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Canada: Hundreds of unmarked graves found at residential school

351 points by akbarnama 5y ago

alex_anglin 5y ago
For those unaware of the history here, 'Residential School' is a misnomer for what these institutions were. There are plenty of details on Wikipedia [1] for those seeking more information. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_school_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_sc...
- trutannus 5y ago
  Residential school is a coy name for "internment and reeducation camps for children".
  - hnuser847 5y ago
    Now for the real eye opener - all compulsory schooling can be described as "internment and reeducation camps for children". Children are taken from their parents, forced to learned a standardized dialect of the dominant language, indoctrinated with myths and ideals that are useful for the state, taught history that's heavily skewed to present the nation in a positive light, and trained that obedience to authority figures is highly desirable. 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.
    - trutannus 5y ago
      I think it's pretty disingenuous to compare the residential school system to the compulsory public school system. Yes, the standard school system is skewed towards a positive view of the state in North America (note Germany as a counter-example), but they're summer camps compared to the residential schools. You won't be beaten by a teacher for speaking Arabic if you're Afghan for example.
      - beerandt 5y ago
        Cajun-French almost went extinct, and it was illegal for a long time to speak it. 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.
- stavros 5y ago
  So more like concentration camps for children?
  - hluska 5y ago
    Precisely concentration camps for children. :(
    - stavros 5y ago
      Yay :(
    - munk-a 5y ago
      I wouldn't say precisely concentration camps for children - at least not late-war concentration camps that were focused precisely on eliminating the population. I'm not saying residential schools were good in anyway - I just don't want to minimize just how bad the nazis were... Residential schools were pretty close to the US internment camps of Japanese citizens though.
      - hluska 5y ago
        Okay folks, I've got to put a trigger warning here. This next paragraph is absolutely brutal - it's physical, sexual abuse and infanticide. :( 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.
      - glangdale 5y ago
        You are conflating "concentration camp" with "extermination/death camp". The modern "concentration camps" were invented by the British during the Boer war.
- isoprophlex 5y ago
  > The school system was created to remove Indigenous children from the influence of their own culture and assimilate them into the dominant Canadian culture. 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'.
  - gnulinux 5y ago
    It wouldn't be farfetched to call these institutions concentration camps for indigenous Canadian children, given that mass graveyards were found. It's not unusual to disguise concentrations camps under euphemistic names such as "Internment Facilities". [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_Americans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...
    - throw0101a 5y ago
      > given that mass graveyards were found. 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-calvin-jr-s-untimely-death/ 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-child-mortality-rate/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041751/canada-all-time-...
neom 5y ago
I'm mad as hell about this. My father was the executive director of Anishinaabe Community Counseling, a mental health services non-profit set up by the federal and provincial government in North Western Ontario. I spent a lot of time on and around the reserves, and it's not like this stuff was unknown. People told stories often about the residential schools, people wouldn't go near certain areas because they knew what was there. I can't believe I'm saying this, but as a Canadian I would echo Chinas call for a full human rights inquiry at the international level. If Canada is seriously about truth and reconciliation, we need to do more than just continue to publish reports acknowledging the wrongs committed, we need real change in Canadian society. The recommendations put forward by the government never go far enough, and frankly, the Indian Act is stain on our country.
- newsclues 5y ago
  What does Canada need to do and what will it accomplish?
  - jsjsbdkj 5y ago
    We had a multi-year project called the Truth and Reconciliation Comnmission which came up with a very exhaustive collection of testimony and calls to action. Their findings are heart-breaking, and the government has done nothing to follow through on their findings: http://www.trc.ca/about-us/trc-findings.html http://www.trc.ca/about-us/trc-findings.html If you just want the 94 calls to action, they're summarized here: http://www.trc.ca/assets/pdf/Calls_to_Action_English2.pdf http://www.trc.ca/assets/pdf/Calls_to_Action_English2.pdf
    - michael1999 5y ago
      We got the Truth. But did nothing about the Reconciliation.
    - haecceity 5y ago
      Replace public education with this.
  - 5y ago
adventured 5y ago
> Between 1863 and 1998, more than 150,000 indigenous children were taken from their families and placed in these schools. The children were often not allowed to speak their language or to practice their culture, and many were mistreated and abused. This is still going on in Europe today. Denmark has a large scale cultural genocide program similar to what Canada did to their indigenous population, except it targets Muslim children instead. The openly stated goal is to sterilize Muslims in Denmark of their own culture and force them to be acceptably Danish. The Europeans seem to be entirely fine with it, apparently, judging by the near complete lack of serious political effort to try to make Denmark stop the attack on Muslims and their culture.
- 0xdeadc0de 5y ago
  Could you point me to any new sources on this?
  - tokai 5y ago
    I think adventured is interpreting danish integration policies a bit too harsly when it is calling them genocidal. They are hard though, and there is a current of xenophobia in danish policy making. It would be more relevant in this case to mention that Denmark did very similar things, as Canada, towards the Greenlandic population during the last century. Utilising forced adaptations of kids, suppressing greenlandic language and culture, and force moving communities to hinder them being able to live in a traditional greenlandic way.
    - neom 5y ago
      If you happened to be Danish, I watched this 30 min minidoc the other day and it was eye opening, I was curious how accurate it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A1LtmxkAYk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A1LtmxkAYk - If you have some time, i'd love to know. Thanks.
      - tokai 5y ago
        Skimmed through it. Seems mostly accurate. There is a lot of laws made explicitly to control the muslim minority. There is something about it that feels off to me though. Maybe its the "oh wholesome Denmark is actually awful". It's not really a dark secret, nationalistic populism has been on the rise in all of Europe for 20+ years. The scene with the 'antifascists' being used as an argument for the animosity in Danish society seems construed imo. We don't see what lead up to it. But if I saw someone vlogging with his pals in that spot, just after a Paludan 'event', I would also tell them to stop filming. That corner as been used as hangout for a gang, and coupled with the boiling atmosphere in the neighbourhood its not really safe. Regardless I find the video factual but very bombastic.
scruffyherder 5y ago
Canadian schools are pure trash. The only people surprised by all of this are as always Canadians. They treated left handed people pretty shitty too but luckily they didn’t get the chance to send us to concentration camps to die. I’m definitely never sending my kids to Canada, I’ll send them to Beijing way before that.
