Mass Grave of Over 200 Children Found at Former Canadian Residential School
- Thread starter Cicada 5
- Start date
Your explanation doesn't square that well with a lack of evidence that the schools tried to tell anyone that deaths had occurred. False claims of "Uh... they, umm... went missing!" is not a good look. Worse than that they died of some disease.
Of course, it would be interesting if the schools had actually tried to tell someone in authority but were rebuffed and, for whatever reason, felt their only recourse was to hide the deaths themselves also-- while possibly less culpable, that would still be not exactly heroic behavior. Seems like the kindest interpretation I can give them, though.
The kindest interpretation would be that the deaths were reported to the government, and the schools lacked the information needed to contact families. Regardless, I'm certain the reality is that those operating the schools might have been able to do better for the children, but the version with people beating children to death for not being the right religion is about the least generous interpretation one could come up with, if we want to avoid unnecessarily extreme interpretations of events.
hmm. how little effort would they have had to put in/would we have to expect of them for this to be plausible?
It’s also literally what happened given the evidence of sexual abuse and explicit punishments for speaking their own languages, using their own names, or carrying out their own cultural practices. When people are carrying out genocide occasionally the interpretation becomes a bit extreme.
How hard is it to imagine a residential school having children involuntarily dumped on them by the government and not knowing how to contact the next of kin in the 1800s?
I'm not denying those things happened, I'm referring to the mass grave in particular. Do you think it more likely they were beaten to death, or died in epidemics that at times killed half the residents of these schools, which is also documented literally what happened.
Please do not engage in personal attacks on other users.
Tstorm hasn't met a mass child grave yet that he won't defend, particularly if it was done by catholics.
Depraved indifference for starving, struggling children being kept in glorified concentration camps dying of treatable illnesses is not the bright spot you think it is. It’s how people usually die when they wind up in mass graves, including the genocide ones.
Why do you think there was universally depraved indifference among people running schools? Why do you blame the Catholic Schools that got screwed over and scapegoated by the government. To list the timeline of the Catholic schools in that system:
1) Catholics voluntarily set up schools for anyone who wanted a Catholic education. Not for genocide.
2) Canadian government takes "responsibility" for educating indigenous children.
3) Canadian government sticks these children into existing schools, about half of which were Catholic schools.
4) Schools are now overcrowded and underfunded.
5) Canadian government supplements the funding by sending sick children to live there.
6) Lots of children die of disease.
7) The government takes over the schools.
8) The government closes the schools.
9) Justin Trudeau asks the pope to apologize.
In has to take a serene level of grace for the Pope not to laugh in the face of that request. You stole our schools from us, filled them with effectively kidnapped children, left us without the resources to even feed them, filled the facilities with disease, shut them down, and blamed us? You have got to be kidding.
I'm inclined to agree. They are almost certainly kids who mostly died from a range of natural causes, albeit potentially with a side order of substandard treatment and even neglect, and possibly at least some abuse.
What is appalling is that they appear to have been unceremoniously dumped in the ground, unmarked and little considered. They could not make it clear how little they respected or cared about these children and their families. But then, I guess their souls were with God so the leftover meatsack wasn't very important - or whatever excuse clearly wouldn't wash had they been the offspring of respectable white people.
...And are then dumped in the ground, without proper burial, without their deaths being documented or marked in any way?
What other outcome was possible, with facilities that couldn't even feed the children having mass deaths from disease mandated by a government department that refused to return the bodies to their families in even the cases where the families knew what had happened? Who is going to build coffins, make headstones, or dig graves? Do you want children to dig their own graves? Do you want the understaffed and underfunded adults to neglect the kids more to make time for that?
History is full of tragedies where people wish they could offer proper burials, but it just isn't feasible.
Good lord. If they literally don't have the time to properly bury someone who dies, or document their death, then what on earth are they doing trying to run a school?
It doesn't take long to document something. Why is this only being discovered now? Unless they simply didn't give a rat's ass?
Again, they built the schools to operate the same way as other Catholic Schools around the world, and then the Canadian government decided they were going to take on the entire native population, mandated by law, without offering the resources to even keep that many kids fed.
Indeed. Don't see how Catholicism or the Vatican is to blame for the shit the Canadian gouverment did to its native population.
I'm pretty sure there is plenty of blame to go around. Dont go hogging it all for one group
Yes. This was EXACTLY how children, across many countries, were treated. No. That's is a stupid reason to shift blame off schools, Catholics, government or society in general. Yep, I get it. Underfunded. Still not acceptable
You have the blame shifting in reverse. The government of Canada actively created the conditions where mass death of children was unavoidable, dropped it onto Catholic institutions, and now people are acting as though it was religious persecution perpetrated by Catholics.
Like, in any other context anywhere in the world were a school so severely overcrowded and underfunded that the students were actively getting sick, would you ever jump to "man, those teachers sure are neglectful."
Right... and in your scenario, the school didn't even document or report all these deaths, because...? Why are we just finding out about this now?