Terrorism Charges infringe on Charter Rights

[Remiel]

I think it is time to just ignore Chippewa. Anyone who thinks that there has ever been a situation compared to which the extermination of Jews and as many other people during the Holocaust is just like the " Boy Scouts " is clearly a raving lunatic at best.

[Wild Bill]

http://www.hiddenfromhistory.org/

What does that link prove? Some lady listens to oral reports from some natives, who may be telling the truth or they may have a political axe to grind.

The list of contributing authors at the end is of similar people.

How can we tell if these stories are true or just made up by natives pissed off at white folks?

[charter.rights]

What does that link prove? Some lady listens to oral reports from some natives, who may be telling the truth or they may have a political axe to grind.

The list of contributing authors at the end is of similar people.

How can we tell if these stories are true or just made up by natives pissed off at white folks?

Dr. Bryce

Dr. Bryce Residential Schools

"I want to get rid of the Indian problem. I do not think as a matter of fact, that the country ought to continuously protect a class of people who are able to stand alone... Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department" Duncan Campbell Scott, Superintendent of Indian Affairs

[Wild Bill]

Dr. Bryce

Dr. Bryce Residential Schools

"I want to get rid of the Indian problem. I do not think as a matter of fact, that the country ought to continuously protect a class of people who are able to stand alone... Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department" Duncan Campbell Scott, Superintendent of Indian Affairs

I wouldn't dispute that residential schools were often harsh. There may indeed also have been some atrocities committed. Those were frontier times. Police were not as common and the laws were often non-existent or not enforced. An ogre of a school master could indeed likely have sinned with impunity.

However, you have made claims of tossing babies into ovens! Of hundreds of thousands of murders! The scale of what you claim is just too great to have possibly been overlooked or ignored.

If the numbers were THAT great I'm certain that the parents of those children would have taken the warpath! There would have been armed insurrections everywhere!

With your lack of objective historical evidence and your hyperbole you make it hard for anyone to believe you. What's more, there's nothing anyone can do today to right the wrongs done at residential schools. Also, you face the problem that non-natives don't think of themselves as a tribe. We have absolutely no concept of collective guilt! Evil is done by specific individuals. What can you do when those individuals are long dead? Land claims are a different matter because lawyers and lawsuits can live forever. I feel absolutely no connection to what was done at a residential school. I'm not religious, I wasn't alive then and I personally received no benefit from those evil deeds. If those school masters were alive today I would cheerfully help you by pulling the hangman's rope but that of course is impossible.

The other sad truth is that today, if a native does NOT get a good education he goes nowhere! This is true of course for everyone in modern society. A native can choose to live his life on a reserve but that will limit him to a rather primitive lifestyle, paid for by what amounts to a welfare system. You might have some idea of past debts eventually being paid as reparations but without some self-sustaining system what would happen to a reserve when the money eventually ran out, even if it were 200 years from now? Perhaps natives could set up their own schools on reserves but if they aren't equal to those off reserve what good would they serve? They might concentrate on instilling pride in native culture but that does nothing to provide a good living standard.

I don't know what the eventual solution will be. I'm the type of person that if I was born on a reserve I probably would have left and taken advantage of the better opportunities available. All I know is that any society needs systems that are self-sustaining. When someone else controls your finances you can never be independent. I believe that natives should be given the same rights to property as any other Canadian. I've read with interest how some tribes have opted out of the Indian Act and have much hope that this will be the key to better lives for them.

To me, the Indian Act looks like what happens when artsy-fartsy socialists are allowed to social-engineer an entire people. I blame it for much of the negatives afflicting reserve natives today. However, since I never drafted the Indian Act, never voted for it, never had any influence at all over it and have never approved of any politicians involved I feel no personal guilt over it! I WOULD support any efforts to scrap it and give natives the freedoms to improve their own lives.

That's all just my personal opinions. I don't pretend to have any power or influence on the situation whatsoever. All I can offer is sympathy and encouragement.

[Remiel]

I think most people do underestimate the destruction caused by the residential school system. Some of the others vastly overestimate it. I cannot remember for sure, but I think in one of my classes, it may have been suggested that around 50,000 children died.

Here is a quote from Wikipedia, though:

In 1909, Dr. Peter Bryce, general medical superintendent for the Department of Indian Affairs (DIA), reported to the department that between 1894 and 1908 mortality rates at residential schools in Western Canada ranged from 30% to 60% over five years (that is, five years after entry, 30% to 60% of students had died, or 6–12% per annum). These statistics did not become public until 1922, when Bryce, who was no longer working for the government, published The Story of a National Crime: Being a Record of the Health Conditions of the Indians of Canada from 1904 to 1921. In particular, he alleged that the high mortality rates were frequently deliberate, with healthy children being exposed to children with tuberculosis.

