The documentary “Through a Blue Lens” follows select drug addicts and police in the Eastside downtown of Vancouver. Even though the goal of this documentary was designed as a public service announcement to (for a lack of a better term) scare grade school students into not using drugs, the documentary also reinforces the stereotypes that are associated with drug addicts. It accomplishes this by showing the most grueling images and scenes of the day in the life of a drug addict life. At first this may seem like a smart and innovative way in which to keep kids off the streets and away from drugs but it also gives people who are addicted to drugs a very negative view due to the stereotypes attached to them. Such stereotypes portrayed in this documentary are that they are wasting their lives away, one of the police officers went to the extent of saying that the addicts were “pathetic.”

This would not be the first time the media has reinforced stereotypes of certain groups especially marginalized groups, it also happened during the time of the Pickton case since many of the victims were drug addicted prostitutes. Because of what the papers were saying the public were making wrong interpretations of these marginalized people due to the fact that they were prostitutes and drug addicts. People were saying that this was their fault and that they had put themselves into the situation they were in. This caused the public including the police to pay no sympathy or attention to the problem at hand, which led to the number of deaths to dramatically increase before anything was done. Examples like these make it abundantly clear that when the media catches onto a story on marginalized groups which has negative connotations, the stereotypes about them are made even more obvious and clear then they already are.

Once in everyone’s life they will most likely receive an apology, which then they reply with something along the lines of “that’s not enough.” This is something I noticed when visiting the Museum of Anthropology and going through the exhibition on the indigenous residential schools. When you go through the exhibit there are long posters hanging from the ceilings which have the apologies from the various institutions that took part in the treatment of the students at the time of the residential schools, apologies included ones from various churches as well as the well know apology given by Prime Minister Steven Harper. Personally these apologies, when I first read them were touching and made me think differently for maybe a split second and that’s when I read the Speaking to memory comment books.

In these books visitors like me had commented in them about what they thought about the exhibition and something I noticed was that a lot of the comments had to do with the apologies. Some of them were positive however there were numerous negative comments concerning these apologies. People went as far as writing that the apologies were nothing but words and had no greater meaning then any other word. What was surprising was that these sorts of comments were written by people who had dealt with intergenerational effects. What this made me realize is that even though the TRC was suppose to allow people to overcome the atrocities of the indigenous residential schools and bring people together, there were some who just weren’t connecting with what was trying to be achieved. Which makes me raise the question of whether or not the TRC is accomplishing what it had hoped to? I ask this because if there are still individuals who feel like they are not being helped, does it highlight that the institutions that apologized may have been only doing so to gain sympathy from the public?