Hello All – On Saturday, more than 200 people joined at the VFW Plaza in Hastings to mark International Women’s Day and to protest what the Trump-Musk duo are doing to destroy our democracy and increase suffering around the world. The Women’s March, organizers of the nationwide actions, reported that more than 300 rallies and demos were held across the USA. CFOW’s Susan Rutman posted dozens of pictures on our Face Book Page. A brief report from Common Dreams profiled marches around the country. People are angry and protests are growing and will continue to grow.
The Women’s Day rallies protested the policies of the Trump-Musk administration that are attacking the rights of women. Trump and Musk are attacking women in two ways. First, by attacking reproductive rights and programs that seek to overcome discrimination by affirmative action: “diversity, equality, and inclusion.” Second, they are attacking women by attacking the “safety nets” that assist low-income people, both in the US and around the world, that give income, educational, and service support for those whose incomes or health/age conditions do not allow them to live well. Tens of millions of people, the majority of whom are women, are facing critical cuts to their standard of living, indeed to their right to life.
This is the white patriarchy fighting back, trying to retain its privileges against growing assertions of their rights by women and people of color. But behind this facade, the wealthy of the world are stoking fears among white people that are used to increase the wealth of the already rich. As the Two Dictators attempt to dismantle the government and force all of us into subjugation, we must speak up. On the Women’s Day, we are fighting back.
PERSPECTIVES ON SOME CURRENT STRUGGLES
Sanders Delivers Livestreamed Response’ to President Trump’s Congressional Address
[March 4, 2025]
---- Hello everybody. Thanks for joining. As most Americans know, we are living in a pivotal moment in American history – facing unprecedented challenges. How we respond to this moment will impact not only OUR lives, but the lives of our kids and grandchildren and, in terms of climate change, the very health and well-being of our planet. As you heard tonight, President Trump has been very effective in creating what I would call a “parallel universe” for his supporters – a set of ideas that either have NO basis in reality or, in the great scheme of things, are nowhere near the most important concerns of the American people. And one way that he does that is through the concept of the BIG LIE. Say something that is grossly false, say it over and over again, and have right-wing social media blast it out endless times, until people actually believe it. And then, rather than address the real issues facing the American people, we find ourselves wasting endless amounts of time discussing Trump’s absurdities. [Read More]
Is This the Beginning or the End of a New Cold War?
By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies, Code Pink [March 10, 2025]
---- The United States and our friends in Europe have a new chance to make a clean break from the three-way geopolitical power struggle between the United States, Russia and China that has hamstrung the world since the 1970s, and to find new roles and priorities for our countries in the emerging multipolar world of the 21st Century. We hope that Trump and European leaders can recognize the crossroads at which they are standing, and the chance history is giving them to choose the path of peace. France and Germany in particular should remember the wisdom of Dominique de Villepin, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder in the face of U.S. and British plans for aggression against Iraq in 2003. This could be the beginning of the end of the permanent state of war and Cold War that has held the world in its grip for more than a century. Ending it would allow us to finally prioritize the progress and cooperation we so desperately need to solve the other critical problems the whole world is facing in the 21st Century. As General Milley said back in November 2022 when he called for negotiations between Ukraine and Russia, we must “seize the moment.” [Read More]
(Video) Trump’s Attack on Universities Rests on a Lie
From Peter Beinart [March 10, 2025]
---- The Data is Clear: Progressive College Students are Far Less Antisemitic than Trump Voters [See the Program] – 8 minutes
Columbia Bent Over Backward to Appease Right-Wing, Pro-Israel Attacks — And Trump Still Cut Federal Funding
By Natasha Lennard, The Intercept [March 8, 2025]
---- Columbia University could hardly have been more draconian in the last year and a half since students began speaking out against Israel’s assault on Gaza. In early November 2023, four months before the Columbia Gaza solidarity encampment even began, the university banned its chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. A few hundred students from the groups had had the audacity to walk out from classes and hold a “die-in” protest on campus — some of the most widely celebrated nonviolent protest tactics available. The crackdown was just getting started. Since then, the university has ordered police raids on campus three times, leading to the arrests of over 100 students. … Again and again, Columbia has shown a willingness to throw students, faculty, free speech, and academic freedom under the bus in acquiescence to a right-wing, pro-Israel narrative that treats support for Palestinians as an affront to Jewish safety. For all Columbia’s appeasement, President Donald Trump’s Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism announced last week that it would cancel $400 million in federal grants and contracts to the university. [Read More]
NEWS NOTES
Important voting legislation is under consideration now in Albany. The bill in question is called VIVA NY, and its number in the Assembly is A6287. Julie Weiner, of CFOW and Citizens for Voting Integrity New York has prepared in concise analysis of the bill and who in the Assembly needs to be mobilized to get this legislation passed. To learn about the bill and who you need to call, go here.
