Remains of 215 children found at former residential school in British Columbia
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This is Canada's great shame, and we've barely scratched the surface.
Arte made a very good documentary about it, but I can't remember the name atm.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JL5I4u5RSpQ
Whitelisted regions: AD, AT, BE, BG, BL, CH, CY, CZ, DE, DK, EE, ES, FI, FR, GB, GF, GP, GR, HR, HU, IE, IS, IT, LI, LT, LU, LV, MC, MF, MQ, MT, NC, NL, NO, PF, PL, PM, PT, RE, RO, SE, SI, SK, SM, TF, VA, WF, YT [2]
[1] downloading/streaming on VLC, mpv or whatever possible from this site: https://videocyborg.com/
[2] source: https://inv.riverside.rocks/watch?v=JL5I4u5RSpQ
The file downloads with a hash name, but its a .mkv container. Add the filetype to the filename once downloaded and it should play.
https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/093799-000-A/killing-the-india...
I volunteer working to revitalize a Pacific Northwestern Indian language. there's still hope, and still ways to help.
USSR had and Russia still has boarding schools for the children of the indigenous people of the North https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JVWOd-DsAw. I wonder if there any reckoning is to come here.
https://smile.amazon.com/Kill-Indian-Save-Man-Residential/dp...
Bluntly put, when an institution is given power over children, more than that of a family, and the auditing is lax, you're gonna get maltreatment, and from there unmarked graves. Indigenous, orphans, those "born out of wedlock" in the old days, any child prised loose from the family is at tremendous risk of physical abuse, sexual molestation, death, and discarding.
I'm not sure what it says about the human race in general but it isn't very cheery.
We will never be perfect, but we can keep trying to be better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_sc...
For example, I know when I was a kid the school teachers and people were constantly worried about me and my family since we're immigrants from a part of the world they thought of as "backwards". We did not have liberal social views, and my parents opted me out of sex ed, LGBT events, etc. One time I mentioned a comic strip (Calvin & Hobbes) in which the kid dreamed of flying an F-14 with a team of T-Rex pilots to blow up his school because he really didn't want to attend and I was called in for some government program to prevent terrorism and they asked me all sorts of questions about how violent my parents are and did I believe in violence as a tool to solve problems, etc.
Sometimes our tendency is to "civilize" children when we think parents aren't doing that. What OP and you are trying to say is that what parents and family offer (accountability, care for the child, etc.) is usually better than any "values" an institution can impart onto a child. Institutions can often be cold and cruel in a way few parents ever are, and so the tendency to lean on institutions with regards to molding children is one we should avoid unless absolutely necessary.
Slow moving genocide and generally treating these populations like crap to the point where they chose to forgo their culture was the whole point.
In short, above is saying that the abuse and neglect was a feature, not a bug, as far as the government was concerned, and is absolutely correct.
That attitude hasn’t disappeared.
It's undergone a very successful rebranding and PR campaign.
It’s the people with good intentions who are acting with inherent biases and preconceived world-views who often commit acts of blatant racism without anyone realizing until it’s too late.
It's also difficult to change this situation because for many people maintaining homeostasis is much easier and more favorable than opening up their minds to other opinions. Many religious people (not just Christians) I've known just want to follow a set of "rules" and have a simple standard life.
The immense suffering caused is not justified, but at least now I have some idea as to how they justified them to themselves.
Luckily Ireland has cast aside the influence of the Catholic church these days.
Elite pedophiles are a real thing. Abuses such as this are a real thing.
Also, anyone who calls them self a 'royal' can just go fuck themselves. They're kleptocracy and thats all there is to them.
Most native tribes, especially in the West, were not crushed militarily, as they were in the U.S.. The crown and most tribes signed treaties. While what was going on South of the border was, no doubt, instructive, it's to both sides' credit that they looked for a peaceful way to coexist. The terms of those treaties remain controversial today but, nonetheless, they put Canada's natives on fundamentally different footing than almost any other overrun hunter-gatherer societies in human history. They had an established, legal right to continue existing.
