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Canada Haunted by Past Sins
Starting in 1876, with the passage of the unfortunately named “Indian Act,” the Canadian government started a system of residential schools intended to educate native children to integrate them into the larger Canadian society and economy. Management and operation of these schools were entrusted to several Church organizations. With the movement of granting tribal nations more self-governing powers, these schools began closing in the 1940s and 50s, with the last closing in the late-60s. Recently unmarked graves have been uncovered at the sites of 4 former schools and to date, a total of 1148 graves have been discovered.
So far these sites are located in:
Kamloops, British Colombia
Cranbroke, British Colombia
Marieval, Saskatchewan
Brandon, Manitoba
As many as 30,000 children may have died at residential schools while they were in operation.
Sadly, time may have robbed the communities of any semblance of justice as it’s unlikely that many of these children will be identified or a cause of death to be determined. These are not mass graves, these are unmarked graves. In the case of Marieval SK, the gravesites are unmarked because in the 1960s, members of the local Roman Catholic church removed the headstones from the graves.
The denial of justice can lead to disturbing vigilantism and in the past few weeks, four Churches have been burned, with Sacred Heart Church in Penticton BC, St. Gregory’s Church on Osoyoos Indian Band, St. Ann’s Church on Upper Similkameen Indian Band land; and St. Paul’s Anglican Church in Gitwangak was damaged by fire, but remains standing, unlike the other three Catholic churches.
Fortunately, so far nobody has been hurt in any of the church fires, but I fear this is only a matter of time before someone’s luck runs out. Given Canada’s recent track record of arresting pastors for continuing to practice their faith during the COVID hysteria. Will Canada tolerate the persecution of Christians?
It’s the question of the day: Can Canada avoid the sins of the past being fanned into fresh hate by the Social Justice crowd to renewed violence? Is Justine Trudeau really the man for the job?
Published in History
I read that story the other day. I cannot imagine so many deaths associated with a school short of plague. A haunted past indeed…
I seem to remember a story not too long ago, about a similar school in Ireland, run by a Catholic order of nuns for illegitimate children of Catholic unwed mothers. Similar graves were found near the now-closed school.
This isnt just a school, this was a system of as many as 134 schools across Canada.
All the fires were in churches on First Nations territory, so it may not be an urban SJW thing. If it’s anything like Australia there are plenty of damaged survivors still with us.
Man, those numbers make the infamous Florida School for Boys (a closed juvenile detention facility with a dark history) look good.
Here is a link to an interesting article on the subject of “Canadian Residential Schools”. Some of these problems took place in the United States as well.
I have questions about this story. I am skeptical about the claim that discovery of graves shows anything unusual, given the time period.
At the outset, I don’t see anything wrong about referring to Indians as Indians. So I don’t find it “unfortunate” that a law about Indians was named the “Indian Act.”
On the facts, how many Indian students died, and when, and how many were attending the schools in question? The OP indicates that these schools operated from the 1870s to the 1960s. For much of this period, a lot of kids died, everywhere.
There was no modern sanitation. There were no antibiotics. There were few vaccinations (though I think that there was some vaccination for smallpox using cowpox).
On the “unmarked graves” issue, I wonder whether the graves were really unmarked. They may be unmarked now, but after the passage of a century or more, this hardly seems unusual. I seem to recall reports of many Civil War dead being buried in unmarked graves. I also recall reports of old churches, which used to have adjacent graveyards, removing the headstones from the graveyards in recent decades, when people became less comfortable with confronting death.
I have an Army friend who was born and raised on reservations in Saskatchewan (he’s had an interesting and amazing life I can tell you that, Canadian born US Army Green Beret, but that’s a story for another time). Even 10 years ago, before this latest story broke, he would angrily denounce the Resident Schools. As I understood it, the Canadian Government was trying to erase Indian culture by taking children away from there parents.
Further the schools were run on the worst sort of “separate but equal” kind of lines, similar to the segregation in America, where the students were badly taught, poorly cared for, and all around mistreated. He posted recently on FB, that the children in resident schools had a higher mortality rate, than the the Canadian Army did in World War I in Europe. When a student would die, as you point out, during an epidemic or something, often they just sent notification to the parents “your son died and was buried last week” so the parents were not even allowed to morn their children, or do traditional tribal rites for them.