And for some deep thinking about who is leading us in Washington, this just in from Tom Tomorrow.
CFOW NUTS & BOLTS
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. Weather permitting we meet for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, at 12 noon at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) Our newsletter is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com, and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook page. Another Facebook page focuses on the climate crisis. If you would like to join one of our Zoom meetings, each Tuesday and Thursday at noon, please send a return email for the link. If you would like to support our work by making a CONTRIBUTION, please make out your check to “Frank Brodhead,” write “CFOW” on the memo line, and send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks!
REWARDS!
This week’s Rewards for stalwart readers profile the music/humor of the UK’s Frank Turner. I have posted some his music here before, but only this week did I listen to a lot of his stuff and was esp. interested in the wide variety of his offerings. Here is a mere starter kit: "Be More Kind"; "Make America Great Again"; and "I Still Believe." There are lots more on-line. Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
for CFOW
CFOW WEEKLY READER
FEATURED ARTICLES & ESSAYS
On the 30th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, whither gender equality?
From Equal Times [March 6, 2025]
---- Thirty years ago, nearly 200 governments and tens of thousands of activists and civil society organisations from around the world gathered in China to hash out a historic global commitment to equal rights and equal opportunities for all women and girls. The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (BPfA) was signed by 189 governments at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China, held between 4-15 September 1995. It outlined 12 critical areas for action, covering everything from jobs to the environment and political participation, as well as ending gender-based violence and harassment, and provided governments with concrete steps to ensure the actualisation of these goals. … Every March, at the United Nations headquarters in New York, the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) holds a two-week session to discuss progress and gaps in the implementation of the BPfA, as well as other issues that affect the rights of women and girls. This year is critically important: not only does 2025 mark the 30th anniversary of the adoption of the BPfA (Beijing +30), but CSW69 (which is taking place from 10-21 March 2025) also reminds us that there are just five years left to achieve the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, a far-reaching plan to deliver peace and prosperity for people and planet. At a time of rising authoritarianism, ever-increasing inequality and the rollback of basic human rights the world over, this moment presents a final push for universal progress. [Read More]
Woe to You Who Deprive the Poor of Their Rights: A Battle of Theologies in the Age of Trump
By Liz Theoharis, Tom Dispatch [March 2, 2025]
---- As an early act of his second administration, Donald Trump has created an anti-Christian bias task force to be chaired by Attorney General Pam Bondi. At the same time, he’s slashing federal jobs and programs, threatening Medicaid, Head Start, the Department of Education, affordable housing programs, accommodations for the disabled, environmental protections, public health and safety, Social Security, and Medicare, while scapegoating immigrants and trans kids. It’s particularly ironic that Trump, Johnson, and the people with them in the top echelons of power are targeting those that the Bible is most concerned about — children, the poor, immigrants, the sick and disabled, women, the vulnerable, and the earth itself. Meanwhile, Elon Musk, the richest man ever to exist, who has built his wealth off exploiting the poor, goes so far as to call the impoverished “parasites.” After all, there are more than 2,000 Biblical passages that speak about protecting the vulnerable, offering good news to the poor, stewarding God’s creation, and bringing judgment down upon those with wealth and power who make people suffer. [Read More]
Solidarity Lessons: Western MA Stands With Smith College Students for Justice in Palestine
By Jennifer Scarlott and Nick Mottern, Common Dreams [March 6, 2025]
[FB: The authors write, “We hope that communities and non-academic organizations across the country find ways to stand with all college and university students on the vanguard of the movement for a free Palestine and an end to the ongoing genocide.]
