Tiktok and the indigenous community

 Lateral violence is everywhere, even within our community. You can't be indigenous enough, you aren't white enough and you definitely can't use an app if you want help. If you ask for help, there is none from an elder. If you use technology, people ask you why you never asked a person to do it correctly and make so many assumptions. I have seen so many people be divided in this realm, and so many across upper turtle island and below; looking for answers that they can't have due to residential schools and others who aren't willing to share. Gatekeeping and putting the information in a safe box. One indigenous creator started a rhetoric that if you identify as "white passing" or "White presenting" you are white. Which, causes major shit to those who are reconnecting or getting the recognition they deserve over the years of being outcasted by not just white colonist society, but by also those who were of the indigenous community. Such clans, tribes and people that were pushed out and who faced more than what could be an extermination of their tribe. Metis are the people on upper turtle island, but who is to tell us what our Indigeneity really is? I have suffered lateral violence all my life because of being a Mik'maq woman who is reconnecting all over again. I say reconnecting all over again because even my own people, or indigenous community in the late to middle 90's hearing me say what I was.. treated me as if I was nothing. That being nothing was the way it was to bed. Women, who had a white mother or father or that had married into a society of white.. we lost our status years ago. But me, a youth in Middle school was forever wanting to make connections and to know. To feel like I fit in. Now, there is this such thing of healing and reconciliation that is being done where we need to heal, but there are so many taught ways that they are habits that are hard to break. Elders cry, so do the youth. We are wanting to be ourselves without consequence of stereotypes taught, things that we need to heal not just each other but our spirits. We are spirits in a meat suit and we have walked this world for centuries. There are more than just turtle island indigenous that suffer these such things due to colonization and racist ways. There are others such as the beautiful Maori, The indigenous of the Australia and other parts of the world in the amazon and places across Africa. I often wonder, if we all connected and broke the path of the old colonial ways; if that is our true land back. Because we need each other more than before. Those who are purists and gatekeepers; we never seen you as part of the collective. In upper turtle island where I grew up, we were told to fear you. that it was you who went alone and would be morphed into a monster that would eat the people. Destroy the people. I dare not say this creatures' name.. but you are on a path that becomes one and you shall never have a great life until you learn to do better for others and not just yourself.