Of course he’s biased, but the anger it still caused in him two or three generations later was very real. Even if half of what he said was true they sounded like horrible places.
Our public schools do to a lesser degree what the boarding schools in the U.S. and Canada did: Take children away from their parents, against the will of their parents, to raise them in a culture that is not the culture of their parents. As school districts got larger, students had to be away from home for longer and longer parts of the day. Ditto, as schools extended their reach down into pre-kindergarten ages.
The issue of children who died in these schools is far from all that was wrong about them.
Yes, except there is an rhetorical intersection – reports of these deaths are not new, they have been known and historically recorded. Its now becoming an issue in the media. So while these arsonist attacks are taking place on native’s lands they’re happening now (or at all) because media has re-opened these wounds for a fresh salting.
https://globalnews.ca/news/7996179/calgary-catholic-church-vandalism
New data points, Ukrainian Catholic Church in Calgary has been Vandalized.
There are some interesting twists and turns in this story. Church organizations had stopped running these schools in the late 1960’s. The last school closed in 1997. The Canadian government was running these schools in the 1960’s. Decisions were made in Ottawa. In some cases the schools were run by the indigenous peoples from the 1960’s to the last school closing in 1997.
I would imagine that most of the lawsuits to come would require a living complainant. The fact that some indigenous tribal groups were staffing, and in charge of these schools is going to tear some of these communities apart.
It’s far easier to vandalize and burn churches than to vandalize and burn down the Parliament building in Ottawa. A quote from from the link in my comment #6:
I find myself in significant disagreement with this glorification of Indian culture. The Indians were pagan, primitive, violent Stone Age barbarians. Their cultures are quite dysfunctional, in my view. If you want to be less judgmental, you could say that they are inefficient, as demonstrated by the fact that many of the American Indians were living, for centuries, in the best land in the world, and accomplished nothing. They were thousands and thousands of years behind European civilization.
The US and Canada were founded upon the conquest of Indian lands. What’s done is done. There are around 355 million Americans and Canadians now living here, and we’re not leaving. There are around 3-6 million Indians, it appears (depending on whether you include tribal members or those identifying with some Indian ancestry).
So it seems to me that the best path forward was to integrate the Indians into the larger society. This meant education, and it meant teaching them the common language and common culture. Understandably, they didn’t like it. They wanted to continue living in their Stone Age, pagan, barbarian culture.
In the US, and I assume in Canada as well, we ultimately granted citizenship to the Indians. We ended up with the reservation system, which traps them in a dysfunctional culture and grinding poverty, ameliorated to some extent by our subsidies. To me, this does not seem like a good solution.
It was, and continues to be, a very difficult problem. I don’t think that there are any easy solutions.
But I don’t think that separatism is the answer. Integration is a better answer.
Could you specify which “glorification” of Indian culture you are referring to? I personally haven’t seen any, so wonder if you somehow got your threads crossed.
Good point. I found what I called “glorification” to be implicit in the OP and several of the comments. It was an interpretation that I took from the tone and the substance of some of the comments.
It started with the reference to the Indian Act being “unfortunately named.” This suggests that the perfectly reasonable word “Indian” is somehow verboten, the position generally taken by the more obnoxious of the PC/Wokeist types. This was exacerbated by Zafar’s reference to “First Nations,” another Woke term in my opinion, and one specifically designed to undermine the legitimacy of the nations of both the US and Canada.
I am sensitive about this. I’ve seen those absurd genuflections before the noble Native Americans of the First Nations at the beginning of a few podcasts, in which some Wokeist imbecile expresses his acknowledgement of the fact that we are talking from the traditional homeland of the such-and-such People blah blah blah. After about 3 of these, I adopted a new policy of declining to listen to any podcast or other discussion that begins with such smugly sanctimonious sedition.
I did also have a negative reaction to your comment, TR, about: “what the boarding schools in the U.S. and Canada did: Take children away from their parents, against the will of their parents, to raise them in a culture that is not the culture of their parents.” I did overstate the issue, as you were not explicitly glorifying the Indian cultures. Sorry about that.
But I do think that I’m correct about the general attitude, which seems to be that we have to respect and preserve Indian culture. I think that those cultures are quite primitive and dysfunctional, and it would be a good thing if the Indian folks were to join the rest of us is a better culture.