---- Even before the extraordinary activism for an end to the genocide in Gaza and the liberation of the Palestinian people at Columbia University last spring, the students of Smith Students for Justice in Palestine, or SJP, set a high bar for the coming wave of campus unrest across the U.S. with their 11-day occupation of College Hall, Smith’s administration building. For us as residents of Northampton, Massachusetts, it was awe-inspiring to watch Smith students’ activism as those first days passing sleeping bags through the windows of College Hall turned into weeks and months of creative actions demanding the school’s administration end its complicity in genocide. Outdoor student and faculty teach-ins in the snow and mud of early spring set the stage for ongoing pro-Palestine cultural and political education events as the lush grounds of the college responded to the lengthening days and warming temperatures. Local media covered the occupation of College Hall, and Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! noted the intense dedication of Smith SJP’s occupation. … We hope that communities and non-academic organizations across the country find ways to stand with all college and university students on the vanguard of the movement for a free Palestine and an end to the ongoing genocide—until Liberation and Return. We echo Smith SJP’s chant: “Disclose, Divest, We Will Not Stop, We Will Not Rest.” [Read More]
The bird flu outlook has only gotten worse
By Lucy Shapiro, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists [February 20, 2025]
---- H5N1 avian influenza has been nothing if not a slow-boil crisis. The outlook took a turn for the worse in 2021 when birds brought the virus from Europe to America, mirroring 2014, when Asian migratory flocks sparked widespread outbreaks in the United States and Canada. Both these events led to mass infection of domestic poultry and resulted in the culling of millions of chickens. But the outbreaks that began in 2021 and continue to this day have an additional feature: This time, mammals like seals and big cats have also been infected in large numbers, turning up dead on beaches, in zoos, and elsewhere. Last year proved to be yet another inflection point for the virus when it was detected in hundreds of US cattle herds and in workers who managed them. By now it’s clear there’s no reason for optimism that H5N1 will fade away as a minor nuisance. To the contrary, the situation has only been trending worse. With many signs pointing to a future flu pandemic, the keys to getting in front of it will be ensuring a free flow of data that can provide early warning and boosting the resources for testing widely and analyzing H5N1’s genetic evolution. That needs to happen both globally and domestically—but at a critical juncture, President Donald Trump has instead pulled the United States back from international health efforts, compounding his misstep by targeting domestic health agency communications, capacities, and budgets. The chances are increasing that the world will miss an opportunity to address a potential pandemic before it begins. [Read More]
THE WAR ON GAZA
(Podcast) Peter Beinart: 'I Feared Ethnic Cleansing on a Large Scale, but I Couldn't Imagine Gaza'
From Haaretz [Israel] [March 9, 2025]
---- Peter Beinart's new book, "Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning" confronts his "horror" - even as a long-time harsh critic of Israeli policies - at the devastation that has taken place over the past 15 months, since the October 7 Hamas attack. … On the Podcast, he discussed with host Allison Kaplan Sommer what makes otherwise "empathetic and thoughtful" Jews "block out the images and the screams," and deconstructed the talking points that he believes "function less as arguments than as defense mechanisms." Asserting that the mainstream U.S. Jewish community's uncritical support for the Gaza War was both un-American and un-Jewish, Beinart took aim at those getting behind President Trump's "Gaza Riviera" proposal, calling it "a desecration of one of the most fundamental principles in Torah." [Hear the Podcast]
THE WEST BANK
Gaza Doctrine: The West Bank is Under Fire
A Report from B’Tsalem [Israel] [March 10, 2025]
