Trudeau vows help after Indigenous kids' unmarked graves found, but offers no details

[Army Guy]

9 hours ago, WestCanMan said:

Exactly. 

They didn't live in places with marked roads and home addresses by the front door, they didn't always live in permanent settlements, and in some cases they even had temporary seasonal settlements.

 Just imagine it's Nov 1919 and some dude has to go out on horseback to notify a family that their child is sick. The Spanish flu is going around and it's worse than covid by orders of magnitude. Healthy 28 yr olds and pregnant women are dying faster than any other demographic. No one wants him travelling into their town, he can't stay in their hotels, and in the winter he can't just pop into Save-On to get fresh veggies, because selling fresh vegetables in winter wasn't a thing back then.

It's not like he could just send the family a text, or cruise down plowed, sanded highways in a Jeep Wrangler with the tunes cranked, using the GPS, leads him directly to their front door within 1 hr. He has to go through bear and cougar country on a horse with no headlights, and if he gets attacked he has no cel to call an ambulance. He's just fucked. 

So for the sake of argument, the poor sap goes out on horseback, gets lucky, and when he gets back there are 11 more sick kids. And someone in his own family is sick. That's no prob though. "Git 'er done Luke! You got this!"

 

It would have been a terrific task just for passage of info, or travel back in the day. But I'm sure this task would be near impossible to report on  little Billy's report card, or that he had the sniffles or a case of something serious... but here they could not even bother to report that on this date your child has passed on, from this disease. I mean there was a great logistical system already set up, one that managed to collect all these kids and bring them to these schools, I assume this was done once a year or more often... how hard would it have been to pass on a few government letters to the RCMP officers that did the collecting of children and asked them to drop it off at this reservation...dear john your child has passed on this date from x affliction, due to cost they have been buried at the school...The military managed to have worked this out as early as the Boar war...

I think that during the day nobody really gave a shit, and could not be bothered, racism was very common at the time, first nations people were not considered equal to anyone, i mean just look at the meme " educate the savage out of them" the government at the time considered them uneducated savages...and decided they needed to be educated to our standards for some unknown reason...because we were better than they were, damn it we knew what was best for everyone..... I find it a little ironic that when the first settlers landed in North America it was first nations that taught them how to plant food, hunt, fish, build shelter, medicine etc.. and yet they seem to be able to survive just fine without European education.

Shit there are tones of things i was taught that i have never used ever, remember the periodic table,  trigonometry, find the area of an Isosceles Triangle,  A squared times b to the 4 th power = ? , writing poetry, learning music and how to read it, and that plastic recorder, now that has come in so handy...And how about the Juristic period of time and all those dinosaurs names... " OK that did come in handy during the Juristic park movies, and when my son collected all those plastic dino's....  But we spent hours learning all that stuff, and other than the movies i have not seen one damn dinosaur or needed to know their names...

All that being said their culture does have language, math, science, history, agriculture, hunting , fishing, things that they have tailored for their survival...and would have very little use for a European education, that was until our government had this brand new plan to educate the savages....because there was not enough problems in the world already.

[Zeitgeist]

Publicly funded education has probably been the greatest accelerant of human progress, providing access for the impoverished, underprivileged, and child labouring masses to the accumulation of human ingenuity and knowledge.  The masses became literate and never looked back, gaining access to and expanding higher learning in medical science, engineering, and history (including knowledge of the greatest technological inventions, civilizations and freedoms).

 The Canadian government in the MacDonald years had overseen the greatest expansion of publicly funded education.  The first university educators going back to the founding of Oxford and prior, were religious clerics.  The first public school teachers, mostly women, entered the profession as a vocation.  Many were discouraged from marrying and were fired if they had children.  Many teachers were nuns or might as well have been because they gave their lives to teaching.  These early educators made sacrifices to build the society we take for granted today, with all of its freedoms, enfranchisement, upward mobility, increased lifespan, low infant mortality, and progress across countless metrics.

