Respect Indigenous Creators

Honesty is a key component of my personal brand, hence my hashtag #nohatejusthonesty, because I don’t want to use the platform I’m creating to be a hater, but I won’t sugarcoat my opinions either. 

You see, Indigenous creators are trying to spread awareness about the atrocities committed by the Canadian and US governments at the state-funded residential schools. 

On Canada Day, which was July 1st, Indigenous creators encouraged everyone to show solidarity by wearing orange, and not celebrating the holiday. 

Most Americans stereotype Canada as a peace-loving, passive, maple syrup making country, when in actuality it was founded by settlers who committed genocide against the native populations, similar to the U.S. 

I normally see several videos by Indigenous TikTok creators in my feed, however, today I barely see any. 

Looks like their content is being suppressed. The trending hashtags for July 4th include #the4thofJuly, #July4th, #IndependenceDay, and #BBQ. #BBQ is trending (no surprise) because of Black Americans, who do not celebrate “Independence Day” because our people were not free. 

One of the Indigenous creators I follow (now a mutual), made a video stating that she wasn’t comfortable making a video about why Americans shouldn’t celebrate the fourth, just like Canadians shouldn’t celebrate Canada Day, because she feared her account being targeted by white supremacists.

I decided to stitch her video, which allows me to select a few seconds from her video and use it to start my own, connecting our accounts. 

Here is the transcript of what I said in the video, and a link for good measure. 

[Protect your peace. People are too disrespectful. It is not your job to spoon feed grown folk about Indigenous issues, especially since those issues weren’t even your people’s fault. 

To the non-Indigenous people of the United States of America: 

Nobody cares that your family is forcing you to celebrate the Fourth of July. No one cares if you don’t own anything orange in your closet. 

The point is to support our Indigenous creators and Indigenous peoples. 

There are over 350 government-funded, and often Catholic church run, residential boarding schools here in the USA. 

The only reason these schools existed was to strip Indigenous children of their heritage, and take them away from their families. None of this is new information. 

If you feel a creator hasn’t provided you enough information, I encourage you to do your own research. You are not entitled to their emotional labor. 

Type “residential schools” and get to learning. Learning does not end with school. ]

I then decided that I wouldn’t check my account until 4:30 pm, to allow time for me to recover from the stress of putting myself out there like this, knowing how sensitive people are over the internet when it comes to being told not to harass people…