Pamela J.A. Downe, Department of Women's and Gender Studies, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatchewan, Canada

"We are all inheritors of a past," literary scholar Tsenay Serequeberhan (1996) has stated. It is Aborigoinal girls' inheritance of a past marked by intersecting forces of violence, racism, gender bias and cultural dislocation that is the focus of my presentation. There is not much written by or about the daily lives of Aboriginal girls in Canada: how or to what extent they cope with violence, cultural uprootedness, or where the sources of strength and pleasure lie. In fact, Aboriginal girls remain remain among the most silenced in contemporary society. This paper offers an overview of how the colonial history is lived daily by Aboriginal girls who emphasize survival amidst the forms of the violence that they regularly encounter, including relationship violence, racist attacks, poverty, police harassment and the public secrets about Aboriginal women's disappearance.