On Growing Up Oblivious

An investigative journalist reckons with the cost of settler privilege in this gripping exposé of racism and unethical science.

In the last thirty years, various parties have exposed government archives recording the facts of Canada’s genocidal attempt to destroy its Indigenous populations, a gradual holocaust of segregation, poverty, coerced labour, avoidable infectious diseases, forced migrations, and even unethical and cruel scientific experiments, all while the descendants of Prairie settlers enticed by the same government to take over Indigenous territories prospered at their expense. While performative statements of gratitude for being allowed to stand on the territories of various First Nations have become standard features of Canadian public events, the statements of claim, academic literature, and multi-volume commission reports setting out exactly what we stole, who we hurt and how, have been read by few, and the policies and decisions which crushed generation after generation of Indigenous people are still not broadly known.

In On Growing Up Oblivious: Residential Schools, Segregated Indian Hospitals, and the Use of Indigenous People as Slaves of Race Science, investigative journalist Elaine Dewar exposes the governmental machinery behind the unacknowledged Jim-Crow era of the Canadian Prairies, exposing both partnerships with the United States government and the involvement of Nazi scientists.. The granddaughter of settlers saved during their first Prairie winter by the generosity of their Indigenous neighbors, Dewar explores how even well-meaning Canadians who glimpsed the truth of what was being done by the government of Canada in their names did nothing to stop it. Part memoir, part investigation, On Growing Up Oblivious tells the story of a Jewish girl from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, who grew up in a society so segregated—its Indigenous people consigned to an alternate universe—that she failed to notice for decades.

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