'Your history is standing straight up': Survivors' Totem Pole to be raised in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside

The story of colonialism in Canada and around the world has two strands: on one, the narrative of exploitation, dispossession, genocide, appropriation and erasure; on the other, the temerity and resolve to resist centuries of violence simply by continuing to exist -- by surviving. A declaration of war and oppression met firmly by the insistence that "we are still here."