- hluska 5y ago
  Being left handed and cultural genocide have absolutely nothing in common.
  - scruffyherder 5y ago
    They do, it’s how the schools are designed to encourage bullying and bearings from staff and teachers. It was not one school or one teacher. Of course Canadians just want to pretend it was just one group they screwed with, I’m just simply pointing out that it was NOT an isolated thing that Canadian schools are pure trash.
    - allannienhuis 5y ago
      I don't believe that ensuring children conformed to the current cultural norm was or is unique to Canadian schools. My mother was left-handed and was forced to write, etc with her right hand by her Dutch teachers, as were all other lefties. Force included bloody knuckles from rulers wielded by teachers and other corporal punishments. I've heard similar stories from other lefties from other countries. Schools were (are?) about teaching children to confirm as much as teaching them reading and math, etc - I think that was a pretty universal thing in previous generations. Just because your experience was in Canada doesn't mean there was anything specifically Canadian about it.
  - scruffyherder 5y ago
    Also left handed is culture, but some conformist righty wouldn’t understand so instead we had it beaten out of us .
nahuel0x 5y ago
No church should be allowed to educate and host childrens.
- zapataband1 5y ago
  preach
- dang 5y ago
  Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents and certainly not into religious flamewar. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
JohnWhigham 5y ago
I find it very strange how little the genocide and forced re-educations of Native Americans is focused on in schools. Winners really do write all the narratives.
- zapataband1 5y ago
  No one told us about the forced experiments, about bringing the nazi drs back to the US with us, the bombing of black communist communities, black wall street etc, CIA interventions in latin america, and essentially forcibly under-developing the rest of the world. Only about how 'awesome' we were in WW2 when arguably the soviets played a much larger role in crushing fascism.
  - cambalache 5y ago
    "Arguably" hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
  - javagram 5y ago
    > about bringing the nazi drs back to the US with us Pretty sure that Wernher von Braun makes an appearance in pretty much any history book that covers the Space Race, along with a mention that he and his colleagues had originally worked on the German V-2.
corndoge 5y ago
> Last month, the Cowessess began to use ground-penetrating radar to locate unmarked graves at the cemetery of the Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan. Hundreds of unmarked graves found at cemetery?
- andruc 5y ago
  How many schools do you know have their own cemetary?
  - pie420 5y ago
    Literally all boarding schools up until like the 1950s. You realize that kids were dropping like flies before the 50s, right? Many US presidents had children who died of the flu. Coolidge, Lincoln, Eisenhower, and more. The school in question was around for 70 years. That's 3 deaths a year, including the 1918 pandemic. These places were definitely fucked up cultural genocide factories, but let's suddenly forget about child mortality
- cldellow 5y ago
  I'm not sure what your question is asking, but this school operated under government control for ~85 years. Meanwhile, Canada's memorial for IRS schools recognizes that 8 students died there: https://nctr.ca/residential-schools/saskatchewan-fr/marieval-cowesess/?lang=en https://nctr.ca/residential-schools/saskatchewan-fr/marieval... So there's a bit of a discrepancy.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
gadders 5y ago
Similar things happened in Ireland (but for unmarried mothers and orphans, rather than indigenous people): https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/03/mass-grave-of-babies-and-children-found-at-tuam-orphanage-in-ireland https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/03/mass-grave-of-...
at_a_remove 5y ago
As I pointed out in the last thread about this, various similar things have occurred in Catholic orphanages in Europe, as well, and in greater numbers. My point somehow got lost the last time but I will say it again: if you let an organization "do its own books," it can go corrupt and stay that way. When it comes to orphanages and places where children are removed from their parents, that means mass unmarked graves. Not too long ago, in my state, some parents killed their kids and buried them in the back yard. But they were caught, and swiftly, because someone else was doing the books, someone else was keeping an eye out. Institutions that become accountable only to themselves will continue their actions, unimpeded.
- macspoofing 5y ago
  >My point somehow got lost the last time but I will say it again: if you let an organization "do its own books," it can go corrupt and stay that way. That's true, but let's contextualize this a little because that point isn't necessarily relevant here. The modern welfare state is .. well .. a modern post-WW2 invention. Pre-WW2 and certainly pre-1900, in most (if not all nations) there was no such thing as a government provided a social safety net - this is doubly true for the nascent frontier Canadian government which had neither the funds, nor the capability to administer a huge land-mass. In addition, providing a social safety net was not seen as a purview of a frontier government anyway. Settlers were issued a deed and expected to figure things out on their own. The church took on the role of providing charity because there was no other institution that did.
  - staplers 5y ago
    This wasn't charity. It was genocide. Deputy Minister of Indian Affairs in Canada in 1920: "I want to get rid of the Indian problem. I do not think as a matter of fact, that the country ought to continuously protect a class of people who are able to stand alone... Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department." "In 1920, amendments to the Indian Act make it mandatory for every Indian child between the ages of seven and six-teen years, to attend Indian residential school." "In 1933, legal guardianship of the Indian children attending Indian residential school was assumed by the principals of those Indian residential schools, upon the forcible surrender of legal custody by parents." Source: http://www.anishinabek.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/An-Overview-of-the-IRS-System-Booklet.pdf http://www.anishinabek.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/An-Over...
nurgasemetey 5y ago
You know, it is genocide masked as school. What will pay for this? How these people will be repatriated?
- loceng 5y ago
  There's obviously no amount of money that covers it, and so ideally there are actual cultural reinvigoration goals as well perhaps as Indigenous population growth goals - and supporting the costs of social determinants until those communities are thriving and growing at a level above average or some multiple compared to Canada as a whole.
- elevaet 5y ago
  Implementing the recommendations from the Truth & Reconciliation will be a start. It will be a long process of mending and healing that will take time, patience, and deliberate effort.
- munk-a 5y ago
  I think strong cultural investment is a good way to start and beneficial to canadians as a whole. I went on vacation to Haida Gwaii recently and really appreciated the Haida Heritage Center[1] but those places are few and far between - the funding for it actually originated in a standoff with the government[2] that was then invested and nurtured to accrue the value it has today. They host seminars and classes around culture and history while employing a number of reservation residents - I think it'd be wonderful if the federal government put a more serious investment into cultural preservation as a way to spur economic health. There are other actions being called for by the tribes themselves but I hope that cultural investment ends up being part of the end solution. 1. https://haidaheritagecentre.com/ https://haidaheritagecentre.com/ 2. https://gwaiitrust.com/about/ https://gwaiitrust.com/about/
