Today is Orange Shirt Day, the day for remembering Indigenous children who died in residential schools and honouring the survivors.
It was organized by grassroots Indigenous activists for many years before it was officially adopted as the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.
Continue readingI’m wearing my orange shirt from the Woodland Cultural Centre today, Orange Shirt Day, in honour of residential school survivors and all those who didn’t make it home.
Continue readingThread a bead for me,
Not a rosary:
A bright bubble of blood
From that river in flood
Between the worlds.
Carve a flute for me,
To breathe a memory,
Thread a song from the air,
Where the land is bare
On that distant shore.
Hold a hand for me,
Dream a dream for me,
Of summer days I cannot see,
Woven beneath the oldest tree,
Beyond the door.
Light a fire for me,
Down by that inland sea
Where the stars drink the night
And a bright scarf of light
Dances in the sky.
By Yvonne Aburrow
©️Yvonne Aburrow, 2021. Repost only with clear written credit to me. Please include this copyleft notice and all the information below as well.
The imagery in this poem is Pagan imagery (the World Tree, the river between the worlds in The Ballad of Thomas the Rhymer, the land of the dead being over the ocean). The poem is dedicated to the children who did not come home from residential schools. I woke up this morning with the fragment of a dream in my head with beads being threaded on a string as some sort of remembrance ritual. The poem is an attempt to capture the dream.
If you have been paying attention to the news in Canada, you will be aware that the remains of 215 Indigenous children were found in unmarked graves in the grounds of Kamloops residential school. And this week, 104 more were found in another residential school.
Continue readingEvery child matters. Today is Orange Shirt Day, the day of remembrance for Indigenous victims of the residential schools (which ran from the 1870s to 1996). Many children in them died of tuberculosis, hunger, abuse, and neglect. Sexual and physical abuse was rife.
Continue readingMany people are expressing shock and dismay that a fascist government has taken over the USA, and at the rising tide of xenophobia in Broken Brexit Britain. However, if you are at all familiar with the rise of the Third Reich and the operation of oppressive systems such as the British Empire, the signs have been writ large for some time. If you need a crash course in recognising the oppressive atmosphere for what it is, then here’s a crash course. Why have I chosen mostly novels? Because novels try to describe how it feel to be in the situation, and to provoke empathy. And empathy for the persecuted is what we need more of right now.
Dowsing for Divinity 