---- On 19 January 2025, once the ceasefire in Gaza went into effect, the Israeli government declared it was adding the demand for "increased offensive activity" in the West Bank to its official list of "war objectives". The addition was merely a formal affirmation of Israel’s treatment of the West Bank since 7 October 2023 as another front in the all-out war declared on the Palestinians since the Hamas attack. In keeping with this approach, the Israeli regime has ramped up its oppression of Palestinians in the West Bank and adopted more extreme measures, including extreme arbitrary violence against innocent civilians, further loosening of the permissive open-fire policy, severe movement restrictions and disruption of daily life, blanket cancellation of permits to enter Israel, and extreme limitations on access to farmland that are critically damaging livelihoods, mass arrests and the transformation of detention facilities into a network of torture camps. [Read More]
State of Siege: Israel is conducting its largest mass expulsion campaign in the West Bank since 1967
By Mariam Barghouti [March 6, 2025]
---- Israeli military forces killed 34-year-old Tariq Qassas with a bullet to the chest on February 25 while he was on his way home from work at a bakery two kilometers away in the Old City of Nablus. Qassas, a father to a five-year-old with another child on the way, was the eleventh Palestinian to be killed in Nablus—a bustling city in the north of the occupied West Bank—since January. … Medics arrived to transport his body to Rafidia hospital to be prepared for burial. En route, Israeli forces stopped the ambulance and, at gunpoint, ordered paramedics to uncover his face so the soldiers could scan it using facial recognition technology. “Even in death, they want to come and mark their kill,” Loay said, before carrying his brother’s casket to its final resting place. Qassas’s killing is part of a sweeping Israeli military assault, dubbed “Operation Iron Wall,” that has largely emptied four refugee camps in the northern West Bank—Jenin, Tulkarem, Faraa, and Nur Shams—forcing over 40,000 Palestinians to flee their homes in the largest forced displacement in the territory since the 1967 war. Israeli troops have bulldozed roads and destroyed homes, buildings, water and electricity lines, and other civilian infrastructure. On February 23, Israel’s Defense Minister said Israeli troops would remain in some of the refugee camps for the coming year and that displaced residents would not be allowed to return. [Read More]
THE WAR IN UKRAINE
How Biden Botched the Chance To End the War in Ukraine
By Scott Horton, Antiwar.com [March 7, 2025[
---- As President Donald Trump attempts to engage Russia to end the conflict in Ukraine, supporter of the proxy war in Washington, Europe, and Ukraine claim that President Vladimir Putin is an evil dictator who cannot be trusted. The implication is that talking with the Kremlin is equivalent to surrender for Kiev because Putin wants all of Ukraine, and will use any pause in fighting to gear up for the next invasion. However, history disproves that assertion. For Moscow, the war was never about seizing Ukrainian territory or attempting to reconstitute the USSR, but pushing back on NATO expansion after the bloc threatened to add Kiev as a member. Before the invasion and in the early months of the war, Putin made serious offers to both Washington and Kiev to allow eastern and southern Ukraine to remain under Kiev’s control if the country agreed not to join NATO. The Joe Biden administration outright refused to negotiate on those terms, even if they were acceptable to Kiev. Preventing those talks from occurring first provoked the Russian invasion, then prevented it from ending within a few months. As Scott Horton explains in the following excerpt from his latest book, Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine, there were talks in Istanbul, Turkey that nearly ended with conflict within two months. [FB – Intro by Kyle Anzalone.] [Read More]
Trump and the viable road to peace in Ukraine
[FB - Jack F. Matlock, Jr. is a career diplomat who served as U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987-1991.]
---- Finally, there is a prospect for bringing the war in Ukraine to an end. President Trump and his foreign policy team have created the conditions for a negotiated end to the war, replacing a fundamentally flawed and dangerous set of policies adopted by his predecessors including, ironically, the Donald Trump of his first administration. This is true even after the very public blowout in the Oval Office on Feb. 28. … Indeed, anyone interested in peace rather than the threat of nuclear war should be congratulating President Trump. After all, if the war does end and Russia is brought back into cooperative economic relations with Europe and the United States, everyone will benefit. If the war and the attempted isolation of Russia continues, all will suffer and cooperation to deal with common problems such as environmental degradation, mass migration and international financial crime will become impossible. [Read More]
WAR WITH IRAN?
