Friends, I'm overjoyed to announce the launch of The Catholic Filmmaker (@cathfilmmaker), an online journal dedicated to forming and supporting filmmakers in the Catholic Church.
Read the founding statement and first essay at https://t.co/36cNbZd5IK.
I'm prepared to go to jail over this.
My grandmother Rita Pete went to St. Mary's Indian Residential School. She experienced terrible abuse. As a consequence, she struggled with alcohol use most of her life.
My mother was born with FASD as a consequence of her using alcohol to cope with her trauma.
I am Chief of my community Chawathil First Nation. I am working to address the longstanding impacts of these past policies through renovating homes, building new homes, creating childcare, and growing businesses through economic development.
I have interviewed people who went to Indian Residential Schools. I have interviewed people who believe Indian Residential Schools were awful, horrible schools, meant to remove the Indian from the child.
I've also interviewed people who believe they were well intended, generous investments by Canadian taxpayers meant to assimilate a society and had shortcomings.
Like with many things, the history is dark, complicated, and with any policy that existed for a long time, across a whole country - there were different experiences.
No one story tells us everything. No report shares the full experience of the individuals who went. No commentator today can disprove someone's lived experience with statistics.
The path forward is not to criminalize speech, questions, or debate.
The path forward is empathy for past attendees.
The path forward is truth based on facts.
The path forward is real conversations.
The path forward is to lean into complexity.
If the government criminalizes this, then I will be a criminal for having these conversations.
If I am a criminal by the laws definition, then I am committed to going to jail over this.
@BrigidPasulka A number of overlapping reasons. Probably the largest is when you get towards the end of a film / show edit, its hard to watch other stuff, at least for me. A sort of automatic impulse to protect headspace/sensibility kind of kicks in.
Haven't watched a film since February, or a TV show since March. When you're out this long, it's hard to come back. But that will be changing later this week.
Pope Leo XIV quoted Gandalf from "Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” in his first encyclical:
“It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.”
https://t.co/9MkBwTtdPn
I take consolation as well in the reality that God will bring good out of every evil. The visit of Pope Francis to Canada was surely one such case. I'm grateful, too, for the clarity - spiritually, morally and politically - that has come out of these events. But I guess I'm still hurting in my soul, in the feeling of the deep loss of an integrated identity as a Canadian Christian. I pray God will make that wound fruitful in time. /end
It's been five years since the Kamloops announcement. Among many questionable actors, the @nytimes still has not faced or acknowledged any accountability for its role in promoting a rash, confused narrative around that event.
I don't normally post about politics and my personal life (and having been punished for it in the past, on here and offline, I do so with some trepidation), but I feel a need to express why this particular outrage still makes me tremble with sorrow (and if I'm being honest, anger).
https://t.co/y6UVTwjs7E
Who will hold the @nytimes to account? In a just world, the communities most affected by the lie - the ones who had to literally rebuild their churches - would sue them into the ground. When will they correct the story? But even more than satisfying this grievance, when will we, as a nation, hold ourselves to account for the chaos that followed it? What kind of nation do we really want to be? That is the real, deeper question.