Chapter Four

The Vanishing Indian

There are many ways for Indigenous people to disappear.

That’s how I begin this chapter. We’ve disappeared into reservations and off the eastern seaboard. Now I begin to talk about the ways that we disappear from each other. Chapter four looks at our disappearance into residential schools and child welfare and of course these two things are connected.

Photoshop of a piece by Kent Monkman, a Cree artist. In September 2021 I asked Twitter if somebody could put orange shirts on the priests and RCMP officers. Rob Taylor-Case obliged with “thanks, I hate it”