It's incredibly difficult for us, today, to understand the state of affairs that existed just after these treaties were signed. Native tribes were not peacefully co-existing, stagnant populations that had existed in the same spot for thousands of years. They moved around, bumped into each other, struggled to defend territories, had wars, raided each other. Raiding was so honoured and economically important in some tribe's cultures that even other native tribes did not want to be their neighbours. A big part of why so many tribes were eager to sign treaties with the Crown was that the Crown was promising security. They wouldn't have to continually fight other tribes to keep their sources of food secure. The Crown proved to be a less than completely secure food source themselves at first, but that's another discussion.
When we, today, talk about the desire of leaders such as John A Macdonald to "kill the Indian in the child", we find this atrocious. We respect diversity of religion and culture. However, at the time of John A Macdonald, native culture presented real problems. It was actually progressive for the time to think that natives could be as productive as any other Canadian citizens if they could be educated to adopt European economic pursuits and abandon cultural practices, such as raiding, that were wholly incompatible with the peace and order the Crown promised its citizens, native and European alike. There were those, at the time, who still espoused outright genocide. There remain, even today, places in the world where outright genocide is pursued actively.
The residential schools are a painful part of history that is still, very much, in raw living memory. However, we must look at the big picture too. In almost any other place and time in history, native cultures would already be utterly extirpated. They still exist and thrive in Canada and there is every reason to hope that they will continue to do so. How many other times in history have cultures so alien to each other managed to coexist? There remain many problems to tackle, but hope for the future is well justified based on Canada's past.
And of course, on a much grander scale you have Temujin (Genghis Khan) and the Mongols.
I don't follow your logic leap. You exampled a lot of incidents with institutions but that only, in the best case advocates for institutions being nasty, not family, because it doesn't account for abuse within a family context. Is it quantifiably greater in institutions? We can't answer that by the information provided.
I dont think you have any idea what you're talking about. The average residential school does. That's why they're looking. The estimate was 6000 dead children across Canada and they expect that's low.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/06/canada-dark-of...
> As many as 6,000 children died in residential institutions, which ran from 1876 to 1996.
>The accurate figure could be much higher however, since the government stopped recording aboriginal students’ deaths in 1920 in light of the alarming statistics.
If you remove children from under the control of their family and you have a theory that the children are naturally bad and less than human in some ways, yes, that is probably going to lead to exactly this kind of thing.
Currently the US use foster homes rather than orphanages, but is it a better system, just different, or worse simply a more efficient way to hide problems? That’s the kind of analysis that’s difficult yet essential for actual improvement.
I can say anecdotally that being in a foster home was a much better experience than being in group homes. I am sure experiences vary, but I went from feeling like I was a prisioner in group homes to a family in a foster home.
To take a very blunt IT analogy, it's a cattle vs pets distinction.
EX: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/15248380177264...
You're right regarding the history, of course.
Also sadly, one has a way of turning into the other.
Well, both are sad anyway.
“Killing a people” is genocide.
“Killing people” is murder, mass murder if it is lots of people.
The latter is sometimes part of the mechanism by which the former is achieved, but there aren’t “two different meanings of ‘genocide’” involved.
But people do change their identities all the time. And sometimes the destruction of one identity leads to the creation of a new one. This has been a key part of all nation-building exercises. It is a purpose of education and mass-media.
Is the unification of tribes, the destruction of difference, necessarily "genocide"?
Also, if you can speak of the "death of a people", surely you can also speak of a "birth"? What is the source material of the new group?
A grouping is an abstract concept. Individual people have a right to exist, but do abstract groups, just because we anthropomorphize them? Any adjective is an abstract grouping of all nouns to which it'd apply.
People die all the time, and its not murder. A deliberate campaign to kill a people is genocide. A people dieing by processes that don’t involve a deliberate campaign is not genocide.