kube-system 5y ago
My great grandparents survived an Indian School in the US. They grew up with none of their traditional culture as a result -- they were forced to be "white". I sometimes wonder what culture they could have passed down to me as a child, had they been allowed to partake in it themselves. Instead it just feels like a fragment of my family's genealogical culture that has been lost to intentional destruction.
- ghthor 5y ago
  You can pull it back out of the ether if you listen close enough. All your ancestors are here speaking to you, all is not lost.
  - geranim0 5y ago
    Ether? Elaborate.
- pie420 5y ago
  I'm sure you could trace the tribe genealogy and get in touch with tribe members that knew your grandparents and, never too late to get back in touch with your roots. Native American history and culture is so unique and beautiful, it's such a tragedy that it was destroyed and suppressed. I really wish we could recover what was lost and celebrate it
  - kube-system 5y ago
    We’ve done this, many years ago. It’s tough when the native language has no standardized written component, and basically no preserved records. The best genealogical records are the ones done by the schools. There’s one person in my extended family who speaks the language still. And of course, they know it in a preservationist type of sense. The language is extinct outside of any academic sort of sense.
- ErikVandeWater 5y ago
  Don't confuse a race with a culture. "White" is not a culture.
boomboomsubban 5y ago
It's always strange to see the Canadian shame over the memory of residential schools when a slightly better version still exists in the US. Rather than run by the government, they're generally run by a church where they make millions of dollars in profit to put Native American children in foster homes and send them to public school. They still often lead to abuse, only tolerate a sterilized version of their culture, and they use the scummiest fundraising methods to allow all this. Fewer hidden deaths, not truly forced, but still a disgusting practice.
- loceng 5y ago
  The problem is there seems to be no adults at the table in government, just politicians and lawyers pandering and worrying about liabilities it.
- neartheplain 5y ago
  I had no idea these schools still existed in the US. Based on your comment, I looked up this article: https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/open-spaces/2016-02-26/todays-remaining-native-american-boarding-schools-are-a-far-cry-from-their-history https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/open-spaces/2016-02-26/to... This particular school isn't operated by a church, but by the Bureau of Indian Education (which I also didn't know still existed) and the US Department of the Interior. Sounds like the school has evolved significantly from when it was first established in 1892: >Things have changed a lot at Sherman in Doepner’s lifetime. He says a Navajo woman who went there in the 1960s and was forbidden from speaking her language now teaches that language at Sherman. “I believe that those efforts over the past 35 or 40 years have helped transform the nature of what [Bureau of Indian Education] schools have tried to do which is to celebrate the culture of the students, of their families, of their ancestors,” Doepner says. >Some Wyoming students who’ve attended Sherman agree. “They have a beading class,” says Scottie Nez, a junior at Fort Washakie High School who spent his first two years at Sherman. “And pottery—ceramics class. They have a basket-weaving class. And they have a Navajo language class.” Of interest in relation to the original link, this school also has a dedicated cemetery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Indian_High_School#Sherman_Cemetery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Indian_High_School#She... >Because of Bureau of Indian Affairs policies, students did not return home for several years. Those who died were often buried in the school cemetery. May 3 marks an old tradition amongst the local tribes where many local reservations decorate their cemeteries with flowers and replace old crosses. Sherman Indian High School designates this as Indian Flower Day.
millerm 5y ago
I totally understand this is a tragedy, but what does this really have to do with hacker news?
- brandon272 5y ago
  From HN guidelines: On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. *That includes more than hacking and startups.* If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: *anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.*
devtul 5y ago
Props for Canada for caring about this issue, other places wouldn't give two craps about what happened in the past. On the other hand this looks like a festering wound that will never heal and will plague Canadian society endlessly, including being exploited by authoritarian communist dictatorships like China. I wonder if there's anything we can do to, in a way or the other, to leave the past in the past. Honestly I think it will be forever suffered by people who never lived throught that, exploited for financial and political gain, and punished upon the ones who never enforced nor supported. Much like US slavery, despite the 750k dead on the war to end slavery.
- fukd 5y ago
  Caring my foot, indigious people are subjected to heinious crimes even today https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/why-are-indigenous-people-in-canada-so-much-more-likely-to-be-shot-and-killed-by-police-1.4989864 https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/why-are-indigenous-people-in-c...
steve_adams_86 5y ago
I'm not in favour of controlling language, but it's far past the point that it's evident these institutions were not really schools. I'm sure some learning occurred, and perhaps some functioned in ways we might recognize as schools. However it seems like a disservice to allow such an elevated label for such a low and destructive institution. Again, I'm not advocating controlling what people are allowed to call them. Just, the word "school" implies this was somehow positive or even positively intended. But these were not that, or enough were not such that it seems we could have a more honest term for what they were and what happened. I'm not an indigenous person in Canada so I can't speak for them, and I'm not trying to. Perhaps most of them are fine with "residential school" and prefer to be more honest about the history of it. It's just so egregiously incorrect to me to continue to call them schools. Perhaps the word 'residential' in association is enough to remind people, as we expose more about them, that they weren't actually a place meant to foster growth and learning and success. I don't know. It just seems like such a bizarre name to continue using.
- loceng 5y ago
  Detention centres seems too benign as well at first thought. Cultural genocide and child murder centres feels more appropriate - destroying not only culture but families and communities - which clearly has caused continued multi-generational dis-ease progression.
faitswulff 5y ago
As a result of these discoveries, the US will be starting their own investigation into similar institutions: https://indiancountrytoday.com/news/us-boarding-schools-to-be-investigated https://indiancountrytoday.com/news/us-boarding-schools-to-b...
- munk-a 5y ago
  I think in the US most forced family separation of indigenous peoples now falls under "justified" actions by CPS. The US Dept of Interior's boarding schools were terrible and the investigation is likely going to raise a number of painful points - but CPS still ends up targeting minority families, especially native americans, with a much higher rate in the US.
cperciva 5y ago
Important missing context: The school in question was built on top of a cemetary.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