I will concede that our current culture, in many ways, is just as bad as the Indian cultures. This is due to the degeneration resulting from atheism and Leftism, a major portion of which is . . . glorification of other cultures and denigration of our own.
So I’m in favor of integration. It’s easier to justify for immigrants, who do choose to come here, which was not the case for the Indians. But the only alternative seems to be the Reservation system, which perpetuates the poverty and dysfunction of Indian cultures.
There’s a lot to unpack here, and you’re hitting on some of it, but missing on others.
As others have noted, they weren’t just “schools” – children were forcibly taken from their families and the children were never heard from again. Thousands of them died at those schools, due to neglect and abuse. Citing other deaths at the time easily washes the blood off the hands of the policy makers, and those who operated the schools.
Imagine, today, if we took Latinx children, from families who have lived here for generations, from their families, took them off to schools to be educated in the ways of the predominant culture, and they never saw their families again?
This isn’t about wokeism. This is about publicly recognizing what happened, and accounting for the lives lost. It’s been a well-known “secret” for a long time, and finally light is being shown upon it.
I’m an American, born in Vermont. My great-grandfather was born in Burnt Church, in New Brunswick. I’m married to a Canadian. That there is a lot of soul-searching going on in Canada over this should not be casually batted aside. It’s a horror that should be more broadly understood – the understanding of the how, and the why, is what’s important, to those who lost family members, and for anyone trying to know all parts of their history, good and bad.
Thanks for the clarification that these are unmarked graves, rather than mass graves.
I wonder how the number of burials compares to those around non-indian schools at the time, particularly among the poor. I also wonder about the span over which the burials accrued. Hundreds of kids per school over a span of sixty or seventy years before many epidemic diseases were subdued by modern vaccines? I’m not sure those are extraordinary figures.
I don’t know why gravestones would be removed, even if the etchings had been fully eroded. That is not in accordance with any religious doctrine or practice I am familiar with. The decisions might have been local or regional, and non-religious. Or perhaps the indian peoples themselves objected at some point to the Christian tradition of gravestones after they gained enough political power to enforce those objections.
If my great grandfather severely wronged another family in some way, I would offer an apology on behalf of my family. If we take pride for our communities, by the same logic we should accept shame for them. But I would not agree to pay reparations because that is an unmanageable and vindictive standard. Likewise, apologies from the Church — for any wrongs known and not mere conjecture — are advisable. But that is where appeals to human justice should end and appeals to divine justice can proceed.
Various articles predictably frame the history of such schools as attempts to erase indian cultures. I doubt that was normally the reality. More likely, as seen many other times in many other countries, the dominant culture’s understanding of objective truth was taught along with respect for any belief or aspect of local cultures that did not contradict that morality. Thus, for example, an Australian aboriginee once shared with me pictures from his Catholic baptism or confirmation ceremony in which the aboriginees all celebrated with the body painting, dancing, and other traditions which the Church had recognized as good and beautiful.
Thus, the generically Christian cultures of the British Empire and United States of America permitted variations of Hindu religious practice but banned the religious practice of sutee, which involved burning of living widows to join their deceased husbands. Thus, modern Western societies teach about evolution, sex ed, particular histories, and many other subjects that seem necessary according to the dominant culture and not to all. Education properly integrates what is good and culls what is bad.
As Arizona Patriot suggested, it was and remains a good goal to fully integrate people into the society that rules or governs them, while allowing or even honoring tolerable traditions. It is not respectable to exercise power over a people while leaving them in a legal and cultural limbo, neither independent nor fully citizens.
You mentioned dancing. There is considerable documentation, over a period of several generations, of the European-Americans, including especially the European-American Christian missionaries and teachers, objecting to the native dancing traditions. Not everyone had the same level of objection, or even objected at all, but the anti-dance activism was influential. It’s a bit of a puzzle to me why they were so specifically against the dances.
As far as I know, such objections didn’t last into the 1930s.
It was probably the same strange thinking that led to Prohibition. People often struggle to separate the essential from the incidental, or else so emphasize a dangerous temptation that they reject all hope in discipline.
In fairness, many dances are deliberately provocative. Think of it as akin to sexually suggestive lyrics that aren’t appropriate in many settings. But there have of course been cultural movements throughout history that went nuts.