They usually do, but sometimes the overt murder stops while the genocide continues. If, and this is debatable, an endpoint could be drawn for the Native Ameeican Genocide in the US, its definitely long after outright killing based on being a Native not assimilated into the White society stopped being an organized practice.
Matters very little what people like yourself who are far away from any impacts want to call it, it's still happening.
Here is an editorial from 1888 about the first Prime Minister of Canada and his starvation of indigenous, doesn't necessarily seem to me that everyone was on board with the treatment back in 1888.[1]
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1888_Editorial_carto...
Also a better chance of what succeeding? Do you know the history of Canada? The displacement of indigenous was the point of the policies.
Yes.
> But if, in the minds of those people, just before I hit the switch, a collective identity forms -- "The People of the Gas Chamber" -- then my act is instead genocide, due to their internal mental state?
No, acts directed at the extermination of a people, not that incidentally cause it, are genocide. You’d still be committing mass-murder-but-not-genocide, not that the distinction is likely to be more than technically significant, unless you are a acting in a context so as to not render mass murder an international crime but only one subject to local jurisdiction. (Genocide is universally subject to universal jurisdiction, while mass murder requires special additional circumstances to rise to an international crime — either a war crime or crime against humanity.)
And when mass killing does rise to genocide, its not “instead of” being mass murder, but “in addition to”. Same with deportation, imprisonment, torture, rape, enslavement and other “act based” crimes against humanity when done as part of a mechanism aimed at destroying a people. The offenses are cumulative, not alternative.
And the goal, to the actor, is not so much killing, as it is the destruction of the belief in each victim's mind, that they belong to the group. The destruction of the body and mind holding the belief is just a means to this end.
This is all very strange.
It supposedly protects distinct cultural groups from being destroyed which is the right thing to do in today's definition. However, as Sapiens put forward, empires throughout the history have assimilated all sorts of people, and objectively speaking, they didn't necessarily made the lives of those people worse, and in many cases voluntary bi-directional cultural influence took place, until one is barely distinguishable from another. Therefore, I agree to some extent that it seems weird to elevate this definition of "genocide", even sometimes cultural, as something graver than the act of actual mass murder. Sometimes they do happen together, to some extent even in this example, where the children died en masse. But in many occasions throughout the history, the gradual disappearance of a cultural identity is a very distinct thing than people actually dying or having their living conditions worsening. As you said, group identities disappear and reappear in an endless ebb and flow, maybe not so much in the modern world with all these nation borders, but much more commonly throughout the history.
https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1450124405592/1529106060...
And interestingly, Dartmouth College in New Hampshire was created to educate native Americans. Now it’s an Ivy League college.
What's the alternative?
The government is no better here.
I can say that the mandatory training programs and background checks that are required to work with children (now) far exceed anything I’ve seen from other churches.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/do-the-right-thing/2...
Which discusses the fact that the abuse isn't any more prevalent than with school teachers or other denominations.
With celibacy, you immediatly dismiss all people who wish to live relatively "normal" lives, and get a lot more outcasts into the organization.
Add to this a relatively easy access to children, the higher ups giving protection to criminals, and you get where we are now.
On the contrary, I would say that the effect could be that it places an unreasonable restriction on "non-outcast" people who otherwise would have wanted to have sex "normally", but were forced to not do so, at least out in the open, when they join the church. Then, their immediate and most obvious choice becomes turning to the children, as you mentioned. This is what I find unreasonable about this blanket celibacy requirement.
Families are not particularly safe. Systems that pulled children from their family for placement in a "correct" family created similar horror stories and the natural families of many are also horror stories.
Air crashes are more notable than auto-crashes despite being less likely per passenger. Similarly, even if institutions fail at 1/10th the rate of placement in families, notable news will still paint us the opposite picture.
At least one study found that rates of abuse in foster homes are ~4x higher than in other homes.
