The residential school thing
The left blogs are busying themselves mourning over the innocents killed at Indian Residential Schools. Apparently, it’s news to these enlightened bastions of white-liberalism that tens of thousands of kids died there. They’re actually shocked, like they just found it out:
In what other developed nation could a group of people release a statement about hundreds (possibly thousands) of dead children, some of them electrocuted, some of them flogged to death, and bodies found in furnaces, and the media not jump all over it?
Do you know why the media’s not jumping all over this? Because it’s old bloody news you ignorant racist. The horror of the residential schools is a well established, well publicized fact.
You don’t need a press release from a collection of fringe anarchists in order to find out that at least 25% of kids died at the residential schools. Look on the Residential Schools Survivors homepage, try the AFN, try the Residential Schools Settlement Website.
These facts are everywhere.
The fact I care about right now is the fact that you self-centred bigots just now learned of this crime from a press release. Every single one of you should be ashamed of yourselves for not having known this long before.
As for the fringe group and their “International Human Rights Tribunal” that their press release is promoting – they have been disowned and repudiated by the Assembly of First Nations because they fear that it will diminish the real work of the legitimate ‘Truth and Reconcilliation Commission’. That thing won in hard fought negotiations between natives and the Federal government.
But you racists probably didn’t know about that either, did you?
Maybe you should busy yourselves with your ‘boycott Israel’ committees and your ‘Free Tibet’ protests – you clearly don’t know enough about Canada’s First Nations to comment intelligently.
That their unnamed is for some reason important.
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Tyrants who kill for political reasons or sickos who kill out of some psychological malfunction would not want the graves of the their victims to be marked in any way, nor would they want what they had done to be front page news. The importance of that lies in understanding the context of the victims’ deaths (ie) the motive of the killer and his desire to keep it unknown.
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Getting back to my original point, the facts are everywhere. People should not just be learning them now. That something like this would surprise people – surprises me.
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I doesn’t surprise me, really. Unless one has an interest in history or in the peoples affected you’re not likely to know much about it. I married an Iraqi Canadian way back in 1970. I knew what Saddam Hussein was doing long before most people did. Some of my husband’s relatives were victims. But there are a lot of people who didn’t know about the genocide in Iraq until after the regime was toppled in 2003. There are some people today who want to pretend that all was perfect in that country before Bush screwed it up.
Louise
April 22, 2008 at 12:30 pm
50,000 is not an outrageous number.
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You’re probably right, but two points need to kept in mind. 1) Residential schools were a feature of Indian education for a more than 100 years. 2) The great advances in medical science didn’t really take off until the second half of the 20th century. Child mortality rates dropped accordingly.
The schools were without doubt unhealthy places to live, even if you discount the physical and emotional abuse aspects, especially during the late 1890s up until the second world war. I almost died as an infant from an infection resulting from scratching a rash. The only thing that saved me was this new wonder drug called penicillin. When I was growing up there were many children dying from polio. There is a tendency among some folks to ignore that sort of context.
Of course, health and safety or rather the lack thereof are only part of residential school legacy. No one is denying that abuse took place in many of those institutions from time to time and in some ways their very existence can be termed an abuse.
Louise
April 22, 2008 at 3:09 pm
“If the notion that children died in those schools was a surprise to you, then you obviously don’t know the history.”
That children died is not a surprise, Louise. We wouldn’t call them “Residential School SURVIVORS” if death wasn’t unheard of. What isn’t generally known in Canada is that there were mass graves for children, constructed during the 20th century!
That Canada is among the ranks of Rwanada, Kosovo, Germany, and other countries stained with modern-history mass graves sponsored through government institutions, is a bloody disgrace. And to not make this terrifying fact well known to all people so that they can keep that in mind, would be a further disgrace, and danger.
saskboy
April 22, 2008 at 5:05 pm
Again, Saskboy, you are completely misrepresenting what actually happened and falling for the scam that Annett and others set for you. In the Soviet Union they called such naive people in the West useful idiots. Swallowing the spin lock stock and barrel without any questioning or inquiry.
Louise
April 22, 2008 at 8:49 pm
Louise: you are completely misrepresenting what actually happened
So what “actually happened?” Obviously you know, having done the investigation that has been asked for. Do share your findings with us.
Dr.Dawg
April 22, 2008 at 10:12 pm
Got a lifetime, Doc? I’ve been interested in, studying and working in this field since my teens. I’m pushing 60 now. If I have the energy when I retire, I might start churning out some books or something. Stay tuned.
Louise
April 23, 2008 at 1:50 am
“The great advances in medical science didn’t really take off until the second half of the 20th century. Child mortality rates dropped accordingly.”
Louise,
I am interested in knowing the source of this information about child mortality rates. Do you have information about the mortality rates for the Residential Schools, or are you just making a general statement? I must say your comments have the flavour of someone who knows the truth but is trying to discredit it to cover it up.
