It’s Nice To See –

– people talking about it like it was, instead of what the government would like you to believe it was.

Canada probes TB ‘genocide’ in church-run schools

CANADA is to investigate claims that tens of thousands of native Indian and Inuit (First Nation) children died of tuberculosis at church-run residential schools in the early 20th century, and that their deaths were hushed up. Campaigners allege that school officials did nothing to halt the march of TB despite warnings, and charge that their inaction was tantamount to genocide.

Christian churches ran up to 88 boarding schools for aboriginal children across Canada between 1874 and 1985. Their stated aim was assimilation; children were forbidden to speak their native languages. Some 200,000 children passed through the schools, attendance was mandatory and the Mounted Police rounded up truants. Their experiences were often brutal, and Canada is finalising a C$1.9 billion ($1.7 million) class-action settlement for 80,000 surviving former inmates, with extra payments for those who suffered physical and sexual abuse.

(emphasis mine)

The government program was cultural assimilation (the methods have changed but that’s still, IMO, the goal), and the church was their [more than willing] tool.

Unfortunately, with government investigating what government did, and why it did it, how much legitimacy can the process, or the report, actually have?

So far there have been no lawsuits over deaths at the schools, although survivors tell of children disappearing and secret burials. Under pressure from campaigners, Indian Affairs minister Jim Prentice announced last week that his department would find out “why [children] didn’t return and where the bodies are”.

The “why” is pretty simple. I know quite a number of residential school survivors, I’ve heard a lot of stories about how they were treated, it can be summed up as less than human, they were things, as opposed to real people, and the nuns and the priests did with them what people do with things when they break.

Good luck to Prentice finding the graves of these kids. I know people who searched for years and years to find the graves of relatives who were sent south to the TB hospitals; many of them died and were buried where ever they happened to be with no thought given to family members and friends back home.

Prentice will never really open up the can of worms he is talking about, and if some of the harsh reality that people lived does accidentally come out it will be sugar coated with phrases like “good intentions”, “unintentional consequences”, and “a few bad apples”, or tied to descriptions like “in the past” with little, or no, reference to the fact that much of this happened to people of my generation and not hundreds of years ago as the mainstream like to comfortably think.