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 Sugarcane...After the discovery, I received a phone call. It was from a friend and former colleague, Emily Kassie, asking if I’d be open to co-directing a documentary about the legacy of the 139 government-funded and church-run boarding schools that operated across Canada and forcibly separated six generations of Indigenous children from their families. The idea behind the schools, in the words of one of their administrators, was to “get rid of the Indian problem.” In 2008, the Canadian government established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to document their destructive legacy, and the commission concluded that these institutions committed a “cultural genocide” against the country’s First Peoples."... archive.is |
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Christianity, a progenitor of genocide... |
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Vocihc 12:23 Look through the history of Christianity. You will see that from the days of the Apostles, Christian missionaries were eager to promote the cultures they went to. St. Paul in Athens (Acts ch. 17) is a classic example of evangelism INTO the culture of the hearers, and the early church was eager to translate the Bible into a wide range of 'barbarian' tongues. The Cyrillic Alphabet is named after St. Cyril who invented it so the various slavic peoples could have the scriptures in their own tongue. It was a Christian missionary who made slavic languages literate, thus providing them with the core around which their own cultures could crystallise when confronted with pressure from the classical Mediterranean cultures.! Thus was their desire to foster the peoples they preached to, rather than commit the cultural genocide of 'civilising' them into Greek/Roman culture. The problems arose when the European nations gained technological supremacy. But even then, the aim was not genocide, either physical or cultural. It was profit! An excellent book 'Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World' by Niall Ferguson outlines in very readable style how the prime motive of all European empires was about looting the natives rather than 'converting' them (or in England's case, piracy against those European nations that got there first). It was only much later that missionaries were even permitted, much less welcomed; those missionaries (both Catholic and Protestant) invariably tried to defend the natives against rape, murder, dispossession and slavery. Read about the Debate of Valladolid. The film 'The Mission' with Jeremy Irons and Robert de Niro portrays this struggle and explains the real reason behind the Pope banning the Jesuit order when they interfered with the progress of imperialism. Later, with the growth of Humanism, came the idea that it would be a good and noble thing to 'lift the savages up to a civilised level', and that was when the real genocide started. European arrogance considered anything other than 'European culture' to be something the natives needed to be rescued from, and the religiosity of the times included formal acknowledgement of Christian belief as part of the package. Of course, Christian behaviour by the elites was optional, since elites are always above the laws they enforce on others. As you said yourself in your 09:58 post, the aim of the church-run schools was not to spread Christianity, but to "get rid of the Indian problem". That is as secular an aim as you can get. Were some churchmen complicit in this? Heck, YES!! Most were! Because they too were Europeans in their outlook, not because they were Christians dragging government to do their dogmatic bidding! Most of the people involved in these church-run schools were also trained educators; does that mean that "Education is a precursor to genocide"? Most would have been of European descent; does that mean "Being of European descent is a precursor to genocide?" You said yourself that they were government-funded; does that means "Government funding is a precursor to genocide"? Why pick one trait out of the hundreds available? Meanwhile, as close to home as I can get, the congregation of Eastwood Uniting Church where I attend was once almost entirely Anglo. It is now about 40% Anglo and the others mostly an even split between Korean and Chinese, with (to my certain knowledge) at least a Swede, a German and an Iranian in the mix. Our Pastor is a Korean immigrant. Our notices are spoken in English, but displayed on screens in three languages (just like the titulus on Christ's cross!) Last Sunday two days ago was admittedly unusual, but it was a Zoom sermon by a Korean woman in Japan speaking Mandarin and being translated in-house. Not much 'genocide' going on there, folks! So stop blaming Christianity for atrocities committed in the service of Greed and Pride, particularly the laissez-faire Capitalism and European arrogance of the 19th century. |
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@vocihc www.google.com Are you aware of the arguments that say the story in your OP is false? |