ryanmentor 5y ago
Germany de-nazi-fied. Will Canada de-colonize?
vkou 5y ago
The most depressing thing is the lack of prosecution for the perpetrators of these crimes. It sends a clear message that this sort of thing is something the country can live with.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
beloch 5y ago
These children should be exhumed, autopsied, identified, and returned to their communities wherever it is possible to obtain the permission of local native communities to do so. There are too many questions about what went on in residential schools. It's time to address those questions.
brailsafe 5y ago
I recently came to learn—for those also unaware—that it wasn't just indigenous people that were put into residential schools. There were also the Doukhobors among probably other groups. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doukhobors https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doukhobors
glangdale 5y ago
It seems like time to pull out the ground-penetrating radar at, well, anywhere the church-y types have been allowed custody of children. The Irish "homes for fallen women", for example. It's amazing, in Australia, how religious types are still by default trusted with children and welfare in general, and even state-subsidized to continue doing what they do. We've had a raft of scandals like this (and rape scandals, and child abuse scandals), yet the taxpayer continues to fork over major $$$ to subsidize religious schools and charities. It's one of the things the USA got broadly right, by contrast.
eloff 5y ago
Child mortality rates were high in those days. Just to add some numbers, 30% of Canadian children died before reaching the age of 5 around the year 1900[1]. Presumably at a school the mortality rate would be lower because the children were older. But this is not necessarily an unreasonable death rate for a school that operated many decades. Especially for undernourished native kids who would've been much more vulnerable to diseases they had no historic immunity to. This would have been common in other countries and other Canadian schools too. The difference, of course, is usually a boarding school would contact the parents to notify them. People are spinning this story like this was a death camp for native kids. It's not. It was a real tragedy that children were removed from their parents forcibly and the institutions couldn't be bothered to report if your kid freaking died... Given the period in time and lack off oversight, I don't doubt there was abuse too, and let's not forget this is the Catholic church, which has a poor record, but it's clueless to account these deaths to abuse just on the basis of possible graves existing on ground penetrating radar. We're not even sure these are all graves, you have to excavate to have an idea what the error rate is. One last thing to keep in mind is at this point in time the government barely existed. There were no social safety nets or programs and hardly any government oversight out west. It's called the wild west for a reason. The church was operating these schools as a charity because the government had neither the resources not inclination to do it themselves. Things were different back then, and they often don't look good judged through our modern eyes. That's a sign of how far we've come in less than a century. To us today this looks about the same as what the Chinese are doing to the Uighurs. Definitely not a moment in history to be proud of. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041751/canada-all-time-child-mortality-rate/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041751/canada-all-time-...
- developer2 5y ago
  > People are spinning this story like this was a death camp for native kids. It's not. Link your sources, or fuck right off. You're going to become a holocaust denier? "Child mortality rates"… you're a piece of shit.
  - eloff 5y ago
    Wow, that's uncalled for. I've flagged your post for violating site guidelines. I also added a citation, which took 30 seconds to look up. It's publicly available data. Instead of calling me a piece of shit, you could have done that and shared the results of your research with everyone here.
bobthechef 5y ago
"Cowessess First Nation is 'optimistic' that the church will work with them in investigating further, he said." "It has not yet been determined if all the unmarked graves belong to children" It's best to wait for a full joint investigation before jumping to conclusions, especially in an atmosphere when accusations are made very lightly and emotion run hot and tensions are high. Justice presupposes truth; it would be unjust and irresponsible otherwise. We don't yet know the reasons for these graves. Recall that child mortality, disease, lack of money or means to transport remains, etc, etc, all played a role historically. They could have played a role here as well. Let's wait for the investigative reports. Also, beware of Trudeau's feigned outrage. The man is as smarmy of an opportunist as they get.
aaron695 5y ago
These stories are essentially fake. I'd be willing to bet the technology behind "Last month, the Cowessess began to use ground-penetrating radar to locate unmarked graves " is fake. This is hard to do, most at the commercial level only detect disturbance. No one is releasing the data or even having it checked so far I can see. Unmarked graves are normal, this many in one spot and allegedly unknown is not. This to me says it's a graveyard, and this is just a survey. Nothing strange - > "This is not a mass grave site. These are unmarked graves," said Cowessess Chief Cadmus Delorme. If you think schools back then were killing or allowing students to die at levels higher than normal for the time you are delusional. If you claim the parents were not told about all these deaths, more than what we already know, prove it with the new info, but it's nothing to do with unmarked ground disturbances.
sunkenvicar 5y ago
So far we have preliminary reports and evidence. Ground penetrating radar helps identify where to dig. But we won’t know what’s down there - or why - until we expose it to daylight. Spanish flu, TB, accidents, all awful causes of death for children separated from their parents.
wolverine876 5y ago
We are outraged by the conduct of people in prior generations. What evil are we perpetuating now that our descendants will be outraged by? That is what we should be focused on. It's much easier to look at evil from a safe distance; we can feel righteous. When the evil is in the mirror, there's no feeling righteous; it's much more complicated; but we can do much more good by actually stopping it now and rather than feeling bad about it later. (I completely support also researching and addressing what happened at the residential schools. I'm saying that's the easy part.)
- crooked-v 5y ago
  > What evil Climate change.
- bredren 5y ago
  There will be many. Be prepared to say, “we were wrong.” My pet issue is the mass slaughter of animals for food / factory farms. I believe today’s normalized routine that builds businesses off animal suffering for consumption or entertainment will be seen as absolutely barbaric.
  - somedude895 5y ago
    I agree. No matter your current view on industrial meat production, it's clear to me that at some point in the future people will be saying something along the lines of "We used to grind up animals and stuff the bloody pulp into their torn out intestines."
    - bredren 5y ago
      It will likely be in the lifetime of those who enjoyed dogs at the ballpark. And these young people will look at them strangely.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    > There will be many. Be prepared to say, “we were wrong.” I'm not. That's a comfortable, lazy cop-out. I'm prepared to do it right. Maybe you and I should eating meat?
vmception 5y ago
This is like the promised neverland
voisin 5y ago
What I don’t understand is why the government doesn’t have special investigators that can demand the records that, to date, the church has “refused to release.” How can they simply refuse?

