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[AUDIO LOGO] MAGNUS FISKESJO: I would like to welcome everyone to this symposium, which is going to run from now until 5:00 with two Q&A sessions, one after the first part and one at the end. There's also going to be a small break in the middle when you could run off either find something here or run off to the coffee shop to buy things.
The piece of paper that I suddenly realized that I'm missing is the riot act from the Cornell police. We would like to ensure that this event, like every event at Cornell, proceeds without interruption. The riot act sheet that I was supposed to read out to everyone says that we should ensure that the speakers may speak without interruption and we should ensure that those who want to object or raise a different opinion have a chance to do so but without interfering in the proceedings. So that's my summary of the riot act. It's basically to try to have a nice symposium, which I'm sure that we will have.
What we should also do is something that's become a little bit of a ritual, but it has special significance today. The land acknowledgment, which is a statement acknowledging that we, Cornell University, are located on the traditional homelands of the Gayogohono, the Cayuga Nation of American Indians, which belongs to a confederacy of six sovereign nations with a historic and contemporary presence at this land which precedes the establishment of Cornell, of New York, of the United States. We acknowledge the painful history of Gayogohono dispossession and honor the ongoing connection of the Gayogohono people, past and present, to these lands and waters.
The reason I say that is a double appropriate is because in our symposium today, we have two speakers who are themselves of American Indian descent. And I'll introduce them in a second. After me, I'm going to deliver an introduction, but after I have done that, we have a recorded message from Adrian Zenz, who's going to present on what we know today about the family separations and indoctrination of children. His research has been based in Chinese documents and statistics and has published a lot of them. Then we have with us today-- he's going to present remotely then.
With us today we have Rukiye Turdush, who is an Uyghur scholar and author. And Zumret Dawut, who's a camp survivor from East Turkestan, recently arrived in the US, and coming to us from DC with a large part of her family. And we want to say a special welcome to all of you. So we're going to hear from Adrian, Rukiye Turdush, and Zumret Dawut and her family after this.
Then in the second part, we get to Jeffrey Palmer, he's not here this moment but coming in a moment, who is Kiowa from Oklahoma and an associate professor of performing and media arts and also a filmmaker and director of a film that he will speak about the Indian schools, very similar to the indoctrination of children in China that we are talking about, in a film called Ghosts.
Then last today we have Amy Bombay, who is a psychiatrist professor who will speak to intergenerational trauma, which is what is caused by these family separations and indoctrination of children, stealing their language, culture, and so on. She bases her work mostly in Canada. She is herself a member of the Anishinaabe people of the Rainy River First Nations, which is what Indigenous peoples are called in Canada. So they are coming up later.
Before I start my introduction, I also want to thank all our sponsors. There's the East Asia program, the main sponsor. Then this list has everyone except I just realized earlier that one is missing and that is the Cornell Institute for Material Studies and Archaeology, whose director is sitting in the back. So this is pretty embarrassing for me to omit from the list. I hope you forgive me for this. The list had been growing and growing. We're very grateful for all this response and support.
We are pursuing questions such as what is happening to these children. What actually happens to you when you're separated from your family and force assimilated? And also why the Chinese government is doing this today to such huge numbers of children. Why anyone would do this? Why did they do it in the past? And what is the nature of the traumas that the children endure who suffer this? And also a difficult, big question, can these wounds be remedied? We will get back to that.
OK. Throwing myself into my own introduction to what's going on to set the stage for speaking about what's happening with the children, I want to introduce you first of all to these three UN experts who exactly one month ago raised a big alarm about the forced assimilation of Uyghur children in China. I start here because I want to show you all that it's not just us here who are worried and concerned about what's happening. It's actually people around the world.
I should mention also that they have also raised their voice for the children in Tibet who are also being rounded up and forced assimilated, forced to speak Chinese only as we speak in ways that are quite similar to what we are talking about that's happening to the Uyghur children.
I want to introduce you first to two Uyghur children that you can read about in the news. It's a report that's very unique because it's one of the few interviews that have been made with children that have actually been locked up in these boarding schools. These two kids were citizens of Turkey and their father, also an Uyghur, had become citizen of Turkey. And he was able to negotiate the release of his two children from China. Not the release of his wife. She's probably passed on now. The children are holding it.
The number one interesting thing of their case is that how they tell about their experiences, the brutal torture they suffered if they opened their mouth and spoke in their own language, and the effect of that. When they met their father after one and a half years, they could no longer speak to him. There was a long period of time before they started recollecting what it was like to speak Uyghur because this had been beaten out of them. This shows that this method is actually effective. You can excavate and remove somebody's culture and language. And I propose this is why the Chinese government is doing it.
We get information, like I said, from this kind of interview but also from eyewitness who have been there. We will hear more about this later today. And heard people who have witnessed these things. Another genre that we look at is the Chinese social media where people will post things. Sometimes teachers postings. Sometimes passersby postings. And we get glimpses from this world of boarding schools where the children are held in the hundreds of thousands but without a date, a place, the name of photographer. So it's also a material that is difficult to handle.
What it comes down to in the comparison with North American situation is how just like in the Indian schools here in this country, in the United States, they had a slogan, kill the Indian, save the man. The idea was we will not kill these Indian children. We will just remove their Indianness. We will brainwash them so they lose their Indianness. That gets removed out of their head. That will save the man.
What kind of man? Of course, that man is a worker that can be exploited, that can function in the general society, in a world where there are no more Indians because they have been killed. So this is about how you can destroy a nation, a people, a culture. But the people who were part of it may still live.
In China, one with the North American situation is that they detain not only children but also grown ups. This we learned about from 2017 on. It would seem that the Chinese government is in a hurry. I will mention what happens to these grown ups that are put into the camps. Of course, it's because they are put into the camps that the children are also orphaned by this action of the state and then collected and put into the children's camps.
Behind this is the Chinese Communist Party's leadership with the top leader, party chief Xi Jinping. I believe his motivating ideology is a kind of Chinese supremacism, an inability to tolerate diversity, seeing diversity in the Chinese nation as a threat. And he's also done a major policy shift.
You see him in the picture here on the left on the top visiting a temple built by an emperor in the 18th century who had just massacred a people to the last man, the Dzungars, who no longer exist. This temple commemorating the genocide, Xi Jinping, the leader, made a purposeful visit to celebrate this. The way he put it was that this act of slaughtering all these people was good for the unity of the nation.
You can see how he equates the nation today with the empire of the past. This is a 180 degree shift in Communist Party policy. Because before they come to power, they told the people that had been conquered by the empires in the past, if we come into power, we will allow you to have your own nation, your own state. And then of course, when they did come to power, that did not happen. But they used to be anti-imperialists. Now they are imperialists.
When you hear Adrian Zenz's presentation in a minute, you'll hear him mention Mr. Chen Quanguo, who was appointed by the top leader as the man in charge of carrying out the first five years of this project, mainly of mass detentions and indoctrination for both parents and children. I wanted you to have a picture of him.
When we first heard about these camps, it was by hearsay through eyewitnesses that had fled China or had contact with people inside of China that knew about this. Then people started looking online for satellite imagery and they discovered not only the camps under construction. It is also possible to discover how they are expanded and modified over time. And multiple news organizations got themselves into this. So we have a lot of documentation of where they added watchtowers and so on.
This is all enabled by the world's most comprehensive and intrusive surveillance system that they built up in the previous years. Everyone is constantly under surveillance, including their phone, their car, their home, their everything. They have to submit their faces, their iris, and so on to police stations to be collected so that no one can escape this intrusive surveillance.
Then the targeting of people for detention in these camps started. It's totally apartheid. Only the ethnic minority people and not the Chinese settlers in this region were taken in. Sometimes there was no reason. Arbitrarily mass arresting people by quota. Sometimes there were reasons such as finding a Koran in someone's home.
So the everyday religion of these people, most of the people in this part of China are Muslim. Owning a family Koran constitutes a crime according to the regime now. And you will be sent to these camps. So it is an illegal collective punishment of an entire people. And it's also the largest systematic detention of ethnically defined people since World War II.
There are also many women inside of the camps. On the right, you see a drawing of what it can look like inside a women's camp. On the left, you have men separated from each other. From the start children were, as I said, orphaned by the detention of their parents. But it's important to remember that the detention of children is not just a side effect of seizing these adults. It's also a main event, because it is done to prevent the emergence of future generations of the Uyghur nation. So as part of a master plan of genocide, as I see it.
What are these camps really for? I believe they are to force convert the detainees from their original ethnicity to Chinese. And that is exactly like in the children's boarding schools where Uyghur language, culture, and religion are forbidden on pain of torture, solitary confinement, and so on. So it's another version of the American slogan. Kill the Uyghur and save the man. And I don't think any of the Chinese government attempts to first deny and then somehow justify having these camps, none of this has really worked.
What is part of their master plan is to transfer the detainees to forced labor to exploit them. And we have seen only last week that there are slave workers also in seafood processing in Eastern China. I believe that the reason why most detainees are not killed right away, like they could have obviously, is because of this exploitation. There is an estimate of 3 million people currently in forced labor. That is generating a wealth for the state. And that may be the reason why they are not killing them.
Those who are not able-bodied and able to contribute in that way, they're sent to prisons where we hear many die of maltreatment. There's also this strange stream of messages that we see about people who are sent home from prison and then die the next day in their own home.
While this is going on, the entire society is subjected to forced assimilation in a huge campaign where Uyghurs are made to switch to Chinese ways, Chinese foods, pork, alcohol, all of this. It also includes the systematic destruction of mosques, pilgrimage sites, et cetera. And that is to destroy the foundation of a future resuscitation of the Uyghur nation.
One strange example with a Cornell connection is how among the many cultural leaders that they have detained alongside the regular people who have nothing to do with any of this, the musicians, poets, writers, imams, professors, and so on, one is the anthropologist Rahile Dawut, who was seized in 2017.
And while they seized him at the airport in Urumqi, they were bulldozing the site that she had been researching for many years. And it's possible that that was actually a coordinated action. Seize the person, make her disappear, and make sure that what she described is no longer there. She gave a lecture here at Cornell in 2012. I haven't been able to find out where it was, but maybe it was in this room.
Another intellectual that's disappeared is the musician Ablajan. His music video "Dear Teacher" I think gives a clue. Because it presents the Uyghur kids as perfectly able to be both traditional and modern Uyghur and Chinese at the same time. This is absolutely against the Chinese government's idea that we have to root out their culture because it's impeding them. It's impeding progress. It's worthless, useless. We have to destroy it to save them and to save our nation. And this musician, he made these videos saying exactly the opposite. And he was using both Uyghur and Chinese. And that's something that they will just not allow.
We can conclude despite the fact that there is a genocide, despite the fact that China blocks independent observers, notice that Adrian Zenz after his publications on the sterilizations of women, they shut down the government website that he had been drawing on apparently in panic.
You have to imagine a panicked bureaucracy saying, God, what are these foreigners doing with our statistics? How could they find this? And as you will hear from Adrian, they are now shutting down the publication of statistics of anything from schooling to demography and so on, because they don't dare put it out there anymore.
And even in the absence of transparency, we estimated 900,000 children already are detained. That includes both those detained because their parents have been disappeared into camps and forced labor and prisons but also children that have been simply taken to boarding school even though their parents are still living in general society. And the policy that has been announced is that the plan is to have all Native children go to this kind of sequestered boarding school.
So in my view, this is a cornerstone of a premeditated multi-year genocide with the goal of having no future generations of Uyghur. They are using a whole range, as I mentioned, of other measures as well. Promoting settlers, Chinese men marrying Native women, and the other way around-- not the other way around, all with the same goal.
Notice, by the way, the name of the region we are talking about is the Uyghur Autonomous Region. That's the official Chinese name of the area. But if the Uyghurs were truly autonomous, in charge of their own area, it's very hard to imagine that they could allow all these things happening that we are now seeing.
I see it as the Chinese party state hitting human dignity itself is robbing people of their dignity. Millions of innocent people are reduced to zombie slaves. Children facing trauma and loss when they're robbed of their language, religion, and culture, the foundations of Uyghur identity, and thus of their dignity. And all of this violates the letter and the spirit of the Genocide Convention, especially the explicit prohibition of transferring children from one people to another.
There's also violations of the Convention of the Rights of the Child as well as several commitments China has made to protect the cultural heritage that they are currently bulldozing. And given all this, I think that as human beings, as scholars, as a University, we should be calling for halt to these atrocities.
