DISABILITY WITH POSSIBILITY

This week on Outlook we’re starting, along with our mission on this show toward recognising intersectionalities and identity, we begin this episode by talking about the date this one originally airs: September 30th.

In Canada, the last day of September is known as Orange Shirt Day since 2013 and now Canada’s National Day For Truth and Reconciliation since 2021. We emphasise, during a time of the year when school is generally back in session for local students, how the government and church run residential schools for Indigenous children were less like schools and more like concentration camps. We acknowledge these things while remembering all the innocent children made to suffer within that so-called educational (more like colonial) system.

Yet also, we celebrate joy in community and culture, while sharing too about the acts of community and solidarity between Indigenous and non Indigenous people with a story from an Ontario school for the blind and a current act of sharing it participated in bringing together the land and Stewards of both the W Ross Macdonald School for the Blind and Mohawk Institute Residential School now known as Woodland Cultural Centre.

In the second half we replay some audio of a recent Disability Without Poverty town hall community meeting put on locally in London we were invited to attend. We keep wanting to become a bit more involved in the things happening close to home and with this set of audio clips, we split up in the group to meet others in the community, we heard so many personal stories of the lives of people living with disability and those who love and advocate for and with them, as we play what we said that day when it was our turn as this country heads toward a promised Canadian Disability Benefit, as imperfect and even minuscule as it might be.

It’s the DISABILITY WITH POSSIBILITY edition of a Mixed Bag show.

Check out award-winning Indigenous Hip-Hop artist, producer, writer, and multi-instrumentalist Mattmac and their song Still Got Love featured on this episode:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cD0qVjYoeE

Show your support for Woodland Cultural Centre:

https://woodlandculturalcentre.ca/support-us/

Disability Without Poverty has a new podcast. Check out Disability With Possibility:

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/disability-with-possibility/id1770063176

And for more on the kinds of things Disability Without Poverty are up to or how you can help:

https://www.disabilitywithoutpoverty.ca