351 points by akbarnama 5y ago

For those unaware of the history here, 'Residential School' is a misnomer for what these institutions were. There are plenty of details on Wikipedia [1] for those seeking more information. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_school_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_sc...

trutannus 5y ago
Residential school is a coy name for "internment and reeducation camps for children".
- hnuser847 5y ago
  Now for the real eye opener - all compulsory schooling can be described as "internment and reeducation camps for children". Children are taken from their parents, forced to learned a standardized dialect of the dominant language, indoctrinated with myths and ideals that are useful for the state, taught history that's heavily skewed to present the nation in a positive light, and trained that obedience to authority figures is highly desirable. 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.
  - trutannus 5y ago
    I think it's pretty disingenuous to compare the residential school system to the compulsory public school system. Yes, the standard school system is skewed towards a positive view of the state in North America (note Germany as a counter-example), but they're summer camps compared to the residential schools. You won't be beaten by a teacher for speaking Arabic if you're Afghan for example.
    - beerandt 5y ago
      Cajun-French almost went extinct, and it was illegal for a long time to speak it. 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.
stavros 5y ago
So more like concentration camps for children?
- hluska 5y ago
  Precisely concentration camps for children. :(
  - stavros 5y ago
    Yay :(
  - munk-a 5y ago
    I wouldn't say precisely concentration camps for children - at least not late-war concentration camps that were focused precisely on eliminating the population. I'm not saying residential schools were good in anyway - I just don't want to minimize just how bad the nazis were... Residential schools were pretty close to the US internment camps of Japanese citizens though.
    - hluska 5y ago
      Okay folks, I've got to put a trigger warning here. This next paragraph is absolutely brutal - it's physical, sexual abuse and infanticide. :( 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.
    - glangdale 5y ago
      You are conflating "concentration camp" with "extermination/death camp". The modern "concentration camps" were invented by the British during the Boer war.
isoprophlex 5y ago
> The school system was created to remove Indigenous children from the influence of their own culture and assimilate them into the dominant Canadian culture. 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'.
- gnulinux 5y ago
  It wouldn't be farfetched to call these institutions concentration camps for indigenous Canadian children, given that mass graveyards were found. It's not unusual to disguise concentrations camps under euphemistic names such as "Internment Facilities". [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_Americans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...
  - throw0101a 5y ago
    > given that mass graveyards were found. 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-calvin-jr-s-untimely-death/ 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-child-mortality-rate/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041751/canada-all-time-...

neom 5y ago

I'm mad as hell about this. My father was the executive director of Anishinaabe Community Counseling, a mental health services non-profit set up by the federal and provincial government in North Western Ontario. I spent a lot of time on and around the reserves, and it's not like this stuff was unknown. People told stories often about the residential schools, people wouldn't go near certain areas because they knew what was there. I can't believe I'm saying this, but as a Canadian I would echo Chinas call for a full human rights inquiry at the international level. If Canada is seriously about truth and reconciliation, we need to do more than just continue to publish reports acknowledging the wrongs committed, we need real change in Canadian society. The recommendations put forward by the government never go far enough, and frankly, the Indian Act is stain on our country.

newsclues 5y ago
What does Canada need to do and what will it accomplish?
- jsjsbdkj 5y ago
  We had a multi-year project called the Truth and Reconciliation Comnmission which came up with a very exhaustive collection of testimony and calls to action. Their findings are heart-breaking, and the government has done nothing to follow through on their findings: http://www.trc.ca/about-us/trc-findings.html http://www.trc.ca/about-us/trc-findings.html If you just want the 94 calls to action, they're summarized here: http://www.trc.ca/assets/pdf/Calls_to_Action_English2.pdf http://www.trc.ca/assets/pdf/Calls_to_Action_English2.pdf
  - michael1999 5y ago
    We got the Truth. But did nothing about the Reconciliation.
  - haecceity 5y ago
    Replace public education with this.
- 5y ago

adventured 5y ago

> Between 1863 and 1998, more than 150,000 indigenous children were taken from their families and placed in these schools. The children were often not allowed to speak their language or to practice their culture, and many were mistreated and abused. This is still going on in Europe today. Denmark has a large scale cultural genocide program similar to what Canada did to their indigenous population, except it targets Muslim children instead. The openly stated goal is to sterilize Muslims in Denmark of their own culture and force them to be acceptably Danish. The Europeans seem to be entirely fine with it, apparently, judging by the near complete lack of serious political effort to try to make Denmark stop the attack on Muslims and their culture.

0xdeadc0de 5y ago
Could you point me to any new sources on this?
- tokai 5y ago
  I think adventured is interpreting danish integration policies a bit too harsly when it is calling them genocidal. They are hard though, and there is a current of xenophobia in danish policy making. It would be more relevant in this case to mention that Denmark did very similar things, as Canada, towards the Greenlandic population during the last century. Utilising forced adaptations of kids, suppressing greenlandic language and culture, and force moving communities to hinder them being able to live in a traditional greenlandic way.
  - neom 5y ago
    If you happened to be Danish, I watched this 30 min minidoc the other day and it was eye opening, I was curious how accurate it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A1LtmxkAYk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A1LtmxkAYk - If you have some time, i'd love to know. Thanks.
    - tokai 5y ago
      Skimmed through it. Seems mostly accurate. There is a lot of laws made explicitly to control the muslim minority. There is something about it that feels off to me though. Maybe its the "oh wholesome Denmark is actually awful". It's not really a dark secret, nationalistic populism has been on the rise in all of Europe for 20+ years. The scene with the 'antifascists' being used as an argument for the animosity in Danish society seems construed imo. We don't see what lead up to it. But if I saw someone vlogging with his pals in that spot, just after a Paludan 'event', I would also tell them to stop filming. That corner as been used as hangout for a gang, and coupled with the boiling atmosphere in the neighbourhood its not really safe. Regardless I find the video factual but very bombastic.

scruffyherder 5y ago

Canadian schools are pure trash. The only people surprised by all of this are as always Canadians. They treated left handed people pretty shitty too but luckily they didn’t get the chance to send us to concentration camps to die. I’m definitely never sending my kids to Canada, I’ll send them to Beijing way before that.