Thank you. And to find out more, you can either go to the literature list that I printed out. There should be a couple of copies left, I hope. Or you can go to either of these websites that has lots more information about this.
OK. Now we can move to the presentation by Adrian Zenz summing up his view of the current situation.
ADRIAN ZENZ: Hello, everyone. It is my pleasure and privilege to be part of this event via video recording. My apologies that I was not able to attend in person. I'm happy to speak on the topic and research of parent child separation on which I conducted research first in early 2019 and then in late 2020.
Parent child separation constitutes a very important aspect of the atrocities in Xinjiang, particularly through breaking the intergenerational transmission of culture of spirituality of language, many other things. And so separating this connection constitutes a very important aspect of the atrocity, of the ongoing slow genocide that we are witnessing in the region. So let me elaborate a couple of specifics, background, and the sort of state of our understanding.
Now, when Chen Quanguo came to Xinjiang in 2016, it's quite clear that he knew he had only about seven months of time before the campaign of mass internment. It was in my opinion premeditated. And therefore, besides massive police recruitments to prepare for this campaign of mass internment, Chen prepared in other ways too, knowing that likely many children would effectively become parentless.
In September 2016, merely one month after ascending to power, Chen proposed a massively accelerated preschool construction campaign with early 2017 as the campaign start date. The aim was to achieve in advance the goal of the next five year plan of three years universal preschool education for all children. This was clearly a new initiative and a diversion from the original plan. The original plan had just been drafted in May 2016. It only called for an 80% preschool enrollment share for children aged four to six years by 2020.
Chen aimed for 100% by the autumn of 2017. So a dramatic acceleration. Specifically, for example, we have the original five year plan for Kashgar prefecture for 2016 to 2020, which was only to have a three year age group preschool enrollment rate of 80% by 2020. In January 2016, this plan envisioned a construction and expansion of 490 new and existing preschools by 2020.
However, after Chen Quanguo came in, Kashgar ended up building a total of 1,152 preschools and much faster. By late February 2017, Xinjiang had begun the construction of nearly 4,400 "bilingual," quote unquote, meaning Chinese language focused preschools, with a planned intake of over 560,000 new students. The focus of the campaign was, of course, the rural south, and it was done with great urgency.
Several news reports noted that the construction was done at maximum pace using a Chinese idiom referring to spurring a horse at full speed with a whip. The coordination between the involved government departments for the fast construction of the schools was done in a quote, "military command fashion," end of quote.
A January 2018 document, the Xinjiang Youth Development Plan 2017 to '20, reveals the true need behind this urgency. It generally speaks of the need to support minors who are not sufficiently cared for. But uniquely, and this wording is unique to Xinjiang, not found in similar youth development plans of other regions, the Xinjiang version of the plan includes minors of persons in detention and minors of persons-- minors of reeducation trainees. Persons in reeducation. So openly speaks of the need to care for uncared minors of persons in reeducation.
In 2018, Xinjiang embarked on a campaign to centralize and expand the boarding capacities of schools across all levels. The government issued a call to strengthen the construction of boarding schools in March 2018. A government directive from Kashgar from August 2018 states the region is striving to complete the 2020 goal of the construction of dormitory based schools, meaning-- and it states that for grades four and higher, boarding is mandatory.
Government statistics show that between 2017 and '19, numbers of boarding students in primary and middle schools, so grades one to nine, increased by 77% from nearly 500,000 to 880,000. So we have an increase of 382,000 boarding students during the time frame of the peak of the internment campaign. Since then the state has stopped publishing this kind of data.
Between 2017 and '19, the number of primary and middle schools in Xinjiang decreased while their total floor space grew, reflecting a centralization of educational facilities. So the average floor space for primary school, for example, rose by 45% and for middle schools by 43%, reflecting this centralization in boarding and highly securitized boarding complexes.
Educational facilities in Xinjiang became highly securitized and also intensely political environments where students live and study under the careful watch of a sophisticated high tech surveillance apparatus. The schools are required per policy to employ security guards with, quote, "firm political views," end of quote. They feature multi-tiered defensive intrusion prevention systems that can rival even those installed in internment camps.
Installing full coverage video surveillance, some boast electric fences and computerized security patrol management systems equipped with one button alarms. One Xinjiang middle school published a procurement bid for a 2.1 million RMB campus video surveillance system, which is more than some reeducation camps advertised to have spent on surveillance systems.
Propaganda reports about the Hotan City Vocational Skills Education and Training Center, the reeducation camp, stated that the camp has an immediately adjacent sunshine preschool and primary school so that parents can engage in, quote, "carefree study." The children eat and live at the schools. Many of them reportedly started to call their teachers mummy, mama in Chinese.
According to the report, children are told that they and their parents are both "studying," quote unquote, so that their family will be-- family life, quote, "will be happier in the future." Another report about another preschool connected to the same camp, the Hotan City Kindness Preschool, says that it admits children who are only a few months old.
Several other articles state that the state established schools with boarding or child care facilities next to so called vocational training centers, reeducation camps, as a convenient service to the detained reeducation students, quote unquote. One such report about [INAUDIBLE] reeducation camp states that the children eat and live for free there. Parents can therefore save up their work incomes for their children's future education.
Another facility notes that children are taken care of. The preschool female workers can freely enjoy life by dancing in the public square. The center has also its own nursery for children below typical preschool age.
In late 2020, I published new data from internal government spreadsheets pertaining to just one localized region showing over 10,000 mostly Uyghur children in, quote, "hardship" due to one or both parents detained. About 10% of these had both parents in detention. A number of them were shown to have been put into state orphanages, some of which located directly next to regular schools.
In 2019, Yarkant County in Kashgar stated that just under 20% of all primary and secondary school students in the county were considered by the state to be students, quote, "in difficult circumstances." Generally in China, children in difficult circumstances are typically defined as children with at least one parent who is severely disabled or seriously ill, where the children themselves have a serious disability, where at least one parent is dead or serving a long prison sentence, or children with single parent or low household income, where parents or remaining parents are unable to fulfill guardianship duties. According to the policy documents, these children are to be, quote, "included in centralized state care."
The evidence contained in the local government spreadsheets on, quote, "children in difficult circumstances" with one or both parents in detention can be corroborated through several publicly available sources. A notice issued by Kashgar prefecture in September 2018 uses the terms couples where both partners are detained in reeducation and couples where both partners are in vocational training internment camps.
Their children are referred to as, quote, "children in difficult circumstances." The document openly states that when these children's parents are both in camps, the family cannot pay for their medical insurance bill, then the insurance for them and their children who are at school must be paid for by the local authorities.
Xinjiang's weaponized boarding education system in sum, I'm closing now, represents a powerful tool of assimilation. A June 2018 notice issued by the Xinjiang Education Department proclaimed that by the end of that year, the region's 2.94 million students in mandatory education grades one to nine were expected to have a fully Chinese medium language education.
By separating children from parents and making itself the primary parent, the state is moving towards a crucial stage of its long term project of coercive social re-engineering in the region. The international community is responsible for closely monitoring the fate of these children.
In closing, I may say it's very concerning that the state-- many important statistics are no longer published by the state, both population statistics, population breakdowns, birth rates, educational statistics such as boarding school situations. Data is being withheld, which is making the study, of course, very difficult. We have other witness reports. We have studies by media on the fate and situation and the abuse happening to these children.
And it's very, very important. I'm very grateful that Magnus is highlighting and [INAUDIBLE] are highlighting the fate of these children at the event today. And I hope that further study can be conducted. And even more, I hope further advocacy can take place. If there's any questions, feel free to contact me by email. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
MAGNUS FISKESJO: Hold your questions for Adrian. If you do want his email, I can give it to you. And with that, we're now welcoming Rukiye and her presentation.
[APPLAUSE]
RUKIYE TURDUSH: Thank you very much, everyone. Thank you very much for Magnus and Adrian Zenz's very informative and very important presentation. They have covered almost everything about China's current policies that targeted Uyghur children and their actions as well.
I want to talk about what is happening to these children inside the boarding schools and those so called orphanage camps. It is very difficult to know actually what's happening to these children in China's orphanage camps and boarding schools, because they were not allowed to visit their families. Their children in boarding school allowed to visit only once in two weeks. And the children in orphanage camps, we don't know what's happening to them. It's very difficult to find out. And the parents or relatives are not allowed to visit them. So finding information about those children is extremely difficult.
But I rely on my information. We rely usually the information, especially me, relying on the information that the school workers posted on the social media and the parents of the children took the video when the children visit the home and they posted on social media. Also the Chinese state media, more obviously the propaganda purposes, they posted some information on the state media. And I also rely on the information that my personal interview with Uyghur parents in diaspora who lost their children in the camps and some of the kids-- that some of the parents or kids were released.
So the age removed or collected children is between seven months to 16 years. I have interviewed dozens of parents in Uyghur diaspora and collected photos and other information of 62 children. 40 of these children among the 62 were believed to be in Chinese orphanage camps and the rest of them's whereabouts is unknown. And that means it's very difficult for these children to find out their parents or be reunited with their families even if they're grown up and released from the camps.
The conditions inside the facilities are not the same. For example, in some institutions, school age girls and boys are mixed in the same dormitory and some of the facilities and three, four kids squeezed in very small bed. And they mixed with sick kids and healthy kids in some facilities. And siblings are separated.
For example, some siblings and sent to other city and some siblings were sent to another city and they don't know which. Because, for example, one family's kids or three kids are detained or taken to the orphanage camps in Hotan and one city. The brother was sent to Kashgar or her sister was sent to Gulja. It's like that. So different cities. So it's very difficult for them to find out their siblings too.
And they're all locked in prison facilities, like Adrian Zenz explained. Have implemented full coverage surveillance system and perimeter alarms and 10,000 volt electric fences on these facilities. The video secretly filmed by the independent media Bitter Winter Journalists shown one of the orphanage camps called [INAUDIBLE]. Based on that video, there are 2,000 Uyghur children in the facilities of Lop County alone in 2017. It explained that those kids are all from double detained Uyghur families. Just as Adrian Zenz explained, both parents were detained, so they called double detained Uyghur families.
Those children were put under military discipline and locked in prison style facilities. Public security forces and the police teachers instruct them in Chinese language and political study. They were forced to eat pork and not allowed to practice their language, culture, or religion. Workers in the facility told undercover journalists from the Bitter Winter that these kids display a very unstable mood and some of them tried to kill themselves by drinking detergent or eat fish bones.
So inside the instruction-- inside instruction overwhelmingly prioritize the indoctrination of the Communist Party's political agenda and imposition of the Han Chinese language. Chinese culture has become a compulsory course for children, Uyghur children. Sometimes forced to these children forced to wear, you can see on the photo, ancient Han Chinese ethnic costumes as a school uniform. And they are forced to sing Red Party songs, Chinese party songs.
And in this photo, you can see that these kind of uniforms usually-- there's another photo I want to show. Yeah, these kind of uniforms usually is not worn by the ethnic Han Chinese unless there is a special occasion, I guess, in China. But here's a part of the break of the roots efforts of make these children not only speaking Chinese but feel like Chinese, look like Chinese. That's why they put them as those and make them wear that clothes.
I want to show another video that how and why little Uyghur girl afraid to pronounce her brother's name in Uyghur and can't tell his brother's Uyghur name. Because when the teacher ask him what is your brother's name, and she said, I cannot tell you his Uyghur name, but I don't know his Chinese name. Probably she was separated from her siblings, brother, so she didn't know that her brother has get Chinese name after they're separated.
So she said, I don't know his Chinese name. And the Chinese teacher said, OK, tell me the Uyghur name. And she said no, I can't tell. If I say the Uyghur name, what if you scolded me? So she's afraid she even-- that's mean they were not allowed to say their Uyghur name in these boarding schools. And I think you can see this video here. How I'm going to play this. Oh yeah, sorry.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[SPEAKING CHINESE]
[END PLAYBACK]
RUKIYE TURDUSH: OK, so this is the video. I just explained it. And you can see, there are plenty of videos how Uyghur kids indoctrinated the Chinese language and CCP propaganda, with CCP propaganda.
