How can being tied to a culture be detrimental to an individual?

How can being tied to a culture be detrimental to an individual?

Being tied to a culture can be detrimental to a person when the culture is not accepted by the people around you. The discrimination of people because of where they’re from causes loss of culture. Some try to force cultures to be forgotten. For example, the Aboriginal culture. The Aboriginal culture has been tested too many times in the past. They have endured having their land taken away from them, residential schools, colonization roads, the Oka Crisis, and many more.

In my opinion, every culture should be treated as equal. The Aboriginal peoples are just one of many cultures that aren’t given the respect of being treated equally. To make the people around them more accepting of them, they aren’t even able to use their own names. One woman uses a French Canadian name over her Mohawk name to avoid the great possibility of being treated without respect by people with power around them, police officers for example, or even just people that aren’t a part of their culture.

One of the biggest things to impact Aboriginal culture was the Oka Crisis. The Oka Crisis was a 78 day standoff between the Mohawk people and the town of Oka in Quebec. It started when the people of Oka tried to expand a golf course over Mohawk land, which included a Mohawk burial ground. The Mohawk people retaliated and blocked off the highway through their community to the golf course. What they called “war” broke out in the Mohawk community and contained gunfire and teargas. It resulted in the death of an officer, Corporal Marcel Lemay, which resulted in the SQ retreating.

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2016/10/23/colonization-road-ryan-mcmahon-michelle-stjohn_n_12562738.html

Two sisters fought for their lives during the crisis, the older sister trying to help her younger sister flee to safety. The officers took the situation too far, stabbing the older sister in the chest with the end of his gun. If he had have stabbed her a centimeter any way, she would have died. When all of this was “finished”, the people of the Mohawk community tried fleeing, but on their way out, the people of Oka threw rocks at their cars, injuring many, including small children. While all of this was happening, the Oka police stood by and watched the Mohawk people be attacked.

Colonization had impacted the way the Aboriginal culture grew over the years after the Europeans stole their land and made it their own. When colonization started, the native land was stolen and given to settlers to make lives for themselves. Treaties were signed between the Aboriginal peoples and the settlers and were placed as laws, but the government did not follow the laws they had placed. The government decided that if the native peoples did not use their land “productively”, meaning how they wanted it to be used, they would take it from them and use it for whatever they thought was right. Roads were built over these lands that were stolen that they called “Colonization Road”. They were built all over Canada and many of them turned into roads that we use today, many of which are around where we call cottage country.

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2016/10/23/colonization-road-ryan-mcmahon-michelle-stjohn_n_12562738.html

One community that was isolated from the rest of civilization had tried to build a road out of their community so that they were no longer isolated there. They wanted to call this “Freedom Road” as it would lead to their freedom of isolation, but the government had repeatedly denied them the ability to build this road. There had been many instances, including a man who needed an ambulance to make it to a hospital, that people could not make it to or from this community in emergencies.

In my opinion, I believe that the Aboriginal peoples have been treated extremely unfairly and their culture should be left alone and should have been from the start. The settlers that came and took over the land of the people already residing there just living their lives how they were taught and how they felt was the right was for them were greedy and should have found places that were not already being used, even if it was for a purpose they did not agree with. The Aboriginal people being tied to their culture can be detrimental to their lives because they aren’t able to show their culture of what they believe in without the rest of the population looking down on them and telling them what to do. This was proved by the Oka Crisis and how the Mohawk people were only standing up for what they believed in only to be met with war and angry citizens of a town who didn’t even own the land they wanted to build on to begin with. Their land was theirs from the start and the European settlers should not have taken them over to build the Colonization Roads over them.