The 19th and early 20th century world was a harsher one.  It was the end of a world where Indigenous, in the south at least, could realistically live a traditional lifestyle because the modern world was expanding and offering new opportunities to all   To pretend that all of this new opportunity was rejected or resisted by most Indigenous isn’t really the case.   It was a compromise, but electricity, film, radio, and the inventions of Edison were and still are hard to resist, like so many other technologies for farming, travelling, etc.

Terrible as the idea of residential schools sounds today in our more gentle world, they were seen as the way to raise living standards and provide the linguistic and cultural literacy needed for Indigenous to participate in this advancing, convenient, multifaceted wider world.  An illiterate Indigenous man would be a fish out of water in this new age.  Do you really think it was possible or advisable to try to stay closed off in the wilderness?  The government tried to protect at least some of that with reserves, but of course they’re artificially propped up with federal money and benefits   In the end the two-tier society is an unrealistic and I think unhealthy choice.   However, that’s for Indigenous to decide now.  It has to be for political reasons, because we can’t open ourselves up to more colonialism.  Indigenous have upheld the Indian Act despite its problems, because they’re afraid of losing its protections.

Our society is essentially still dealing with the fallout of a centuries old clash of civilizations, but if we’re honest, most Indigenous would far prefer to use grocery stores and computers and modern medicine to the traditional means of survival.  The old ways are mostly maintained to preserve the memory and cultural traditions, except in the far north, on the most part.  It’s not a bad deal actually today: protected  free land, few taxes, publicly funded health and education, free university...

When we’re honest about history, it’s easier to see that many of the things we don’t like about our past were hard choices that seemed like progress to most but not all people at the time.  Families suffered even as many made gains at the same time.  Suffering is baked into life, but those who had less power suffered more, as is also the case today.  Yet even today it’s hard to know what helping the disenfranchised means. Is it about leaving people to fend for themselves or giving them everything or somewhere in between?  We will be judged as retrograde soon for the “progressive” choices we make today.

Tearing down the Roman triumphal arches, including the one celebrating the conquest of Jerusalem, is not what most people today would want, including most Jewish people.  MacDonald and Ryerson achieved some good things but also hurt people.  Sometimes those who were hurt also achieved great victories, not so different from our world today.  

 

 

 

Edited June 6, 2021 by Zeitgeist

[bush_cheney2004]

1 hour ago, Zeitgeist said:

 The Canadian government in the MacDonald years had overseen the greatest expansion of publicly funded education....

...Our society is essentially still dealing with the fallout of a centuries old clash of civilizations, but if we’re honest, most Indigenous would far prefer to use grocery stores and computers and modern medicine to the traditional means of survival.  The old ways are mostly maintained to preserve the memory and cultural traditions, except in the far north, on the most part.  It’s not a bad deal actually today.  Protected free land, few taxes, publicly funded health and education, free university...

 

The history is far more nuanced and contentious than that, and the voices and perspectives of those impacted in real time should mean more than the government's well intentioned but very flawed execution.  What natives said then and now should still be more relevant and significant than those who executed and enforced such policies.

How many non-natives were forced to attend residential schools ?

 

Quote

Quote

Many indigenous leaders believed that the residential schools were a violation of the treaties between the government and First Nations. When the government signed these treaties, it promised to provide education for children on the reserve. Even those who had wanted government education did not envision a situation in which the children would be taken away from them to undergo a complete cultural transformation.

https://www.facinghistory.org/stolen-lives-indigenous-peoples-canada-and-indian-residential-schools/chapter-4/resistance

 

 

Edited June 6, 2021 by bush_cheney2004

[Zeitgeist]

9 hours ago, bush_cheney2004 said:

 

The history is far more nuanced and contentious than that, and the voices and perspectives of those impacted in real time should mean more than the government's well intentioned but very flawed execution.  What natives said then and now should still be more relevant and significant than those who executed and enforced such policies.

How many non-natives were forced to attend residential schools ?

 

 

For many Indigenous there wouldn’t have been an education that resembled learning to read and write, do math operations, learn scientific principles, etc. without residential schools because there weren’t local schools in their communities.  Now you can argue that the Canadian government should’ve only educated non-Indigenous, but that’s a sort of “prime directive” argument that’s consistent with something else MacDonald said about not clothing or feeding Indigenous, basically leaving them entirely to fend for themselves.  In the end the federal government took the former approach, having taxpayers pay for education, health, and in most cases even infrastructure and housing for Indigenous.  It’s a no win because getting involved means stealing culture and spoiling relationships at great expense.  Not getting involved is callous, so now we’re stuck with this strange highly dependent reserve system that doesn’t satisfy anyone except perhaps on the wealthier reserves.

