750 Unmarked Graves Found At Second Canadian Residential School

Sam Wilkinson

According to a faithful reader, I'm Ordinary Times's "least thoughtful writer." So I've got that going for me, which is nice.

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20 Responses

  1. James K says:

    Can’t argue with that.Report

  2. Oscar Gordon says:

    It’s hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.

    -Bill WattersonReport

  3. Philip H says:

    You missed adding how the US Conference of Catholic Bishops is seeking to deny Communion to President Biden for his pro-choice political stance, despite essentially being told by their boss in Rome that they shouldn’t do that.

    But otherwise, depressingly, maddeningly spot on.Report

  4. Chip Daniels says:

    The unspoken horror is the existence of the schools themselves.

    It was official policy all across America and Canada to forcibly separate Native children from their communities and indoctrinate them into the dominant culture.
    Their language, their religion, their entire culture was deliberately suppressed in a deliberate effort to eradicate it and replace it with the correct way of thinking.
    This was the original Political Correctness, except enforced with genocidal power.

    This was done by the very people who were yelping about freedom and liberty.

    One of the many lessons we should take away from this is that yes, all the horrors we see around the world like pogroms, tyranny, and genocide, It Can Happen Here, because it already has, several times over.Report

  5. Rufus F. says:

    I’ve mixed feelings here. Because I agree absolutely on the role of the Catholic Church in this.

    But, also, I’m hearing plenty of Canadians saying “That damned Catholic Church!” at the moment, and it sounds like they’re saying “Not us!” yet again. The thing is Canada is a deeply and systemically racist country founded in British-style colonialism and unable to fully expunge those roots, regardless of all the talk about truth and reconciliation.

    Hell, those beloved mounties were founded to patrol the newly conquered First Nations territories to the North and modelled after the Royal Irish Constabulary, the occupying force in Ireland until 1922.

    Then you have “starlight tours”:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saskatoon_freezing_deaths

    Then you have reservations that have had unsafe drinking water advisories for decades because the government is in charge of water facilities:
    https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/canada-indigenous-drinking-water-dangers/

    Then you have racist nurses mocking the dying:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6OhOyujM60

    Then you have violent rednecks still killing them:
    https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/brayden-bushby-barbara-kentner-sentencing-1.6056010

    Then you have missing and murdered indigenous women:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_and_murdered_Indigenous_women

    Then you have countless disputes on how much native land can be taken from native people when we need to drill for oil or play golf:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oka_Crisis

    I mean, it goes on and on here. And it’s not us. It’s never us. We have the right attitudes and say the land acknowledgements. But the rest of us live with it nonetheless because we’re not the victims of it.

    So, at some point, yeah, it’s us too.Report

  6. Dark Matter says:

    I’m hardly a fan of the church, but it’s unclear to me if this was a moral crime or if it was just a reflection of child mortality at the time.

    Wiki says these schools where shut down about 20 years ago but existed for 120 years. Further the death/disappearance rate was about 5%.

    Statista says the child mortality rate for children under the age of 5 was 30% in 1900. So a child at birth only had a 70% chance of being alive 5 years later. Mortality rate dropped to about 10% in 1935.

    https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041751/canada-all-time-child-mortality-rate/

    We could be looking at us applying modern record keeping and child mortality standards inappropriately to history.Report

    • Oscar Gordon in reply to Dark Matter says:

      It’s less about child mortality at the time and more about how the society viewed the value of those lives as disposable, not even worthy of a grave marker, after that society took the children from their families.Report

    • Brandon Berg in reply to Dark Matter says:

      Since the Kamloops thread where I expressed a similar thought, I’ve looked into this, and there is evidence that the mortality rate was quite a bit higher at these schools than among contemporaneous white Canadian children. The main factor was likely housing all those children together in poorly ventilated buildings, creating an ideal environment for disease to spread. They also may not have been receiving adequate nutrition for optimal immune function.

      That said, this particular site was a communal graveyard before it was a residential school, so it’s unclear how many of the bodies are actually those of former students. If you read the article, there are quite a few hedges and qualifications.Report

  7. Chip Daniels says:

    Related:
    WaPo story of one such Native child taken from Alaska to a boarding school in Pennsylvania.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/more-than-a-century-later-disinterment-starts-a-native-american-girl-toward-home/2021/06/25/a8124a94-d5bc-11eb-ae54-515e2f63d37d_story.html

    Pratt’s stated goal was “kill the Indian, save the man.” Upon arrival, children were stripped of their native dress and long hair. “Before and after” images carefully document the transformation.