And I would like to show you another video. That Uyghur boy were forced to deny his Uyghur identity as they consciously obeyed their Chinese teacher and dictate that I am Chinese. I have black hair, I have black eyes, yellow skin, and I am the children of [INAUDIBLE] and the [INAUDIBLE], ancient Chinese people's name. So he said I am Chinese actually. He was completely denying his Uyghur identity. All school children was forced to dictate like that things to deny the Uyghur identity.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[SPEAKING CHINESE]
[END PLAYBACK]
RUKIYE TURDUSH: [INAUDIBLE] play full this video. It's longer. And I already explained what he said. And actually not all of the Uyghurs eyes are black. They have brown, blue, green eyes, very mixed people, the Uyghur. And they have brown hair. Too some of them even have blonde hair, some of them has black hair. So completely denying their identity and force them to say that my eyes is black and I have yellow skin. My ancestors is [INAUDIBLE]. This is very ridiculous and it can show that how these children are forced to deny their identity.
The indoctrination process in orphanage camps is not only those party slogans and denying their identity. There is a military indoctrination as well. And I want to-- I forgot to say something. There is this kind of indoctrination actually start in very young age. So I want to show another video quickly. This kid in the video is around about three years old. And when he was asked about the Chinese red flag and who he loved the most, he said Xi Jinping. This video here. So I want to show.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[SPEAKING CHINESE]
[END PLAYBACK]
RUKIYE TURDUSH: So the indoctrination process in orphanage camps and the boarding schools is painful. And the videos posted by Han Chinese teachers depict children sitting in rigid plastic chairs for prolonged periods, appearing very tired and exhausted as they struggle and are forced to learn Han Chinese language.
They are forced to repeatedly recite party slogans despite the constantly the yawning and even crying. They are compelled to chant the Red Communist Party songs. And their emotional distress is evident. Because of the time issues, I don't want to show these videos, but we have plenty of those kind of videos posted by the Chinese teachers from the boarding schools or orphanage camps.
As part of the brutal genocidal agenda, these Chinese institutions, boarding schools and orphanage camps, recruit Uyghur children into the CCP's warrior ideology actually. The one Han Chinese individual profile name is [INAUDIBLE] in Xinjiang, self defined as a promoter of patriotism and ethnic unification posted numerous videos in Douyin account where he asked the question of random Uyghur children in the street. These kids are probably not from orphanage camps who aren't allowed to go out. Most likely they are from boarding schools.
I collected 38 of his videos on the day that they celebrating the establishment of the People's Republic of China. All questions related to loyalty to China and the Communist Party from their body language and their tone, we easily see that these children's answers are dictated and memorized because they're talking at reading speed and very loudly.
Only two kids say they will become a teacher like they are Chinese teacher when they grow up. The rest of all the kids all [INAUDIBLE] the firm answers such as I love China. I love Communist Party. And I will become a soldier, protect the Chinese border. I will become policeman, fight with the bad people. I will sacrifice my blood for China. I will die for China. And I'm not going to afraid to die. They talking like that.
So question is, what will be the future of Uyghur children? Are they fully assimilated and become ethnic Han Chinese? In other words, become more loyal nationalist Han Chinese than original Han Chinese to the CCP? Or they will be just become nobody. Not Uyghur, not Han Chinese, but people who lost identity and emerged with new slave identity who could unconditionally serve for China or China's nation.
The many Uyghur kids in East Turkestan say they are Chinese when they were asked the question about their identity. Just last week I saw one video that Han Chinese guy randomly asked question from two Uyghur kids about their ethnicity at the street. Actually his question was very clear. He asked are you Uyghur or Tajik? And the kids right away said, we are Chinese. So he took a video and posted the conversation in social media.
Evidently, these kids can't be Uyghur when they grow up, because they are denying their identity because they were culturally assimilated and forced to deny their identity. But they can't be treated as Han Chinese because racially, they don't look like Han Chinese. And the Chinese people never accept them as a Han Chinese. Usually even the mixed kids who are born from Han Chinese and other ethnic parents in China always face discrimination in Chinese society. And I personally witnessed that in many years. And the Chinese people call them [CHINESE]. That means is not pure.
I can concluded that indoctrination of these Uyghur children has following potential consequences. First, many of these children's parents were detained for having more than two or three children, considered as a violation of China's family planning policies. Or in other words, Xi Jinping is fear of Uyghur population as a national security threat. So precondition is created for removal of these children. As the planning ethnic destruction is the priority through assimilation of these children, China are not focused on well being or security of these children. Mental and physical health of these children are unknown.
Second, under the guise of education, the development of children's free and critical thinking skills as well as their beliefs and opinions are heavily restricted. Instead of encouraging analysis and independent thought, these Uyghur children are coerced into memorizing party slogans, party propaganda, and regurgitating information from textbooks. This will effectively hijacking the intellectual development of their brain and the creativity. The hopes and the dreams of these children are not allowed to flourish organically but rather is directed towards the predetermined agenda of the Chinese state colonizers.
Creation of such as an absolute loyal robotic new generation of Uyghurs will contribute to the justification of the innocence of Chinese colonialism, as these new generation of Uyghurs not only cannot present their own Uyghur identity, perspective, and historical roots but will defend the Chinese colonialism to their own land in the future.
So by training these children as slave minded future soldiers who are unconditionally willing to sacrifice themselves in a war and the conflict for the Chinese state, it becomes apparent that China's [INAUDIBLE] have no concern for these children's future well being or their freedom to choose their own path of life. They may become hate production against anyone who consider it as Chinese enemy.
Since they were not treated as Han Chinese or equally as Han Chinese, this cultural assimilation does not make them Han Chinese but slaves. Clearly the intention of these child focused policies, far more than forced assimilation but genocidal intent, that transformed those kids into [INAUDIBLE] so they can use them for their own dangerous missions such as wars. You may ask where's the China's genocidal intent to kill or destroy these kids? They didn't kill these kids. But I think since the end result of sacrificing themselves for China would fulfill the kill, there is no need for the Chinese state to reveal any genocidal intent to kill these kids first.
Based on the consequences, we can conclude that the intention is to destroy ethnic Uyghurs through destroying young Uyghur generation. And it's genocidal because extermination or assimilation of young Uyghur generation and it's genocide, because Uyghur people need to continue their generations. And this kind of extermination or assimilation of Uyghur generation will lead to discontinue Uyghur population grow as an ethnic and religious people.
China's genocidal intention is to removing these children are also very clear from their slogans, for example, Chinese settlers in the station, the boarding schools and orphanage camps has huge power. Their main focus is to express in the Chinese slogan cut the generation, cut the roots, and break up the lineage, break up their origin. In Chinese they call, quote unquote.
[SPEAKING CHINESE]
To facilitate Chinese state genocidal policies. This intent was officially stated in the number six document distributed by Kashgar government administration office in March 6, 2018. And it's clearly genocidal. In conclusion, Chinese colonialism in region is the root cause of the mass scale displacement of Uyghur children implemented with institutionalized genocidal policies that aim to eradicate the future generation of Uyghurs that are not yet born. Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
MAGNUS FISKESJO: We're now moving to speak with Zumret and her family. She wants to start by showing us a video clip.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
- My name is Zumret Dawut and this is my story. I was born on June 16, 1982 in Urumqi, East Turkestan, a part of China. I got married to my husband, Imran Muhammad, a Pakistani man, in 2005. We had three children. We weren't rich, but our family was happy. What I enjoyed most was traveling, seeing new sights, being free. Because in Urumqi, things were never great. And then it got worse.
In 2016, Chinese authorities requested Uyghurs to return to their place of origin. They began to build police stations every 300 meters in the residential areas. They forced us to install a special application on our phone that monitored any time I would say something about Islam. People would be taken away to detention camps if the authorities found anything representing the Muslim faith in their homes. So people threw out their stuff. Eventually the sewers were lined with copies of Koran and prayer mats.
I was preparing lunch and got a phone call to report to the police station immediately. I thought it was just a check in. I arrived and two police officers came and took me by my arms to the basement, put me in a tiger chair. They asked me about my phone calls, about my visits abroad, which Uyghurs I have met there, whether I had more children because of my Muslim religion.
[SCREAMS]
The interrogation continued the whole night. The next day, they took me to a police car with iron gratings. A hood was placed over my head. I thought they were going to shoot me. When they took the hood off, I saw that I was in a kind of a military hospital with many Uyghur women. They took our fingerprints and photos, vagina tests, an ultrasound, a blood sample, eye scans.
The police then took me to the car again and placed the hood over my head again. We traveled for one and a half hours. When they took the hood off, I realized I was in a detention camp. I had to change in front of two male officers and one female officer. I was then taken to a cell. There were more than 30 women in there, but not everyone could sleep at the same time. I soon realized that the women were taking turns. Half were lying and half were standing and they changed every three hours.
Every day we would be taken to a large hall where we were made to sit for four or five hours at a time and told about the greatness of Xi Jinping. On the second day of the camp, I was taken to a room. I saw boxes on the ground and realized they were full of human hair. I had always been proud of my hair and they grabbed me and chopped it off. I couldn't stop crying the entire time.
[CRYING]
The food quality was very bad. But as I was starving, I ate the food. There was an old woman who had diabetes and I shared some of my bread with her. Two camp guards came who saw that through the camera and beat me. As they did, I accidentally mentioned the name of Allah and they beat me more.
On certain nights, the camp guards came to the cell to select young, pretty girls to take them away. On one occasion, I was able to ask one sister a little older than me what had happened. She told me that they had undressed her, made her naked, beat her, and the police officer urinated on her. She tried to kill herself that night. But since she didn't have access to any room, she tried to chew her own wrists.
While I was there, my husband did everything he could to find me. He went around all the police stations in Urumqi to ask about my whereabouts, but they refused to reveal anything to him because of order from higher authorities. So he went to the Pakistani consulate in Beijing twice-- because of order from higher authorities. So he went to the Pakistani consulate in Beijing twice. He then threatened to speak to international media outlets. The Beijing authorities finally got back to him and warned him to stop speaking to the media.
In the hall, the camp guards stated that Allah does not exist, but Xi Jinping does and did many good things for us. On one occasion after the class, they asked us does Allah exist? I stayed silent. I couldn't say no. So they beat me again and again. What kept me going through all this was to not let the Uyghur people become extinct.
I woke up and was told I was leaving. I was given back my clothes. They again placed a black hood on my head and drove me for about one and a half to two hours. We arrived at the police station and my handcuffs were removed. My husband was there waiting. I couldn't believe it was finally over.
I was forced to sign a form stating that I had religious extremist ideas and that is why I had to go to the camp. I got home and told my husband we needed to leave Urumqi. We couldn't live here anymore. It wasn't safe.
The Chinese authorities instituted a forced pairing system. A family of four Han Chinese had to stay for 10 days in our home every month. I was forced to treat this family very well, including shopping for them. Every Monday morning, we were forced to attend a Chinese flag raising ceremony and praise Xi Jinping.
At another flag raising ceremony, the authorities asked mothers who had more than two children to stay after the ceremony. A police car collected me with four other women and took us to the hospital. I was given anesthetics and lost consciousness. When I came back to my senses, I felt a lot of pain. I was told I have been sterilized.
My husband and I wanted to leave China with our family, but the authorities wouldn't let us travel anywhere. They hold our passports. After many attempts, we were finally given a meeting at the police station. I undertook not to reveal anything about the camps. Finally, I was allowed to fly to Islamabad. Every day there I received phone calls from the Chinese authorities asking me to give them names of Uyghurs I would meet in Pakistan. I didn't give them any names. I knew I would never go back.
We finally got a flight to the United States, but I was so worried, afraid that I would be arrested at any point until I got on that plane. But the plane lifted off, bound for Washington. As we arrived, my husband warned me that the US Customs would probably pull me aside. The customs officer took my passport, looked at me, and asked me about my Uyghur roots. I was so nervous. He didn't pull me to the side room. Instead he said, "welcome to America." It was one of the happiest moment of my life.
Shortly after settling, I started talking about what I had been through. The Chinese government has made threatening calls asking me to stay silent and to cherish my days with my children. My father passed away and I am 100% convinced that the Chinese government mentally or physically abused my father and caused his death. My brother don't talk to me anymore. But I won't be silent. I need to tell people my story. I need people to know what is happening to the Uyghurs.
My family and I still aren't rich. But we are happy, because we are free.
[NON-ENGLISH SINGING]
[END PLAYBACK]
MAGNUS FISKESJO: Thank you everyone. Are these working? We now move to a conversation. We learned about Zumret's escape from the situation in her homeland. And now we can move to asking her some questions about her experience during this time as it relates to this symposium. So one question is if you witnessed children being taken away during this period.
