In the second segment of this six-part interview, Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie talk to Kakoli Mitra about why they believe that First Nations and Native American peoples have managed to build resilience and persevere, despite centuries of systematic physical genocide and cultural annihilation that they were subjected to by European colonizing institutions. Julian explains the profound irony of the fact that residential schools were deeply dehumanizing institutions that were premised on the idea that Native peoples (and their cultures) were backwards and dirty and ugly and deserved to die, yet that it was/is precisely these ancient Native cultures — with their communal and family structures, which are also deeply human — that have enabled Native people to be resilient. Emily describes having been among many different peoples around the world (including her own community of Jewish holocaust survivors and their descendants), who are bonded by collective trauma. She talks about how Indigenous communities, like the First Nations people portrayed in Sugarcane, are not just bonded by trauma, but by the common experience of having been systematically colonized, abused, and attempted to be eradicated, thus being able to build resilience rooted in deep communal connections.

Continued... (scroll to below the bibliography to access next part)