In 1920 and 1922, Dr. F. A. Corbett was commissioned to visit the schools in the west of the country, and found similar results to Bryce. At the Ermineskin school in Hobbema, Alberta, he found 50% of the children had tuberculosis.[10] At Sarcee Boarding School near Calgary, all 33 students were "much below even a passable standard of health" and "[a]ll but four were infected with tuberculosis." When he entered a classroom there, he found sixteen of the children, many of them near death, were still being made to sit through lessons.

So, the 50% death rate is not baseless. However, it appears that it is quite possible that it may be for a certain period in time in a certain period of the country, not everywhere all the time. If we say that it was that bad for the period from 1894 and 1922 in the West, that is a pretty damn horrific system of governance. But unless most of the deaths accrued in this short period, it does not really tell us what was happening in the bigger picture.

However, in this one class I had, the tone of which generally allowed for feeling of "Residential schools were Satanic," one possible alternative theory was reviewed. I just do not remember clearly what it was. I think it may have been something to do with sick children rating more funding from the government, but I do not recall exactly. I think the consensus was though that if it was what happened, the administrators were not out and out evil, but stupid beyond all reasonable limits.

It would not exactly surprise me were it the case that having a lot of children without much resistance to tuberculosis being cooped up in large numbers in poorly ventilated areas was in itself responsible for much of the devestation caused, rather than it being primarily wanton genocidal murderers.

[TimG]

It would not exactly surprise me were it the case that having a lot of children without much resistance to tuberculosis being cooped up in large numbers in poorly ventilated areas was in itself responsible for much of the devastation caused

This is exactly what happened. But that does not stop historical revisionists from trying to paint it as deliberate.

That said, We have a problem today where pedophiles go where they are likely to get away with abusing kids (Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, et. al.). It is likely that similar dynamics affected the staff who volunteered for these schools. But again, this was negligance on the part of government - not part of any plan.

[charter.rights]

This is exactly what happened. But that does not stop historical revisionists from trying to paint it as deliberate.

That said, We have a problem today where pedophiles go where they are likely to get away with abusing kids (Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, et. al.). It is likely that similar dynamics affected the staff who volunteered for these schools. But again, this was negligance on the part of government - not part of any plan.

No. It is what happened in some cases but not all.

Between 50 and 75,000 children - half the children attending residential schools - never returned home and are missing. According to Dr. Bryce many of those children didn't just succumb to TB. They had all forms of treatment withheld. That is a deliberate attempt at genocide. Others were raped, sodomized on a regular basis, beaten and murdered. There are decades of testimony from residential school survivors many of whom have now passed on. There are graves sites being unearthed near those school right where some of the survivors said they would be.

"The Plan" was to take the Indian out of the child. The first step was to take the child out of the family, out of their communities and often hundreds or over a thousand miles away to schools secreted away from the knowledge of their families. Often times they were kidnapped under gunpoint. So yes there was a plan and whether or not that original plan included genocide, there is no doubt that the end plan incorporated it.

[bloodyminded]

I think it is time to just ignore Chippewa. Anyone who thinks that there has ever been a situation compared to which the extermination of Jews and as many other people during the Holocaust is just like the " Boy Scouts " is clearly a raving lunatic at best.

The Holocaust analogy is preposterous. Holocaust analogies usually are. We're talking about the single most identifiable moment of murderous lunacy of the 20th century...which is exactly why it tends to stand alone in public consciousness.

Such uses of analogy are troublesome. Yes, they often tell us something, and some of them make a kind of sense, for the sake of trying to open eyes to what is going on. (This particular analogy does not rise even to that level, mind you.) But even then, they should be viewed, and used, with caution. For the sake of accuracy, and honest debate.

[charter.rights]

[bunk]I wouldn't dispute that residential schools were often harsh. There may indeed also have been some atrocities committed. Those were frontier times. Police were not as common and the laws were often non-existent or not enforced. An ogre of a school master could indeed likely have sinned with impunity.

However, you have made claims of tossing babies into ovens! Of hundreds of thousands of murders! The scale of what you claim is just too great to have possibly been overlooked or ignored.

If the numbers were THAT great I'm certain that the parents of those children would have taken the warpath! There would have been armed insurrections everywhere!

With your lack of objective historical evidence and your hyperbole you make it hard for anyone to believe you. What's more, there's nothing anyone can do today to right the wrongs done at residential schools. Also, you face the problem that non-natives don't think of themselves as a tribe. We have absolutely no concept of collective guilt! Evil is done by specific individuals. What can you do when those individuals are long dead? Land claims are a different matter because lawyers and lawsuits can live forever. I feel absolutely no connection to what was done at a residential school. I'm not religious, I wasn't alive then and I personally received no benefit from those evil deeds. If those school masters were alive today I would cheerfully help you by pulling the hangman's rope but that of course is impossible.