RUKIYE TURDUSH: I'm going to be translator, by the way.
MAGNUS FISKESJO: Yes, I didn't mention that. Rukiye is going to help translate.
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
RUKIYE TURDUSH: Yes, I have witnessed that. Yes, I have witnessed that many kids were taken away from their families. That's why I have personal experience. That's why I could not sleep and I want the world know what's happening to these kids and I'm working hard to try to become their voices.
MAGNUS FISKESJO: And why would they take the children at a separate time, at a different time from the parents? They were not taking them all at once.
RUKIYE TURDUSH: You're not taking them all at once?
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
OK, when their parents were detained, the children were taken away, because the Chinese government has an excuse at that time. They said that these children has to be taken care of by the government. So once their parents were detained, children are going to be taken away.
MAGNUS FISKESJO: And after they were taken away, were there other relatives left behind that could visit them or no?
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
RUKIYE TURDUSH: No, none of them has the right to ask those kids. They were not allowed any of the relatives. If both parents were detained, the government has the right to take those kids. No one allowed, even the very close relatives.
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
Even when the parents were detained, even when the parents were detained, until the government's taken away those kids, if they are the neighbor and if we know them, if we try to bring the food those kids, we're going to get punishment. So people scared to look at those kids even until the government taking away those kids.
MAGNUS FISKESJO: And did you see children not taken and left behind and lingering after their parents or other family had been taken away?
RUKIYE TURDUSH: I'm sorry, could you repeat your question?
MAGNUS FISKESJO: Were there are also children that were left behind by the police as they were taking the parents away? Were there some children that were left behind?
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
RUKIYE TURDUSH: Usually if the one parent's detained, not the double parents, one parents are at home and able to take care of the kid, sometimes if the facilities are very crowded maybe and there is only one parent detained and they can leave the kid for that parent. If not, double parents detain.
MAGNUS FISKESJO: I seem to remember we talked about one case where you had noticed a little boy sitting alone on the steps of a house.
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
RUKIYE TURDUSH: OK. How are that kid. Sorry.
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
I witnessed it one of the boy not, only witnessed, whole neighborhood witnessed Mustafa, the one little boy. He was six years old. And after his mother was detained, he left with his father. His father was alcoholic and then this boy, I can see him every day even raining or snowing. I can see him every day that he was-- because their building was destroyed and they moved to different neighborhood and we were in the same building before, we moved to different neighborhood too.
But I can see that boy always going to stand, sit in front of the previous neighborhood, that destroyed area. And he was waiting there and I asked him, why do you sit there? He said, if my mom come back, she cannot find us. So I'm waiting here. And then he missed his mom so long after that. I think that's why he's dead. He's sick and then he passed away.
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
Sorry. She wants to continue or you want? Because--
MAGNUS FISKESJO: If she wants to, yeah.
RUKIYE TURDUSH: Explain how.
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
You can continue.
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
Whole neighborhood knows about his story because he told everyone that how much he missed his mom. And he used to sleep pinching his mom's neck, holding his mom's neck, always pinching his mom's neck. So that's why he kept telling the people I can't sleep. I have to hold my mom's neck. He told everyone. So everyone knows about his story. That's why he's become so famous and it was so affected me. And that's why I took his photo with me when I come to the US, his photos with me. I have his photo.
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
So I told the journalist about his story too, how he passed away.
MAGNUS FISKESJO: Thank you. We just saw in the film that you witnessed from the window how people were taken away. And I'm sure there would have been a lot of rumor and speculation in the neighborhood at what is going to happen to these people. What is going to happen to the children that are taken away? What would people say? What would they be guessing? What would they know and how could they know what happens after people were taken away?
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
RUKIYE TURDUSH: It's impossible to the people to come discuss each other what's happening to these kids, because always camera, the surveillance cameras and everywhere. Even they installed the surveillance cameras in our home too. We can't talk freely in our home, discuss about these kids, anything those kind of sensitive issues. But still sometimes when we find out somewhere no camera, then maybe we can in the dark or somewhere. So we can talk about. But you can guess it. Because it's not only one child were taken. So many massively collected.
So that's why we were thinking where these children going, these mass children. Maybe they're going to put them in the camp too like their parents. We talk like that. But no more than that. We couldn't. It's very, very difficult, very rare for us to discuss about that, because we are afraid even from our expression from the camera they can find out what they were talking, what we were talking. That's why we don't discuss much.
MAGNUS FISKESJO: Shall we try asking Zumret's children what were their experiences going to Chinese school, if we'd like to share?
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
RUKIYE TURDUSH: My children didn't go to those kind of Uyghur children's boarding school or orphanage camps [INAUDIBLE] because when they were born in my area, there is no Uyghur school. So I sent them to Chinese school. They study with the Chinese people in the Chinese school. So they did not experience like those Uyghur children in boarding schools or orphanage camps. But they still have some friends and they heard and they have-- because they are Uyghur in the Chinese classes, Chinese students, and they maybe have some personal experiences. You can ask them.
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
I know that they were discriminated and physically punished just because of they are Uyghur in the Chinese classes and Chinese. Even they are studying with the Chinese school with the Chinese students. So they can talk about that if they want to.
MAGNUS FISKESJO: So can we ask maybe both your son first and then your daughter? Can we ask first your son and then your daughter what was it like to be an Uyghur student in the Chinese school? Anything you'd like to share.
RUKIYE TURDUSH: He speaks English. Do you want to speak in English or do you want me to translate for you?
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
OK. Uyghur is better than English because he is new to USA too, so he want to speak in Uyghur. I'll still translate.
MAGNUS FISKESJO: Closer to the microphone. Thank you.
RUKIYE TURDUSH: Excuse me? OK, sorry. So he wants to speak in Uyghur because he's not long in the United States. So I'll still translate.
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
At the school if we-- because I'm Uyghur, if I fight with a Chinese kid, even I don't have any wrong saying and that Chinese kid did something wrong to me, still that Chinese teacher do not do anything, do not try to separate us, or do not let us stop the Chinese kid even they beat us but Uyghurs. And then they still even I didn't do anything wrong, Chinese teachers give us the punishment, doesn't give punishment to the Chinese student. They give punishment to us and ask me to write down 2,000 words apologized letter. So each time when we fight.
MAGNUS FISKESJO: What kinds of punishments were the teachers giving?
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
RUKIYE TURDUSH: OK. You say it already, I think, and I will repeat again. That they ask me to write apologize letter. That's a 2,000 words and apologize letter. I have to explain that how I feel bad to fight with that Chinese student and how am I going to apologize, how I'm going to become good behavior later on. So I have a lot of sorry things that I have to put on that letter. It's very difficult to fill. And any other punishment you asked? No?
MAGNUS FISKESJO: Oh. I wanted to ask in your class, it was Chinese school. So mostly Chinese. But how many Uyghur and how many Han Chinese students were there in a class? And if there were Uyghur students in the same class at yours, would you be talking to each other in the Uyghur language or always in Chinese?
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
RUKIYE TURDUSH: No, we're not allowed to Uyghur-- they not allowed the Uyghur kids to speak each other in Uyghur language. There is one other student he was Uyghur in my class. And the teacher asked us to come to his office and we walked front of him and the teacher was behind. We speak in Uyghur each other slowly. And then teacher was heard about that and he came was very angry. And he said, in this school, is not allowed to speak in Uyghur language. I don't want to see you speak in Uyghur language.
MAGNUS FISKESJO: And was this new or was it always the same? Did it change during the time you were in your school?
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
RUKIYE TURDUSH: It was before 2017. It was still we had restrictions in speaking in Uyghur language. It was there. But since 2017, it's become very, very restricted and intensified. It's impossible to talk in Uyghur language.
MAGNUS FISKESJO: Let's ask Zumret's daughter. What is your experience in the school? And is it different being a girl and a boy?
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
RUKIYE TURDUSH: It doesn't matter boy or girl. It's the problem is being Uyghur. If you are Uyghur, you're going to treated bad. Doesn't matter you are boy or girl. At my school is different than my brother's school. In his school, the teachers give them you're not going to talk, you're not allowed to maybe say that. But in my school if they find out if we speak in Uyghur, they're going to call our parents, try to suspend us.
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
Because her Uyghur is not very well too, that's why her mother tried to help to find the words and she couldn't find the words. She said that every Friday the teacher collect us, collect the Uyghur students, in the different room and they interrogated us. Every Friday it's the same routine. They keep asking us over and over. Is your parents pray? Is your parents read Koran? Do you have a Koran in your room? Do you pray? Those kind of questions they keep asking us.
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
My children are bigger, but usually when they call the elementary schools or very young kids, they collect and questioning them and they ask them try to be nice to them to try to get information from these kids' mouths. Like do you have Koran or any book in your home? Your father's prayed? They tried to be very nice and to get information.
These very young kids doesn't know sometimes tell that if they have Koran at home or praying mat at home. Yeah, I have seen. But maybe it's a language he's seen before. But his grandma said a present tense. He said I seen. So they were thinking and still they have it at home. And then they arrested parents because of that. It was happening to many families.
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
My kids always live in worry, because they worrying that if I said anything wrong on that Friday, they going to arrest my parents. So they live in constant worry.
MAGNUS FISKESJO: So can I ask one of the questions that we brought up beforehand? And I think that you found it strange. But I have read that there are some of the Chinese teachers in the Uyghur region who were forced to treat their Uyghur pupils very harshly and punish them and so on. Some of them regret that and feel bad about it. And I wonder if you have ever seen any sign of that or if they would regret being too harsh on the Uyghur children. Would either of you like to comment on that?
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
RUKIYE TURDUSH: I want to tell you one story about my personal story for this question. When I was in Chinese school at that time, I was not big like this. I was very small kid. And the leader of the school, the other Chinese kid, he was leader of my class, he was tall and big. And he always tried to scold me and try to manage on me something all the time.
And I fed up and one day I said, why you always come to me? And then he choked me and then he made me fall and he step on me. And my teacher was there. Teacher was smiling and looking at us sarcastically. And usually the other Chinese kids fight, they always go. He always go to separate them, to stop them to fight. But he looked at me and smiled at me. So I never seen the regret.
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
When my son was beaten at that time, one of the kid in the class took a video and sent to me that video. And then that's how I found out he got beaten. And then I could not tolerate that and then I went to the school to talk with the school principal. And they were angry at me. They said, who are you to ask questions like that? If you don't know yourself, get lost. They talk like that. They didn't care.
MAGNUS FISKESJO: Would you like to add something to this question?
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
RUKIYE TURDUSH: You want me to repeat the question again?
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
No, I never seen any teacher regret.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] students will read them out.
MAGNUS FISKESJO: Yeah. We are moving into the next stop, which is the Q&A. If we can ask Ruslan, who's going to be the moderator to join us here at the table. Welcome. But before we move in, shall we give round of applause to our panel here? Thank you so much.
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
Thank you so much for your contribution to help us understand. So maybe you can also translate that we're moving to a Q&A. We will open to questions from the audience. And you don't have to answer. You can answer if you like.
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
Maybe we take a question from the room first and then we go online. There's a question there. Do we have someone to hand out-- yes we do. Thank you. Thank you.
AUDIENCE: How has it been coming to America for you and adjusting?
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
RUKIYE TURDUSH: How I could explain to you how I adjusted. I can explain to you that I feel like I'm a fish comes out of the mud to the river, like to the water.
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
So here is a school bus take the children and the school is very responsible. Over there, we have to send the kids to do a public bus. And many little kids sleep in the public bus. They miss and the kids are lost and so many kids are missing like that. There is no responsibility. There is no law to protect Uyghur.
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
I am so happy here because here in the schools, the teachers never hit or scold the children. And they are so responsible for children's safety and security. And the school bus always come to front of my door, take my kids to the school. So my children are safe. And what else I expect? I'm so happy.
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
In Chinese schools, I couldn't even the kids sick, I cannot ask the day off for the kids. Even one day or half day, that's impossible. They don't give. And they said, OK, get the letter from somewhere else, like some neighborhood office and somewhere. There's so many trouble over there to get a day off for the kids for some even family emergency or important things.
But here this time when I want to come here in US, I asked my children's teacher that they're going to come to the Cornell and they were so happy and they say to go enjoy it. It's so easy. I was so surprised how they get.
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
I feel that real humanity in USA. I feel that.
