I am speechless, truly speechless. This needs to be investigated immediately and those responsible for any wrongful acts, if any are still alive, brought to justice.

I’m pretty angry and ashamed right now, so take that into account, but I sincerely hope this destroys the Anglican and Catholic churches in this country. Nothing but racist criminal gangs.

Aeneas,

As I stated, I am angry. Pissed beyond words.

I am a former Anglican myself and my family have been staunch Anglicans for over 150 years - my great-grandfather was the Anglican Minister in Lennoxville Quebec 100 years ago. The thought that our money, lives and efforts were supporting an organization committing such heinous crimes not only against aboriginals, but against innocent children sickens me.

Sorry, but taking children from their families, physically and sexually abusing them, destroying their language and culture then burying their bodies in unmarked mass graves is what is “clearly over the line”.

All in the name of “saving their souls” or “civilizing them”, I suppose.

By “destroying” I mean financially. I mean that I hope every piece of property, every church, every silver chalice and every other chattel both organizations has must be sold in order to repay the survivors for this genocidal wrong. Unlike them, I don’t want a single person to be harmed, but I want justice for those aboriginal kids that died and disappeared at their hand.

Is that “over the line”? So be it. I am angry and my entire family heritage has been betrayed and forever tainted by these organizations. There is blood on their hands, the blood of dead aboriginal children. They deserve to be as destroyed as the Nazis or the Klan for what they have done.

I want to make sure they - or any other organization - can commit these kinds of crimes again.

Sorry if that is too harsh, but at this point I do no care.

Well, if crimes were committed and the nation has sites to investigate, so be it. And if there weren’t crimes committed, let’s find that out too. Assign funds and forensic archaeologists.

At the very least, it can be documented what is physically there as remains and artifacts and not there in each of those places, instead of leaving it blank and undetermined, with shadows over all.

The honest of us know shitty, Othering crap was pulled in the previous centuries of this nation (and still goes on). Be a lot less wasteful to respect the fact Canada was not built on the Golden Rule and to hold ourselves and our descendants to the fire so it doesn’t happen in future. The ghosts in our soil deserve it.

“Am I the only one that noticed the following?”

Yes. I skimmed the article and got hung up on the locations (the golf course is particularly disturbing to me).

I’m with Aeneas: “If these allegations are true, then they say more about the attitudes of the 19th and early 20th Century than they do about communicants today. If true, they are extremely lamentable and heinous.”

Should there be investigations and reparation? Absolutely. However, I would bet that the bulk of those commiting the crimes are already burning in Hell, although if there are some still alive, no, they should absolutely NOT be allowed to finish their twilight years in peace. They should be made to meet with the families they helped destroy, ideally from inside an institution.

My late Uncle Joe Sylvester told me that if people poked around behind where the old Kuper Island school they would find bodies. I’ve never shared that before - because I didn’t know what to do with the information.

Joe claimed that if the girls in the school got pregnant, that’s what they would do to the babies.

How would the girls get pregnant at a Church run school where kids were trapped on an island?

Good question.

Anyways.. even when you have reliable people telling you something like this, you don’t generally want to believe it. I thought for a time that Joe was talking about maybe one or two infants. But when I pressed him on it, he said it was more like over a dozen. I thought to myself “There’s no way this can be true”.
But I still remembered what he said.

I didn’t know what to believe — until I read this.
Joe said the babies were buried behind the school. I remember that very clearly. Too bad he’s no longer with us to ask him what he thinks of all this.

Once again I went through the mainstream news and found nothing - you’d think that allegations of kids bodies stuffed into walls or under floor boards would tweak somebodies interest. In what other developed nation could a group of people release a statement about hundreds (possibly thousands) of dead children, some of them electrocuted, some of them flogged to death, and bodies found in furnaces, and the media not jump all over it?

How much more significant is that than whether or not some gay bashing Conservative MP gets his hand slapped in public or not, or even whether or not the Prime Minister is involved in election finance corruption?

I listened to a long discussion of the issue on CBC Radio One this morning. Still there isn’t much in the media.

As harsh as it may sound, I think there are several reasons why this hasn’t attracted much media attention:

1. Many Canadians have moved on. The tragedy of residential school’s has been examined, apologies made and reparations paid. Small comfort for those involved. I expect many people not close to the issue acknowledge that terrible things happened but see little likelihood these things could happen today.

2. Some of the allegations are difficult to comprehend so an initial rejection isn’t unusual.

3. I think some of the language ( eg: “genocide” and “mass graves” ) will appear exaggerated until an inquiry produces objective support. Right now it’s a list of allegations.

Not everyone will share Mike’s principled outrage or shared sense of guilt.

I think a lot of people can get riled enough to do something over the killing of seals, or the possible extinction of polar bears due to global warming, and even a truly idiotic statement by some Canadian mayor.

But when stories like this about Aboriginal peoples appear, stories that reflect back upon the reader because it deals with the actions of their leaders (past or present) or their institutions (past or present), I think some kind of psychic self-defense mechanism pops into gear.