hluska 5y ago
Being left handed and cultural genocide have absolutely nothing in common.
- scruffyherder 5y ago
  They do, it’s how the schools are designed to encourage bullying and bearings from staff and teachers. It was not one school or one teacher. Of course Canadians just want to pretend it was just one group they screwed with, I’m just simply pointing out that it was NOT an isolated thing that Canadian schools are pure trash.
  - allannienhuis 5y ago
    I don't believe that ensuring children conformed to the current cultural norm was or is unique to Canadian schools. My mother was left-handed and was forced to write, etc with her right hand by her Dutch teachers, as were all other lefties. Force included bloody knuckles from rulers wielded by teachers and other corporal punishments. I've heard similar stories from other lefties from other countries. Schools were (are?) about teaching children to confirm as much as teaching them reading and math, etc - I think that was a pretty universal thing in previous generations. Just because your experience was in Canada doesn't mean there was anything specifically Canadian about it.
- scruffyherder 5y ago
  Also left handed is culture, but some conformist righty wouldn’t understand so instead we had it beaten out of us .

nahuel0x 5y ago

No church should be allowed to educate and host childrens.

zapataband1 5y ago
preach
dang 5y ago
Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents and certainly not into religious flamewar. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

JohnWhigham 5y ago

I find it very strange how little the genocide and forced re-educations of Native Americans is focused on in schools. Winners really do write all the narratives.

zapataband1 5y ago
No one told us about the forced experiments, about bringing the nazi drs back to the US with us, the bombing of black communist communities, black wall street etc, CIA interventions in latin america, and essentially forcibly under-developing the rest of the world. Only about how 'awesome' we were in WW2 when arguably the soviets played a much larger role in crushing fascism.
- cambalache 5y ago
  "Arguably" hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
- javagram 5y ago
  > about bringing the nazi drs back to the US with us Pretty sure that Wernher von Braun makes an appearance in pretty much any history book that covers the Space Race, along with a mention that he and his colleagues had originally worked on the German V-2.

corndoge 5y ago

> Last month, the Cowessess began to use ground-penetrating radar to locate unmarked graves at the cemetery of the Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan. Hundreds of unmarked graves found at cemetery?

andruc 5y ago
How many schools do you know have their own cemetary?
- pie420 5y ago
  Literally all boarding schools up until like the 1950s. You realize that kids were dropping like flies before the 50s, right? Many US presidents had children who died of the flu. Coolidge, Lincoln, Eisenhower, and more. The school in question was around for 70 years. That's 3 deaths a year, including the 1918 pandemic. These places were definitely fucked up cultural genocide factories, but let's suddenly forget about child mortality
cldellow 5y ago
I'm not sure what your question is asking, but this school operated under government control for ~85 years. Meanwhile, Canada's memorial for IRS schools recognizes that 8 students died there: https://nctr.ca/residential-schools/saskatchewan-fr/marieval-cowesess/?lang=en https://nctr.ca/residential-schools/saskatchewan-fr/marieval... So there's a bit of a discrepancy.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

gadders 5y ago

Similar things happened in Ireland (but for unmarried mothers and orphans, rather than indigenous people): https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/03/mass-grave-of-babies-and-children-found-at-tuam-orphanage-in-ireland https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/03/mass-grave-of-...

at_a_remove 5y ago

As I pointed out in the last thread about this, various similar things have occurred in Catholic orphanages in Europe, as well, and in greater numbers. My point somehow got lost the last time but I will say it again: if you let an organization "do its own books," it can go corrupt and stay that way. When it comes to orphanages and places where children are removed from their parents, that means mass unmarked graves. Not too long ago, in my state, some parents killed their kids and buried them in the back yard. But they were caught, and swiftly, because someone else was doing the books, someone else was keeping an eye out. Institutions that become accountable only to themselves will continue their actions, unimpeded.

macspoofing 5y ago
>My point somehow got lost the last time but I will say it again: if you let an organization "do its own books," it can go corrupt and stay that way. That's true, but let's contextualize this a little because that point isn't necessarily relevant here. The modern welfare state is .. well .. a modern post-WW2 invention. Pre-WW2 and certainly pre-1900, in most (if not all nations) there was no such thing as a government provided a social safety net - this is doubly true for the nascent frontier Canadian government which had neither the funds, nor the capability to administer a huge land-mass. In addition, providing a social safety net was not seen as a purview of a frontier government anyway. Settlers were issued a deed and expected to figure things out on their own. The church took on the role of providing charity because there was no other institution that did.
- staplers 5y ago
  This wasn't charity. It was genocide. Deputy Minister of Indian Affairs in Canada in 1920: "I want to get rid of the Indian problem. I do not think as a matter of fact, that the country ought to continuously protect a class of people who are able to stand alone... Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department." "In 1920, amendments to the Indian Act make it mandatory for every Indian child between the ages of seven and six-teen years, to attend Indian residential school." "In 1933, legal guardianship of the Indian children attending Indian residential school was assumed by the principals of those Indian residential schools, upon the forcible surrender of legal custody by parents." Source: http://www.anishinabek.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/An-Overview-of-the-IRS-System-Booklet.pdf http://www.anishinabek.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/An-Over...

nurgasemetey 5y ago

You know, it is genocide masked as school. What will pay for this? How these people will be repatriated?

loceng 5y ago
There's obviously no amount of money that covers it, and so ideally there are actual cultural reinvigoration goals as well perhaps as Indigenous population growth goals - and supporting the costs of social determinants until those communities are thriving and growing at a level above average or some multiple compared to Canada as a whole.
elevaet 5y ago
Implementing the recommendations from the Truth & Reconciliation will be a start. It will be a long process of mending and healing that will take time, patience, and deliberate effort.
munk-a 5y ago
I think strong cultural investment is a good way to start and beneficial to canadians as a whole. I went on vacation to Haida Gwaii recently and really appreciated the Haida Heritage Center[1] but those places are few and far between - the funding for it actually originated in a standoff with the government[2] that was then invested and nurtured to accrue the value it has today. They host seminars and classes around culture and history while employing a number of reservation residents - I think it'd be wonderful if the federal government put a more serious investment into cultural preservation as a way to spur economic health. There are other actions being called for by the tribes themselves but I hope that cultural investment ends up being part of the end solution. 1. https://haidaheritagecentre.com/ https://haidaheritagecentre.com/ 2. https://gwaiitrust.com/about/ https://gwaiitrust.com/about/

kube-system 5y ago

My great grandparents survived an Indian School in the US. They grew up with none of their traditional culture as a result -- they were forced to be "white". I sometimes wonder what culture they could have passed down to me as a child, had they been allowed to partake in it themselves. Instead it just feels like a fragment of my family's genealogical culture that has been lost to intentional destruction.

