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A Canadian Moral Outrage Party: BYOM
On May 21, 2021 a moral outrage party began in Canada. Bring your own matches — the accelerants were provided by Tkʼemlúps te Secwepemc First Nation, the Canadian government, and Canadian media. Attendees would join the party from US media outlets, as well European media.
On May 27, 2021, the Tkʼemlúps te Secwepemc First Nation claimed they had discovered the “heartbreaking truth” regarding the Catholic-run residential school after a ground-penetrating radar allegedly uncovered a mass grave of 215 children.
Three years, $7.9 million, and at least 85 destroyed historic Catholic churches later, no human remains have been discovered, according to a May 9 report from Western Standard.
Now to be fair to our Canadian friends, citizens in the United States are quite adept and willing to throw a moral outrage party from time to time. Human nature that includes gullible individuals willing to engage in violence, arson, and fueled by lazy journalists, as well as Progressive politicians, is no respecter of borders.
Department spokesperson Carolane Gratton stated in the report that the department had allocated the $7.9 million to uncovering the bodies, and confirmed that no progress had been made.
Both Gratton and the First Nation tribe have declined to disclose how the funds were utilized.
7.9 million dollars and the loss of 85 Catholic churches will probably disappear in the usual manner of being ignored by both the media and the current Canadian government.
Lying by both omission and commission is not unique to any nation. This story will reappear when the need for another moral outrage party is necessary to marginalize Catholics and Christians, the truth will not.
Published in History
Tom Flanagan has been writing lots of stuff about this saga:
https://www.fraserinstitute.org/profile/tom-flanagan
This tidbit is especially shocking:
Whoops.
The papal rush to embrace the slander and to participate in pagan rituals with the “offended” communities speaks loudly to the defects in his papal charism. Lord have mercy.
Every Indian Catholic grave is a murder victim in this scenario. Smallpox, flu, accident? Nope.
Woke teachers in the US and Canada work to convince the children of Christian normals that there is no societal future for their primitive beliefs and practices which can only hinder the child’s progress and status. That is the exact crime of which the Catholic Church of more than a century ago stands accused.
This is an information plaque in a park in my town.
If you do the math, that’s
0.04%4% of the children in government-sponsored Residential Schools over a 125 year period.For perspective, according to this website, the overall child mortality rate (for kids under the age of 5) in Canada prior to the 1920s was over 25%. It didn’t get below 5% until the 1950s.
I haven’t found a mortality stat for school-aged kids over that same period of time, but I wager that it might be higher than
0.04%4%.(Math is hard. ;-) )
6.000 is 4%. rather than 0.04%. of 150,000.
True. .04 is the result of the division, but to make it a % you move the decimal two places.
Whoops! Typo. I do know how to calculate percentages, I swear!
Who enabled the indigenous people to have a written language?
I’ll wait.
I wish you had posted the complete text of that sign in both languages. The language appears to be Ojibwe, once the lingua franca of the Great Lakes region. It may be a slightly different dialect than the Red Lake Minnesota dialect used in the Pimsleur course. I understand hardly any of it, but I’m guessing that gchi-ogimaa, which I would have guessed to mean something like “great chief” or “main chief” somehow is part of what is translated as “government-sponsored.” It’s news to me that ogimaa can be used that way, but like I said, I understand hardly anything. It’s a good word to know, as it is part of several place names in North America.
Aki often is translated as Earth or land, but here seems to be translated as territory. It, too, is part of several North American place names.
Yeah. On a far less serious note, several years ago, I was a very minor player in the Ravelry Knitting Wars (more culturally significant than you might think), getting involved at the very start of them, after I received an apologetic email from a little outfit that had created a knitting pattern I’d purchased several years before, for a pair of slipper boots that it called “Mukluks” (the “First Nations” word for boots made out of reindeer hide; footwear whose shape and design clearly inspired the name for the knitted objects so referenced.)
Cultural appropriation much? (This was just about the time that cultural appropriation was becoming a thing.)
Part of the email I received went thus (emphasis mine):
I was moved to respond. (I bet you weren’t expecting that.)
Part of the response I sent went thus (emphasis mine):
and concluded thus:
The trouble with all these hoaxes and false narratives, from the deadly serious one outlined in the OP, all the way to the ridiculous aspects of Muklukgate, is that such ahistorical, progressive, agenda-driven performative art deflects attention away from really important matters, and–in many cases–shunts what may have actually have been real atrocities or inequities that should be recognized and acknowledged, aside.
