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An Indigenous group said the remains of hundreds of children had been found in unmarked graves on the site of a former boarding school in Saskatchewan.
It came weeks after the remains of 215 children were found in unmarked graves on the grounds of another former boarding school in British Columbia.
In a statement, the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations said that the latest remains numbered in the hundreds and were “the most significantly substantial to date in Canada.” It did not give an exact figure. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/24/w...katchewan.html
Time for government and church to literally open their history books, lay it all out on the table. No more secrets. Nobody can heal and move on until the truth is out
Yup. I think we all knew that there will more and more. It's a horrible legacy of Residential Schools.
I don't believe all of the deaths were the results of deliberate, intentional neglect and abuse. Frankly I think the people who were running the residential schools were overwhelmed by deaths because they were totally clueless and ignorant about the special health and dietary needs of North and South American native physiologies. Their complete lack of immunity to ALL the eastern hemisphere European diseases, viruses, bacteria, toxins, inherent allergies, bad eating habits, bad hygiene and other incompatible habits and ailments that Europeans brought to this continent with them and exposed the natives to all of that. They still are not immune to them. Taking those kids out of their natural environments was like taking a fish out of clean water and expecting it to survive on polluted land. No matter how much you may mess around with the fish trying to "fix" it, it still isn't going to survive out of it's natural, healthy watery environment.
I don't believe all of the deaths were the results of deliberate, intentional neglect and abuse. Frankly I think the people who were running the residential schools were overwhelmed by deaths because they were totally clueless and ignorant about the special health and dietary needs of North and South American native physiologies. Their complete lack of immunity to ALL the eastern hemisphere European diseases, viruses, bacteria, toxins, inherent allergies, bad eating habits, bad hygiene and other incompatible habits and ailments that Europeans brought to this continent with them and exposed the natives to all of that. They still are not immune to them. Taking those kids out of their natural environments was like taking a fish out of clean water and expecting it to survive on polluted land. No matter how much you may mess around with the fish trying to "fix" it, it still isn't going to survive out of it's natural, healthy watery environment.
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I'm sure that's part of it, but I still can't ignore why unmarked graves?
I'm sure that's part of it, but I still can't ignore why unmarked graves?
I don't have any trouble understanding it, if we consider this often happened a century or more ago.
There definitely would have been a mindset among many (not everyone, but a lot) that Indigenous we're quite human, or at least were of lesser value as people.
I don't have any trouble understanding it, if we consider this often happened a century or more ago.
There definitely would have been a mindset among many (not everyone, but a lot) that Indigenous we're quite human, or at least were of lesser value as people.
Yes, that's my point. Having them die of disease doesn't take away the cruelty of it all.
Unmarked graves are not unusual. The chief pointed out that they may have been marked at one time, they may contain remains of town people. That's coming from the CHIEF.
There are unmarked graves all around me too. Villages that didn't make it, people moved on leaving behind cemeteries. Eventually nature crumbling markers to the point where they were set aside, unreadable in some cases, and eventually forgotten and farmed over.
What's terrible is that the government or the church didn't want to pay the cost of shipping bodies home in many cases. And if records were transferred to somewhere else by either the church or the government, they should be located.
Residential schools were terrible. But there seems to sometimes be a misunderstanding of the difference between an unmarked grave and a mass grave, which implies out and out murder.
I'm sure that's part of it, but I still can't ignore why unmarked graves?
I agree with AJ. Back then to most people from the old world, the indigenous people of North and South America including their islands, and all Pacific islands (all the Polynesian islands) were not considered evolved enough to be human, they were all thought of as mentally deficient, worthless primitive savages and enemies who stood in the way of European invaders' easier conquests and acquisitions of new lands.
And some people might argue this, but the fact remains that even today there are many people who still think of indigenous people in the same way, even though they now know better. You may not have heard it said, but I have heard certain types of contemptible people visiting here from other places, upon learning with shock about how many indigenous tribes there are in BC, making the comment that "the only good Indian is a dead Indian".
If you are an ignorant brute and what you think of as your mentally deficient savage enemy's mentally deficient child died from attrition and exposure while the child was in your custody after you kidnapped it and subjected it to inhumane brutalities and labour, would you bother to mark the grave that you dug to dispose of the body? Probably not.
There are still people who take the adage seriously to "SSS and forget" - which means shoot, shovel, shut up and forget about it. People don't mark the graves or keep records of the people that they have SSS'ed. No more so with mistreated children back then than with all the missing native women today who have been kidnapped and brutalized then buried in unmarked graves.
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