ghthor 5y ago
You can pull it back out of the ether if you listen close enough. All your ancestors are here speaking to you, all is not lost.
- geranim0 5y ago
  Ether? Elaborate.
pie420 5y ago
I'm sure you could trace the tribe genealogy and get in touch with tribe members that knew your grandparents and, never too late to get back in touch with your roots. Native American history and culture is so unique and beautiful, it's such a tragedy that it was destroyed and suppressed. I really wish we could recover what was lost and celebrate it
- kube-system 5y ago
  We’ve done this, many years ago. It’s tough when the native language has no standardized written component, and basically no preserved records. The best genealogical records are the ones done by the schools. There’s one person in my extended family who speaks the language still. And of course, they know it in a preservationist type of sense. The language is extinct outside of any academic sort of sense.
ErikVandeWater 5y ago
Don't confuse a race with a culture. "White" is not a culture.

boomboomsubban 5y ago

It's always strange to see the Canadian shame over the memory of residential schools when a slightly better version still exists in the US. Rather than run by the government, they're generally run by a church where they make millions of dollars in profit to put Native American children in foster homes and send them to public school. They still often lead to abuse, only tolerate a sterilized version of their culture, and they use the scummiest fundraising methods to allow all this. Fewer hidden deaths, not truly forced, but still a disgusting practice.

loceng 5y ago
The problem is there seems to be no adults at the table in government, just politicians and lawyers pandering and worrying about liabilities it.
neartheplain 5y ago
I had no idea these schools still existed in the US. Based on your comment, I looked up this article: https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/open-spaces/2016-02-26/todays-remaining-native-american-boarding-schools-are-a-far-cry-from-their-history https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/open-spaces/2016-02-26/to... This particular school isn't operated by a church, but by the Bureau of Indian Education (which I also didn't know still existed) and the US Department of the Interior. Sounds like the school has evolved significantly from when it was first established in 1892: >Things have changed a lot at Sherman in Doepner’s lifetime. He says a Navajo woman who went there in the 1960s and was forbidden from speaking her language now teaches that language at Sherman. “I believe that those efforts over the past 35 or 40 years have helped transform the nature of what [Bureau of Indian Education] schools have tried to do which is to celebrate the culture of the students, of their families, of their ancestors,” Doepner says. >Some Wyoming students who’ve attended Sherman agree. “They have a beading class,” says Scottie Nez, a junior at Fort Washakie High School who spent his first two years at Sherman. “And pottery—ceramics class. They have a basket-weaving class. And they have a Navajo language class.” Of interest in relation to the original link, this school also has a dedicated cemetery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Indian_High_School#Sherman_Cemetery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Indian_High_School#She... >Because of Bureau of Indian Affairs policies, students did not return home for several years. Those who died were often buried in the school cemetery. May 3 marks an old tradition amongst the local tribes where many local reservations decorate their cemeteries with flowers and replace old crosses. Sherman Indian High School designates this as Indian Flower Day.

millerm 5y ago

I totally understand this is a tragedy, but what does this really have to do with hacker news?

brandon272 5y ago
From HN guidelines: On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. *That includes more than hacking and startups.* If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: *anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.*

devtul 5y ago

Props for Canada for caring about this issue, other places wouldn't give two craps about what happened in the past. On the other hand this looks like a festering wound that will never heal and will plague Canadian society endlessly, including being exploited by authoritarian communist dictatorships like China. I wonder if there's anything we can do to, in a way or the other, to leave the past in the past. Honestly I think it will be forever suffered by people who never lived throught that, exploited for financial and political gain, and punished upon the ones who never enforced nor supported. Much like US slavery, despite the 750k dead on the war to end slavery.

fukd 5y ago
Caring my foot, indigious people are subjected to heinious crimes even today https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/why-are-indigenous-people-in-canada-so-much-more-likely-to-be-shot-and-killed-by-police-1.4989864 https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/why-are-indigenous-people-in-c...

steve_adams_86 5y ago

I'm not in favour of controlling language, but it's far past the point that it's evident these institutions were not really schools. I'm sure some learning occurred, and perhaps some functioned in ways we might recognize as schools. However it seems like a disservice to allow such an elevated label for such a low and destructive institution. Again, I'm not advocating controlling what people are allowed to call them. Just, the word "school" implies this was somehow positive or even positively intended. But these were not that, or enough were not such that it seems we could have a more honest term for what they were and what happened. I'm not an indigenous person in Canada so I can't speak for them, and I'm not trying to. Perhaps most of them are fine with "residential school" and prefer to be more honest about the history of it. It's just so egregiously incorrect to me to continue to call them schools. Perhaps the word 'residential' in association is enough to remind people, as we expose more about them, that they weren't actually a place meant to foster growth and learning and success. I don't know. It just seems like such a bizarre name to continue using.

loceng 5y ago
Detention centres seems too benign as well at first thought. Cultural genocide and child murder centres feels more appropriate - destroying not only culture but families and communities - which clearly has caused continued multi-generational dis-ease progression.

faitswulff 5y ago

As a result of these discoveries, the US will be starting their own investigation into similar institutions: https://indiancountrytoday.com/news/us-boarding-schools-to-be-investigated https://indiancountrytoday.com/news/us-boarding-schools-to-b...

munk-a 5y ago
I think in the US most forced family separation of indigenous peoples now falls under "justified" actions by CPS. The US Dept of Interior's boarding schools were terrible and the investigation is likely going to raise a number of painful points - but CPS still ends up targeting minority families, especially native americans, with a much higher rate in the US.

