Canadian Politics

Tk’emlups confirms bodies of 215 children buried at former Kamloops Indian Residential School site

It's ever awful what we put native Americans through. Genocide there's no real other word for it.

Over 60% of the total population in every Canadian province has now been vaccinated with their first dose

Nova Scotia and Newfoundland are both over 70%, and Quebec is close behind them.

20% of all Canadians are fully vaccinated, and that goes up to 25% in Alberta and Saskatchewan.

It’s looking like BC and Alberta should be almost fully reopened as of Canada Day.

Edited by Galadriel on Jun 22nd 2021 at 4:12:32 AM

I read on CBC that two Roman Catholic Churches in British Columbia were burned. One was in Penticton.

I’m sure that this is retribution for the graves that were dug up recently regarding the schools.

Edited by Ominae on Jun 22nd 2021 at 6:39:00 AM

Both the churches are on reserves. Yes, I’m pretty sure this is related to the discovery of the mass grave at the Kamloops residential school.

Edited by Galadriel on Jun 22nd 2021 at 6:43:41 AM

Hundreds of bodies reported found in unmarked graves at former Saskatchewan residential school. They expect the number of bodies to be 3x that of Kaamloops' 215.

Reminder that at its peak, Canada had over 130 such schools...

Edited by Ghilz on Jun 24th 2021 at 8:44:33 AM

Makes you wonder about how much the residential school system is still impacting the mental health of Indigenous communities to this day.

I mean, a lot clearly. Just have to look at some of the testimonies from the truth and reconcilliation comission. One doesn't just shrug off genocide.

Apparently it's 751 unmarked graves

On that topic The testimony of a survivor of that school

I saw an article about that. What was up with these schools and mass graves?

Basically, these "schools" were essentially tools of indoctrination and cultural genocide of the First Nations people. The discovery of these unmarked graves seems to be evidence that what was happening at these "schools" was even worse than what was already known. And what was already known was plenty disturbing.

The Catholic Church is also involved in this since these schools were run by them.

Edited by M84 on Jun 24th 2021 at 10:44:22 PM

Yeah, it’s looking like the schools may have been more of the traditional genocide stuff than the cultural genocide stuff that was thought to be all they were doing.

It really doesn't help that present day treatment of the First Nations people isn't great. Forced sterilization of indigenous women is still ongoing in Canada.

Edited by M84 on Jun 24th 2021 at 10:56:00 PM

There were both. Kids from native american communities were taken there (If parents didn't let them, one parent would be given jail time). Kids were taken there to be force-fed christianity and have any of their traditions or culture stomped out of them. Of course these places had no qualms about violence, but also no one actually cared about the kids there either enough to really invest in them, so maltreatment was common. And those grave just show how many of these kids never made it out.

And its worth mentioning that the graves had headstones, the catholic church removed them in 1960s. Like, that's an extra level of horrid.

What?! Could you provide a source regarding forced sterilization?

Edited by Galadriel on Jun 24th 2021 at 7:58:49 AM

Senate report from 3 weeks ago

Huh, I was just about to link that report.

This is horrific! Thank you for raising that.

Just a little Australian perspective: a couple of years ago, we unearthed mass graves in the Queensland town of Cherbourg, a former Aboriginal mission where 90 out of the 590 Wakka Wakka residents died from the Spanish flu in 1919. Now, I'm not familiar with Canada's Indigenous history, but I know from prior reading that the pandemic also decimated Native reserves in Alaska during this period, practically wiping some communities off the face of the Earth.

Like Ghilz said, the main priority of the residential school system was uprooting Indigenous children from their cultures and communities, with small frivolities like disease prevention and humane living conditions pushed way to the side. When the Spanish flu hit these schools, it found masses of young children packed together in damp, cramped quarters, often suffering from malnutrition and other health issues borne out of maltreatment. The results were all too predictable.

But even in relatively normal times, residential school students (and Indigenous communities more generally) died from preventable causes at astronomical rates. Tuberculosis and other infectious diseases were endemic, thanks to the unhealthy conditions; Kamloops, IIRC, saw a quarter of its student body infected by the 1957 Asian flu. Safety codes were non-existent, leading to mass deaths from fires and other accidents. Once in a while, students would try to run away, only to die from exposure. And that's before you get into active physical and sexual abuse, whether by the staff or the students themselves.

These things aren't exclusive to the residential school system: last year, the Irish government finalised its report on a Catholic maternity home in Tuam, where 796 infants born to unwed mothers died from diseases and malnutrition between 1925 and 1961. But Indigenous communities were particularly vulnerable to this kind of systematic abuse thanks to their longtime status as de facto enemies of the settler-colonial state, which gave the state a lot of legal and coercive powers to herd them into these places.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Jun 25th 2021 at 7:51:08 AM

Canada Day’s coming soon and two more churches were reported to be burned. They’re treated as suspicious.

As opposed to naturally burning churches?

Accidental. Though the timing is definitely sus.

A cathedral in Saskatchewan got vandalized with paint and a bunch of onlookers watched and described the scene and very beautiful and touching.

Then we have Doug Ford who yesterday talked about how the residential school system needs to be taught in history calls, presumably hoping people would forget he's the one who cancelled The Indigenous Curriculum rewrite the moment he took office.

Edited by Ghilz on Jun 29th 2021 at 12:47:56 PM

182 unmarked graves at the st-eugene's mission residential school in BC

Edited by Ghilz on Jun 30th 2021 at 7:08:29 AM

Twitter link doesn't seem to work, so here's an article about it:

CBC: 182 unmarked graves discovered near residential school in B.C.'s Interior, First Nation says