• NateNate60@lemmy.world
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    15 days ago

    Well compare the proportion of natives living in Canada/United States versus the proportion of natives living in India or Nigeria or South Africa and I think you’ll agree I’m mostly right when I say that the British succeeded in displacing the indigenous population of North America.

    • IninewCrow@lemmy.ca
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      15 days ago

      All joking aside … you are right … for the most part. Almost all the communities,cities and towns in Atlantic Canada and southern Ontario and Quebec have basically wiped out all Indigenous people … any that are left there are very diluted ancestry and can claim about 1/4 at best of Indigenous ancestry. I don’t like playing genetic games with Indigenous ancestry and who is more Native than another - but it is a fact of life now so I can’t avoid it … and argue it any further and then you start playing Eugenics and purity games, which I never agree with.

      Personally I know a lot of a variety of native people … full blooded, quarter blood, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32 … federally carded, non-identified and adopted … I know so many that I even have family with blond hair / blue eyes who are fully recognized and members … and conversely I know people who are full blooded or have majority Native ancestors but due to history, land changes and treaties, have no recognition at all!

      More remote areas of Canada where people are not as likely to move to are mostly Indigenous … far northern Ontario, far northern Quebec, far northern Manitoba/Saskatechewan/Alberta, NWT, Yukon is full of mostly Indigenous or large populations of them … and Nunavut especially is almost all Inuit.

      But if it isn’t genetics that will eventually dilute our ancestry so much that you won’t be able to tell who is native or not any more … it will be through cultural and identity loss.

      My first language is Cree/Ojibway and I’m fully fluent. The generation after me? They are only partly fluent and mostly speak English. The generation after them … is almost all completely English. All our languages are dying out even in the remote areas because everyone wants FB, IG, Youtube and Tiktok, so there is no encouragement of the language.

      So Europeans displaced us over the past 500 years … but not completely … we were able to survive through a lot but with the modern world of pop culture and internet culture, whatever we had left is slowly drying up. For hundreds of years, they tried to beat, kill and torture the culture out of us but they couldn’t … get us to watch a few million TikTok videos and we’re willing give up our souls … just like everyone else out there.