You know that you aren’t personally capable of doing anything that horrible. You know that you personally would never sit idly by if you knew that something this horrible were going on today.

Yet, in the end, that is exactly what happens. By the time all of that has been rationalized, a perfectly good excuse for doing nothing has already been created.

I’m not pointing fingers. I’m just trying to understand. I think we all react like this to some extent no matter where we come from or how we were raised. I think it’s just another factor that separates “the other” — no matter who the “other” is.

Ah, but you see Kevin, I do think that people just don’t care, if they did this would be large news, they don’t and it isn’t.

This isn’t, as so many willfully choose to believe, ancient history. This happened within many of our life times, I have good friends and relatives who were forced to endure this sort treatment - and I’m not even close to ancient.

Finally (at least) one other blogger has picked up on this and asks the question

Will this holocaust also be remembered,will memorials be built across Canada ? Will school children be taught this “history” in hopes of bridging that mighty gap that still divides First Nations people and the rest of Canada? Will First Nations peoples finally get justice ? Will Canada finally sit down with First Nations as equals and work out a mutually acceptable solution?

My kids know - how many others can say the same?

If you can track down a screening or copy of “Muffins for Granny”, go see it. Quite moving. A granddaughter’s tribute to her grandmother who grew up in a residential school.

http://sheenavision.blogspot.com/2007/06/muffins-for-granny.html

Sorry I got here so late. I will do something tomorrow.

I would like to have emotion to touch this issue. I really would. I would like to feel outraged. But I can’t. I just can’t work myself up anymore. There are so many people I have known who have died much earlier than they should have — who would never have gotten deathly ill if there had been better knowledge and use of medical care. I’ve been to too many funerals for people who, having lived through the horror of the residential schools drank themselves to death… The alcohol acting like a balm for their troubled souls. I know of too many people who have T.B. I know of too many people who died from compliciations related to diabetes. I am thoroughly numbed out. As the wonderful poet Sherman Alexie once wrote “I have nothing new to say about death”. There are no words.

When you have sat and listened to the stories of life in these “schools” — and heard about children, ages 7-10 being forced to labour well into the night to pay for their “room and board” - instead of actually learning how to read and write…

When you have sat down with elders who were supposed to have been educated in these places and realized they only got a grade 3 education… and are humbled by your ease in reading notices from the band office. You don’t have time or energy to get angry.

But it hits you sometimes.. really hard, and you want to pull your hair out from the grief and pain that you have witnessed… but there is nobody around to explain how frustrated you are with what has happened, and what continues to happen to your grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins….

I’m glad that people here have the energy to get angry.
I can’t. I’m too tired.
So thank you for being able to carry the anger and the outrage for my relatives. If enough non-aboriginals got good and angry about what is happening to my relatives, then maybe something would change.

But I’m too tired to wait for that to happen.

Aeneas: “Further, none of these Churches - as structured today - are capable of the type of racist deeds that you are decrying. To suggest we need to wipe-out Churches and Communions that are far removed in time from these heartless and quite un-Christian acts is radical and extremist.”

Missed this earlier… the Pope of the so-called “One True Church” arrives and is treated with an embarrasing amount of pomp and ceremony by Prez Bush at the White House while the Catholic Church is reeling charges that it knowingly, wilfully covered up sexual abuse of children by its priests for decades (and maybe longer).

Methinks you wrote too quickly.

I was struck by the “news event” where the pope met with five abuse survivors. Imagine that, five whole, no doubt hand picked by the church, abuse survivors amid the thousands upon thousands of people the church abused, and my friends, the news cast went on to say that he not only graced them with his presence but that he prayed with them. Well whoop-de-fricken-do, I wonder how far that goes to helping deal with generations of abuse, lies, denials, and pay offs?

Nothing but racist criminal gangs.

Nice fine-tipped brush you wield there.

How else would you describe organizations responsible for aiding and abetting people who abused little kids lrC? What other description would you use considering what the people who worked for these organizations did coupled with what those organizations did on behalf of these criminals (can we agree they are criminals?) to shelter them and their actions? Misguided seems a tad light don’t you think?

The church is now simply reaping what it has sown (who says I didn’t pay attention in church ‘eh?), their god warned them, and it might suck to be them but in my opinion it’s well passed time it caught up to them.

While I certainly do not wanty to defend the residential school system, as heinous a piece of sadism cloaked in pretty ideals as could be invented, I do have to point out someproblems i have with these reports. the first is that many of these locations are not readily accessible, and there may have been reasons for having burials of bodies in areas on the grounds. With diseases like TB, or during the 1917 influenza outbreak, it would seem as only prudent to dispose of the dead in a timely manner. It does not explain other deaths, but could explain some. In the same vein I wonder about the claims of ‘an electric chair’ in Fort albany. This is a remte village, and I am not sure if it would have had the power necessary to run a electric chair of any power at the time. It is also quite possible that these were legitimate burial sites, that have been forgotten over time.