I don’t make excuses for the misguided approaches of past governments except to say that they represented the prevailing values of the time, but I don’t think that not educating Indigenous children was necessarily a better idea.  If that happened you can bet the discussion today would be about how terrible it was that colonial Canada didn’t provide education to Indigenous.  I don’t doubt that abuses took place and families were hurt, more so than in non-Indigenous schools, which themselves were rife with harsh treatment.  It’s a sad chapter from a harsher time in our history.

Edited June 6, 2021 by Zeitgeist

[Dougie93]

the failing was as usual, government in Canada trying to run every aspect of people's lives

the Indians couldn't take care of themselves, because they were not free and they had no property rights

the government chased them all off into the reservations, wrecked their sources of livelihoods

then to fix the problem the government caused in the first place, it kidnapped their children to put them in death camps

the banality of evil, Hannah Arendt called it

[Dougie93]

Canada is still guilty now, because Canada is still doing this now

in order to keep the French in, the Americans out, and the Indians down, the government is still committing these crimes

still wrecking peoples livelihoods, still seizing property, still trying to brainwash peoples children in the public schools

Canadians have internalized this government as being mother's milk, so they simply won't or can't acknowledge that it is poison

[Zeitgeist]

50 minutes ago, Dougie93 said:

the failing was as usual, government in Canada trying to run every aspect of people's lives

the Indians couldn't take care of themselves, because they were not free and they had no property rights

the government chased them all off into the reservations, wrecked their sources of livelihoods

then to fix the problem the government caused in the first place, it kidnapped their children to put them in death camps

the banality of evil, Hannah Arendt called it

Those policies changed and inflammatory language is unhelpful.  In the end if Canadians and FN can’t take a reasonable and historically accurate approach to solving these problems, then they’ll pay a price for that.  I keep my British passport current and I haven’t sold the place in Florida.  I love Canada but if Canadians can’t manage their affairs...

Edited June 6, 2021 by Zeitgeist

[Dougie93]

14 minutes ago, Zeitgeist said:

 inflammatory language is unhelpful.

it's only "inflammatory" to you, because you are internalizing Canadian Confederation as your mother's milk

whereas as I see Mother Canada as she really is, a bulwark against American freedom fool's errand

whatever, we'll meet in Florida to discuss it over beers

after the Chinese Communists have made Canada into their finger puppet

 

Edited June 6, 2021 by Dougie93

[Zeitgeist]

9 minutes ago, Dougie93 said:

it's only "inflammatory" to you, because you are internalizing Canadian Confederation as your mother's milk

whereas as I see Mother Canada as she really is, a bulwark against American freedom fool's errand

whatever, we'll meet in Florida to discuss it over beers

after the Chinese Communists have made Canada into their finger puppet

 

Make mine a cold Landshark beer.  

[Dougie93]

5 minutes ago, Zeitgeist said:

Make mine a cold Landshark beer.  

meh, Canadian beer, overpriced

the value pick is Dortmunder Actien Brauerei

Scots German Orangemen of British North America, last of the Hanoverians

 

[WestCanMan]

17 hours ago, Army Guy said:

 but here they could not even bother to report that on this date your child has passed on, from this disease. I mean there was a great logistical system already set up, one that managed to collect all these kids and bring them to these schools, I assume this was done once a year or more often... how hard would it have been to pass on a few government letters to the RCMP officers that did the collecting of children and asked them to drop it off at this reservation...dear john your child has passed on this date from x affliction, due to cost they have been buried at the school...The military managed to have worked this out as early as the Boar war...

I think that during the day nobody really gave a shit, and could not be bothered, racism was very common at the time, first nations people were not considered equal to anyone

No one knows right now whether those are unreported deaths, and it's almost impossible for it to be so. 

