A young Cape Breton woman who decided to fight back after being mocked for her appearance says she is now facing cultural discrimination after sharing her story.
Hannah Battiste says she has been battling mental illness and dealing with bullies for most of her life.
The 19-year-old Eskasoni First Nation woman says she lost her father when she was nine and her brother when she was 11. She also says she has been criticized for her appearance and eventually quit school in Grade 9.
“I started getting bullied when I started school because I was overweight. I was bullied in school and on my street. I was always beat up, picked on, people always told me to kill myself,” says Battiste.
“In November, I tried to commit suicide. I just had a hard time and I was going through therapy and stuff.”
Fed up with her critics, Battiste decided she needed to do something to turn her life around, so she created a portrait series online to fight back against body-shaming and remind people to keep their comments to themselves. The photos have been shared thousands of times around the world.
“I'm a good person. I'm talented. I'm beautiful and I'm smart. I don't care what I have or what other people think of me.”
However, Battiste says she’s now dealing with a different kind of online abuse after sharing her story.
“One man was talking about white-man bullying, how I’m an Indian. There were two other comments saying I’m an Indian and we have it good and stuff like that,” she says.
“This was all started because of my weight and my confidence and it just took a turn into my race. I was like, what? Racism still shocks me because this is 2016.”
Felix Odartey-Wellington, a communications professor at Cape Breton University, says it takes a lot of courage to open up online, but it can also open up another side of cyber-abuse.
“The same properties that offer the democratic potential also create room for abuse,” says Odartey-Wellington. “This includes the fact that you can engage in social media anonymously and there’s very little gatekeeping when it comes to publishing your ideas.”
While she’s disappointed new cyberbullies have come forward attacking her culture, Battiste says most of the comments have been positive, and now she’s helping strangers who are in similar situations.
“I inspired them to get help. I inspired them to get new clothes, fix their hair, be a new person,” she says. “They say thank you so much, I love you, I know you don’t know me but I love you. I’m like, I love you too.”
With files from CTV Atlantic's Kyle Moore