Trump’s Narrow Iran Window Is Closing
By Trita Parsi, The American Conservative [March 4, 2025]
---- Punishing Iran was not on Donald Trump’s mind when he entered the White House in January. Rather, he had gone out of his way to declare his desire for a deal by avoiding insulting rhetoric, disavowing regime change and declaring nuclear weapons as his only red line. Similar signals came from Iran. Direct talks with Trump was Tehran’s new line. Yet this unique window of opportunity is closing fast, mainly because Trump isn’t paying attention. Iran policy is once again falling into the hands of the neocons who sabotaged Trump’s hope to reach a deal with Iran during his first term—with war lurking around the corner. As I wrote in this magazine in August of last year, despite his bombastic rhetoric and military threats, Trump genuinely aimed for a new deal with Iran. But he was given disingenuously bad advice by Iran hawks such as Mike Pompeo and John Bolton who wanted to drive matters toward war. The neocons deceived Trump into thinking that ramping up sanctions would break Iran and force it to capitulate to American demands. … Trump's rhetoric on Iran in 2024 was strikingly different. Gone were the hints of regime change, maximalist demands, and petty insults. Instead, he focused on his desire for a deal and peace. … By June, this crisis will be acute and potentially unresolvable. The snapback provisions in the Iran deal expire in October, and the Europeans will likely trigger them in June, prompting Iran to announce its withdrawal from the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). With a mandatory 90-day notice, Iran won’t be able to formally exit the treaty until October, leaving just three months for negotiations. If talks fail, UN sanctions will be reinstated, and Iran will fully exit the NPT. At that point, war will only be a matter of time. [Read More]
THE CLIMATE CRISIS
Just 36 Companies Drove Half the World’s Climate-Altering Emissions in 2023: New Report
By Sharon Kelly, Desmog [March 5, 2025]
---- Half of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions in 2023 came from just three dozen companies, according to a new report released today by the Carbon Majors project, with the list dominated by coal, cement, and oil producers. Saudi Arabia’s Saudi Aramco, the year’s worst offender, drove 4.4 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide pollution alone in 2023, the report found. Five publicly-traded oil companies — ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, TotalEnergies, and BP — combined to produce an additional 4.9 percent of the year’s global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels, the report adds. … The year’s top carbon polluters were a mix of investor-owned and state-owned or national companies — but they have one thing in common. “They’re some of the most obstructive actors towards climate policy,” Emmett Connaire, a senior analyst at the Carbon Majors project and one of the authors of the report, told DeSmog. [Read More]
CIVIL LIBERTIES
(Video) ICE Detains Green Card Holder over Columbia University Gaza Activism
From Democracy Now! [March 10, 2025]
---- Immigration agents with the Department of Homeland Security have detained a leader of the Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University in New York. Mahmoud Khalil, who is an Algerian citizen of Palestinian descent, is a green card holder and is married to a U.S. citizen; his wife is eight months pregnant. Immigration officials told Khalil’s lawyer his green card was being revoked. Khalil recently graduated from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, and his whereabouts are unknown. “The [Trump] administration doesn’t seem to know exactly how to justify this very haphazard, unilateral move,” says Prem Thakker, political correspondent and columnist for Zeteo. The arrest comes as Donald Trump’s Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism announced last week that it would cancel $400 million in federal grants and contracts to the university, despite Columbia’s suppression of pro-Palestine activism. The Trump administration doesn’t “really care about antisemitism or keeping Jews safe. All they care about is crushing dissent,” says Joseph Howley, associate professor of classics at Columbia University. [See the Program]
The West’s Support For Israel Is The #1 Threat To Free Speech
By Caitlin Johnstone [March 5, 2025]
---- President Trump has made a post on Truth Social saying federal funding will be cut to universities which allow “illegal protests” on their campuses, obliquely referring to pro-Palestine demonstrations against Israel’s genocidal atrocities. … Western governments’ support for Israel is the biggest threat to free speech in our society today. Civil rights are being stomped out throughout the western world to protect Israeli information interests, and speech is being suppressed in support of Israel more aggressively than with any other topic. We’re not seeing this level of all-out warfare against free expression on any other frontline — not Russia, not vaccines, not “election security”, not on any kind of ideological front. The west’s support for Israel is the number one threat to free speech in the west today, and nothing else comes anywhere close. Trump’s latest announcement about “illegal protests” against Israel on university campuses is just the latest escalation in what has been an ongoing assault on all criticism of the Zionist entity. We’re seeing journalists and activists persecuted and fired for opposing Israel’s genocidal atrocities in Gaza, protests violently shut down by police, new laws shoved through at alarming speed to help target pro-Palestine demonstrators, massive amounts of social media censorship across all major platforms — all while the mainstream press commit extremely egregious journalistic malpractice with obfuscations in their reporting and punditry designed to spin Israel’s abuses in a positive light. [Read More]
