[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?
"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.)
[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...