It’s very difficult to have an adult, rational, conversation with someone who’s incapable of either, and is merely on a mission to destroy and tear down. I’d like to see those people made accountable too.
I remember being taught about this man in elementary school or early years of high school. Can’t remember when for certain.
https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/sequoyah-and-creation-cherokee-syllabary/
We tell ourselves many stories, not least of these is the Western wherein one usually white man (with a sidekick or two) stands against crime and protects the weak from the predations of the strong.
There is a counter story wherein no one protects the weak and the whites are all in on it.
Most of us know that Westerns are mostly myth, and that is in part because we have historical evidence of very few shoot outs and such. The counter story, seen as a bulwark against the Western myth, gets no such fact-checking.
Sometimes things suck for individuals or groups.
Things sucking is not proof of victimization.
From the linked lesson plan (emphasis added):
Oral tradition will only get so far before it becomes like a game of telephone where the communication suffers terminal breakdown.
$7.9 million to dig a hole in the ground? I know inflation has gotten bad lately but yikes!
Not A hole. A BUNCH of holes. At least one per church destroyed, I’d think.
and no one will apologize for pushing the narrative. They will move on to the next outrage.
A few holes. Most of the churches were set alight by “enlightened” types. Or drunken boobs. It can be hard to distinguish in the dark.
Sorry, I don’t even remember exactly where the plaque is located. I’ve been keeping the image on my phone for a long time waiting for the right opportunity to share it.
Different people developed the written script for different indigenous languages. For the Hurons I believe it was Fr. Jean Brebeuf. For the Inuit it was some British dude whose name escapes me.
I have a vague memory of a movie where the (fictional) indigenous (in the movie) thought that the written word was magic because it allowed white men to communicate without speaking, like telepathy.
Provinces with lots of First Nation Reserves have an inordinate number of local
mobsterspoliticians that have to get their taste. There’s the elected chiefs and councils, and then there’s also the hereditary chiefs, etc. It’s why each reserve works so hard to be recognized officially as a distinct “nation”. The more “nations” within a given geographical area the more payoffs.To be fair, some indigenous groups are better than others. Lots of the nations in BC and along the St Laurence are legitimately business-oriented. Saskatchewan and Manitoba, however, have lots of reserves that are basically feudal dictatorships that are entirely dependent on federal payoffs.
Look at a satellite map of Saskatchewan. You see vast expanses of farms, periodically broken-up by city-sized squares of land where nothing grows. Those are the reserves. They cannot claim the land is no good because they are literally surrounded by farms. The problem is nobody in their right mind is going to try farming when the land is communal property.
Ironically, a large proportion of the surrounding farmers are of Ukrainian descent. They know a little something about the non-viability of communal farms.
Heh.
I believe the movie you are thinking of is Black Robe (1991).
I thought that was a good movie when I saw it many years ago. Perhaps I should watch it again.
It’s interesting that you mention hereditary chiefs. I recently finished Anton Treurer’s book, “Warrior Nation,” about the history of his own people, the Red Lake Ojibwe in Minnesota, in which he talks a lot about the hereditary chiefs. I’ve wanted to ask him to explain when the chief position became so rigidly hereditary. In one place he talks about an election of chiefs, after which the positions became hereditary, but he also talks about the old “libertarian” nature of Ojibwe society in which chiefs didn’t have much authority beyond what they could do to persuade individuals and what could be obtained through the reputation of having effectively looked out for the good of one’s community.
At the time when the U.S. government was trying to deal with Indians, it was often frustrated by the lack of clear-cut authority figures who the government could deal with (often through bribes and other shady arrangements) who could sell large blocks of land by treaty, and which sales would have the consent of all parties concerned. Sometimes the U.S. government ended up creating what came to be known as “medal chiefs.” These were men who didn’t have much claim to leadership other than that they were willing to work with U.S. officials. They gained some authority because they then became the conduit through which treaty goodies were distributed to the people. But they were never the kind of persons who could traditionally have served as chiefs. (You can see some of the same processes going on with incumbent members of the U.S. Congress who are the conduit by which goodies are distributed by the administrative state to the various congressional districts.)
Anyhow, I’m interested in the processes among my own distant ancestors and in many other societies, by which what started out as a relatively egalitarian meritocracy eventually turned into a class- and heredity-based system of leadership and authority.
None of us would be here if it weren’t for the viability of communal farms in the distant past. However, it is probably best to have low expectations of how they could work now. The Hutterites do pretty well with communal farms on the northern plains of the U.S. and Canada, but the “communal” aspect doesn’t work in isolation from some other factors, including religion.