OUR HISTORY
Bloody Sunday: restored photos show the violence that shocked a nation [Selma]
By Briana Ellis-Gibbs, The Guardian [UK] [March 7, 2025]
---- Sixty years ago, on 7 March 1965, civil rights leaders and nonviolent activists attempted to march from Selma to Montgomery in a fight for African Americans’ rights to vote. But as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, they were met with unfounded brutal violence from Alabama state troopers. This day is commemorated as Bloody Sunday. Among the marchers was photojournalist “Spider” Martin who worked for the Birmingham News; he documented the violence firsthand, shocking the nation with his revealing images of the reality of voter suppression. Though the march occurred six decades ago, Doug McCraw, a native son of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and producer of the exhibit Selma Is Now, on display in Montgomery, Alabama, until 1 June, argues that the fight for civil and voting rights continues today. McCraw writes in his co-produced book, Selma Is Now: The March for Justice Continues, “sacrifices made by the marchers in March 1965 paved the way for the liberties we enjoy today, but the struggle for social justice continues.” … Martin’s newly restored photos, on view at the exhibit Selma Is Now, show his work as the only news photographer to capture the moments that occurred on Bloody Sunday and the subsequent marches from Selma to Montgomery. During the 1960s, the public primarily witnessed major events like Bloody Sunday through images in newspapers and magazines. Martin’s photographs were so influential that they sparked nationwide protests, prompting President Lyndon B Johnson to order 2,000 national guard troops to escort the marchers from Selma to Montgomery on 20 March 1965, to prevent another Bloody Sunday. [Read More]
An Expanding Vision of America
By Nicole Eustace, New York Review of Books [March 27, 2025 issue]
---- However reluctant white Americans have been to confront the full history of US expansion in North America, Native people have never not known about it. In 1920 the publishers of a book by the Oneida historian Laura Cornelius Kellogg, Our Democracy and the American Indian, admitted that “for four centuries the white man has put off the day of reckoning with the American Indian.” It has now been five centuries. Though academic specialists have started to speak of “American genocide” in monographs published by university presses, popular myth has continued to promote the idea of the US as a benign nation animated by benevolent ideals. Now, more than a century after Kellogg tried to complicate that story, we may finally be at a historical and moral turning point. Major new books written by eminent scholars for general readers about the peoples who lived in North America for millennia before the arrival of Europeans promise to reshape the history of the continent. They include Kathleen DuVal’s Native Nations: A Millennium in North America, Pekka Hämäläinen’s Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America, and Ned Blackhawk’s National Book Award–winning The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History. [Read More]
(Video) “Sugarcane”: Oscar-Nominated Film Explores “Colonial Silence” Around Indian Residential Schools
From Democracy Now! [March 4, 2025]
---- We speak with Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, the co-directors of the Oscar-nominated documentary Sugarcane, which examines the legacy of Indian residential schools in Canada. For over 150 years, these government-funded and church-run boarding schools forcibly separated First Nations, Métis and Inuit children from their families in an effort to destroy Indigenous languages, cultures and communities. The schools were rife with physical, psychological and sexual abuse, and many children did not survive. In 2021, a First Nation in British Columbia found evidence of 215 child-sized graves on the grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, setting off a nationwide search for more possible gravesites. Kassie and Brave NoiseCat would document the painful search for answers at Saint Joseph’s Mission, the residential school where Brave NoiseCat’s own relatives had been sent and near where his father was born and abandoned in a dumpster. The film explores “the colonial silence that exists in our broader society about this history” and how it has “seeped into the lives of the people who had survived it,” says Brave NoiseCat. [See the Program]
