As someone who's never even been to Canada, this article makes little sense to me. Who are these Indigenous people, and why would anyone want to do this to the

As someone who's never even been to Canada, this article makes little sense to me. Who are these Indigenous people, and why would anyone want to do this to them? Skimming some of the other comments, it seems I'm not alone in this sentiment. That's what racism looks like from the outside. To people who've lived their entire lives unaware of the conflicts and prejudices between races, the practices employed to oppress a people seem unrealistically sinister, as if they're from some dark, dystopian novel. If this had been about US physicians coercing African American women into undergoing sterilization, I would've just shrugged it off as yet another act of racism, the sort to which I've grown accustomed to seeing everyday. The same beast is rearing its head in this case, yet only when it happens elsewhere does it look utterly foreign to me--"that would never happen in _my_ country!" It's rare that I actually get an opportunity to observe racism from this perspective. Over the course of a lifetime, I've learned who hates whom and how they go about expressing that hatred on a regular basis. But I was entirely unaware of the conflict between these two peoples, despite living quite close to the Canadian border. It's a reminder that the racism I witness on a daily basis shouldn't be a part of my life, and it is utterly ridiculous to attempt to excuse it on the basis of ignorance. I'm the ignorant one here: I wasn't aware of this issue. The people involved in these acts of racism aren't ignorant; they're consciously choosing to engage in malicious acts against an arbitrarily defined portion of their own society. And their crimes should be treated as exactly that: pure, unprovoked malice.