Sometimes relatively local offenses tarnish much larger groups for centuries. For example, the Spanish Inquisition was a local (and largely political) corruption condemned by Rome at the time, but it still often gets held against the Church generally.
I fear this controversy over unmarked graves will do to Canada’s public faith what abuses did to faith in Ireland.
It was probably on account of the Ghost Dance movement, which in turn was associated with violent resistance or aggression (depending on timing and one’s point of view). By the 1930s, no Indian tribe posed a credible threat, so any ghost dancing that still existed* would not have raised alarms.
*the Ghost Dance movement had prophetic elements that, to put it mildly, failed to come to fruition.
In the Caribbean African drums were outlawed for their political and cultural power. This backfired and lead to the development of the pan or steel drum. But diminishing the historical cultural identity that ran counter to the dominant culture was the point.
I’m new to this subject. Are there actual accounts of deaths caused specifically by neglect and abuse? Or is this lore that is being handed down?
A lot of the claims of abuse is a general assumption because the Catholic Church is involved.
Why so many children died at residential schools
At this point, it maybe impossible to determine the cause of death for many – if not most of these individuals, or even identity.
The thing is, these deaths have been known and historically recorded – its not a new discovery that thousands of children died while at residential schools.
Here is a video of the Prime Minister, making a formal apology to the first nations for the residential school deaths:
This video was from June 11 2008… Prime Minister Stephan Harper…
So Harper and the Canadian Government are proponents of parents’ rights, home schooling, and retention of families’ rich and vibrant culture, traditions and community. Hm.
I’m pretty sure it started before that. It was in connection with the Ghost Dance Movement that I first learned about it, but then I learned that it started decades before that. I should double check my most recent reading on this topic, though.
The issue started receiving a lot more attention because Gord Downie, of the Tragically Hip, became involved and active in telling the story, particularly the story of one boy who died running away from the residential school.
Worth a look, if you’re interested.
https://downiewenjack.ca/
Forcibly separating kids from parents is immoral, except perhaps for very few cases of physical abuse. If the indian kids in these schools were not accompanied by their families to whom they could return after each school day, that is tragic and outrageous.
But, again, if people could normally demand reparations for the sins of ancestors, the effects on society would be devastating. There can be no peace without mercy and focus on the present.
I’ve often thought about demanding reparations from our public school system, but you are right that there is no way they can be done without making the situation worse.
You might be interested to know that the Soviet Union also took indigenous children away from their parents and sent them to boarding schools, also leaving resentments that have lasted to this day, or at least until recent times. I learned about it in the 2006 book by Piers Vitebsky, The Reindeer People: Living With Animals and Spirits in Siberia . It’s not nearly as New Age-y as the title and the author’s previous publication history make it sound. As soon as the Soviet empire fell and the country opened up to foreign researchers, Vitebsky, a linguist, spent two years learning Russian and then wrangled his way into an Eveny community, and went back for quite a number of years, one time taking his wife along to spend a Siberian winter.
One thing that was different about the Soviet experience with indigenous people is that those Eveny who weren’t willing to be collectivized were shot. That, too, has left resentments.
I learned about Vitebsky after watching the 1977 movie, Evil Spirit of Yambuy (Злой дух Ямбуя) which also isn’t as New Age-y as it sounds, despite what we may think about the religious tendencies of an officially atheist country. It’s more of an adventure movie of the kind we took our kids to see when they were young, except the scary encounters with animals aren’t drawn out to wearisome and boring length. Some actual Evenki people took part in the film, and I was fascinated by the way they rode their reindeer, in contrast to the way reindeer in Scandinavian countries are ridden.
That led me to learning about Vitebsky’s book. A bonus was learning how similar the Soviet treatment of indigenous people was to the American and Canadian treatment of indigenous people.
Here’s a version dubbed in English (with Slovak subtitles):
I hate movies dubbed in English, though I don’t mind those with voiceover. English subtitles exist, but I don’t know if they are to be found on YouTube now.
Why is it so hard to just say sorry?
One of the early Jesuits in Canada had to remind his fellow missionaries that not every cultural difference was the work of the devil. That’s a statement that appeared in one of the Jesuit Relations, IIRC, but I’m not sure where. I wish I could find it again.
The objectors never came out and said that, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t right.