Here, recently, we had a case of some missing kids where the children were killed and buried in the back yard. The difference is that there was a swiftness in catching them. Or that little girl that was starved to death by her parents near to me -- again, caught.
When it is an institution, there are no external checks on that institution, and so you get these mass graves and by the time people clue in, the perpetrators are dead. My point is that if you're the one auditing your own books, you can get away with a lot, for a long long time, and sometimes that means retiring with having gotten away with it.
When he was young, after WW2, he lived in several foster homes spread over Europe and managed by nuns. He told me he often had to sexually pleasure the nuns in order to get some extra food. His parents were not able to care for him in this period, but eventually he got back with his parents.
He told me he doesn't look back in anger over that time period though. As far as he knew it was the same in most other foster homes.
Children were forcibly taken from their families by the Canadian government for no other reason than the families they were born into.. to be converted to a different culture and faith and endured horrific abuses across the board in every residential school.
A good place to learn why these children specifically suffered, and how monstrously wrong it was (some schools operated into the 1980s and 1990s) is the Truth and reconciliation commission that took place in Canada.
https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1450124405592/1529106060...
This is a very strong claim to make about cultural genocide: that the children’s race was incidental to the destruction.
The problem with the abuses that we're discussing, as described by somebody down the chain, could be that the church and the foster care institutes are set up in a way so that they are already designated as "special" from the get go. I still don't know if that what's described in Brave New World, i.e. every child in the whole society being raised collectively, is such a bad idea. The author's apparent derision and demonization of such an idea was the most jarring part when I read the book. In fact, many studies have proposed that the whole idea of "marriage" and "nuclear family" is a quite recent invention, or at least is something that was not shared by all hunter-gatherer societies, many of which did raise their children as a group. In fact one could well argue that the strict adherence to monogamy and to one nuclear family is contrary to the human nature, which the incredibly high rate of divorce in the modern society seems to support to a certain degree.
Ironically, the very idea of "marriage" and "nuclear family" seems to be something heavily promoted, even enshrined, by the Christian religions, which themselves committed such atrocious crimes on children.
I guess my main point is, your position seems to be one that emphasizes the importance of "family", while I've always been wary of the idea of elevation of "marriage" and "family" as something of a doctrine, even sacred and not subject to any debate. This idea has always sounded very traditional and potentially irrational to me.
"The Truth and Reconciliation Commission issued its final report on residential schools more than five years ago. The nearly 4,000-page account details the harsh mistreatment inflicted on Indigenous children at the institutions, where at least 3,200 children died amid abuse and neglect."
> The Kamloops school operated between 1890 and 1969. The federal government took over the operation from the Catholic Church to operate as a day school until it closed in 1978.
How weird that all the most relevant info, was at the bottom.
The initial summary might include it as well, or be more broad.
In a news article, you put the key facts first, then get into the detail. A summary is optional. Journal articles are different.
That it apparently continued up through the 70s is terrifying.
The tech for identifying remains must be quite advanced. I don't watch TV shows that might keep me informed on the topic but I imagine it's a well funded area, and like other medical areas the people working there have a strange relationship to their job, given 'job satisfaction' means, successfully identifying cause of death and aiding in criminal investigations as well as relief to families. Not work I could do, bravo to them.
The most likely outcome is the remains will be respectfully transferred to local band councils who will perform the appropriate rituals and lay them to their final resting place, and that's it.
Would be interesting to know many more details: was this completely unmarked? What were the conditions of the burials? How old are they (both in terms of age of remains but age at death as well)?
My country has had a very bad holier than thou attitude with regards to history and culture.
In typical aboriginal kickassness, the Ktunaxa took one of those residential schools and turned it into a luxury golfing resort for the rich gentile folks to enjoy, pay for, and be reminded of history.