    “Pratt’s vision was to rescue the children. But depriving the children of identity and language was unconscionable,” said Barbara Landis, a Carlisle-based historian who has done extensive research on the school.

    Little is known about Sophia’s five years there except that she spent more than half her time on “outings,” when students were sent to live with White families. The ostensible goal was for them to learn how to adapt in White America, but the girls and boys served as cheap labor during those placements, working in factories, on farms or as domestic servants in households.

    This is an example of how the ecosystem of racism breeds horrific abuse. When an entire class of people become UnPersons, they become easy prey for any and all manner of abuse. They have no rights, no voice, no ability to defend themselves.

    When I read about these homes, I think of the current state of the thousands of immigrant children in custody, languishing in a vast gulag of prisons without representation. They are legally UnPersons and the system we have almost guarantees that in some future time, we will be reading reports about horrific abuses committed right now in 2021.Report

    • Rufus F. in reply to Chip Daniels says:

      An interesting thing I found when researching my book was that my great-grandmother was also adopted by rich people when her laborer father was still alive, and essentially served as free labor in their house. I don’t think it was nearly as horrific, but she also had nothing to do with the family once she got married and moved to Brooklyn.Report

  8. LeeEsq says:

    There has been a rash of arson attacks against the Catholic Church over outrage from this discover:

    https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3dnyk/more-churches-torched-in-canada-as-outrage-against-catholics-grows?fbclid=IwAR2T6wt–RcueCL-KjZuM3-fg1WbCc0DU2obgmglZc1a5ClEb7zeRl_lHzY

    I’m not really sure what to make out of all of this. The past settlement regarding religion worked because the Cold War pitted the developed world against officially atheist communism. There was a cozy ecumenism and the number of atheists in the developed world, especially outside of Europe, was low enough that we all kind of agreed on civic deism and all minor and major believers could be united against the Communists. Now we live in a totally different political system. In the developed world we have a lot of really anti-religious people that want to wage war against all religion but we also have a lot of people that still believe. Both factions cover the entire political spectrum.

    The Roman Catholic Church is one of the hardest nuts to crack in this because of it’s hierarchical unified form, sheer size, and wide spectrum of believers. There are people that believe we need to totally destroy the Roman Catholic Church for all it’s crime but also over a billion people that find at least some comfort in it.Report

    • Dark Matter in reply to LeeEsq says:

      Churches get targeted for arson all the time. It doesn’t normally make the news unless the media is trying to link something they don’t like to something else. So maybe Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc.

      Now these churches are (supposedly) on First Nations land so there’s that.

      Here’s a link from July 2020 trying to link multiple church burnings to BLM.
      https://www.the-sun.com/news/1135323/churches-burned-black-lives-matter-protests/Report

    • Dark Matter in reply to LeeEsq says:

      In the developed world we have a lot of really anti-religious people that want to wage war against all religion…

      I don’t think anyone has a problem with the Church existing, but the usual norms and laws need to apply. That means no raping children, and they need to expect a lot of pushback on claims to have special authority on ethics and the nature of reality.Report

      • Oscar Gordon in reply to Dark Matter says:

        And you don’t get to hide behind the cloth. The org needs to treat internal bad actors the same way other orgs do, by turning them over to the authorities for investigation and prosecution, not shuffling them around to other locations.Report

        • Dark Matter in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

          That sort of thing is just the tip of the iceberg.

          Historically a LOT of people have thought that the purpose of government+society was to serve their religion, not the reverse. “War against religion” and “asking religion to accept they’re a normal, probably entertainment or identity org”, are the same thing.

          The US has gone pretty far down this path but if we’re talking about the entire Western world then there are states that don’t really separate church and state.
          They’ll collect tithes for religions like they do taxes and they also force you to be a member of something and/or let the church dictate policy in various areas.

          Historically Religion is about power, not entertainment. In many places they still have some or a lot. Trying to get them to give it up is a big deal.Report

      • LeeEsq in reply to Dark Matter says:

        I know quite a few people who have a problem with the Roman Catholic Church or really any religion existing at all.

        I’m not saying that the norms and laws of society shouldn’t apply to religious organizations but I am saying is that with a religion as institutionalized as the Roman Catholic Church, there is a very tough nut to crack in this case.Report