The other sad truth is that today, if a native does NOT get a good education he goes nowhere! This is true of course for everyone in modern society. A native can choose to live his life on a reserve but that will limit him to a rather primitive lifestyle, paid for by what amounts to a welfare system. You might have some idea of past debts eventually being paid as reparations but without some self-sustaining system what would happen to a reserve when the money eventually ran out, even if it were 200 years from now? Perhaps natives could set up their own schools on reserves but if they aren't equal to those off reserve what good would they serve? They might concentrate on instilling pride in native culture but that does nothing to provide a good living standard.

I don't know what the eventual solution will be. I'm the type of person that if I was born on a reserve I probably would have left and taken advantage of the better opportunities available. All I know is that any society needs systems that are self-sustaining. When someone else controls your finances you can never be independent. I believe that natives should be given the same rights to property as any other Canadian. I've read with interest how some tribes have opted out of the Indian Act and have much hope that this will be the key to better lives for them.

To me, the Indian Act looks like what happens when artsy-fartsy socialists are allowed to social-engineer an entire people. I blame it for much of the negatives afflicting reserve natives today. However, since I never drafted the Indian Act, never voted for it, never had any influence at all over it and have never approved of any politicians involved I feel no personal guilt over it! I WOULD support any efforts to scrap it and give natives the freedoms to improve their own lives.

That's all just my personal opinions. I don't pretend to have any power or influence on the situation whatsoever. All I can offer is sympathy and encouragement.[/bunk]

The Indian Act was a creation of the Family Compact created by the Victorians....or as they are known now...the Tories. It is a Conservative construct originally designed to displace aboriginal people from their land and resources for the benefit of a few rich elitists.

[Oleg Bach]

Perhaps you should read some Dworkin to gain a better understanding of judicial discretion.

That's bullshit...there was nothing discrete about the supporting by our highest court of the hiding of documents and a refusal to disclose! I don't want to read Dworkin....all I know is if you have to lie to win - that is called corrupt - they all lied and covererd for each other - from begining to the end - I know enough about litigative proceedure to understand that one side is to disclose all they have in their control - the other side is supposed to do the same - NOT hide a key endorsement. They broke their own rules!

In the end they ruled that a person does not have the right to know. This might pertain on a civil level but not on a judicary level - If there are rules of disclosure..you follow them..You just don't twist the rules and then write up a cheeze ball summary that has nothing to do with the initial issue. It all came down to them protecting their own system...what the hell good is that to the average Canadian - we have the high court there to serve and better us - not to maintain power simply for themselves?

[Wild Bill]

The Indian Act was a creation of the Family Compact created by the Victorians....or as they are known now...the Tories. It is a Conservative construct originally designed to displace aboriginal people from their land and resources for the benefit of a few rich elitists.

There you go again! This is much of the difficulty in having a debate with you. You are a Marxist!

You don't just ask that someone agree with you on a point of history. You also expect them to agree with your socialist premises.

For many of us, that's just too big a chunk to swallow!

IOW, you don't seem to want any solution for aboriginals except socialist ones! Personally, I view socialism as a philosophy attractive in its appearance but evil in its results. I believe it's like giving a baby sugar water. The baby likes it and stops crying but eventually all his teeth rot out!

By linking the two together you have drastically limited your potential pool of support.

[charter.rights]

There you go again! This is much of the difficulty in having a debate with you. You are a Marxist!

You don't just ask that someone agree with you on a point of history. You also expect them to agree with your socialist premises.

For many of us, that's just too big a chunk to swallow!

IOW, you don't seem to want any solution for aboriginals except socialist ones! Personally, I view socialism as a philosophy attractive in its appearance but evil in its results. I believe it's like giving a baby sugar water. The baby likes it and stops crying but eventually all his teeth rot out!

By linking the two together you have drastically limited your potential pool of support.

So now you are thinking for me? You can't even think for yourself.

We're not even into a discussion on the solutions. We're still trying to identify a problem you don't think exists and what it boils down to is THAT IS THE PROBLEM....

[noahbody]

http://www.hiddenfromhistory.org/

Witnesses testify that Priests from Churches were just throwing New Born Babys into furnaces while still alive.

How did a story about one baby become plural? Also, did you listen to the supposed witness's account? She says the mother was 7 years old. So, for this story to be true, she likely would have to had gotten pregnant at 6 years of age. You actually believe that?

[Shwa]

The Holocaust analogy is preposterous. Holocaust analogies usually are. We're talking about the single most identifiable moment of murderous lunacy of the 20th century...which is exactly why it tends to stand alone in public consciousness.

Such uses of analogy are troublesome. Yes, they often tell us something, and some of them make a kind of sense, for the sake of trying to open eyes to what is going on. (This particular analogy does not rise even to that level, mind you.) But even then, they should be viewed, and used, with caution. For the sake of accuracy, and honest debate.

Agreed. "Holocaust" simply doesn't apply here, when discussing the effect of Canadian government policies on Aboriginals and the scale of that effect.

Are more apt term is "ethnic cleansing."