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@vocihc <<Canada Gives Up Trying to Prove the Mass Graves Hoax Very quietly, the Canadian government has ended funding for a committee of experts formed to help Indigenous communities find unmarked graves at the former sites of religious residential schools. It marks the end of one of the most disgraceful moral panics in modern history. In 2021, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation made an announcement that radar technology had discovered over 200 human remains in unmarked graves near a Catholic “Indian residential school.” A wave of condemnation spread over the world. “‘Horrible History’: Mass Grave of Indigenous Children Reported in Canada,” reported the New York Times. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ordered flags to half-staff to honor “215 children whose lives were taken at the Kamloops residential school.” In the following months, 20 announcements of soil “anomalies” discovered by radar near residential-school locations were announced. Soon, news articles about the residential-schools issue in Canada were positing the discovery of thousands of unmarked graves. This, in turn, led to waves of protest and a series of arsons that afflicted 24 churches over the next two years. Pope Francis visited, allowing himself to be used as a prop in the Canadian government’s staged punching of the church, so the government could effectively disclaim its own role in the residential-school system. In 2021, while making a pro forma condemnation of church burnings, Trudeau still gave a tacit moral endorsement. “It’s real, and it is fully understandable given the shameful history we are all becoming more aware of,” he said. Then, he claimed, “people have gone decades and even generations living with intergenerational trauma, with outcomes and institutional racism that has created extreme difficulties for Indigenous peoples across this country that are also the legacy of residential schools.” The burned churches included those that serve First Peoples congregants today. Canada Day events were canceled as the nation faced what reporters solemnly called a “reckoning” with its settler-colonial and genocidal past. There’s one problem. It was built on lies. In all the excavations that have been conducted, not a single unmarked grave has been found. Not one. This despite the fact that it would be expected that at some long-abandoned schools, where mortality rates in the late 19th century were abominably high, markers of graves had been lost to time and inattention. This history was well-covered by a 2008–2015 inquiry by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, which collected voluminous personal histories and documents on the residential-school system that Canada had operated for a century in conjunction with several religious bodies. The appalling health conditions at some schools are well known. In the last year, criticism of a “mass graves hoax” perpetrated by progressive media and academia has given rise to a small scholarly industry devoted to defending the moral panic. Researchers have counted how often headlines used the phrase “mass graves,” versus the more modest and defensible “unmarked graves.” Through a tendentious process of disqualification they find just 35 percent of newspaper stories misled readers or provided inaccurate information. Thus they conclude, preposterously, that there wasn’t any “mass graves hoax” and anyone who says otherwise is engaging in “residential school denialism.” That is a neat trick. But it reveals the depravity at work, which is not a concern for justice, but building up a black legend, through the progressive policing of language. The mission has been to absolve the progressive state and smear Canada’s last remaining conservative institutions in the present. We welcome Canada’s abandonment of this lie. We regret that it comes so late and without apologies.>> www.nationalreview.com |
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More a plan to make money on dead, possibly murdered orphans, I suppose. |
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More info about Sugarcane... Canada’s residential schools were based on similar facilities in the United States, where Catholic and Protestant denominations operated more than 150 boarding schools between the 19th and 20th centuries, according to researchers, that also were home to rampant abuse." ca.news.yahoo.com |
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@mo-one Entirely true based on what? <<More a plan to make money on dead, possibly murdered orphans, I suppose.>> Evidence for that? |
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@vocihc So you’re moving off the mass graves claim? BTW, you oughta check the links between molecules-to-man evolution and genocides and between atheism and genocides. I think you’ll find evidence supporting the links to be quite strong. Let me know if you need me to point you in the right direction. |
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The bottom line is the psychopaths of the world. Don't process emotion in the way we do. Therefore they don't understand it and will often mimic emotions to fit in. Transactional exchanges that benefit themselves in some way. Even if it is purely ego stroking. And just as the snake has patterns to blend in. So too does psychopaths they camouflage themselves to gain trust and they enter areas and professions of society that get them closer to their prey of choice. This can be any religion, any profession and or walk of life. If a homeless person starts a killing spree it doesn't make homelessness Evil. Humans are Apex predators and some don't feel a thing. Also what's going to make the news and be remembered? The 200 soup kitchens feeding people or the guy who decided to burn down a nursing home? Point being there have been many evils perpetuated in the name of a religion. But that is a human condition not a religious condition. I personally don't like the word religion. Jesus is about relationships not religion. |
