The residential school thing « rjjago.wordpress.com

The residential school thing

21Apr08

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.

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Tags: Aboriginals, Blogs, Canada, First Nations, Indians, Left, Natives, Residential Schools

31 Responses to “The residential school thing”

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1 MW on April 21, 2008 said:

I had no idea that *anybody* gave any credence to what the AFN said about anything.
2 saskboy on April 21, 2008 said:

Mass graves were known?

“They also endured electrical shock, force-feeding of their own vomit when sick, exposure to freezing outside temperatures, withholding of medical attention, shaved heads (a cultural and social violation), starvation (as punishment), forced labour in unsafe work situations, intentional contamination with diseased blankets, insufficient food for basic nutrition and/or spoilt food. Estimates suggest that as many as 60% of the students died (due to illness, beatings, attempts to escape, or suicide) while in the schools.”

While one of your links has that, it doesn’t say there were mass graves, does it? Please point it out where this was known. If you asked most Canadians if they knew this, the answer would be, “no”.
3 Robert on April 21, 2008 said:

MW: I don’t like the AFN, and I don’t like much of what they do - but I do trust them on the Residential Schools file. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission is 100 times more important than whatever these freak anarchists from the Main and Hastings Tribe are trying to pull off.

SB: You can see the numbers and the forms of death. The burial sites should be obvious from the context: http://www.irsss.ca/history.html You can also dig a little further on your own, and look the apologies issued by the federal government to each of the native nations. This was one issued to the Nu Chah Nulth where the Federal official refers to “those children who died in an Indian residential school and did not return home.” Mass graves and unmarked graves are well known to anyone who cares about the issue. There are hundreds of reports on them. Here’s one from the Edmonton Sun about 2 residential school survivors who dug those graves and even burried one boy alive: http://www.edmontonsun.com/News/Columnists/Hanon_Andrew/2008/02/24/4872425-sun.html
4 balbulican on April 21, 2008 said:

Nice tantrum, Robert. But as a result of Stageleft’s post, a lot more people know about the issue than did before.
5 Louise on April 21, 2008 said:

I can think of only two scenarios where mass graves are dug. Maybe someone can think of others. Those two are in instances where a brutal conflict, such as war, or a brutal dictator has groups of people lined up and shot or killed in some fashion, for political reasons, and then just dumped into the grave. The other is when an epidemic of a deadly disease sweeps through a population and masses of dead and possibly contagious bodies need to be disposed.

If there are “mass” graves, as opposed to graves with only one or
two bodies on the grounds of these former residential schools, they are almost certainly of the second type. Disease was rampant among Aboriginal populations well into the 20th century. I remember reading an account somewhere that claimed many of the children who were put into the schools had tuberculosis already in their systems. The tuberculosis germ takes a long time to develop within the body.

I remember right up until the 1970s teachers on Indian Reserves were required to have a test to ensure they were not carrying the germ.
Once medical advances were achieved and the disease became both preventable and curable, measures were taken to reduce the incidence of it in First Nations populations. These leftards love to take a tiny bit of misinformation and run with it, without any further investigation and without any attempt to place it in the context of its time.
6 Dr.Dawg on April 21, 2008 said:

I normally wouldn’t reply to a troll like Louise, or to silly allegations of racism, but the links you yourself posted, Robert, imply that more was going on than epidemics. I would like to know what Louise’s credentials are for airily dismissing the serious investigations that led to the formation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the first place–one modeled on Nelson Mandela’s forum in South Africa. Louise is a denialist. A racist.

But those of us who picked up on Annett’s work are not. Of course we are well aware of much of the depravity and sadism visited upon Indian kids in the name of that grand oxymoron, Christian love. What we were not aware of was mass, unmarked graves (as opposed to cemeteries). And (speaking only for myself) my main problem with all this is that the media has not been all over it.

Maybe it will turn out not to be true. Or denialists and racists like Louise will try to explain it all away. But the media silence on these specific allegations, pinpointed locations and all, is very hard to understand.
7 balbulican on April 21, 2008 said:

I think terms like “mass graves” and “holocaust” are political and polemical, and lead discussion away from the substantive issues. Sceptics get to dismiss authentic malfeasance by scoffing the language in which these statements are couched; activists get to whip up anger. And then, of course, comments that rely on infantile trollisms like “leftards” further degrade things.

There are real issues of note and concern here, and they matter more than the rhetoric.
8 Dr.Dawg on April 21, 2008 said:

Balb:

How many people have to be in an unmarked grave to make it “mass”?
I’m genuinely curious.
9 Robert on April 21, 2008 said:

I was reading the US report on Kosovo, it was their catalogue of ‘mass graves’. Judging from that a mass grave is any grave with more than one unnamed person in it. That their unnamed is for some reason important.
10 balbulican on April 21, 2008 said:

Dawg: dunno. Point is, if one death has been concealed by authorities, a crime has been committed. If multiple deaths, the crime is multiplied. And the larger the conspiracy (if it exists) to conceal, the greater the crime above.

