[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_sc...
So... Basically the goal of current Chinese re-education camps, only applied to the indigenous Canadian population?
How 'nice' to frame that as a 'school'.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...
They were just graveyards. Nothing "mass" about them. A mass grave is where a backhoe is used to open a giant pit and dump bodies in en masse.
These are just individuals dying and graves made for them as needed. Given most of these were run starting in the 1890s and the first-half of the twentieth century, mortality rates were quite high. Reminder: penicillin was only generally available after 1945.
Before that, it didn't matter if you were the US President's son, life could be extremely fragile:
> The general story is well-known: while playing lawn tennis with his brother on the White House grounds, sixteen-year-old Calvin [Coolidge], Jr. developed a blister atop the third toe of his right foot. Before long, the boy began to feel ill and ran a fever. Signs of a blood infection appeared, but despite doctors’ best efforts, young Calvin, Jr. was dead within a week.
* https://coolidgefoundation.org/blog/the-medical-context-of-c...
A little while ago there was a news article from BC about a former school having 210 graves. People seem to have been shocked that this number was 'high', but it seems that most people didn't do the math: the school ran for over 70 years, and with that many graves, all you need is 3 deaths a year over the decades to get to that number.
Given historical child mortality rates, 3 isn't a crazy-high number IMHO:
* https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041751/canada-all-time-...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuberculosis#Epidemiology
And pre-1945 the entire planet would be considered 'undeveloped' by modern medical standards.
The graves were marked, it's just that it was with wood which has since disintegrated over time. Even stone ones will dissolve eventually. I went to three funerals in 2020 and was at the cemetery for the lowering of the body/ashes in each case: plenty of almost-disappeared graves in cemeteries that are less than a century old (of which many did (used to) have stone markers once).
If I have erred in my statements, provide the correct information.
The report also notes that the death rate of children attending Indian residential schools was much higher than the Canadian average at the time, and that most children were not returned to their families for burial.
I think it's fair for people - especially people who haven't read the TRC report - to be upset by these numbers.
"We're shocked at finding graves for kids that we already knew had died, and already knew about where the graves should be, but are really surprised that they actually were there when we looked."
Especially if they found out the shocking discovery just confirmed what the second group already knew (and was what they'd been told by officials all along).
In neither the press release from Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc back in May[0] nor today's announcement from Cowessess First Nation[1] is there any claim that this is a "shocking discovery". Most of the Canadian media appears to be reporting on this as the start of a process to help the affected communities grieve and find closure, not as some kind of big, dramatic surprise.
I assume most of the people shocked by these findings are either not Canadian, or just didn't know much about the history of indigenous people in Canada. For those people, I think being upset is an authentic emotion.
[0] https://tkemlups.ca/wp-content/uploads/05-May-27-2021-TteS-M...
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/cowessess-mariev...
Using the term "mass graves" or "hundreds of unmarked" is selling the quantity, with a strong implication that the deaths involved foul play.
And by foul play, I don't mean "caught a disease and died".
There seems to be a bit of an elitist bent to several comments here, implying that anyone who is responding to these findings emotionally must either be thoroughly ignorant or incapable of considering historical child mortality rates.
Surely it's reasonable for people to be "shocked" to find that children in these schools died at a far higher rate than their non-indigenous peers, and were buried on-site, presumably far from their homes, in graves that up until recently their relatives weren't even sure where they were? What is wrong with allowing people to have that emotion?
[1] This is a very good interview with Murray Sinclair, the former chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission where he states:
"The parents were often not notified that their children have died and little effort was made to get the bodies home"
The government stopped documenting child deaths in 1920 at these "schools" because the death rates were so high. They documented 3,200 child deaths by 1920 but experts estimate the number increased up to 25,000 by the time last residential school closed in 1996.
Could you imagine what it would be like to have the police take your child away to an institution then to never hear from them again?
I'm so sad for the children and parents who had to endure this.
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-june-2-2...
"Concentration camp" is a euphemism when you're actually talking about death/extermination camps.
The difference between an "internment camp" and a "concentration camp" isn't entirely clear to me, but the terms were originally meant to mean what they say at face value: camps where people are concentrated or interned. The interment camps for Japanese Americans were concentration camps in the literal face-value meaning of the at term. They took a group of people that was spread out over the whole west coast and concentrated them down into a few small camps.
A camp that is purpose built to exterminate people, not merely concentrate them, should be called an extermination camp. In casual conversation extermination camps are often called 'concentration camps', but that is clearly euphemistic. (This is somewhat complicated by the fact that many nazi extermination camps were also concentration camps. "Auschwitz" was a cluster of several camps, some of them extermination camps, some of them concentration camps. Treblinka on the other hand was an extermination camp but not also a concentration camp.)