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Vocihc 1. <If I was blaming Christianity, I would have used the article "the" instead of "a"...> How interesting that THIS is the one you picked out, from the many available! When will you post articles that list all the other 'precursors to genocide'? Start with education, then press on to the invention of property rights, then perhaps the concept of private property in general... etc. 2. <"From the 19th century until the 1970s, more than 150,000 First Nations children were required to attend state-funded Christian schools as part of a program to assimilate them into Canadian society.> Who 'required' this attendance? Not Christian churches themselves; they had not power to make that requirement. It was the GOVERNMENT. So perhaps we should add 'government' and perhaps 'democracy' to the list of 'precursors to genocide'. 3. < They were forced to convert to Christianity> That depends on what is meant by the terms used, but I take it that nobody can 'force' someone to believe something in the innermost reaches of their own minds. I take it that they were required to conform to certain behaviours. This is common in schools and a rigid standard practice in all schools, and at the time even for the children of the elite of society. As recently as 1960 I was forced to write right-handed in class, despite being naturally left-handed. To ensure I obeyed I spent time out in front of the rest of the class, kneeling on the floor and writing right-handed using the seat of a chair as my table. It's a good thing it hasn't affected me in later life! (Twitch! Blink! Shudder! Rock autistically!) 4. <and not allowed to speak their native languages.> Yes, the same thing was happening all around the world at the time. Not just in Christian-run schools but in all state schools and also in most private schools. Even though there were more Hindi-speaking subjects of the Crown in the British Empire in 1935, not one of Britain's elite schools conducted lessons in Hindi! I wonder about that sometimes, but not for long. 5. <Many were beaten and verbally abused> Again, standard operating procedure at the time for all schools, not just Christian schools. Verbal abuse was so commonplace that it was rarely noticed. I can recall as late as the mid-1960's ALL schools in New South Wales practiced corporal punishment for even minor infractions. This was typically caning across the open fingers, and multiple blows were the norm. 6. <and up to 6,000 are said to have died> I immediately distrust numbers preceded by 'up to'. Even one is 'up to'! The real number might have been a few hundred or even less. Also, recall that child mortality was not a rare thing in the 19th century and even into the mid-twentieth in remote locations subject to extremes of weather, poor food, poor sanitation and untreated water supply. That is not to excuse or justify neglect; but it means that there needs to be evidence of neglect for the statistic to have any meaning, and an accurate estimate of occurences against the total population is also required before we can say it was exceptional for the times compared to other alternatives. 7. <that also were home to rampant abuse."> Indeed, and it is one of the great strides forward over the last few decades that churches are being called out on this. So why didn't it happen a hundred years ago? Once again, it was ignored because it was so common throughout society. Every upper-class Englishman who had been through the English private school system had experienced it himself or at least been aware of it happening to his friends, so it was no secret. His response was simply to accept it as part of growing up. If his own son were to complain about it (which would not happen often, because the son would not want to appear weak), the answer would be to tell the lad to get some backbone. When society allows these things to happen, they will happen; and they will happen disproportionately to those most vulnerable because of their poverty, their mental deficiency or their race. And psychopaths will be disproportionately attracted to those institutions that offer easiest access to victims combined with personal immunity for such acts. In summary, every point you picked out was common to society as a whole, of which Christianity was but one component and by no means the critical component. To my mind, the most obvious point was that the society at the time was effectively social-Darwinist, in which each looked after himself and even the most generous-minded did little to protect the vulnerable from the powerful. FINALLY.... Back to 1. <If I was blaming Christianity, I would have used the article "the" instead of "a"...> And if you were NOT specifically blaming Christianity, then why was your subsequent post entirely aimed at Christian-run schools? Methinks that betrays your excuse. |
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The op is about a documentary that was nominated for an oscar I'm fully aware of genocide perpetrated on others. I merely emphasized the involvement of the holy hand in the documentary. |
