Kayla’s Reviews > Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water > Status Update

“..which is named after an Indigenous child, Jordan River Anderson, who suffered from a rare neurological condition that required constant medical attention in Winnipeg. His doctors recommended that he stay…near the hospital, but the provincial and federal governments couldn’t agree on who was financially responsible for his care; during the extended time these arguments went on, Jordan died in the hospital.”

“‘I don’t like it when people say that Cross Lake is beautiful,’ he murmurs. ‘Because I remember what it was like before. You think you see beauty but you are looking at ruins, ruins of the land and the water.’”

“…been a pattern of sustained…abuses against Indigenous Peoples by law enforcement, including the infamous “starlight tours,” conducted by the Saskatoon Police Department in which Indigenous men who had been arrested were driven to the perimeter of the city in the dead of winter, had their shoes taken from them, and then were abandoned… Several men died of exposure from the late 1970s… early 2000s.”

“The residential schools also carried out extreme medical testing and nutritional experiments on students… Canadian physicians were experimenting with Indigenous children, withholding riboflavin, thiamin, and other essential nutrients to study the impact of malnutrition, even while children sickened and died… The last residential school in Canada did not close its doors until 1996.”

“My father’s later Pakistani citizenship has…made it extremely difficult for me to travel in India because of new visa rules that prohibit people with Pakistani ancestry from being allowed to apply for multiple entry visas and that require them to apply for their visas not by mail but in person… Those rules resulted from recent tensions arising from the victory of Hindu nationalist parties…”