The Boer War was two decades earlier, but 1919 was a year unlike any other in Canadian history. I mean, honestly, what percent of the mass graves from after the Civil War in NA do you think are from 1919?  Probably all of them. Aside from maybe in Mexico, from drug wars.

[Dougie93]

12 minutes ago, WestCanMan said:

The Boer War was two decades earlier, but 1919 was a year unlike any other in Canadian history.

no, in the Boer war Canadians were still desperate to prove they were more British than the British

in 1919,  the Canadians had fought from Ypres to Mons, the Somme, Passchendaele & The Hundred Days

by 1919, Canadians had changed

on Vimy Ridge in 1917 they were all still "British"

but by 1919, Canada had already started to Americanize, they had already turned away from Britain towards America

[Argus]

15 hours ago, bush_cheney2004 said:

 

The history is far more nuanced and contentious than that, and the voices and perspectives of those impacted in real time should mean more than the government's well intentioned but very flawed execution.  What natives said then and now should still be more relevant and significant than those who executed and enforced such policies.

How many non-natives were forced to attend residential schools ?

I don't know that anyone ever kept track. Education was made mandatory for all children. If you lived in such a tiny town that it couldn't provide a school, or lived out in the boonies or bush it's quite likely they made the kid go to a boarding school somewhere. But no one seems to have looked into it. 

The majority of the reserves in Canada have populations in the hundreds and there are many hundreds of them. I doubt the government could have found the hundreds of schoolteachers (most of them women) willing to go and live by themselves in isolated native reserves to teach the children there. Either they were educated in some central location or for the most part they weren't going to be educated.

Edited June 6, 2021 by Argus

[dialamah]

1 minute ago, Argus said:

I don't know that anyone ever kept track. Education was made mandatory for all children. If you lived in such a tiny town that it couldn't provide a school it's quite likely they made the kid go to a boarding school somewhere. But no one seems to have looked into it. 

The majority of the reserves in Canada have populations in the hundreds and there are many hundreds of them. I doubt the government could have found the hundreds of schoolteachers (most of them women) willing to go and live by themselves in isolated native reserves to teach the children there. Either they were educated in some central location or for the most part they weren't going to be educated.

Wow, such minimizing!

The removal of these kids to residential schools was an overt and deliberate attempt to remove from them their culture and identity.  It was government policy.  They weren't sitting around saying "aw gee, we just can't find enough teachers to go to the reserves, we have no choice but to remove them from their families, from toddler on up, put them hundreds or thousands of miles away so they can't find their way back, permit no communication between them, and not bother to advise families when kids were sick or died".   

Nope, the discussion was "How can we make these kids not indian?  We must remove them from their parents, and prevent any communication between them.   Oh, kids died?  Way too hard/expensive to figure out who to inform, or to send the kids back.  Just cause the Indian agent could tell us where to find the kids doesn't mean he'll have any idea how to find kids' parents."

It was the choice of the religious organizations who ran the schools to abuse the kids.  It was the combined choice of the religious organizations and the government to decide that dead indigenous kids could just be stuck in the ground - without any acknowledgement of their existence - and their families didn't need to know what happened to their kids.

That some people are trying to minimize this shows just how far some of us haven't progressed since these schools were set up.  

[bush_cheney2004]

28 minutes ago, Argus said:

I don't know that anyone ever kept track. Education was made mandatory for all children. If you lived in such a tiny town that it couldn't provide a school it's quite likely they made the kid go to a boarding school somewhere. But no one seems to have looked into it.

 

Okay, but it seems to be far more complicated than that, from New France battles over language rights, extraordinary education influence from prevailing Catholicism, prairie agricultural economies, discrimination against females, and labour/taxation conflicts.   Funding mandatory education was a problem across the board, so it is little surprise that the most "impoverished" groups were subjected to least expensive solution(s).

 

 

Quote

The majority of the reserves in Canada have populations in the hundreds and there are many hundreds of them. I doubt the government could have found the hundreds of schoolteachers (most of them women) willing to go and live by themselves in isolated native reserves to teach the children there. Either they were educated in some central location or for the most part they weren't going to be educated.