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lets not leave the u.s. out of this... |
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@vocihc <<Investigation finds at least 973 Native American children died in US government boarding schools BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — At least 973 Native American children died in the U.S. government’s abusive boarding school system, according to the results of an investigation released Tuesday by Interior Department officials who called on the government to apologize for the schools.>> Further down, the article says the Catholic church ran a lot of the schools, and you oughta be aware significant differences exist between Catholicism and Christianity. This article identifies some of them.. <<I am a Catholic. Why should I consider becoming a Christian? First, please understand that we intend no offense in the wording of this question. We genuinely receive questions, from Catholics, along the lines of “What is the difference between Catholics and Christians?” In face-to-face conversations with Catholics, we have literally heard, “I am not a Christian, I am Catholic.” To many Catholics, the terms “Christian” and “Protestant” are synonymous. With all that said, the intent of this article is that Catholics would study what the Bible says about being a Christian and would perhaps consider that the Catholic faith is not the best representation of what the Bible describes. As a background, please read our article on “What is a Christian?”>> www.gotquestions.org Did you look into the links between atheism and genocides and between Darwinism and genocides or was your only interest smearing Christianity? |
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Abstract The Rwandan genocide of April–July 1994 shows how a single group of people living next door to each other, speaking one language and sharing the same culture, even often intermarrying, were artificially divided into two races by colonial rulers infused with Darwinism. The race judged superior was the Tutsi race, and that judged inferior was the Hutu race. In the end, in one of the worst genocides of the last century, over 800,000 Rwandans were murdered, mostly the Tutsi murdered by the Hutus. This is one more example of the harm that results from rejecting the biblical teaching that all humans are descendants of Adam and Eve, and replacing this belief with Darwinism.>> answersresearchjournal.org Does anyone dispute Darwinism was the motivation behind the Rwandan genocide? |
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Vic |
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Based on what? On what basis do you dispute the article I posted at 15:36? |
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It’s well known that communist governments killed 94+ million of their citizens in the 20th century… <<According to a disturbingly pleasant graphic from Information is Beautiful entitled simply 20th Century Death, communism was the leading ideological cause of death between 1900 and 2000. The 94 million that perished in China, the Soviet Union, North Korea, Afghanistan, and Eastern Europe easily (and tragically) trump the 28 million that died under fascist regimes during the same period. During the century measured, more people died as a result of communism than from homicide (58 million) and genocide (30 million) put together. The combined death tolls of WWI (37 million) and WWII (66 million) exceed communism's total by only 9 million.>> reason.com Did atheism have anything to do with it? <<“Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions. Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the central pivot. To achieve its diabolical ends, Communism needs to control a population devoid of religious and national feeling, and this entails the destruction of faith and nationhood. Communists proclaim both of these objectives openly, and just as openly go about carrying them out.” Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn The Marxist-Leninist View of Religion Most Americans believe in God, and a majority observe some form of religion or spiritual practice. Communism—theoretically, ideologically, and historically—opposes God and all forms of religion. From the time of Karl Marx to today, communism is based on the abolition of religion. In 1844, Marx wrote, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” He compared religion with opium because he believed that religion, like a drug, provides at best temporary relief from pain and suffering. For Marx, man created religion to survive life’s hardships. This famous quote is more than a summary of Marx’s views of religion and God. Marx was an avowed atheist, and he denied the existence of a divine being or God. This denial stands as a major cornerstone of Marx’s outlook, in which religion is a symptom of the evil bourgeois society. He predicted that communism would eliminate the need for religion: once freed from capitalist oppression, people would no longer need the illusory relief they sought in artificial faith. In its place, Marx believed that ‘human self-consciousness’ would, through the abolition of the capitalist society, remove the causes for alienation and suffering. Vladimir Lenin agreed with Marx: “’Religion is the opium of the people’—this dictum by Marx is the corner-stone of the whole Marxist outlook on religion.” Lenin then expanded upon Marxism with the argument that all religion is a tool used by the bourgeois to repress the working class. The Marxist-Leninist outlook drove the decision to formally institute anti-religious policy at the Russian Communist Party’s Eighth congress in 1920. Here, the Bolsheviks decided, “As far as religion is concerned, the RCP [Russian Communist Party] will not be satisfied by the decreed separation of Church and State.” Rather than wait for the creation of a communist society to make religion unnecessary (as Marx believed), Lenin would actively seek to destroy it. This policy has served as the foundation for decades of religious persecution in the Soviet Union and the rest of the communist world.>> victimsofcommunism.org |
