This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.

This is an inherently political thread; please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.

I am always curious about these kinds of situations.

for example, I live in Canada and (iirc) in 2021, there was a discovery of unmarked graves (I think) near a church that used to be a residential school for the indigenous children at the time.

given its closeness in time to the George Floyd protests, it sparked a discussion up here regarding our own failures of how to do proper truth and reconciliation with the remaining indigenous community.

my university graduation was also around that time, and the university wanted to jump on the bandwagon of appearing to be woke. their attempt at this was to have a former student of a residential school come and speak at the event about her experiences at the school. forseeably real sad stuff. you can't help but feel sadness hearing it.

Then, we had to sing the national anthem of Canada.

I have never stopped finding it funny that whichever genius was tasked with planning the schedule for that day, decided the most appropriate thing to do after hearing about the lengths that the church and government of Canada tried to go to to "stomp the indian out of the child" is to proceed to sing a song celebrating that government. You can kinda make an argument that we were singing a song to celebrate the ideal of Canada, which is a country that is about always trying to do better but from my perspective, what it felt like was they had a template of what a graduation ceremony was like and just decided to shoe-horn in that lady at some point in a pre-existing template.

One other funny story I've heard (I think from an indigenous comic who was a guest on an NPR podcast) was he relayed a story about how during covid, when their work went remote and had meetings on zoom and the DEI was gaining more and more popularity at the time in corporate environments, their bosses best idea was to do land acknowledgements on zoom..while everyone was at home. He had a whole bit about it that was quite humorous and I can't really remember but it was hilarious.