MAGNUS FISKESJO: Shall we take a couple from--
RUSLAN YUSUPOV: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
AUDIENCE: So I'll be reading some of the questions that we're getting on Zoom. So one person asked, are Uyghur children allowed to live in other cities and their parents allowed to live in other cities in China outside of Xinjiang? And are they allowed to move there? And if so, can they attend these schools and do their communities mistreat them at all?
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
RUKIYE TURDUSH: Let alone the kids, even adults it's impossible to from one city if you were Uyghur freely going to other city. They don't allow you to move. That's why whereas the parents the kids can't move, of course, when parents are not allowed.
AUDIENCE: Another question asked, how can we teach-- this is from a professor. They're asking how can they teach about this in University classes and do you have any comments on specific challenges or strategies about teaching about this issue? Specifically they also teach a Zoom course. And if you could talk about any difficulties you might encounter in that.
MAGNUS FISKESJO: So this is for me? I guess so.
RUSLAN YUSUPOV: I guess so.
MAGNUS FISKESJO: Thank you for your question.
RUSLAN YUSUPOV: Would you like to answer?
MAGNUS FISKESJO: Yes. Thank you for the question. It's, of course, possible to put together a class and to teach it. Here at Cornell, I'm fortunate to be able to do so. We have some classes like the introduction to anthropology that somebody has to teach and somebody has to do it. If not me, then my colleague. If not my colleague, then me.
But then we also have the space to develop our own course based on our own expertise, and I have done that. And I taught for several years a course on genocide, which also brings in the situation in China as a major focus. I was prompted to do so by what is happening in China since 2017.
And on the literature sheet I left up there, there's a reference to the Xinjiang documentation project based at UBC in Vancouver. That's a website where they have one section that is actually course syllabi. And my syllabi, one version, is up there together with some other professor's syllabi that they have opened up to people to borrow from. So I would recommend going to that website at Xinjiang documentation center at UBC in Canada.
And other professors, academics, could get inspiration to teach on this. I know also that there are many, many academics who teach courses, for example, on East Asia or China where they will also bring up what is happening to the Uyghurs as one part of the content. And that's, of course, also possible.
RUSLAN YUSUPOV: Thank you. Yeah. Do we have other questions online? Shall we just pause a little bit and then take some questions from the audience? So do we have someone wanting to ask a question on site here? Yes, please. Can you give the mic?
MAGNUS FISKESJO: Mic is coming. Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Hi. I'm a language teacher, so I always ask questions about languages. When I think about people from other nationalities who have had to leave their country and come to the United States or to France or to some foreign country, some nationalities succeed very well in maintaining their language in a foreign country. For example, the Estonians who came to the United States during the Soviet period, they kept their Estonian language. And maybe other nationalities don't succeed so well in keeping their language. They just begin to speak English.
What can we expect from the Uyghurs? Are there a large enough number of Uyghurs here in the United States or in different countries so that they can continue to speak in Uyghur and read in Uyghur and write in Uyghur and make websites in Uyghur?
RUSLAN YUSUPOV: Yeah. Thank you. Very important question about language preservation.
RUKIYE TURDUSH: The question for who?
RUSLAN YUSUPOV: Oh yeah.
MAGNUS FISKESJO: Would you like to translate?
RUKIYE TURDUSH: OK.
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
OK. I'll answer. Yes, I agree that some nations they can preserve their language because they always speak their own nation's languages at home. They are very strict on that and they have an opportunity to if that community is bigger and they live in the same places for their children play together all the time. That's a very, very challenging issue for Uyghurs right now too.
And from Canada and Canada and the US and everywhere, around the world, the Uyghurs are very, very small community but scattered around the world. Only in Turkey Uyghurs are big community in Turkey. We have so many Uyghurs over there. They speak Uyghur. The children has Uyghur language skills. So it's easier for them. Even though because Uyghur language is very close to Turkish language, they mix up the language, Uyghur children. And the they mix up the Uyghur language and Turkish language all the time.
But in English language countries and North America or European countries, they don't mix up the language, but it's hard for them to preserve. That's very difficult. That's a very challenging and it's a very good question too. And as an activist, I'm trying hard for that too, how we preserve. Many Uyghurs are parents too. They're very strict right now. They want to preserve their language. They're working hard. But we don't know what's going to happen in the future. We'll see.
RUSLAN YUSUPOV: Thank you so much. Yeah. Do we have any other questions from the audience? Yes, there is a person here. Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Given what you experienced with the surveillance, do you find it hard to have technology now in the US? Are you apprehensive of using technology now?
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
RUKIYE TURDUSH: We were very scared back home because of the Chinese surveillance system. That's why when we use the technology in even in US, because most of the apps are created by China, so many Chinese apps there still, we are not feel safe here. For example, we always get the message in Chinese language. How they know we could speak Chinese language and why they sending us the message in Chinese language? And each time when we receive the message in Chinese language, we're so scared. That's why in that regard, we're still scared here because so many Chinese apps.
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
I think it took a long time for us to recover. Even now my children when they see the police, American police, they were so scared. They feel shock and panic. And they were not the Chinese police. Don't be scared. It took a long time for me to calm down my kids. But I saw other people's kids speaking with the police and they joking and talking each other. And we look at them and then we feel that that's totally different. So I think it took a long time for us to recover.
RUSLAN YUSUPOV: So it's 3:00 PM right now and we are supposed to gradually or immediately transition to a coffee break. But if you have questions, feel free to approach during the coffee break. As for now, please join me for thanking Rukiye and Zumret and her kids for this gripping account and their experiences.
[APPLAUSE]
MAGNUS FISKESJO: Welcome back, everyone, including everyone who is on the Zoom attending the meeting. We're now moving to the second part of our day's program starting with Jeffrey Palmer, my colleague here at Cornell that I mentioned and introduced earlier also. We're very grateful that you're here. He's going to present his own work, which is a feature film showing how the residential schools into which American Indian children were put, how that might have looked if you were there. I tell you, I've seen it once and I am very, very impressed. So I'm glad that you are here.
I'm handing over to Jeff, then we'll have Amy Bombay speak from the psychiatrist perspective on the trauma these children suffer. And then we have our last and final Q&A session. Thank you very much. So please welcome again.
JEFFREY PALMER: Thank you. Hello. Oh, sorry. It's wonderful to be here. I just wanted to say a few things and then we'll start the film. My hope is that it will be a feature. It's a short film right now that all of you will be watching.
I guess the first thing I wanted to say is that I do see through the lens of history and language and cultural theory. But I'm mainly a storyteller. And so when I think about the experiences of my family, the tribal group that I'm from, which is the Kiowa tribe of Oklahoma, and my own experiences in terms of boarding schools and the assimilation policies that Native Americans faced for several hundred years, it's a story that is really, really closely connected to me. My great grandfather was in boarding school. My great grandmother, my father, my uncles, my cousins, my grandmother. All of them went through the boarding school system.
And it was interesting. I was just having a discussion about language and where the Kiowa language is right now. And the Kiowa language is pretty much down to about 20 fluent speakers. There used to be fluency not too many years ago, 50 to 100 years ago, many, many people speaking fluently.
And now it's all but disappeared. And part of that has been, again, part of the assimilation policies that were placed on Native American people and especially in boarding schools, where Native American people were not allowed to speak their language.
And this story, Ghosts, that I created is a true story. So I think that we can call this historical. But there is some fiction in it. So it is historical fiction in the sense that I tried to dramatize things because we don't have a lot of knowledge about what happened in some of these schools. Right now we're trying to figure out what those stories are and what actually happened.
And this is one of these stories. It's about three boys that escape a boarding school in Oklahoma. And I'll take a Q&A afterwards just to talk about it. But I hope you enjoy it. And there's a lot of Kiowa language in it. So take that in, because you might not ever hear it again. So thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[SPEAKING KIOWA]
[CICADAS CHIRPING]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[SMACKING]
- We will beat the savage you if you won't obey.
[COUGHING]
[SPEAKING KIOWA]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[SPEAKING KIOWA]
- The wounds will heal in time. Charles?
[SPEAKING KIOWA]
- Come now, let's get you to bed. I'll have to see to this doorknob.
- Oh Lord, oh God, create in me a new heart and a new right soul in me. In the name of Jesus I pray, amen.
- Amen.
[SPEAKING KIOWA]
- You can't. It's too far.
- Did you cry?
- Leave him alone.
- They stop when you cry.
- The ghost dance is starting, Seta. Grandfather calls to me.
- Your grandfather's dead.
- Boys, you will repeat after me and then spell each word I say. Your first word shall be servant.
- Servant. S-E-R-V-A-N-T.
- Trouble.
- Trouble. T-R-O-U--
- Start again.
- T-R-O-U-B-L-E.
- Brave.
- Brave. B-R-A-V-E.
[CICADAS CHIRPING]
- We will beat the savage out of you if you don't obey.
- Start again.
- Brave. B--
- Tonight we go. We'll follow the river downstream.
- Grandfather will protect us. I'll tell Paul.
- He'll never make it.
[SPEAKING KIOWA]
- Speak English, boys. You know what'll happen if you don't.
[SPEAKING KIOWA]
[SPEAKING KIOWA]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
- Seta.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
- Shoes. Get your shoes.
[CLATTERING]
- What devilment is this? You heard me, Paul. Put those down.
- Sir?
- What do you know about this?
- He didn't want to wet his bed, sir.
- That's ridiculous. He's too old for that.
- That's what I said.
- Get to bed. Open this door. Open this door.
- What is going on?
- Open this door immediately.
[BANGING ON DOOR]
Catch them.
[PANTING]
- Charles, Judah.
- This will not be tolerated.
[SPEAKING KIOWA]
- What is this place?
- You should not be out here. You need to go back.
- We're going home.
[SPEAKING KIOWA]
- The ghost dance is starting. The ones we lost are coming back.
[SPEAKING KIOWA]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[SPEAKING KIOWA]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[APPLAUSE]
[END PLAYBACK]
JEFFREY PALMER: So yeah, it's probably a little bright in here for some of the dark, dark imagery that's in that film. So I hope everybody got to see everything that they could in the film. But yeah, I made this a couple of summers ago and really, really proud of it. Really proud of the film. And I think it's a film that inspires and is about hope and survival.
So I always think to myself when I watch this film that even though my ancestors had gone through so much trauma in their lives and faced a genocide in this country, we're still here and we're still able to tell our stories and our language still survives. And I think that's probably one of the most important aspects to why I do the things that I do.
Probably 90% of the films that I make have Kiowa in them or some Indigenous language in them. So that really becomes the heart and the crux of why I do the things that I do. But I also think it's important that untold stories are told. And a lot of these stories, especially dealing with boarding schools in North America, whether it's what we call Indian boarding schools in the United States or residential schools in Canada, a lot of these stories are lost.
And we're trying to reclaim those stories and trying to figure out ways to bring them back so that we can talk about them, because I think not enough people do have discourse or talk about these particular stories. And we to. We need to really understand what happened in this country. And so I think that's another reason why I do the things that I do as an artist and filmmaker. So I'll open it up for questions.
AUDIENCE: Is it on? Testing. Jeff, that's a really amazing film. Great that you made it. Probably most of us aren't familiar or that familiar with ghost dances. Is it ritual or practice or where that fits in? That's clearly the historical fiction part. And could you maybe-- I think it might help us to understand the narrative a little bit if we knew a little bit more about that practice.
JEFFREY PALMER: Sure. Yeah. The story itself of the three boys' escape from this boarding school is in the historical record. But there's only a paragraph. And what I do know historically is that these boys escaped the Anadarko boarding school.
The story says at the very end we don't know what happened to these boys. And the truth of the story is that they left that evening. They walked for about 30 miles. And this was in January. And there was a snowstorm that hit and they died of hypothermia before they actually made it to their tribal village. And so all three of them perished. That is the true story.
What I want to believe in my mind, and when I tell this story, is that they had a purpose. They were going for a reason. And Wounded Knee, the Wounded Knee Massacre, which happened in South Dakota, which is now an area known as Pine Ridge Reservation, where Lakota elders, women, and children were gunned down practicing the ghost dance.
The ghost dance, it's ceremonial and its ritual. I think that it was a revitalization ritual. It was the idea of going back to something in the past and reconnecting with your ancestors. The idea of your ancestors coming back or the buffalo coming back, which was a major important source of food and also ceremony for Native people on the plains at that particular time. And it was spreading all over the sort of Midwest, central plains area.