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Truth & Reconciliation You’re going to need a better simile, because there is no way any content could contain less truth than a Groper SOTU. A plot of Groper truth on the complex plane falls deep into the third quadrant. Negative AND imaginary. I don’t know about the mass graves. Catholic run laundromats manned by unwed mothers in Ireland sported graves for miscarriages, SIDS infants, and older toddlers stricken down by various contagions. It would hardly be surprising to find such graves when one in ten children might not survive to puberty. Look at Romanian orphanages back when abortion was banned. That is even more recent. I was raised on a Shoshone Paiute Indian reservation. It is true the children were removed to state run boarding schools, a practice that ended barely a decade before I attended school there. I don’t believe the children were murdered, usually, but suicide is still not uncommon. The grandson of my mother’s best friend was tortured by police just a few years ago, and hung himself. She had two sons and a daughter, and one of her sons committed suicide too. Her daughter once rescued me on a hunting trip back when I was in junior high. |
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Links Of the 150,000 children taken from indigenous parents and placed in boarding schools—a practice that did not end until the 1990s (1950s in the US), more than 4000 died. “Mass graves” is the wrong description, because it wasn’t like the children were executed. While that may have occurred from exuberant beating or privation, more likely it was simply some more natural cause. Measles lacked vaccines before 1950, and while it now only kills about one in a hundred, back then one in twenty under school conditions might have occurred, especially among native populations. Just half of 150,000 children contracting measles nets 4000 dead children at that rate, and there was still polio, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, and other diseases, not to mention deficiency conditions like rickets and pellagra. Boarding school diets tended to be shy of certain essentials until we better understood the causes of that. Pellagra ran rife in southern plantations, share croppers, and especially prisons, where it was thought cornbread and water could sustain someone forever. That the schools were primarily religious served the “genocide” aspect, as the objective was to destroy the indigenous culture. I don’t blame religions specifically, they simply took advantage of the situation. Government policy was cultural eradication, and church compliance merely facilitated that. US and Canadian public policy was predicated on more than just demands by certain church factions, though to be sure Sunday blue laws and other regulations enjoyed ecclesiastical sponsorship. |
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Links II www.hilltimes.com The above is paid, but is the source for 4000 deaths, most interred cheaply on school grounds—just like in Ireland. 150,000 in Canada, at least 60,000 opinion the US. But we really did massacre native populations, perhaps as enthusiastically as Australians did—likely more so. Native American population in California fell from two million in 1860 to 200,000 by 1910, and they didn’t emigrate. Instead, buffalo hunters just found new game after driving Midwest herds into near extinction. The following site says US boarding schools ended in the 1970s. It was twenty years earlier in northern Nevada, but elsewhere probably stretched on that long. |
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Keep forgetting the link. |
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Five Months Back www.canada.ca |
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Truth Outs Despite the well-documented reality that thousands of Indigenous children died at Indian Residential Schools and at other institutions to which they were forcibly transferred, and are buried in unmarked and mass graves, many Canadians still find it hard to accept that the federal government committed such atrocities against children. And, unfortunately, a small but vocal group of denialists have mounted a concerted effort to attack the truths of Survivors, Indigenous families, and communities and claim that there are no missing and disappeared children and no unmarked or mass graves in this country. While it may be tempting for Canadians to believe a mythical and idealized version of national history, denying the painful truths of Survivors and of the missing and disappeared children is a barrier to advancing reconciliation. A mature and healthy democracy is strengthened by its willingness and ability to confront the political, legal, and moral failures of its own past and change accordingly. osi-bis.ca So efforts to dismiss mass graves as a hoax are underway, but should be viewed as skeptically as a Groper SOTU. |
