Yes, I do think Canada in 1918 was comparable to Canada in 1918. The schools we are talking about were made compulsory in 1894. I'm not just saying the situation was comparable to the 1918 pandemic, I'm saying they were literally concurrent with that pandemic and other epidemics. This mass grave could very well be from literally that pandemic, though I don't believe the graves have any estimated date, as they were just found with ground penetrating radar. They could be newer or older than that, nobody knows yet.
But this is
assumption on your part. That's the point. More on the cause of death question below...
You don't know it wasn't mentioned to anyone. There were over 4000 children whose deaths were recorded in these schools. These could very well be among the children whose deaths were recorded and reported. We can't currently know if that's the case, what we're finding out now is that they were buried at this specific spot. The mass grave from the flu in Pennsylvania I linked you was a plot where locals said there were graves, and the people buried there were certainly known to be dead, but there just wasn't a record of where they were buried.
There are official records of 51 deaths among the children at this specific school from 1900 - 1971. So no, it's not really possible for these 215 to be some of the ~4000.
And on a side-note, the 4100 figure is from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
report. And the Commission notes that for about half of those, cause of death was
not recorded by the authorities. Among those that were, tuberculosis was the leading cause of death-- killing more than four times as many as Influenza. Influenza also places behind "other unknown illness".
Details which go flatly against the idea that 1) these deaths were recorded; and 2) these deaths were likely a result of the 1918 pandemic.
Let's look at some of the other sections from the Commission's report...
TRC said:
In 1914 a departmental official said “fifty per cent of the children who passed through these schools did not live to benet from the education which they had received therein".
So, four years
before the pandemic, half of the children going into the so-called "Indian Residential Schools" system were not making it out alive.
On how deaths were reported...
TRC said:
Prior to 1915, Indian Affairs’ annual reports reproduced a detailed report from each principal that often contained information on the health conditions and the number of students who had died in the previous year. But, after 1915, Indian Affairs stopped publishing principals’ reports. Subsequent reports did not provide information on student deaths in any regularized format. It was not until 1935 that Indian Affairs adopted a formal policy on how deaths at the schools were to be reported and investigated.
TRC said:
In many cases, neither the gender nor the name of a deceased student was recorded
So, we have a gap of 20 years with little-to-no reliable reporting of this, despite the fact that officials in 1914 had already identified that it was happening on a mass scale. And when reporting is done, they frequently leave out even the absolute basics, like somebody's
name.
How much more evidence do we need of gross negligence?
TRC said:
As can be seen, until the 1950s, Aboriginal children in residential schools died at a far higher rate than school-aged children in the general population.
Huh, so the stresses of the 1918 pandemic didn't have the same scale of impact on non-native children...
Here's a final section I find particularly telling;
TRC said:
In 1895, Indian agent D. L. Clink decided not to return a runaway boy to the Red Deer, Alberta, industrial school. He wrote, “I felt if I left the boy he would be abused.” Clink wrote that the actions of one teacher “would not be tolerated in a white school for a single day in any part of Canada".
