750 Unmarked Graves Found At Second Canadian Residential School
Let’s suppose the only thing we knew about the Catholic Church was its administration of the Irish Laundries. Would that be enough to tarnish the institution to the point where it could never be polished again? The answer is no. We know that because the Catholic Church remains, no matter how many women’s lives it stole, both metaphorically and quite literally. One would think that the discovery of a mass grave of 150+ bodies would have been enough for a significant rethink of the church’s role in society, but nope! No matter what the church does, it stays; and, in fact, it continues to hold forth on moral matters, as if its own easily accessible history doesn’t exist.
Let’s suppose the only thing we knew about the Catholic Church was its decades-long commitment to aiding and abetting the sexual molestation of children. Would that be enough to tarnish the institution to the point where it could never be polished again? The answer is no. We know that because the Catholic Church remains, no matter how many children’s lives it stole, both metaphorically and quite literally. One would think that tens of thousands of abused children across the globe would be enough for a significant rethink of the church’s role in society, but nope! No matter what the church does, it stays, and, in fact, it continues to hold forth on moral matters, as if its own easily accessible history doesn’t exist.
So, let’s suppose the unfurling Canadian unmarked graves scandal continues to reveal itself, as this week’s revelation of 751 unmarked graves at the Marieval Indian Residential School marks the third such discovery in the last few weeks. The previous revelation – of the bodies of 215 children at the former site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School – means so far that more than 1000 unmarked have been discovered. It is tempting to conclude that this is bad, especially when one accounts for there having been 150 of these schools in existence during the program’s history. That program, which removed indigenous children from their families so that they could be properly assimilated into Canada (them and their families having long predated Canada’s existence of course mattered not at all), existed for more than 100 years and likely saw more than 150,000 children come through its doors. These schools were state-based, but most were run by the Catholic Church. The churches brutalized the children sent there. But let’s assume, for no particular reason and certainly not an earned one, that less than a third of the lowest number of unmarked graves discovered at one site as our baseline – in other words, let’s assume that Marieval was an outrageous outlier, and that Kamloops was an outlier – meaning that authorities are going to discover 75 unmarked graves per remaining facility. That would put the total number of unmarked graves at 12,100. In other words, a huge percentage of the students that came through the schools ended up buried in unmarked graves.
And that is all presuming an extremely low estimate against what is known so far.
So, will that be enough to tarnish the institution to the point where it could never be polished again? The answer is no. We know that because the Catholic Church remains, no matter how many children’s lives it stole, both metaphorically and quite literally. One would think that the discovery of unmarked graves of more than 1000 unidentified individuals, a significant portion of whom are children, would be enough for a significant rethink of the church’s role in society, but nope! No matter what the church does, it stays, and, in fact, it continues to hold forth on moral matters, as if its own easily accessible history doesn’t exist.
As if desperate to illustrate this arrogance, we have Owen Keenan, a Catholic priest from Mississauga, Ontario, who decided that it made good sense to ask his parishioners, and Canadian society generally to think of all of the good that had been done at the Residential Schools. Faced with hundreds of unmarked graves that contained the bodies of children who had been ripped away from their homes and families and parents, Keenan – who is, again, a priest, tasked with providing moral guidance, among other responsibilities – argued that people should consider appreciating all of the “good done” in the residential school system.
During a mass on June 6, Keenan said the discovery was “very sad” and a symbol of the “ongoing tragedy” of government policies against Indigenous people, but also that:
“We don’t know how those children died. We don’t know, we can’t know, if they would’ve died if they stayed at home.”
While he called for prayers and reconciliation, he also said, “Many people had very positive experiences of residential schools. Many people received health care and education and joyful experiences.
“They weren’t universally awful. But there’s still no place for the horrors that are alleged to have occurred there.”
Residential school survivors have shared horrific accounts of abuse, starvation and neglect, and difficulties getting documents from the Catholic Church, which ran the majority of the schools. The final 2015 report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission begins by stating that what took place at residential schools “can be best described as ‘cultural genocide.'”
Keenan was, apparently, serious. Sure, there are all of those bodies, after all, but only a monster would consider focus on just that when all of the good these schools achieved could be discussed instead. Keenan did not extrapolate on all of this alleged good; presumably, those listening were just meant to understand that good had occurred.
So, yes, the Catholic Church and its monstrous arrogance remains. But none of the rest of us are obliged to go along with this nonsense. We are not required to believe that the Catholic Church is good or decent or even okay. We are allowed to properly understand it as a criminal organization that has, again and again and again, aided and abetted remarkable evil. And if that position forces a reconsideration of those that still attend and donate and support and encourage and look the other way, well, what other course of action would be more reasonable?
YeahReport
Can’t argue with that.Report
It’s hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
-Bill WattersonReport
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
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
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
That’s also fair.Report
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
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
Yeah, I don’t think most people are imagining torture chambers and mass killings up here. But we’re been hearing accounts for years from kids who returned from the residential schools that they were pretty horrific places. After all, the point of the system was to “kill the Indian in the child.” They weren’t exactly summer camps.
And, to clarify, we’ve been hearing accounts of abuse, rape, and unrecorded deaths for a long time:
https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2021/06/25/she-saw-the-horrors-of-marieval-residential-school-as-a-child-60-years-ago-as-an-adult-something-drew-her-back.html?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=SocialMedia&utm_campaign=National&utm_content=drewherback
So, we’re already dealing with that legacy. And, for years, there were rumors of kids who died in those placs, and the parents were told the child ran away, while their bodies were quietly buried out back. But it was a child’s adult memory versus the official word.
Let me put it this way- every Canadian I know is heartbroken, shattered, and angered by this news right now. I don’t know a single one who’s surprised.Report
Hell, even just the whole, “Your child died while in our care and we couldn’t be bothered to tell you about it with even so much as a letter, or to return mementoes of the child”. Just a complete disregard of any measure of humanity for the families of those children.Report
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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