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The following is a summary of the 2023 book Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth About Residential Schools) by C.P. Champion and Tom Flanagan. On May 27, 2021, Rosanne Casimir, Chief of the Tk’emlúps te Secwepemc (Kamloops Indian Band), announced that ground-penetrating radar (GPR) had located the remains of 215 “missing children” in an apple orchard on the site of a former residential school. Politicians and media seized on the announcement, and stories of “mass unmarked graves” and “burials of missing children” ricocheted around Canada and indeed much of the world. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau set the tone of the public response by ordering Canadian flags to be flown at half-mast on all federal buildings to honour the “215 children whose lives were taken at the Kamloops residential school,” thus elevating the possible burials to the status of victims of foul play and making Canada sound like a charnel house of murdered children. According to Canadian newspaper editors, the discovery of the so-called unmarked graves was the “news story of the year.” And the World Press Photo of the Year award went to a “haunting image of red dresses hung on crosses along a roadside, with a rainbow in the background, commemorating children who died at a residential school created to assimilate Indigenous children in Canada.” These events created a narrative about the genocidal nature of residential schools, which were established in the 19th and 20th centuries by churches and the government to educate Indigenous children and assimilate them into Canadian society. That narrative went unchallenged at first. Yet substantial pushback gradually developed among a group of retired judges, lawyers, professors, journalists and others who have had careers in researching and evaluating evidence. It’s no accident that most are retired, because that gives them some protection against attempts to silence them as “deniers.” In the words of Janis Joplin, “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.” I published a book, which has been an Amazon Canada bestseller, proving Canadians’ desire for accurate information on this topic. The book is a collection of some of the best pushback essays published in response to the Kamloops mythology. They analyze and critique the false narrative of unmarked graves, missing children, forced attendance and genocidal conditions at residential schools. The book’s title, Grave Error, summarizes the authors’ view of the Kamloops narrative. It is wrong, and not just wrong, but egregiously wrong. It deserves our sardonic title. And our book shows in detail just why and where the narrative is wrong. Several of these authors, as well as others who have helped research and edit these publications, had for many years been writing for major metropolitan dailies, national magazines, academic journals, university presses and commercial publishers. However, they quickly learned that the corporate, legacy or mainstream media—in addition to religious leaders and politicians—have little desire to stand up to the narrative flow of a moral panic. They thus wrote about residential schools mainly in specialized journals such as The Dorchester Review, online daily media such as True North and the Western Standard, and online journals such as Unherd and History Reclaimed whose raison d’être is to challenge conventional wisdom. For example, the first essay—“In Kamloops, Not One Body Has Been Found,” by Montreal historian Jacques Rouillard—has done more than any other single publication to punch holes in the false narrative of unmarked graves and missing children. Other essays punch more holes. Academic provocateur Frances Widdowson shows how the legend of murdered children and unmarked graves was spread by defrocked United Church minister Kevin Annett before it popped up at Kamloops. Retired professor Hymie Rubenstein and collaborators examine the “evidence” of unmarked graves, such as the results of the GPR, and find there’s nothing—repeat, nothing—there. Journalist Jonathan Kay explains how the media got the story completely wrong, generating the worst fake news in Canadian history. Retired professor Ian Gentles examines health conditions in the schools and shows that children were better off there than at home on reserves. My contribution criticizes the prolific but weak body of research purporting to show that attendance at residential schools created a historical trauma that’s responsible for the social pathologies in Indigenous communities. Retired professor Rodney Clifton recounts from personal experience how benign conditions could be in residential schools. And other essays explore other fallacies. Our book demonstrates that all the major elements of the Kamloops narrative are either false or highly exaggerated. No unmarked graves have been discovered at Kamloops or elsewhere—not one. As of August 2023, there had been 20 announcements of soil “anomalies” discovered by GPR near residential schools across