While I hope an investigation is launched and the allegations proved true or false, please do not be hasty in finding crimes where there are so far unfounded rumors. We should support an independent, professional inquiry into these allegations.

Living near one of the sites, I have also heard rumors of a burial ground. The tales I heard says the site holds the victims of disease that had no families, who were not only residents of the facility but also of the nearby community.

> the first is that many of these locations are not readily accessible, and there may have been reasons for having burials of bodies in areas on the grounds. With diseases like TB, or during the 1917 influenza outbreak, it would seem as only prudent to dispose of the dead in a timely manner.

And many are incredibly easy to access. I only have half-an-hour walk to get to the Kamloops Indian Band school myself. Ask an elder where the graves are, and you’ll get told right away. It’s no secret. It’s just that nobody in the halls of power has been listening.

One of the major problems is that the churches won’t reveal where many more graves are located (or that many are buried on church land, and we aren’t allowed access).

The ones listed above are the tip of the iceburg. We’r not talking about hundreds of graves, nor even thousands. We’re talking tens of thousands over a hundred years. Smallpox and the flu did kill many natives. So many that we don’t know where all the graves are until we build our homes and highways over top of them, but that does not explain the abnormal number of deaths in the schools alone in the years preceding and following those outbreaks.

It’s so incomprehensible, until you listen to the words of people who had witnessed it first hand the terror.

Go watch Unrepentant.

There is another problem. People who may know of the location of these burial sites are getting old and dying off. Some burial sites are being bulldozed or planted over, or are disappearing as trees and undergrowth take over. Something should be done soon, but even some of the survivors still won’t talk about their experiences or refuse to expose old wounds.

Then there’s the question of who is buried in these sites. I have no doubt many of them exist, and there may be more out there. But taking my grandfather’s brother for example, the school has no records of his attending that school. My grandfather was there. Other people were there with them. Yet my grandfather has disappeared from any of the so-called “documented records” since oral history or testimony is still looked down on by the courts — as if the responsible agencies have nothing to hide.

Sometimes, to quote someone but I forget whom, it makes you want to holler.

Whooee! Okay, I’m disgusted and repulsed by these revelations. I’ve been at the Mohawk Chapel in Brantford and last year, I was in Alert Bay at the big First Nations heritage centre (I can’t remember the name of it right now and I’m too lazy to go lookin’).

What’s got me all confuddled is the lack of press this issue is getting. The press release was issued at a public press conference in Vancouver on April 10th. That was last Thursday. A Google web search today for “mass graves” +Canada has this very Stageleft post as the top result with my own nod to this post coming in at #3. There is only one MSM result in the top 10: an Edmondton Sun piece from April 11. A Google News search is not turning up much MSM interest, either.

Why is that?

The simplest answer is that a cover-up or downplaying of the horrendous facts is taking place. Certainly, there’s plenty of precedent for downplaying and hushing up abuses carried out against First Nations people. But simple answers aren’t always the right answers. Even with a history of cover-ups and downplaying, the exposure of 28 mass grave sites and the possibility that hundreds or even thousands of children died due to abuse or neglect is a huge news item. Huge.

In my searching for MSM follow-ups to the April 10th press release, I came across a couple related items mentioning Kevin Annett and FRD. There was aG&M piece (behind $$ wall) but republished in the Sault Star. This was from about 10 days before the April 10th press release. It looks like it relates to the same revelations. The articles states that no hard evidence of any mass graves has actually been found.

Okay, I’m willing to believe that these mass graves exist. The anecdotal evidence and reports are too ubiquitous to deny. However (dang howevers), I think the MSM might be alot more willing to run with this story if there was some forensic evidence. That’s what Annett said was the next step. I’m wondering why they didn’t get at least some hard forensic evidence from at least one of the 28 sites before going public. Obviously, many of the sites are going to be hard to dig up but some minor digging in at least one spot with cooperative owners would seem to be possible.

I want to see a lot more light shed on this whole thing. Who’s going to shed that light? These FRD folks have pointed the authorities in the direction of a possible crime scene but they are also on record as worrying that the RCMP will remove the remains in a further attempt at covering up. If these crime scenes exist all across the country, it seems like the RCMP would be the ones to investigate. Maybe we need Interpol?

On my blog, I called this the most important and disturbing news in Canada today. I will do my bloggin’ best to keep it alive, as I know SL et al and many of the other blogger/commenters will do. We need to uncover as much as we possibly can and we need to hold the badasses accountable, even if it was 40 or 50 years ago.

JB

Shmohawk, is it “Makes me want to holler” from Marvin Gayes’ song Inner City Blues?

Anyway,
Reparations and justice.

For years I had felt apathy, but lately that apathy was revealed as merely skin grown over a sore. Rip it off, and the anger spills out.

It’s a challenge to turn that apathy into anger, and then into hope, but that’s what’s got to happen.