As you note, many folks are using or challenging terminology to draw attention to or away from what may have been done. It’s that “what” that matters.
11 Louise on April 21, 2008 said:

Ya, ya, ya. Predictable as all get out. Out come the accusations of racism, bigotry, etc., etc., etc. Somebody’s livelihood or ego must be at stake here.
12 balbulican on April 21, 2008 said:

No value added there, Louise. Sorry.
13 saskboy on April 21, 2008 said:

Louise, check the post we’re commenting on before using that as the defense of your dismissal.

And Robert, although you may be well informed, I’m very confident that most Canadians (me included I guess) don’t/didn’t realize there were “mass graves” to go along side residential schools. I suppose we naively assumed that only beatings and not murders took place at the terrible places. And I had assumed that deaths would be reported to the families and bodies returned or buried with a minimum of respect.
14 Patrick Ross on April 21, 2008 said:

The mass graves weren’t known, mostly because that has yet to be proven.
15 Louise on April 22, 2008 said:

It’s not a “defense of my dismissal” Saskboy. It’s a observation of an old trick used by the Captains of Indian Industry to silence anyone who won’t accept the sensationalist and exaggerated language that the Industry uses to promote their self serving agenda; words like Holocaust and genocide. It’s been happening for a long time and many, many people have been intimidated into silence by it.

I have no doubt that many children died in those schools. That’s on record. Historians have written about. Testimonies have been collected. I have no doubt that there may have been some children murdered by teachers or other school officials who got too rough in their discipline. No one was there to defend those children, but there is no statute of limitations on murder. Those murders can be investigated and, if the perpetrators are still alive, they should be brought to justice.

But there is a big difference between that and genuine genocide. At no time in Canadian history has the government (colonial or Canadian) ever sought to wipe the native population off the face of the map. Genocide was not the intent. What they sought to do was change them into good little white men. And they failed miserably. The more they failed, the more severe the measures they took, primarily through the vehicle of the Indian Act.

Most of that changed following WWII, when the most egregious sections of the Act were repealed, but the legacy is still with us. There are some Captains of the Indian Industry who do not want damage of that legacy to be undone, because that would put them out of business. Not all of those Captains are Indians themselves. In fact, I would say most of them aren’t.

I think it’s time you admitted you are out of your league on this one, Saskboy. If the notion that children died in those schools was a surprise to you, then you obviously don’t know the history.
16 stageleft on April 22, 2008 said:

Lots of people knew that kids died and were killed Robert, and lots know that thousands of others were mentally, physically, and sexually abused - what we didn’t know was were the mass graves were.

The intent of your little rant is noted, my guess is that it only made sense to the dogmatic.
17 Dr.Dawg on April 22, 2008 said:

So far, only Louise has used the words “Holocaust” and “genocide” in the building of a straw man that she immediately kicks over.

Louise, this place is for honest folk, even if Robert gets carried away sometimes. Go back to SDA.
18 balbulican on April 22, 2008 said:

“I have no doubt that there may have been some children murdered by teachers or other school officials who got too rough in their discipline. No one was there to defend those children, but there is no statute of limitations on murder. Those murders can be investigated and, if the perpetrators are still alive, they should be brought to justice.”

Excellent, Louise. Then we all agree. All of your playing around with words becomes irrelevant in light of that admission. Thanks.
19 Louise on April 22, 2008 said:

Dr. Mangey Mutt, you don’t have to go very far to find the Holocaust and genocide rhetoric. I didn’t invent it. It’s been spouted over and over again by the Indian Industry for at least the past thirty years. Pretend you’ve never heard it, if you must.
20 Robert on April 22, 2008 said:

Louise, I see what you’re getting at, but let me propose a few other reasons why there might be mass graves:

1. Canada is cold, the ground sometimes freezes, children who died in winter, may not be burried until the thaw, in which case they would be dumped in a single grave.

2. Children were put in small unmarked graves in the same general area, but the sheer numbers of burials make it appear to be a mass grave.

3. A common grave was used, like a midden or a garbage dump. It’s not unheard of. The grave would be filled one kid at a time, over a pro-longed period. Once full, it would be abandoned, and a new site started.

The above are just hypotheses - I’m not saying that I know for a fact that any of these is the case.

There’s no doubt that a significant number of kids died. 50,000 is not an outrageous number. The real survivors groups say more. Given that number, and given the possible scenarios, it seems entirely likely that there are mass graves. It’s not hard at all to find survivors who will attest to worse things.

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.
21 Louise on April 22, 2008 said:

That their unnamed is for some reason important.
===============================================
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.
===============================================
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.
=============================================
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.
22 Louise on April 22, 2008 said:

50,000 is not an outrageous number.
=====================================
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.
23 saskboy on April 22, 2008 said:

“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.
24 Louise on April 22, 2008 said:

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.
25 Dr.Dawg on April 22, 2008 said:

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.
26 Louise on April 23, 2008 said:

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.
27 granny on April 23, 2008 said:

“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.
28 Louise on April 23, 2008 said:

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.
29 Rhonda on April 23, 2008 said:

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?
30 Louise on April 23, 2008 said:

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.
31 granny on May 17, 2008 said:

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.