Canada; but most have not even been excavated, so what, if anything, lies beneath the surface remains unknown. Where excavations have taken place, no burials related to residential schools have been found. In other words, there are no “missing children.” The fate of some children may have been forgotten with the passage of generations—forgotten by their own families, that is. But “forgotten” is not the same as “missing.” The myth of missing students arose from a failure of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s researchers to cross-reference the vast number of historical documents about residential schools and the children who attended them. The documentation exists, but the commissioners did not avail themselves of it. Media stories about Indian residential schools are almost always accompanied by the frightening claim that 150,000 students were “forced to attend” these schools, but that claim is misleading at best. Children were not legally required to attend residential school unless no reserve day school was available; and even then, the law was only sporadically enforced. For students who did attend residential schools, an application form signed by a parent or other guardian was required. The simple truth is that many Indian parents saw residential schools as the best option available for their children. Prior to 1990, residential schools enjoyed largely favourable media coverage, with many positive testimonials from former students. Indeed, alumni of residential schools comprised most of the emerging First Nations elite. But then Manitoba regional Chief Phil Fontaine appeared on a popular CBC television show hosted by Barbara Frum and claimed he had suffered sexual abuse at a residential school. He did not give details nor specify whether the alleged abusers were missionary priests, lay staff members or other students. Nonetheless, things went south quickly after Fontaine’s appearance, as claims of abuse multiplied and lawyers started to bring them to court. To avoid clogging the justice system with lawsuits, the Liberal government of Paul Martin negotiated a settlement in 2005, which was accepted shortly afterwards by the Conservative government of Stephen Harper. Ultimately about $5 billion in compensation was paid to about 80,000 claimants, and in 2008 Prime Minister Harper publicly apologized for the existence of residential schools. Harper might have thought that the payments and his apology would be the end of the story, but instead it became the beginning of a new chapter. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) that he appointed took off in its own direction after the initial set of commissioners resigned and were replaced on short notice. The TRC held emotional public hearings around the country where “survivors” told their stories without fact-checking or cross-examination. The TRC concluded in 2015 that the residential schools amounted to “cultural genocide.” Cultural genocide is a metaphor, an emotive term for assimilation or integration of an ethnic minority into an encompassing society. The next step, in turned out, was to start speaking with increasing boldness of a literal physical genocide involving real deaths. The claims about missing children, unmarked burials and “mass graves” reinforced a genocide scenario. Perhaps sensing the weakness of their evidence-free position, purveyors of the genocide narrative are beginning to double down, demanding that criticism of their ideology be made illegal. For example, in 2022, Winnipeg NDP MP Leah Gazan, introduced a resolution declaring residential schools to be genocidal—the House of Commons gave unanimous consent. So, there we are—a narrative about genocide in residential schools firmly established in the public domain while unbelievers are called heretics (“denialists”) and threatened with criminal prosecution. But don’t believe the hype, no matter how often the propositions are repeated. As the little boy said in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale, “The Emperor has no clothes.”>> About the author of the above article… <<Tom Flanagan Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Distinguished Fellow, School of Public Policy, University of Calgary Tom Flanagan, Senior Fellow of the Fraser Institute, is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Distinguished Fellow, at the School of Public Policy, University of Calgary, and Chair, Aboriginal Futures, at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. He received his B.A. from Notre Dame and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Duke University. He taught political science at the University of Calgary from 1968 until retirement in 2013. He is the author of many books and articles on topics such as Louis Riel and Metis history, aboriginal rights and land claims, Canadian political parties, political campaigning, and applications of game theory to politics. His books have won six prizes, including the Donner-Canadian Prize for best book of the year in Canadian public policy. He was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 1996. Prof. Flanagan has also been a frequent expert witness in litigation over aboriginal and treaty land claims. In the political realm, he managed Stephen Harper's campaigns for leadership of the Canadian Alliance and the Conservative Party of Canada, the 2004 Conservative national campaign, and the 2012 Wildrose Alberta provincial campaign.>> www.fraserinstitute.org |
