‘The Story of a National Crime’
A century ago, Dr. Peter Bryce demonstrated that residential schools were designed to kill. Canada’s government ignored him.

Canada, a nation full of deep secrets and afflicted by selective memories, can no longer keep this “national crime” hidden anymore.

Nations can deny history, ignore history, minimize history, postpone history and even rewrite history.

But they can’t grow up without facing history for a simple reason. “Knowing the before lets you create a different after.”

 kcar wrote:

probably died from infectious disease?

Westslope, I get the impression that you're implying that the missing FN children died at the hands of other FN children and not school/church staff. Do you have any evidence to back up this apparent assertion? 

 westslope wrote:
No. Merely showing the existing mindset and prevailing conditions (of settler-colonialism), which left little room for speaking out.

Though apples and oranges, structural abuse in white boarding schools would merit a national debate as well. But it's a bit of a red herring.

The abuse (and trauma) started with kids being forcibly taken from their parents for the purpose of forced assimilation.

Colonialism remains an ongoing process, shaping both the structure and the quality of the relationship between the settlers and Indigenous peoples.

 R_P wrote:
RP.  If you are saying larger society failed in its 'job' to oversee organizations of the Catholic church administer services to the larger population and to its own congregations, then yes.

In my experience listening to victims abuse, people knew about the abuse or appalling conditions but for one or another reason stayed quiet.  Expecting a top down-driven resolution of abuse and simply poor care in that kind of context, certainly in the past, is unrealistic.  

I have chatted up FNs who have described abuse suffered at the hands of other FN boys.  Standard stuff, if you ask me.  Should the RC managers have prevented the worst excesses of violence?  Absolutely yes.  

If white kids at a boarding school beat the piss out of each other, do we crank up a national debate?

No need for a counter-example.  I figured out very early in primary school that it was good to have educated, articulate parents to take up your cause.  Hierarchy.  There are reasons why social anarchism and political ecology acquired influence in the late 20th century.

If you are insinuating that the buried were all murdered, well, we might know in a few months or years depending on how long the investigation takes.

 westslope wrote:
In partnership with the government:

Roman Catholic, Anglican, United, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches were the major denominations involved in the administration of the residential school system. The government’s partnership with the churches remained in place until 1969, and, although most of the schools had closed by the 1980s, the last federally supported residential schools remained in operation until the late 1990s

 westslope wrote:
What is "much"? Citation please...

One counter-example (or several actually):

At the Alberni School on Vancouver Island, which was in operation from 1892 to 1973 under the United Church, punishments were particularly harsh, and treatment of the children was often brutal. A staff member in 1961 and 1962, Marian MacFarlane, was fired for attempting to rescue a young child from a severe beating.

The local dentists were given free Novocaine by the government for the Native kids, but the traditional practice after the war years was for them to hoard the Novocaine for their practice in Port Alberni and just work on the Indians without painkillers. Everyone in the school knew about this and condoned it, from the principal on down. No one minded when Indians were hurt, naturally; they were being beaten every day.

To give you an example of the prevailing mentality towards Indians, I once caught a matron beating a little girl with a piano leg. She was just murdering that kid, who was maybe six years old, and she would have killed her if I hadn’t have grabbed the matron and socked her one. So off the matron goes to complain to John Andrews, the principal. That would have been in 1962. You know what Andrews did? He fired me for hitting the matron! And you know what he said? ‘I couldn’t let the matron go because she plays the organ on Sundays. Anything she did to that little squaw would have been better than us losing our organist.’ Well, that shows you what we were dealing with: the lives of the Indian kids were completely expendable. They were considered less than human, almost like a disease we had to get rid of.

 Red_Dragon wrote:
The article contains an important error.   The Canadian government did not take over the school building until 1969.  Prior to that it was run most of the time by the Roman Catholic Church — which makes this find of an unmarked mass grave all the more deplorable.

The residential school history in western Canada is rough.  Without the residential schools, many of today's elected chiefs and band counsellors would not be educated and thus in a better position to defend and advance the interests of their community members.