And the Kiowas actually received the ghost dance around this particular time. And so to me, I felt like they needed that motivation to leave. There certainly could have been any motivation that they could have left in the place that they were at this particular boarding school, which they were surrounded by disease. They were surrounded by death. They were surrounded by people that were abusing them sexually and physically.
But the ghost dance for me in this particular film became really, really important, I think, in terms of as a motivator, of the idea of survival and the idea of renewal. And so that was the reason why I placed it into this context. So yeah. Other questions? Yes.
AUDIENCE: Hi. Thank you so much for your movie and the work that you do. I guess one question I had was particularly pertaining to language. So I'm not Native American, but I come from a group where our language has also kind of been erased. So I know all these histories, these stories, and a lot of part of culture is lost if the language is lost.
Do you think in the US the practice of-- so a lot of kids, they usually take a second language in middle school and high school, but they're all European languages. None of them are Native American languages. And I felt like personally when I went to high school and I was like, I knew more about Native American languages and how many of them are at the brink of extinction because there just aren't enough people who speak them anymore.
Do you think there's a way we could advocate or do you think it would be better to advocate for us being taught Native American languages rather than still reinstating, I guess, I see it as a remnant of colonialism, this Eurocentric perspective of still teaching French and German rather than appreciating these other languages that are truly a part of American history?
JEFFREY PALMER: Yeah. Absolutely. I certainly believe there should be a choice.
[LAUGHS]
It would be wonderful if every state who has-- every inch of this land has been inhabited by Indigenous people. And their languages and their culture sort of wrap around this whole place that we call the United States.
And for example, the fact that we have Gayogohono language here on this campus, Cayuga language on this campus, is really, really extremely important. It's a huge deal. Because there are not a lot of speakers and because of the historical idea of these people being removed. And the fact that we are able to speak Gayogohono here on this campus I think is really, really important.
But to have that in the public school system I think would open doors to so many things culturally, historically. It really would change I think the way that we think about that particular history which has been lost. But not only that, it again stimulates the idea that language revitalization or language preservation is really, really important no matter who is actually speaking the language.
It would be wonderful to hear people speak Kiowa that weren't Kiowa. And in fact, that did happen. At the University of Oklahoma, my dad taught Kiowa to kids from North Texas coming from Dallas. So there's kids walking around the campus who understood Kiowa. And I think that that is some somewhat an idea of decolonization in that particular time period.
So yeah, I agree that that would be wonderful. How it's possible is another question, how we can make that happen. Because you're right, the speakers are becoming less and less. And the idea of having conversation is becoming less and less. So it's a challenge. But it's a wonderful idea that I hope happens. So I'll keep that with me.
AUDIENCE: So like just following up on what you guys were just talking about, linguistic imperialism and how some languages are going to get dominated by others, like our main language English. So I think one maybe solution to this might be like integrating these, whether it be African languages or Native American languages. I feel like a lot of them are underrepresented in a lot of companies like Microsoft where you can instantly code, for example, if I type in Korean, that will be downloaded instantly.
So if we have other ways of documenting these gradually fading away languages into a place that's more permanent. Even if societies-- I mean I know that it's not a good way of conserving people using them often. But I feel like at the same time, these are little steps that people can take, whether it be through documentation or through just having that available in technology and in the records. I think that would be really useful.
JEFFREY PALMER: Yeah. I mean, Kiowa language is really, really lucky, because anthropologists have been studying Kiowa for 100 years. And so we have a lot of recordings. We have a lot of records and some of those have been digitized.
As I said, part of the projects that I do, a lot of them is just recording Kiowa speakers. They have nothing to do with cinema. It's just the idea of getting this down so that we can create a database. We can create something in the digital world and now this idea of the cloud where these things will remain. And that at some point, we can go to those things. There's a lot of people right now in immersion programs, teaching programs, all of these different things that are making amazing strides.
And I think part of it has to do with the digital era and exactly what you're talking about. And cinema becomes part of that. All kinds of things that are sort of new media becomes part of that. So I think that that's a wonderful-- it's been a wonderful tool for us that a lot of Indigenous people are utilizing. So I hope it works.
MAGNUS FISKESJO: Thank you so much. And can we continue asking you questions in the next round of Q&A?
JEFFREY PALMER: Sure. Yeah, absolutely.
MAGNUS FISKESJO: So thank you once again. Thank you so much.
JEFFREY PALMER: Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
MAGNUS FISKESJO: We are going to the last presentation of the day by Professor Amy Bombay that I hope we have online. I think I can see an image here.
AMY BOMBAY: Hi there. I'm really happy to be here today. I've learned a lot from listening to the presentations before me and I'll be carrying this information and those stories with me. And I plan to share them in my work as well.
And I hope that today in my sharing some of the research that our team has done in the context of looking at the long term effects of the Indian residential school system in Canada is helpful in some way for all of you and your understanding and your work. So I'll just go ahead and share my presentation screen.
So the title of my presentation is "Trauma and Resilience, the Long Term and Intergenerational Effects of Government Policies of Forced Assimilation and Child Removal." And I'm at Dalhousie University. And Dalhousie is located in Halifax in the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi'kmaq people.
And so just to give a very, very quick background about colonialism in Canada. Like in other contexts, Indigenous peoples in Canada were viewed by the newly formed government as a problem to be solved. And what occurred as a result was unrelenting government sanctioned actions aimed at forced assimilation.
So I don't have-- there was a number of many different harmful actions and policies by the government, including broken treaties, stolen land, forced relocations, forced sterilizations, and many more. But today I'll touch on and be discussing some of the policies that our team has looked at in terms of the long term effects.
The first of which is the Indian residential school system that targeted children who were deemed the most suitable for a complete transformation. And that was a quote. And then following the residential school system, it was followed by what we call now as the Sixties Scoop, in which the child welfare system really kind of took over in terms of their efforts to assimilate Indigenous children.
And to give you a little bit more background, first starting with the Indian residential school system, it occurred in Canada from the mid 1800s until the last school closed in 1996. And Indigenous children from across Canada were forced to attend. And again, another famous quote was that they were meant to take the Indian out of the child.
And so as very similar to the boarding school experience in the US, children were separated from their families, communities, and cultures. There was widespread abuse and neglect. Many children died in these schools. And of course, because of the goal that was forced assimilation, there was daily racism. Children's hair were cut when they came in, which was very important in many cultures. There was cultural denial, shaming. So all of really terrible, a number of terrible different things. And these children experienced chronic adversity.
And just to give you an idea, this is from a survey that was done with residential school survivors living in First Nations communities. And they were asked which experiences they felt at residential school had negative impacts on them. And so just to go through these, most felt that they were really negatively impacted by isolation from family, loss of cultural identity, harsh discipline, separation from community, witnessing abuse, not being able to talk about it while at school, the harsh living conditions.
There was significant physical neglect. There was nutritional studies done where children were starved in residential school. And as well as sexual abuse and various other types of stressful experiences.
And so what we know from research in other populations, for example the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study in the US, is that the more childhood adversity that is experienced, the greater the risk for a variety of negative health and social outcomes. Studies in various populations since this ACEs study have shown graded relationships between the number of childhood adversities and the number of comorbid health and social outcomes not only in childhood but across the lifespan.
And these are just examples of the systematic reviews and review articles that it's just so well documented that adverse childhood experience have such significant long term effects in terms of our well being.
And to just explain a little bit about some of the pathways involved in how adverse childhood experiences impact our well being, a lot of it has to do with our stress response system and its functioning over time in response to our environment and our experiences. So a lot of us think of stress as being a really bad thing. But really in a healthy situation, we should be able to handle little amounts of stress.
And this can be viewed as positive stress and where we have brief increases in heart rate, mild elevations in stress hormones, but then always coming back to homeostasis. There's also our bodies can still handle even a little bit more stress here, tolerable stress, which can be serious often but temporary responses. And these can be buffered by protective factors in our environment like relationships, cultural engagement, positive cultural identity, and other positive protective factors.
But when we really start to see the negative outcomes is when people are exposed to what's often referred to as toxic stress, which happens when there's prolonged activation of the stress response systems in the absence of protective factors.
And this happens when there's chronic exposure to early life stress and adversities, which can lead to what is called allostatic overload when our kind of stress response systems and other biological systems become overly taxed, leading to harmful outcomes rather than protective, which is what our stress response system is supposed to do in a healthy environment. And so we know that excessive, prolonged, or frequent activation of the body's stress response system, especially early in life, can result in toxic stress leading to long term health consequences.
And it's not only the stress response system that underlies these effects of adversity. But all sorts of biological systems are involved. And another mechanism which more people are interested in learning about is epigenetics. And just to very quickly explain what epigenetics is, it's really our understanding of how, yes, we are born with our genes and those don't change. But what we now understand is that our environment can actually influence the expression of our DNA, turning genes on or off. And so this is a pathway by which our environment can impact our physiology and result in risk for various health and social outcomes.
And so in addition to the significant literature showing the risk associated with adverse childhood experiences, there's also studies that have specifically looked at how children reared in institutions are at an increased risk for delays in most developmental outcomes. Research across various groups.
This is from some review articles have shown that levels of deprivation often seen in institutional care can result in negative outcomes both during that are seen both at the time and occurring long term afterwards. And just to give you some examples of some of these outcomes that have been documented are poor quality, poor attachment with caregivers, dysregulated stress response, systems stunted or delayed physical development, as well as deficits in certain cognitive developmental areas.
And just to show you one example of one study that was done in Romania looking at the effects of institutional rearing. So that's represented by the blue graph, the blue bar there, where it says care as usual. And they compared it to children who were in foster care but in situations where that wasn't necessarily a good situation and was disrupted. And then they compared that to children who were in foster care but in a very stable situation and household. And then to those children who have never been placed in an institution.
And so we see the outcome here is internalizing symptoms. So symptoms of anxiety and depression. And we see the highest levels in those who were living in institutions and who were in foster care placements that weren't particularly healthy. And the good news is, of course, as expected, those children that were never placed in institutions have low levels. But also those placed in stable foster care situations were also protected against those negative effects of being separated from their families.
And so when we started to look at the long term effects and intergenerational effects within the context of the Indian residential school system in Canada, we were really expecting to see these increased risks associated with either attending residential school or having a parent or grandparent who attended a residential school. Because we know from research in other groups the importance of early life experiences and quality attachment with caregivers.
And this is just one example of some of our work. This graph is looking at the proportion of adults with moderate or high levels of psychological distress. And you can see the non IRS group, that represents First Nations adults who did not attend residential school or whose parents or grandparents did not attend. And then we compared that group to residential school survivors who attended themselves, those who had a parent who attended residential school, and those who had at least one grandparent who attended. And we see not only do those who personally attended residential school are more likely to report high levels of psychological distress, but those with a parent and a grandparent were also affected.
And here on the very left is the bar representing the proportion of the non-Indigenous population reporting these high levels of psychological distress. And we can see even compared to that group those not affected by residential schools are still at higher levels. And that's really reflecting other aspects of colonialism, ongoing discrimination. Because residential schools, as I mentioned earlier, was only one part of the government's harmful actions.
And this is just in case you want to look at research in other populations that have collectively experienced trauma. And it's not only in Indigenous populations, but we see that in various contexts where we see effects on those who were personally affected and also in their children and grandchildren in some cases.
So another research question that we were really interested in exploring was what are the pathways involved in the intergenerational transmission of effects of residential schools? And we considered how survivors themselves dealt with their experiences and how they were able to understand it and communicate it with others, including their children.
And a lot of our research and research of others has revealed that residential school survivors often kept their experiences of trauma to themselves, which was really purposefully they were kind of threatened while in residential school to never talk about these things. And that stayed with them. And then there's also we only know that silence and trying to ignore and try to forget our experience is a normal way of coping with trauma when there aren't healthy ways of coping with it.
And so when we asked a sample of First Nations adults whose parents went to residential school, at what stage of life did they learn about their parent's attendance? We found that 36% reported that they learned about it in childhood. Another about 32% reported that they learned about it in adolescence.
And the remaining, almost about 1/3, reported that they didn't even learn their own parent went to residential school until they were adults. So this just speaks to the kind of collective silence that is often present following these experiences of collective trauma. And not only within the individual, but at the family level and also in whole communities.
