Children and Cultural Survival
Like other agencies for aboriginal child protection world-wide, Weechi-it-te-win is focused on the protection of children within a modern aboriginal and also bi-cultural context. "The mission of Weechi-it-te-win is to preserve Indian (Anishinaabe) culture and identity among our people; to strengthen and maintain Indian (Anishinaabe) families and through them our communities; and to assure the growth, support and development of all children within our families and communities." This mission must be understood in the context of a history of both the systemic use of aboriginal child protection for genocidal purposes and the participation of Anishinaabe communities in mainstream society in Canada. Denying a people the right to raise its own children is a method for culturally extinguishing it.
Read more about this topic: Weechi-it-te-win Family Services
Famous quotes containing the words children and, children, cultural and/or survival:
“The family environment in which your children are growing up is different from that in which you grew up. The decisions our parents made and the strategies they used were developed in a different context from what we face today, even if the “content” of the problem is the same. It is a mistake to think that our own experience as children and adolescents will give us all we need to help our children. The rules of the game have changed.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“...I was confronted with a virile idealism, an awareness of what man must have for manliness, dignity, and inner liberty which, by contrast, made me see how easy living had made my own group into childishly unthinking people. The Negro’s struggles and despairs have been like fertilizer in the fields of his humanity, while we, like protected children with all our basic needs supplied, have given our attention to superficialities.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 19 (1962)
“At times it seems that the media have become the mainstream culture in children’s lives. Parents have become the alternative. Americans once expected parents to raise their children in accordance with the dominant cultural messages. Today they are expected to raise their children in opposition to it.”
—Ellen Goodman (20th century)
“... survival is the least of my desires.”
—Dorothy Allison (b. 1949)