Folks do not like hearing this but much of the abuse experienced in these schools was perpetrated by First Nation children on other First Nation children.

I just hope that this does not advance the ideology of victimhood that characterizes some Canadian First Nations.   

Remains of 215 children found buried at former Canadian residential school

 westslope wrote:

Also known as a Gestapo-like sweep of the West Bank.

It is actually rather interesting to observe the Israelis deploy strategies and tactics popularized by Nazi Germans during WW II.     I guess the full set of military strategies and tactics is sufficiently limited that any belligerent will borrow some of those infamous tools.

 R_P wrote:

Not going to happen.

Canada's UN Ambassador on Human Rights is Bob Rae, formerly in the Chretien cabinet and briefly the premier of Ontario.   He is a long-time supporter of the Israeli nation building process.   He supports the settlers, he supports the nuclear weapons and has zero to contribute to ending this conflict.

I recall in the summer of 2014, Bob Rae penned a particularly useless op-ed in the Globe and Mail that essentially talked around all the critical issues.   Hamas was signalling to the Palestinian Authority that it was ready to come out of the cold and stop violent resistance.   The PA president explained that that meant Hamas would abide by agreements that the PA had signed with the occupying Israel state.

At roughly the same time, a Palestinian man murdered 3 Rabbinical students in the occupied West Bank.    The Israelis, never one to lose an opportunity, immediately made a connection between the man who killed the students and Hamas.  They used this flimsy pretext to round up all known Hamas militants in the occupied West Bank.

Oh well, I felt hopeful for about 20 seconds.......

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh calls for Canada to block arms sales to Israel amid escalating violence

Shelley Fralic: Vancouver, once heaven, now merely a mess choking itself to death
Opinion: Sure it’s still pretty (those mountains!) but it’s become unaccessible, unaffordable, unfriendly and unwelcoming


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Careful.  This is a biased piece.  Fralic leaves out the joys and high social status of the targeted shootings, especially the drive-by shootings.    

 R_P wrote:
 
Oops.  Odd.  The couple could have gone for a few runs around the Seawall at Stanley Park to boost their immunity systems.  

Canadian mogul fined after getting Covid vaccine meant for Indigenous residents

According to officials, Rodney and Ekaterina Baker travelled by chartered plane to Beaver Creek, a community of 100 in Canada’s Yukon territory, where a mobile team was administering the Moderna vaccine to residents. Among those slated for the vaccine were elderly members of the White River First Nation.

At the mobile clinic, the Bakers claimed to be workers at a local motel, according to reporting by the Yukon News.

But after the couple asked for a ride to the airport and the hotel confirmed they weren’t employees, staff with the mobile clinic called enforcement officers.

After receiving the tip, enforcement officers searched for the couple at their quarantine location in Whitehorse, but found they had already left. They were discovered at the airport, preparing to fly back to Vancouver. (...)

Until resigning Sunday, Rodney Baker was head of the Great Canadian Gaming Corporation, which runs racetracks and casinos across the country. His total annual compensation in 2019 was C$10.6m, according to the Yukon News.

2 Years After Legalizing Cannabis, Has Canada Kept Its Promises? -NYT
Legal pot has made Canadian justice a little fairer, with “heavily racialized” arrests for possession mostly ending. But vows on amnesty, illicit sales and Indigenous inclusion are works in progress.

It is a good piece and certainly worth reading.   I did come across what I perceive as the fruit of biased op-ed journalism though.

Can you read the article and guess?

 westslope wrote:
 
Unconscionable!

Ms. Payette, a former astronaut, was said in some news accounts to have quizzed employees about the distance between celestial bodies. Several staff members in her office have quit or gone on extended leaves.

The governor-general just resigned after a meeting with the prime minister to discuss a report on the toxic work environment she had created.

No fuss, no muss.    And, absolutely no long, drawn-out, Reality TV drama.

Dear Americans:  Come live in Canada and be bored to death!  

 R_P wrote:
 
Do as I say, not as I do.     Ancient Canadian tradition.   

Here are the Canadian politicians facing questions over travel amid COVID-19 restrictions

 westslope wrote:
 

Love it!