Another pathway that we wanted to explore was the exposure to stress and trauma and the next generation throughout their lifetime. And indeed, we found that those who had a parent who went to residential school were more likely to report adverse childhood experiences in their own life, which we know is linked with a number of different reasons, including their parents' trauma and their resulting mental health and other health and social outcomes as well influencing their ability to provide healthy environments for their children. And we also found that children of residential school survivors reported more adult trauma as well as perceived discrimination in adulthood. And in turn, all of these experiences contributed to their increased risk of depressive symptoms.
And so not only was children of residential schools at more risk for experiencing more stress and trauma throughout their lives, they were also more affected by these stressors and trauma in terms of their depressive symptoms. And just to try to explain that a little bit more, this graph shows how adverse childhood experiences are associated with greater risk for depressive symptoms but that this relationship was particularly strong among those with a parent who went to residential school.
So those adverse childhood experiences seem to have more of an effect on them. And although we didn't look at it in this study, we can hypothesize that it has to do with altered stress functioning or altered different amounts of healthy ways to cope with these stressful experiences.
And this is just a similar study that was done in the context of the Holocaust showing similar kind of susceptibility to the negative effects of stressful events in the children of those who attended.
And this is just another study that was done in Canada and that really wanted to see if biological factors were, in fact, involved in the transmission of these experiences across generations. And what they found was that those who had a mother who attended residential school were more likely to report dysregulation of various biological systems, including the stress response system, but also in measures assessing the cardiovascular system, neuroendocrine, and immune systems. So we know that just providing more evidence of the negative effects of early life trauma on survivors and their children.
In this study, we wanted to take into consideration that residential schools occurred for over a century and many families were affected at numerous generations. And so we wanted to try to see if we could assess any evidence of these effects accumulating across generations. And what we found when we compared those who were not affected by residential schools, those who had one previous generation who attended, so a parent or a grandparent, and we compared to those with two previous generations who attended, so a parent and a grandparent.
And we found that those with those two previous generations were at the greatest risk even compared to those with only one generation. So providing some evidence of the accumulation across generations. And that's important in contexts where there's multiple harmful policies all happening at once and happening over a number of time within a specific population or community.
And not only did we want to assess effects in individuals and in family units, but we also carried out a study where we tried to understand a little bit about the collective effects in whole communities that were affected. So to do that, we interviewed health service providers who worked with residential school survivors.
And so we asked them what did they think were-- and how did-- in working in the communities, what did they see at the collective level in terms of the effects of residential schools? And in particular looking at the effects of abuse from the staff at residential school and also abuse from other students at school. Because we know that that's also a common phenomenon in situations where children are institutionalized and are not provided with an appropriate healthy environment for development that it's common for abuse to take place between students as well.
And I'll just read this one quote related to this that one of these participants shared with us. They said it was part of the systematic way that people in power used to teach us. They were abusers and they had to make sure we also knew how to be abusers not only of other people, but to have hatred against ourselves. Abuse beget more abuse and bullying was only one form of it. And today we see this in First Nations schools.
So we actually heard from some of these participants about survivors sharing stories about how the staff at residential schools actually encouraged bullying and abuse between students as a way to have control over them and as a way-- and for these students who were not given enough to eat, it was in some cases a way of survival to try to get that extra apple or whatever. And so when they go back into their communities and that's what they're taught and there's silence around this and nobody's talking about it, it can have effects that continue. And when it's a large proportion of the population that's affected, that's going to have effects at the collective level.
This person, another participant shared, I think what is important to ask is how many abusers being students went home into community thinking they were allowed to at residential school that they could continue abusing their loved ones at home and how this cycle of hurting one another has been passed on for generations.
Again, these health care providers also talked about the silence at the collective level among residential school survivors and their families. One person shared that it's not been safe for people to make those kind of disclosures in their own families and communities for fear of being ostracized and being told that they are lying and to stop making trouble. So for many people there, it was very difficult and there were no safe spaces to talk about their experiences and to help and to heal from them.
And I won't talk about this graph in detail. But just to make the point, this is a study that looked at the intergenerational effects of relocation policies in relation to depressive symptoms and delinquency outcomes in youth. And like our research showing the intergenerational effects of residential schools, other researchers have shown similar intergenerational effects as a result of other government assimilation policies. And so those are all happening at the same time and also interconnecting with each other.
And in Canada, as the residential school system was closing, it started to shut down, the last school closed in 1996. But they started to shut down in the 1950s. But instead at that time, the federal government gave power over child welfare services to the provinces. And what occurred at that point was that the child welfare system really took over and just continued the assimilation and continued to remove Indigenous children from their families.
This is a quote from Laurence Kirmayer, someone who's done a lot of work on mental health in Indigenous peoples in Canada. And many have argued that the child welfare system through its large scale removal of Aboriginal children from their families, culture, and communities be considered a continuation of the policies of forced assimilation of the residential school system.
And so in our research, we wanted to also provide some more evidence for this. And we found that those who had a parent who went to residential school were themselves at an increased risk for then being removed by the child welfare services from their families. So continuing this intergenerational cycle, even though different government policies were enacted at that time.
And of course, like the negative effects of being personally and intergenerationally affected by residential schools, we also see negative effects in terms of being removed from their families by the child welfare system in the Sixties Scoop and since then. And this is just showing differences in depressive symptoms that we've found in those who've been affected by the child welfare system.
So as we've shown in the amazing movie we just watched, culture and cultural engagement and ceremony and spirituality is very important to Indigenous peoples. And while we learned a lot in our research about the transmission of risk and resilience, we also heard stories of resistance and intergenerational transmission of cultural pride and cultural engagement and cultural renewal.
Here's an example one of our participants who shared that think my mom showed me more than she told me. She's very traditional and has practiced our culture in front of me when she could. My mother remained a very traditional woman and has maintained her language. My mother has always been a proud Native woman.
Another participant shared that I was ashamed growing up, but I have since reclaimed my identity. And now that I'm on my own, I have more pride and I'm learning to love my identity. I gave my son a traditional Ojibwe name and I vowed to raise him to be proud of who he is.
And also speaking to the survival of Indigenous cultures and peoples despite the many harms of colonialism that are still ongoing, we see people wanting to more and more reclaim their identity. And this is just a graph showing the proportion of First Nations adults who reported taking part in community cultural events, sometimes and almost often.
And we see that most of the community and adults, youth, and children are taking part. But we see that those affected by residential schools are particularly likely to seek out these experiences and as a way of healing and as a way of wellness, which makes sense considering that they were purposefully attacked. And so it's a way of taking control and taking that power back.
And we also know that such cultural engagement and having positive cultural identities is also protective against those negative health outcomes and can buffer against the negative-- the risk associated with these things. And that's something we can think about in prevention and intervention.
So this is just an example where we looked at-- this is First Nations adults living in Canada. And the outcome is diagnosed anxiety disorders. And we looked at a number of different aspects of cultural identity. Here we looked at cultural group belonging, cultural identity affect, which is just a word for cultural pride and feeling good about one's identity. And we found that both of those variables were associated if they had higher levels of belonging, higher levels of pride, they were less likely to have an anxiety disorder. And in some cases this was particularly the case for those affected by residential schools.
I should also point out that one of the other cultural variables we looked at, cultural exploration, was actually associated with an increased risk of anxiety disorders. And we found in some other research as well that perceived discrimination is associated with more cultural exploration. And so we think that's because people are exploring and because of the silence that has existed for a long time, many are just learning about residential schools now and how it's affected their community and learning about the pervasive racism that exists.
And so that can also come with some risk and put people-- that has negative effects on mental health. But why it's so important to emphasize the other aspects like cultural pride, cultural engagement, cultural belonging, spirituality, and those things can buffer against these negative effects.
Just to give you another example. In this study, we looked at the association between perceived discrimination and depressive symptoms. And here we show that those who had high levels of cultural pride were protected against those negative effects.
And like I just said, sometimes here we found that perceived discrimination, those who had high levels of centrality, which is really just those who really felt that their Indigenous identity was important to their self concept, they were actually more affected by discrimination, which makes sense. Which is why regardless of how strong centrality is, promoting cultural pride and cultural belonging can really provide protective factors against these negative outcomes.
And just to give two more examples. We found that feelings of community belonging was protective against bullying in relation to psychological distress for First Nations youth. And this is another study by another group showing that cultural engagement and being engaged in culture was actually predictive of reduced allostatic and biological dysregulation. And so having protective effects within our bodies as well.
And so I hope that this research just emphasizes the significant effects that these experiences can have but also the importance of identity and culture and resistance. And thank you for listening and I'm happy to take any questions.
[APPLAUSE]
ALLEN CARLSON: Hi. My name is Allen Carlson. I'm a professor in the government department. I'm sort of an interloper here in that I have virtually no knowledge other than having grown up in this country, which means I have limited knowledge of Native American history. And I studied Chinese politics for the past two or three decades. Increasingly I've been working on Tibet.
And so I guess it's a Q&A thing, but there's been so much and there's so many different strands of discussion and I'm so grateful for the organizers, for the people who are handling the tech stuff, for those of you in the audience, in particular the speakers for sharing.
And I'm just wondering perhaps, and this is just an idea, it's such kind of dark times that we live in. And so much of today was understandably about trauma, intergenerational memory of trauma. But also, and I like that Amy finished with this, about resilience.
And the work that I'm doing with the Tibetan community, well, largely in the diaspora, one of the things I think that the Tibetans have done remarkably well over the course of the last three or four decades, particularly since 1959, is to find a path to at least partially preserve their culture and language. I've become very good friends with Tenzin Norbu, who is one of the leading advocates of Tibetan language instruction for second and third generation Tibetans here in the United States.
And one of the things, I mean, China's not going anywhere. And the Tibetans I think have kind of been trying to work their way through that. And one of the things that's really I think a success of the Tibetan story is, again, this kind of preservation of language.
For example, there are currently about 600 to 700 primary school students of Tibetan heritage in the greater New York City area, a concentration of them in Jackson Heights, who are then taking Sunday classes in Tibetan language schools. And there's five or six schools of varying sort of quality and the rest of it. But it is kind of remarkable.
And so I wonder the extent for all the participants here if that type of cultural and linguistic preservation is something which is going on in your communities or something that could be added to some of the advocacy work that you're all engaged in and that's really very admirable and courageous. So that's my little bit. Perhaps maybe it's Friday, it's sunny out. We could try to focus on [TIBETAN] in Tibetan, or hope, to the extent that it's possible.
RUKIYE TURDUSH: I have a question for you. You made that movie for the hope. And I just want to know because the Uyghur people were desperately want to see the hope. We believe that because we are Muslim we believe in the religion. We believe in God created us. So we're clinging to the God. That's why we didn't lost the hope. We believe in that.
But in your community, how did you see the hope? For example, do you know you want to put in every movie the lightning, the hope, right? Where did you see the hope and how do you explain that?
JEFFREY PALMER: Yeah, that's a very, very good question. I think what hope was for Native people in this country was that all of us had sort of an individual ceremonial aspects to our tribal groups. For Kiowa people, we had the ceremony that revolved around the sun dance and [INAUDIBLE] medicine. So it was a medicine bundle and other sacred items that remained in our communities.
And to be able to pass that on generation after generation after so much trauma and abuse and in a lot of ways destruction of our tribal groups, to be able to hold on to those things. Many of those items and many of those aspects to our community were hidden away. And then at a certain point when we felt like it was time for them to come out, they did. And from that, generation after generation sort of took on the job of taking care of those ceremonies and language, which is what we were talking about, and other things.
So I think the youth and the fact that they were inspired to keep going and wanting to know and wanting to understand and feel what it's like to be Kiowa. Because there really is something inside me that says, I am Kiowa. Even though that I in a lot of ways have been pushed away or torn away through centuries of things that have happened here, that's what keeps us going. It energizes us to know that we want to be a part of that. We still want that feeling. And to be able to engage it, because it makes us different. It brings-- it's part of my identity. It's who I am. So that's the hope that I try to bring.
I think these stories, all the stories that we tell up here, provide hope because we're here. We're able to tell them. And hopefully people will hold on to those things and continue that process and that we leave some of that behind us. And my films hopefully will stay around for a long time and inspire people in the same way.
RUKIYE TURDUSH: Thank you.
