08 maart 2018: Photo and words by @dzalcman (Daniella Zalcman) | “When I was 8, Mormons swept across Saskatchewan. So I was taken out of residential school and sent to a Mormon foster home for five years. I’ve been told I’m going to hell so many times and in so many ways. Now I’m just scared of God.” Deedee is one of 150,000 Indigenous Canadians who was forced to attend residential school — a network of coercive assimilation boarding schools funded by the Canadian government that operated until 1996. Indian agents would take children from their homes and send them to church-run institutions where they were punished for speaking their Native languages or observing Indigenous traditions, routinely sexually and physically assaulted, and in some extreme instances subjected to medical experimentation and sterilization. This multiple exposure portrait overlays Deedee's image with the grass that now covers the site where her school building once stood.

For International Women's Day, I'm honored to share Deedee's story, as a reminder that as we discuss the rapid advancements that women's rights have made in recent days, that it's important to work to ensure that feminism is intersectional, and that we're trying to elevate people across a spectrum of identities.
#PressforProgress #InternationalWomensDay #IWD2018 #WomensHistoryMonth #NatGeoWomen