Canada's Colonialism Skateboards has released another pro model board with Vancouver skateboarder, Joe Buffalo. Two, in fact.
On the heels of his first pro model which featured Pitikwahanapiwiyin, otherwise known as Poundmaker, on the graphic, comes Residential School - ID Card. It is based off of his actual card he had when he attended Lebret Residential School in Lebret, Saskatchewan; the second to last Indian Residential School to shut down in Canada, before Saskatchewan's Gordon’s School in Punnichy which closed in 1996.
Vancouver artist Pamela Prostarr went off of a photograph of Joe's ID card to illustrate the graphic.
As Joe tells the story on Instagram, "I dated a girl back in school then and when we left for the summer I gave her my school I.D and she gave me hers. She never ended up coming back. Twenty years later when it came time to apply for my settlement the government said that the records of me being in this place were destroyed mysteriously."
At this point, he says he received a message from the woman on social media, and she sent him a photo of the ID, which ultimately ended up being lost in a fire. But it was enough to allow Joe his settlement from the federal government, and also "a huge chunk of history that I’ll never ever forget."
The second Joe Buffalo pro model Colonialism has just released is called Two Worlds, and has a collage graphic with a number of stories, explained in painstaking detail on their website.
Fifteen different parts of it are explained, and the one large face is meant to "represent all Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island. The Indigenous person standing there could be anyone and represents every Indigenous person. No matter how much genocide and human rights violations are being forced upon Indigenous peoples, we will continue to push through, we will not stand down and will not stop. We will relearn our language, we will reclaim our culture and we will reclaim our lands. We will fight for what is right for everyone. Ahkii and the creator are watching."
Learn more about Joe and his journey, and watch the trailer for a short film about him here.
