About the same time as Uranium
City, Saskatchewan, was becoming a city (of 5,000 souls) David Segerts was born
in 1960 and grew up to see the place there turn into a ghost town. His hometown
basically shutdown in 1982, but David was ready to move on then anyway.
"I am a Dene/Cree, but I
generally say I am Dene because I look almost exactly like my father," and
he shows a picture that proves it. David is the spitting image of his Dene
father. "I dropped out of school when I was in grade 8," and went
back for adult upgrading by the age of 25 at Alberta Vocational Centre in
Calgary.
He said AVC was a good learning
experience although the facility lacked a First Nation student organization, so
he helped put one together. "We held dances, fundraisers, and hosted a
room that the school donated," which became a gathering place for all
nations and a useful foot in the door for First Nation students.
A short time later David
Segerts began to study the tactics known as lateral violence, which are used in
oppression and especially systemic racism. It is this lateral violence that
explains the extraordinary incarceration rates and recidivism in crime of the
First Nation people of Canada. Nearly 50 percent of the prisoners in Canada
either male or female are First Nation or Aboriginal people.
For these kinds of disparities
to exist in a segment of society the problems have to run very deep indeed.
"Lateral violence goes on in every First Nation organization and starts
with arguments like, 'My family is better than theirs,'" he said. Lateral
violence is an important tool used by the purveyors of oppression or systemic
racism.
It is important, "to get
us fighting amongst each other. We are actually born into it, however,"
because the system is designed that way, "Public awareness is the only way
to address it," said Segerts. "The methods of lateral violence
include, backstabbing, gossip, infighting, shaming, humiliating, damaging comments,
belittling, and sometimes violent behaviour."
Other terms for what is
happening to First Nations in Canada include auto-genocide and horizontal
violence, he said. These terms are applied mostly to the members of oppressed
groups in society, he explained, "I didn't really understand lateral
violence until I was about 30 years of age. I rarely discussed it until I did
the research first," said Segerts. "It is designed to prevent efforts
to heal the effects of oppression."
Lateral violence teaches people
to disrespect and deny the rights of an oppressed group, to destroy the values
and beliefs. Practitioners will engage in infighting, faulting finding, and
scapegoating, raising the stakes of competition via jealousy and envy. The
attacks are made upon those who already possess low self esteem and the attacks
lower a person's self worth.
Ultimately the goal is to make
the victim take the blame for the continuous putdowns, "This is the nature
of oppression," said Segerts. It is a denial of their self and humanity.
"They think they have become objects unworthy of respect. They fail from the inability to recognize
themselves as a human being. They become convinced that the oppressor owns
them, and often the oppressor does own them including through financial
dependencies upon welfare and personal dependencies upon drugs or alcohol.
“When my son was 11 years old I
brought him to Vancouver to live with me, and after a few short weeks, he told
me, ‘Dad, I didn’t realize that Indians didn’t drink. I didn’t realize the
Indian men work.’” It was another stunning learning experience about lateral
violence for David the father who has never spent time languishing on welfare
programs but knows on reserves and in some urban communities it can become a
long-running generational trap.
“People who feel dependent
suffer a lack of personal power. When they lose power they will see their
cultural identity eliminated and be unable to stop it,” he said. Many times the
First Nations in Canada have been known to hide their own beliefs or adopt the
beliefs of an oppressing society. “They were dislocated from the land, and
suffered breakdown of family structure during the Residential School years.
Indigenous people were removed from families at age four in some cases, only to
be afflicted with physical, mental, sexual, and social abuses.”
His own mother had a safety pin
jammed through her tongue by nuns at one such school, then was made to sit
facing a corner in a classroom for speaking her Cree language. “There were many
children killed by torture,” he rightly asserts, “Families were disrupted by
one child being raised in a Catholic school and another being raised in a
United Church run school. In fact the Residential School system was a highly
specialized form of lateral violence.”
The lateral violence design for
First Nations people results in a distrust of First Nation leaders by their own
people. “It results in a distrust of those who might emerge to help. Rising
stars are severely restricted or punished. Leaders who make any difference are
fired and persecuted. Incompetent leaders are recruited and promoted by the
oppressors. Dividing and conquering is the main process used by the
oppressors.”
Segerts intends to write a book
with a biographical story line. He was later trained as a technical engineer at
BCIT and NAIT, then, while living in Vancouver, he entered the film industry,
first as an actor, then as a producer and director. Today he is employed on a
youth employment initiative that operates in Canada for First Nations. Remember
the name, because the book will be a heckuva a good read.
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