Uyghur Children in China’s Genocide: A Symposium
Oct. 27, 1-5pm. Online registration now available. Save the date!
We hope you can join, and help us spread the word, for our upcoming event, “Uyghur Children in China’s Genocide: A Symposium,” Friday, October 27, 1-5 p.m. [New York time], Goldwin Smith Hall 76, Cornell University.
The event includes discussion both of the mass family separations, mass child detentions and forced assimilation that is currently being carried out against native peoples in China today; and, of the American Indian and Canadian First Nations intergenerational trauma when they were subjected to family separations and forced cultural and linguistic assimilation only some years ago. We will also mention longterm harm and potential post-genocide remedies. See below.
Hybrid/online registration link now available. Feel free to circulate this information to your colleagues, in your newsletters, announcements, flyers, digital monitors, or social media. Thank you! Also available is a digital poster (jpg and pdf), available on request. See too this symposium description from Cornell university media. Speakers will address both the detention and targeting of Uyghur children today, and the North American experience of forced assimilation of Native children in ‘Indian schools’ — as follows:
- Magnus Fiskesjö, associate professor of anthropology (A&S), will give an introduction and a brief outline of the last few year’s events, esp. the context of the mass detention of children in China;
- Rukiye Turdush, independent scholar from East Turkistan; will speak on the family separations and child forced assimilation as genocide;
- Zumret Dawut, camp survivor from East Turkistan, with her family; will speak on the experience of Uyghur children;
- Adrian Zenz, Victims of Communism Museum and Memorial Foundation, will speak about the recent state of knowledge about the Chinese government’s policies and actions against Uyghur and other ethnic minority children;
on the North American experience:
- Jeffrey Palmer (Kiowa), associate professor of performing and media arts (A&S), director of the film Ghosts; will speak on the experience of Kiowa forced into ‘Indian schools’;
- Amy Bombay (Anishinaabe from Rainy River First Nations), Department of Psychiatry, Dalhousie University, Canada, will speak on “Trauma and resilience: The intergenerational effects of government policies of forced assimilation and child removal.”
There will be opportunities for Q&A.
ps. For pre-symposium background, see the UN experts recent alarm on the Uyghur children –(issued on top of their similar recent alarm for Tibetan children):
+ This 2022 news report is one of several that shed light on the seriousness and scope of the current issue in China
+ on Tibet, see, for example, this report from China Digital Times.
+ for more on the Uyghur children: See this Online bibliography (periodically updated) on the genocide in the Uyghur region (East Turkestan). (incl. section 1.11, on family separations and mass child detentions)
+ for more on the North American Native children targeted by forced assimilation in the past, see for example, the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition website.
+ this “History of Residential Schools” overview from the Indigenous Peoples Atlas of Canada.
Sincerely,
Magnus Fiskesjö, co-organizer