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<<Despite the well-documented reality that thousands of Indigenous children died at Indian Residential Schools and at other institutions to which they were forcibly transferred, and are buried in unmarked and mass graves,>> <<In all the excavations that have been conducted, not a single unmarked grave has been found. Not one. This despite the fact that it would be expected that at some long-abandoned schools, where mortality rates in the late 19th century were abominably high, markers of graves had been lost to time and inattention.>> …it’s on the author of the first paragraph (or on those citing him) to provide evidence of the “well-documented reality.” Maybe it’s true and maybe it isn’t. But the one making the claim is the one who needs to provide the evidence, not the one disputing it. |
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LOL thebcreview.ca Lying for Jesus: “In 1999, the Fraser Institute was criticized by health professionals and scientists for sponsoring two conferences on the tobacco industry entitled Junk Science, Junk Policy? Managing Risk and Regulation and Should Government Butt Out? The Pros and Cons of Tobacco Regulation. Critics charged the institute was associating itself with the tobacco industry's many attempts to discredit authentic scientific work.“. web.archive.org An estimated 6,000 children died while attending these schools, according to former Truth and Reconciliation Commission chair Murray Sinclair. Students were often housed in poorly built, poorly heated, and unsanitary facilities. Why Canada is mourning the deaths of 215 children The truth about Canada's 'cultural genocide' Physical and sexual abuse at the hands of school authorities led others to run away. Above isn’t from some crazy right wing institute favoring Canadian gun rights and denying tobacco/cancer links, but is from the prestigious BBC. www.bbc.com 1100 graves: www.bbc.com And of critical important (which I know certain parties will ignore and deny): More than 150,000 Indigenous children were forced to attend residential schools, the last of which closed in 1996. An estimated 6,000 children died in the schools, though experts say the actual number could be much higher. Canada's special interlocutor on unmarked graves and missing children said despite the "well-documented reality" of those deaths, some Canadians have made a concerted effort to attack the truths of survivors, Indigenous families and communities. [Above is from the Canadian government itself. Continuing:] "Denialism is not a simple misunderstanding of the facts; whether consciously or unconsciously, denialists are working toward the accomplishment of psychological, practical or political goals," she wrote. "Indian residential school denialism must be taken seriously because it puts at risk the important work of truth and reconciliation. It should not be dismissed as a harmless fringe phenomenon." Some of the remains were of children as young as three years old: bangaloremirror.indiatimes.com “Often little explanation was offered to family members of deceased children. Archival analysis and survivor testimony suggest that school administrators preferred to conduct burials on site rather than accept the expense of returning the remains of the Indigenous children to their families and home communities.” www.americamagazine.org So we have school records and staff testimony children who died were buried in situ. And then we have the actual remains themselves, not just ground radar images. So there is that. |
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US Model for Canadian Schools Here's a more detailed look at its history and significance: Founding and Purpose: Founded in 1879 by Lieutenant Richard Henry Pratt, the school aimed to "kill the Indian and save the man" through a philosophy of cultural assimilation, forcing students to speak English, wear Anglo-American clothing, and adopt U.S. values. Gemini states: The U.S. Army is currently working to return the remains of Native American children who died at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, with 19 children slated for disinterment and repatriation in 2025, following previous projects that returned 29 children's remains. This is only one of dozens of US schools where Indian children were buried. Canada’s program was mother than twice the size of the US version, yet denialists want us to believe that despite slightly higher attrition rates, no remains were interred on school grounds? Laughable. Canadian government records indicate at least 6000. These are children who disappeared and never returned home, whose classmates in many instances reported the deaths to their family members who never received remains, and often were never even notified by school administrators. Also, six million Jews lost their lives in the Nazi holocaust. That really happened too, even though most of those bones were smoked. Does Santa come down the same chimney the Jews went up? An Auschwitz survivor goes through the Pearly Gates. God ask him to tell a joke. The guy says, ‟What’s the easiest way to get a Jewish girl’s number?” God shakes his head. Guy says, ‟Roll up her sleeve.” God does not laugh. Guy says, ‟Guess you had to be there.” |
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