"About Us, Culture and Heritage | St. Eugene Resort" https://www.steugene.ca/en/about-us-culture-heritage/
Fun Canadian conundrum with regards to the aboriginal divide. One of our National heros named Louis Riel was a metis man known as a fighter of aboriginal rights during the dominium of Canada. In all of english Canada, he is presented as a man consumed with mental illness fighting along side the natives, whereas in Quebec, which is francophone and healthily feuding with the anglos on all sides, Mr Riel is presented as a franco hero without any mentions of mr Riel's illness and our country's treatment of the man and his condition. Mr Riel saw himself as the gods next prophet, and went into the british/Canadian courts, after killing a british general, convinced that god would reveil him to the world as the next prophet. That did not work out.
I don’t get why Quebecers always think they are the only ones who remember Louis Riel. In Manitoba he’s the biggest cultural and historical icon people identify with. He has grandiose stately statues at the legislature, around town and in universities. Schools, school divisions, libraries, streets, bridges, colleges and community centres are named after him. His mother’s house in Winnipeg is a national park preserved and staffed with period role play actors. He is buried in a prominent scenic grounds where people visit all the time. If you go to tourist shops you’ll find t shirts with Louis Riels portrait. There are handsome murals agrandizing him in the trendy parts of town. He is widely accepted to be the founder of Manitoba (having even chosen the name "Manitoba"), and a hero both within and outside the Indigenous 13%, Metis 6% and French ~12% populations here. He has a provincial Stat holiday in February for gods sake! Try not to paint with an overly broad brush.
I went to grade school in Ontario during the 80's, and I remember the teachings about Riel being quite nuanced. He wasn't demonized nor glorified. If anything, the material was sympathetic to him and the Metis people.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/sterilization-indigenous-1....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_sterilization_in_Ca...
It does appear that the most forced sterilizations, which were part of a eugenics-like program, were stopped in the 1970s based on this article. And there were lawsuits involved by those affected.
But what else would you expect from a country that is so deep into performative show of virtue that it fully admitted to perpetrating a literal genocide not even 2 years ago just to then proceed to not do anything about it, punish anyone or even really following up on that pretty huge allegation it made against itself? Keep in mind that a lot of the people involved in the disappearence of indigenous women (aka the genocide) are still alive. Tons of those people working for the government who by the government's own logic were directly involved in enabling or ignoring a genocide are still working for the federal gov because firing people, that's a bit too much of to ask for, right? Admitting to genocide is just the path to least conflict, so they did it to avoid a public debate
(And whether you agree with it being a genocide or not, the moment the PM and the government say that it was you should at least expect them to actually do... something about it?)
And the claim is coerced sterilization.
EDIT: I was wrong. In addition to the specific incident discussed and the focus on the past, there is this:
"New research shows the forced sterilization of Indigenous women is not just a shameful part of Canadian history. Reports from Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and the territories suggest it is still happening."
'New research shows the forced sterilization of Indigenous women is not just a shameful part of Canadian history. Reports from Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and the territories suggest it is still happening.'
Here another one from 2017: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-november...
Physical harm? Malnourishment?
These deaths could have been prevented if all the students were not concentrated into these schools.
Also it appears that the indigenous population was more susceptible to TB.
It appears that TB in the indigenous population is still a problem:
"The TB rate among Aboriginal people was almost six times greater than the overall Canadian rate in 2008 and in Nunavut, it was more than 38 times the national rate (184.4 cases per 100,000 population)." [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_sc...
TB is a very ancient disease according to [1,3] and has been present in humans since the dawn of humankind according to [2].
There is evidence of the disease in human remains from the Neolithic era and Egyptian mummies from 3000 BC. Furthermore there are references to the the disease in writing from both ancient India [5] and ancient 2700 BC China, see [4].
