Colonialism: Challenging the Rules at the Ontario School for the Blind

Join us on this week’s Triple Vision podcast, where Doreen Demas talks with us about the impacts of colonialism on her life as a First Nations woman from Manitoba living with vision loss. Doreen traces her life, from attending the residential school for the blind in Brantford, Ontario, to a regular school, to an Indigenous residential school in Brandon. She speaks openly about the duality of service provision she experienced from the CNIB as a First Nations person. Listen as she talks about her work at the United Nations and her optimistic hope for the future. “My family always allowed me and my siblings free to go about our community. We were able to go and visit friends, we were able to play in the back of our house. We had trees and could climb them. We could pick berries. We could do whatever made us happy and that is what we did. But when I got to Brantford, I found out I could never do those things. Everything I did was pretty much dictated either by the house parents or the teachers and the structures we had there.”