge that it would be soul-bruising work, and there are many genuinely caring people doing it.
I want to share something I came across recently on the public Facebook page of a 20-something indigenous woman who sees a healer/therapist regularly, and whose mental meanderings may be fairly typical of others in her cohort (though her creative spelling hopefully is not):
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Trying again : ) Problem might have been the chevron characters I was using for the cited material.
I dreamt I wuz on Residential School Groundz residing in the buildingz with ppl, some I knew, some I didn’t, and before I woke up I wuz shown all this hidden smeared blood all over the wallz and bloody handprintz of the innocent livez that were taken too soon. I wuz shown how sicc the ppl that ran them really were, the Priestz and Nunz etc ~ I wuz shown what they did. I’ve had many dreamz where im taken to these placez by the Divine and they tell me thingz about it and show mii thingz about it and the Spiritz of the Children visit mii and do the same. They tell mii to speak up and raise awareness and to Reveal to All what they’ve Revealed to mii and I do, and I have, and I will continue to honour their Sacred Spiritz and their Livez. I’ve also been taken back to the Great Escape when Turtle Island wuz invaded and my Native People were tracked and hunted down shamelessly like animalz and pestz and wuz shown what it wuz like for them with dogz chasing and bullets wizzing by ~ what they made our Married women do in order for some familiez to survive ~ utterly disgusting. Itz hard to have these Dream Visionz ~ I wake up in tearz and so emotional ~ some of my Loved Onez have witnessed me waking out of these Dream Visionz and how heavy of a burden they are to carry.
+ The Divine told mii to watch out for the Children so that it never happenz again ~ confirming my work az a Revealer and Warrior of Pure Heart. +
I’ll keep fighting the GOOD FIGHT regardless of where it may take mii or who hatez mii for it. It iz the Right Thing to do ~ it iz my Destiny.