The advances in medical science are only helpful IF they are implemented. The separation of people with TB was practiced in Canada from the 1901, to prevent it spreading to others and this lowered the death rate considerably. In 1907 Dr. Peter Bryce, Medical Examiner, reported that children in the residential schools were still not separated and must be as the death rates were often over 50%. With no response, in 1909 he wrote a letter saying he believed children were being deliberately exposed to disease. He was sidelined. The Medical Examiner position was deleted. After his retirement he wrote “A National Crime”, again trying to expose the deliberate deaths in the schools, to no avail: DC Scott said the high death rates were no reason for a change in the policies of the department of Indian Affairs. In 1936 another government report again chastised Indian Affairs for not implementing segregation of sick children. The death rates were 50% in 1907, and there were absolutely no controls for at least three decades after that. The death rates were considered consistent with government policy. This is deliberate, and it is “Intent to destroy in whole or in part…” a group of people: Genocide.
granny
April 23, 2008 at 4:25 pm
So you admit that the period in which great numbers of children were dying in those schools was prior to the WWII, not after. Good to see you supporting my position. As for your second paragraph, it’s also good to see that you can use actual documents to support your claim. These are indicative of someone who knows what to do to win an argument. It’s just too bad that in the last couple of statements you throw it all away and revert to screeching of tired old irresponsible hyperbolic rhetoric. Neglect and parsimony do not constitute intent to destroy no matter how hard you screech.
Louise
April 23, 2008 at 6:58 pm
You’d be surprised how many people (including church members) don’t even know that there were residential schools, let alone that thousands of kids died there. Yes, it has been known for a long time, and those of us who work with Kevin Annett quote that information over and over. The point is, why hasn’t anything been done other than a few apologies and some money? Does it matter whether it was 25 years ago or 100?
Rhonda
April 23, 2008 at 7:33 pm
Why hasn’t anything been done? Here are some thoughts on that.
Granny mentions Duncan Campbell Scott. The man has been dead for sixty years. If you want to put him on trial for genocide you’ll have to dig up his bones and prop them up in the corner of the kangaroo court. You might have to explain to him what the word genocide means, since the man was already in his 80s, just three or four years away from his death, when the word was coined. I would imagine it would have taken a few years for the word to become widely known and used as well, so he might not have heard of it at all, assuming he was lucid in the last few years of his life.
As I’ve already said, if there are people still alive who can be implicated with murder, supported with good evidence, by all means, put them on trial. There is no statutory limit, but you need to pin-point real individuals.
Perhaps if Annett wasn’t such a flake and didn’t have such a shoddy reputation as a crack pot, people would pay more attention. Digging up graves and using DNA to identify remains may bring closure for many families, and perhaps it should be done, but it still wouldn’t give any credence the screeching few who persist in misusing powerful words to the point where they become empty, rendering the speakers impotent and their message discredited, not to mention emasculating some very useful words that will never carry the force they once had.
Louise
April 23, 2008 at 9:42 pm
Louise,
You have a great store in pronouncing Canada innocent of genocide. Why?
If the Dept of Indian Affairs deliberately exposed children to diseases, did not treat them, allowed them to die, and buried them in mass graves, that truth should be told, should it not? It is good to know what your government is capable of, and what they will try to cover up and why, and how.
The truth is not an enemy to be fought, but a friend to be invited.
We don’t yet have information about the death rates after WWII, but the information is coming in now. If you have that information, please share. This was the ‘Cold War’ era when we know people in many institutions were subjected to all manner of ‘experiments’. I am sure the residential school students did not escape that.
The intensity with which some people try (and fail) to refute government purpose is, to me, an indication that we are speaking the truth. The efforts of Traditional Elders in creating alternate body for truth is all the proof I need that the government is still covering up children’s deaths and its own intentions.
granny
May 17, 2008 at 11:28 pm
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081027.wgraves27/BNStory/National/
Hunt begins for long-missing students
Neglected graves probed in renewed effort to solve mystery of aboriginal children’s fates
BILL CURRY
From Monday’s Globe and Mail
October 27, 2008 at 3:44 AM EST
granny
November 14, 2008 at 6:12 am
Thanks to the Canadian commission, federal researchers are working to identify the thousands of aboriginal children who vanished from the residential schools; many of the children are thought to be in the anonymous graves at the school sites. It is their memory that Canada should honour as it presses forward with its historic truth commission, and works to achieve a healthier, more united country.
Eduardo Gonzalez is deputy director of the Americas program at the International Center for Transitional Justice and a former staff member of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
…..
Gonzalez oversees Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission for the ICTJ.
http://www.ictj.org/en/where/overview/
granny
November 14, 2008 at 6:29 am
link for above quote:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081103.wcotruth04/BNStory/specialComment/home
Genocide or not?
Ultimately, it will be the international community that will judge Canada.
Interesting to note, though, that Louise denies genocide by describing it. Indeed, kidnapping and torturing and brainwashing Indigenous children to turn them into non-distinct Canadians is exactly the definition of genocide. Genocide is the intentional destruction of one culture and the imposition of another.
In the most heinous examples, like here in Canada, there are also unmarked single and mass graves of little children to attest to this “intent to destroy”.
granny
November 14, 2008 at 6:59 am