JEFFREY PALMER: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Is this working? OK. I got a question for. So she talked a lot about ACE children and I'm really interested in this demographic, whether it be just-- it doesn't really matter [INAUDIBLE] to me. For me, ACE children are something that I really want to focus on in the future. It's something I consider as a career. So in the case that you consider a nonprofit or anything that might be able to help ACE children, whether it be trying to reverse epigenetic effects on their health or emotional health, what kind of resources do you think are most vital towards ACE children in general?
AMY BOMBAY: Hi. Thanks for your question. I think there's a lot that can be done. And I guess I know I work in the context of First Nations communities. And so for us, we're always going to each community and trying to understand from their perspective what factors, where we can intervene. And for many, that involves cultural interventions, culture based interventions based on cultural knowledge.
But if you go to the-- and that's just one aspect in this particular context of assimilation policies. But there's so many factors that can be protective against ACEs beyond that. And it really isn't just one thing. It's looking at it from a holistic perspective. And so I think just teaching about it, sharing about the negative effects and the importance of ACEs.
But also on the flip side, the importance of more research on the protective factors, the resilience factors, and really looking at that from a holistic perspective. I think more research needs to be done on hope, on what can change these negative effects around, what can buffer against these negative effects.
ALLEN CARLSON: I can ask. So do you guys have to go to Sunday school for language or do you learn just at home? Here, now.
[INAUDIBLE]
So you just learned from your mom and your dad?
SPEAKER: I just study from the school.
ALLEN CARLSON: The English though. But your own language.
SPEAKER: My own language, I just that's the language we speak at home. So from my mom actually. She makes my [INAUDIBLE] better. Sometimes I forget some words and then I ask her. Sometimes I said it wrong too. And they just correct me that way.
ALLEN CARLSON: That's great. Thank you.
AUDIENCE: I just kind of have a question about mainly I think for the presenters, the speakers in the first half. Maybe your feelings about in a way visions of the United States or I guess North America. Because in the short animated film, it's kind of black and white with splashes of red until the arrival to the United States and then it goes into color. You feel like a great weight lifted.
But then the comparison here is that with the internment camp is with residential schools. So here we have I think I just kind of want to dig into not the implicit, the very explicit comparison between two different, quote unquote, "civilizing" projects where the nation of liberation in one half, at least the first half of the symposium, is this kind of imperializing force in the second one. So I just kind of wonder. How does that maybe make you feel about coming to the United States and coming to terms with the fact that-- you know what I mean. I'll stop here.
RUKIYE TURDUSH: The question is how they feel after they come to the United States? They already answered in the first panel of that question. Or are you comparing to the Indigenous Peoples' experience? OK. I'll answer your question.
What's happening to the Uyghurs right now in children's boarding school and orphanage camps are pretty similar to what's happening to the Indigenous residential school in Canada and the United States. But the only difference is in China, they want to get rid of the religion and oppress the people and get rid of the identity. But in Canada, they want to force them the religion. So they teach them the religion, enforce them the religion. So that's the difference. But at the end, its result is the same, but the aim is the same to get rid of the identity. So it's this kind of similarity and the difference.
But when I see that after the Professor Bombay's lecture, I was seeing that I feel like I start to scared. Because when I see the Indigenous people's experience, it's those abuse and oppression and those kind of negative effect, the emotional effect and psychological effect, all of them become generational to generational. It's a path through the gene. So that is going to happen in the future to the Uyghurs too.
So that's very scary part, and I start to worried what's going to happen to these children in the future even that China didn't kill all of them. It's going to be very similar to the Indigenous people's to experience. And that was happened 100 years ago in Canada. But now we're living in 21st century and I was thinking why China do not learn these lessons.
And what's happening to Indigenous people is good for Canada, good for USA, no, right? So now people trying to healing the Indigenous people. How Uyghur going to go through in this process? How they can heal themselves in the future? So what are we going to learn? That's why I'm asking the filmmaker where did you see the hope. So how are we going to do it?
So if the China doesn't want to get trouble for yourself in the future, why they don't stop? Why they don't learn these lessons? Maybe they know everything. But they just want to get rid of all of them. Maybe they don't want to be Canadians and they don't want to be US to let these people survive even they get so much negative effect.
They were thinking, OK, so in the future we still have to heal these people. Maybe we should get rid of these people completely. So that's why maybe they intentionally genocide onto these people. And that's why I start to scared. I start to more worried when I compared. That's my feeling. That's how I feel after that.
[INAUDIBLE]
MAGNUS FISKESJO: Thank you. Thank you, Amy, for your presentation. And you mentioned this aspect of how violence contaminates others on the sidelines. I think you used the word lateral and that it applies also within the people who are hurt their own groups. And it made me think of perhaps this is something that also works on a kind of a macro societal level and maybe that is a valid point of comparison between North America and China.
We have this violence, horrific violence, against minorities that does something to the majority to in this lateral kind of way that you're talking about. It's like all of society turns violent. We know China today, you feel it. It's just under the surface there's this violence that sometimes explodes out in the open in the street. Of course, there's a lot of control, policing. But sometimes it just bursts out.
And I'm wondering what you think of this idea that the past violence, and in China's case current violence, and oppressing and exterminating the minorities? Maybe it's something that contaminates all of society in a way so that we're all-- it's not just a question of who went through a residential school, but it becomes a question for the entire population, majority and minority. How about that for a big comparison?
AMY BOMBAY: Is that a question for me?
MAGNUS FISKESJO: Yes, thank you.
AMY BOMBAY: Yes. Oh, can you hear me? Yeah, that's a big question. I think it really, just in my experiences teaching about colonialism in Canada, a lot of non-Indigenous Canadians have only started to learn about this history in the last 10, 15 years, even in the last five years. I still teach about this in Canada and a lot of people are learning this for the first time.
And I think in some cases, especially when this history isn't taught, there can be a lot of defensiveness from the majority group that contributes to ongoing intergroup conflict and intergroup stereotypes and misunderstandings. And I think that's why having a collective understanding of accurate history is important and talking about the history in these contexts is really important.
That said, I'm not sure what the answer is to improve attitudes. We've been starting to measure some of-- try to evaluate some of our educational initiatives that we hope reduces kind of blaming attitudes towards Indigenous peoples. But we don't find that that's necessarily happening for all for everyone. So I'm not exactly sure what the answer is. But I think it maybe starts with education. And beyond that, I think it's still a question that we need to answer and really work and strive towards.
AUDIENCE: OK. Again, a question for Dr. Bombay. In your presentation, you discussed the experiences of Indigenous people whose parents were sent to residential schools. And that influences the later generation. And at one point, you mentioned the children of Holocaust survivors. That is, their parents suffered at the time of the Holocaust. They had children and now that has an influence on the lives of the children.
And I began to ask myself, is there anything comparable to that in my own life? I'm not from an Indigenous family. I'm not from a family of Holocaust survivors. But my father was a military veteran. Are there any studies about what the effects on children of military veterans as opposed to children of people who are not military veterans?
AMY BOMBAY: Yeah, absolutely. There is a big literature and just I guess the short answer is yes there is research showing the intergenerational effects in that context and in other contexts. But in comparing it to these situations where there's this kind of collective trauma where a group was specifically targeted for assimilation, it can be similar and there's a lot of similar things being transmitted.
But in those contexts, there's these additional unique aspects to it related to racism and discrimination that make it a bit different. But certainly any type of trauma and positive experiences, those effects can be transmitted across generations.
AUDIENCE: Thank you. So I guess my question is like for the whole panel and moving forward like what actions people can take. So one thing I would like to comment about talking about minority communities. Oftentimes if these minority communities don't come from a European or white background or from a religion that is not widely represented, their strife is often dehumanized or not brought into a light.
For example, the Uyghur genocide, I'm a big advocate for it, but there is not a lot of awareness. There's not a lot of coverage in media for it. And it's been going on since 2017 and even earlier with what the government has done. Whereas for the Ukrainian war, it had immediate coverage. And I think it was more recognized than things that have happened in other parts of the world with other minority groups.
And I would say even for Native Americans, like you said, in schools kids are only recently learning about this history. It's kind of a history that isn't really taught. And I was fortunate enough to grow up in like New York City where it is talked about. But then I moved upstate and my sister has a very vastly different education that I think is similar to most of America, which is they barely know what happened. They just know that the land was taken away. They don't know about the atrocities.
And how do we go about humanizing the experiences of minority communities? Because it's still a problem today that I think is very strong. And for example, even in France, I would say that we see violence against minority communities such as Muslim populations there where they're putting in a hijab ban, a niqab ban, which kind of validates hate crimes against minority communities all over the world.
And I would say that ex-colonial powers have such a big hand in doing reformation. But I don't ever see them really taking strong action. And our communities try really hard to implement dialogue, but I've never seen it move past dialogue with stronger action. So what would you guys propose be a good way of instituting actionable change for our communities to actually move on from this trauma?
ALLEN CARLSON: That's a great question. So if you guys could each maybe just provide a short answer and then we can be done. [INAUDIBLE]
MAGNUS FISKESJO: Maybe you can translate for them. It's a long question, but you get the gist of it.
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
RUKIYE TURDUSH: Do you want to answer? Anyone can answer. She's thinking is that the question for me. I said this is--
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
MAGNUS FISKESJO: Maybe the younger generation. What should be done? What should we do?
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
RUKIYE TURDUSH: I don't know. This is the question is very difficult, complicated question for me.
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
OK. She forgot something because she is a camp survivor. That's why she want to say it that she said I forgot something. That's not the answer for your question. We're going to come back because she wants to say something.
She said in East Turkestan right now, the China do not let the Uyghur students going to when they finish the middle school do not let them go into high school. Whenever they finish the middle school, they have to go to factory or anywhere. So they really want to study. They have no chance to study. She said I forgot to say that.
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
That's a part of your answer for your question partially. And she wants to say that you can start everyone personally or as an individual, start with the small things. For example, boycott made in China, because most of the people, the Uyghurs right now in forced labor. So anything made with forced labor, you can boycott. You should not buy the made in China goods. That's good stuff that's helped too. So everybody has to do advocacy. That's everyone's responsibility.
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
And she said the cotton. I forgot before when she answered the first answer. The cotton product is made in East Turkestan by Uyghurs. And then also the wigs. The people buy the wigs. Most of the wigs comes from the women in the camp, the Uyghur women. Usually Uyghur women has long hair and they have different color hairs.
So different color wigs when I see it, maybe this color from that camp, that's somebody is with me, it remind me all the time. So when you buy the wigs spending so much money, imagine the woman in the camp. So you're wearing that woman's hair. So you should not buy it.
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
I'm not expecting from you so many things. That's a very little thing that you can do it is boycott those forced labor products. And also the things that you can do, you can raise awareness. You can talk to your friends. You can tell other people. That's a very little thing that you can do to help these people.
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
The Uyghur are disappearing. To save Uyghurs, I'm expecting and I'm hoping your help. We need the world's help. Individuals like you, we have to unite with each other to help the peoples of different cultures to survive. So save the different culture.
MAGNUS FISKESJO: That is a very nice note on which to end. Our time is up. I think we have learned a lot and got a lot of things to think about. And for the students in my two classes, some of which are still here, they have ideas for the paper they have to write about today's symposium. They are now already writing on the paper.
So thanks to you for coming. And a big thanks to all the panelists. Big thanks to Allen Carlson. And special thanks for the young generation, the next generation. And one more round of applause for our panelists. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Hundreds of thousands of ethnic minority children have been seized by the Chinese government, detained, and beaten if they speak their native language, according to numerous human rights groups.
These reported violations of children’s rights were explored in a symposium entitled “Uyghur Children in China’s Genocide” on Fri., Oct. 27, from 1-5 p.m. in Goldwin Smith Hall, room 76.
The symposium explored:
what is happening to children victimized by family separation, who are forcibly cut off from family, siblings, language, and culture
why is the Chinese government doing this
what is the nature of the deep traumas the children endure
how can these wounds be remedied, if the genocide is halted tomorrow
Experts, activists, and witnesses, including Uyghurs, gave presentations on these issues, including the experiences of “Indian schools” in the US and Canada. The panelists include:
Rukiye Turdush, independent scholar from East Turkistan
Zumret Dawut, camp survivor from East Turkistan, with her family
Adrian Zenz, Victims of Communism Museum and Memorial Foundation
Magnus Fiskesjö, associate professor of anthropology (A&S)
Jeffrey Palmer (Kiowa), associate professor of performing and media arts (A&S)
Amy Bombay (Anishinaabe from Rainy River First Nations), Department of Psychiatry, Dalhousie University, Canada