It also suggests to me that outside pressures for policy change in China are probably largely futile. Would the Canadian or American Natives policies have changed much under foreign pressure?
Does it? Strong democracies don't assure that atrocities don't happen, it just means that governments are able to be held accountable for them.
There will never be a Truth and Reconilliation commission in Xi Jinping's China, and there certainly is no mechanism by which any consequences can be had for their actions.
Canadian's and their politicians are faced with this current atrocity, and its politicians may face consequences if such actions were to continue or aren't reconciled.
I would say that actually the extent to which it is possible that politicians do not face consequences is a reflection of weaknesses in the representation of our democracy (e.g.: first-past-the-post, voter suppression, etc..)
Has any government been held accountable for the "Residential School" system? No. Governments have apologized after the fact for actions of previous instances of the government. There has been zero accountability on the matter. Same with the atrocities, against first nations or slaves, here in the US.
>There will never be a Truth and Reconilliation commission in Xi Jinping's China
Likewise, there wasn't a T&R commission in under the Canadian governments that were in charge while these acts were committed.
>its politicians may face consequences if such actions were to continue or aren't reconciled.
>I would say that actually the extent to which it is possible that politicians do not face consequences is a reflection of weaknesses in the representation of our democracy
These statements are true only to the extent that the atrocities are politically unpopular. We don't need to look very far, temporally or spatially, to find examples of genocide being politically popular.
I'm glad I live in a liberal democracy and not under a dictatorship or some other kind of authoritarian system, but we shouldn't pretend that our form of government is capable of doing all, or even very much, of the hard work of respecting human rights for us. That's a key ingredient in the recipe to backsliding.
I'm just saying there is a mechanism by which it is possible, and I don't think it'd take an abundance of polling to recognise that something like the Xinjiang internment camps or "Residential Schools" (internment camps in their own right) would be politically viable.
In fact, it can be argued that a huge reason why there is public knowledge of their existence and why the practice was ended (albeit far too late) was because of our free elections.
> We don't need to look very far, temporally or spatially, to find examples of genocide being politically popular.
There is much truth to this, but it's worth thinking about how democratic sliding/autocratic institutions amplify this to a huge degree. Genocide certainly can be popular in strong democracies, but things like a strong free press and equitable treatment under the law make this sort of thing much harder to defend in the court of public opinion.
> ...but we shouldn't pretend that our form of government is capable of doing all, or even very much, of the hard work of respecting human rights for us.
Absolutely agree, and I'd argue that there are many ways that our government and its institutions don't represent the will of the people. It's not sufficient to solely look towards our systems of government or to look inwards as a society; it's an all or nothing deal which sounds hard at first but there's a strong reinforcement loop in there.
When our institutions and our communities do right by their members, it begets more awareness and will to do well by each other.
I've said it before on HN: this domestic and foreign politics stuff all feels super overwhelming, but one can personally do tremendously to help rectify these ills by focusing on your local community, and being an active participant.
So certainly, I wholeheartedly agree that when democracies are healthy, change happens with political will and that starts on the ground.
I'm saying this as a hyper-privileged, cuddled native of a country that acquired it's position on the world stage in part by enslaving other humans. We were homicidal, genocidal asshats, just like the Canadians with those natives, just like the Chinese with their Uyghur population.
We're a violent race. If we want to be better, we shouldn't tolerate any of our shitty behavior, and we shouldn't soften the messaging when talking about abject atrocities.
Are you aware of the context of the article? Because reducing a race to inherently possessing certain tendencies or traits, and needing to "take action!" and "do something!" about it, is sort of how we got here.
If you want to base it on historic behavior, then it'd be justified, just like the people who set up these schools.
>as a hyper-privileged, cuddled native of a country that acquired it's position on the world stage in part by enslaving other humans.
>We were homicidal, genocidal asshats, just like the Canadians with those natives, just like the Chinese with their Uyghur population.
>We're a violent race.
And you read that as (human) race?
Only difference is that America's genocide was already successfully completed. The original inhabitants in Canada have been disenfranchised and marginalized.
Rulers throughout history have found it useful for their subjects to speak the same language, pray to the same gods, and extoll the same values. The goal of compulsory education has always been to assimilate people into a single culture.
Immigrants from all over were forced in school to use English and punished for speaking their ancestors' languages.
And physical punishment was pretty standard until recently, and a surprising number of schools still give spankings.
There might be things that need to be addressed with residential schools, but Americanizing (Canadianizing?) children and forcing English while banning ancestral language and culture were the norm across the continent.
This may be a time when we need a new word. Residential school doesn't quite capture the horror, the unbelievable level of physical and sexual abuse or the endless stories from residential schools across Canada of babies conceived in sexual assault being taken from their mothers and thrown into furnaces.
I'd really recommend reading some of the testimony from the survivors. These places were a special form of evil.