cperciva 5y ago

Important missing context: The school in question was built on top of a cemetary.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

ryanmentor 5y ago

Germany de-nazi-fied. Will Canada de-colonize?

vkou 5y ago

The most depressing thing is the lack of prosecution for the perpetrators of these crimes. It sends a clear message that this sort of thing is something the country can live with.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

beloch 5y ago

These children should be exhumed, autopsied, identified, and returned to their communities wherever it is possible to obtain the permission of local native communities to do so. There are too many questions about what went on in residential schools. It's time to address those questions.

brailsafe 5y ago

I recently came to learn—for those also unaware—that it wasn't just indigenous people that were put into residential schools. There were also the Doukhobors among probably other groups. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doukhobors https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doukhobors

glangdale 5y ago

It seems like time to pull out the ground-penetrating radar at, well, anywhere the church-y types have been allowed custody of children. The Irish "homes for fallen women", for example. It's amazing, in Australia, how religious types are still by default trusted with children and welfare in general, and even state-subsidized to continue doing what they do. We've had a raft of scandals like this (and rape scandals, and child abuse scandals), yet the taxpayer continues to fork over major $$$ to subsidize religious schools and charities. It's one of the things the USA got broadly right, by contrast.

eloff 5y ago

Child mortality rates were high in those days. Just to add some numbers, 30% of Canadian children died before reaching the age of 5 around the year 1900[1]. Presumably at a school the mortality rate would be lower because the children were older. But this is not necessarily an unreasonable death rate for a school that operated many decades. Especially for undernourished native kids who would've been much more vulnerable to diseases they had no historic immunity to. This would have been common in other countries and other Canadian schools too. The difference, of course, is usually a boarding school would contact the parents to notify them. People are spinning this story like this was a death camp for native kids. It's not. It was a real tragedy that children were removed from their parents forcibly and the institutions couldn't be bothered to report if your kid freaking died... Given the period in time and lack off oversight, I don't doubt there was abuse too, and let's not forget this is the Catholic church, which has a poor record, but it's clueless to account these deaths to abuse just on the basis of possible graves existing on ground penetrating radar. We're not even sure these are all graves, you have to excavate to have an idea what the error rate is. One last thing to keep in mind is at this point in time the government barely existed. There were no social safety nets or programs and hardly any government oversight out west. It's called the wild west for a reason. The church was operating these schools as a charity because the government had neither the resources not inclination to do it themselves. Things were different back then, and they often don't look good judged through our modern eyes. That's a sign of how far we've come in less than a century. To us today this looks about the same as what the Chinese are doing to the Uighurs. Definitely not a moment in history to be proud of. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041751/canada-all-time-child-mortality-rate/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041751/canada-all-time-...

developer2 5y ago
> People are spinning this story like this was a death camp for native kids. It's not. Link your sources, or fuck right off. You're going to become a holocaust denier? "Child mortality rates"… you're a piece of shit.
- eloff 5y ago
  Wow, that's uncalled for. I've flagged your post for violating site guidelines. I also added a citation, which took 30 seconds to look up. It's publicly available data. Instead of calling me a piece of shit, you could have done that and shared the results of your research with everyone here.

bobthechef 5y ago

"Cowessess First Nation is 'optimistic' that the church will work with them in investigating further, he said." "It has not yet been determined if all the unmarked graves belong to children" It's best to wait for a full joint investigation before jumping to conclusions, especially in an atmosphere when accusations are made very lightly and emotion run hot and tensions are high. Justice presupposes truth; it would be unjust and irresponsible otherwise. We don't yet know the reasons for these graves. Recall that child mortality, disease, lack of money or means to transport remains, etc, etc, all played a role historically. They could have played a role here as well. Let's wait for the investigative reports. Also, beware of Trudeau's feigned outrage. The man is as smarmy of an opportunist as they get.

aaron695 5y ago

These stories are essentially fake. I'd be willing to bet the technology behind "Last month, the Cowessess began to use ground-penetrating radar to locate unmarked graves " is fake. This is hard to do, most at the commercial level only detect disturbance. No one is releasing the data or even having it checked so far I can see. Unmarked graves are normal, this many in one spot and allegedly unknown is not. This to me says it's a graveyard, and this is just a survey. Nothing strange - > "This is not a mass grave site. These are unmarked graves," said Cowessess Chief Cadmus Delorme. If you think schools back then were killing or allowing students to die at levels higher than normal for the time you are delusional. If you claim the parents were not told about all these deaths, more than what we already know, prove it with the new info, but it's nothing to do with unmarked ground disturbances.

sunkenvicar 5y ago

So far we have preliminary reports and evidence. Ground penetrating radar helps identify where to dig. But we won’t know what’s down there - or why - until we expose it to daylight. Spanish flu, TB, accidents, all awful causes of death for children separated from their parents.

wolverine876 5y ago

We are outraged by the conduct of people in prior generations. What evil are we perpetuating now that our descendants will be outraged by? That is what we should be focused on. It's much easier to look at evil from a safe distance; we can feel righteous. When the evil is in the mirror, there's no feeling righteous; it's much more complicated; but we can do much more good by actually stopping it now and rather than feeling bad about it later. (I completely support also researching and addressing what happened at the residential schools. I'm saying that's the easy part.)

crooked-v 5y ago
> What evil Climate change.
bredren 5y ago
There will be many. Be prepared to say, “we were wrong.” My pet issue is the mass slaughter of animals for food / factory farms. I believe today’s normalized routine that builds businesses off animal suffering for consumption or entertainment will be seen as absolutely barbaric.
- somedude895 5y ago
  I agree. No matter your current view on industrial meat production, it's clear to me that at some point in the future people will be saying something along the lines of "We used to grind up animals and stuff the bloody pulp into their torn out intestines."
  - bredren 5y ago
    It will likely be in the lifetime of those who enjoyed dogs at the ballpark. And these young people will look at them strangely.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  > There will be many. Be prepared to say, “we were wrong.” I'm not. That's a comfortable, lazy cop-out. I'm prepared to do it right. Maybe you and I should eating meat?

vmception 5y ago

This is like the promised neverland

voisin 5y ago

What I don’t understand is why the government doesn’t have special investigators that can demand the records that, to date, the church has “refused to release.” How can they simply refuse?