According to [6], seals carried TB to the Americas from Africa approximately 6000 years ago; although the Wikipedia entry for TB says that it has been "unambiguously detected" in bison remains in Wyoming dated to around 17,000 years ago. [7]
[1] I. Barberis, et. al., The history of tuberculosis: from the first historical records to the isolation of Koch's bacillus, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5432783/
[2] https://scalar.usc.edu/hc/tuberculosis-exhibit/tuberculosis-...
[3] A Thomas Pezzella, History of Pulmonary Tuberculosis, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30454916/
[5] https://tbfacts.org/tb-india-history/
This is completely speculative, but if post-contact TB was a different strain imported from Europe, that may explain why it took such a toll on Indigenous peoples.
PBS claims that by the 1900 one-seventh of every person that had ever lived had died from TB[1], and according to The World Health Organization, "About one-quarter of the world's population has a TB infection, which means people have been infected by TB bacteria but are not (yet) ill ..."[2]
Significantly, The WHO goes on to say that lifetime risk of falling ill with TB if infected is between 5 and 10 percent. The poor treatment of the aboriginal peoples alone could have caused an epidemic of TB illness due to the crowding, malnutrition, and forced displacements.
My own father had TB, I wasn't allowed to visit him in the hospital as a child that year. Fortunately, he was able to obtain the relatively new antibiotic course of therapy in the early 60's that enabled him to be cured over a long period of time.
See also the Canadian Public Health web page on TB and Aboriginal people [3].
[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/plague-...
[2] https://www.who.int/en/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/tubercul...
I wasn’t able to quickly find out if there are differences in expected outcomes from different lineages in different human populations.
And the lack of resistance to European diseases didn’t help.
Dr. Peter Bryce's report is essential to understand the preventable deaths from disease: https://archive.org/details/bryceonresidentialschools/Bryce%...
The Indian Department knew that the schools served as a conduit for the spread of disease from at least 1907 onward. Dr. Bryce was still campaigning to get them to address the issue in the 1920s.
Ethnic cleansing is a horrifying business.
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/newly-discovered-b-c-gr...
https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longform/st-anne-residential-school-opp-documents
https://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2015/08/25/cover-up-of-residential-school-crimes-a-national-shame.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SFfMnmR-b0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_tcCpKtoU0
http://sisis.nativeweb.org/resschool/sep1997.htmlVolume 4 is "Missing Children and Unmarked Burials". http://www.trc.ca/about-us/trc-findings.html
Pressure is building right now to fund these projects and make a proper accounting of the unmarked and uncounted dead. This is just one of dozens of crime scenes. Consider telling your MP you support this effort.
A comment probably can't begin to convey what any of that means if you haven't experienced it yourself in some way. Practically speaking let me badly paraphrase a 12-step sponsor who said, it might take a year to "work the steps" for an average person, or 5 years if you're saddled with shame issues.
What that means on the scale of a country is pretty much what we observe, decades or centuries of denial, avoidance, actions that make the problems worse.
One of the main characteristics of shame is that shame induces shame, and shame is so unbearable people will do almost anything to not feel shame. I don't know what the answer is or where it even begins but I think any approach that ignores the role of shame will keep awful things happening.
I was going to querry what the estimated amount of dead children there would be as baseline, but the school operated way later then I anticipated and for a shorter time. So 500 pupils and two die every year if uniform, but I guess the deaths were weighted heavely to the beginning. Sounds like a really bad environment for the time, right? The spannish flu surely didn't kill half the school?
It's interesting to know that the people doing this and supporting it thought that they were doing something good for the kids. Remember that when someone with a good intentioned idea that doesn't respect people's humanity speaks up.
There were so-called British "Home Children" orphans sent over to Canada to work housed at private homes. There are many stories how they suffered the same fate. Even in my province an orphanage of local children one of the typical heritage British/Irish/Scottish/French, they also suffered terrible abuse.
There's no prize for who suffered most. The problem is First Nations children are from a minority with few of their own people remaining the abuse suffered amplifies the tragedy along with losing their culture.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_and_Baby_Homes_Commis...