 

That's fine, but there were also non-natives populating sparse areas without similar local access.   If non-natives were forced to attend residential schools over parental objections, I have yet to find any examples.

Ryerson visited over a dozen countries in the mid-19th century and formulated his grand design for implementation along with others in Quebec, B.C., etc.   These "school promoters" became a political force and would have the most leverage over the weakest groups....like natives.

Edited June 6, 2021 by bush_cheney2004

[Argus]

48 minutes ago, dialamah said:

   Nope, the discussion was "How can we make these kids not indian?  We must remove them from their parents, and prevent any communication between them.

You have evidence this was government policy?

[blackbird]

CTV just interviewed the famous lawyer, Mitchel Garabedian from Garabedian Law, who was involved in many cases against the Catholic church over many years.  He said the government has to act right now to legally obtain the records before they disappear.  But the federal government has expressed reluctance to subpeona them.

Edited June 6, 2021 by blackbird

[dialamah]

1 hour ago, Argus said:

You have evidence this was government policy?

Quote from Sir John A McDonsld, 1879:

When the school is on the reserve, the child lives with its parents, who are savages, and though he may learn to read and write, his habits and training mode of thought are Indian. He is simply a savage who can read and write. It has been strongly impressed upon myself, as head of the Department, that Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence, and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men." 

 

[cougar]

On 6/5/2021 at 8:57 AM, WestCanMan said:

Exactly. 

They didn't live in places with marked roads and home addresses by the front door, they didn't always live in permanent settlements, and in some cases they even had temporary seasonal settlements.

 

This still will not explain why hundreds of children get buried in a mass grave and no one knows about it until many decades later.  Those government officials and their offices did not live in temporary seasonal settlements, did they?

The reality is a child doesn't die that easy and when you have hundreds dead, it doesn't take an Einstein to know those children were harmed.

Yeah, blame it on some decease from the middle ages, or maybe they just overdozed or committed suicides because their Iphones stopped working....

Edited June 6, 2021 by cougar

[Zeitgeist]

2 hours ago, dialamah said:

Wow, such minimizing!

The removal of these kids to residential schools was an overt and deliberate attempt to remove from them their culture and identity.  It was government policy.  They weren't sitting around saying "aw gee, we just can't find enough teachers to go to the reserves, we have no choice but to remove them from their families, from toddler on up, put them hundreds or thousands of miles away so they can't find their way back, permit no communication between them, and not bother to advise families when kids were sick or died".   

Nope, the discussion was "How can we make these kids not indian?  We must remove them from their parents, and prevent any communication between them.   Oh, kids died?  Way too hard/expensive to figure out who to inform, or to send the kids back.  Just cause the Indian agent could tell us where to find the kids doesn't mean he'll have any idea how to find kids' parents."

It was the choice of the religious organizations who ran the schools to abuse the kids.  It was the combined choice of the religious organizations and the government to decide that dead indigenous kids could just be stuck in the ground - without any acknowledgement of their existence - and their families didn't need to know what happened to their kids.

That some people are trying to minimize this shows just how far some of us haven't progressed since these schools were set up.  

What?  You think abuse was planned from the top?  Get real.  There was no policy of abuse.  Different educators treated children in different ways.  The standards for discipline were much harsher for children of all backgrounds then.  The matter of being separated from parents was unavoidable if students from remote areas attended school.  Yes there was a suppression of “Indian” culture and by our standards today that was wrong.  Then it was considered progress because the living standards of most Indigenous were substantially lower.  Would it have been better not to provide free education?  Perhaps it shouldn’t have been mandatory, though I’m not sure that would’ve been a better scenario.  This idea of people living a thousands year old way of life as trains and automobiles and decent housing with modern conveniences became widespread is a bit unrealistic, and that’s putting it mildly.   

[cougar]

10 minutes ago, Zeitgeist said:

This idea of people living a thousands year old way of life as trains and automobiles and decent housing with modern conveniences became widespread is a bit unrealistic, and that’s putting it mildly.   

Unrealistic, why??   There were and supposedly still are tribes living in isolation in PNG, South America and other places, preserving their culture and gene pool.

The idea is not to "educate".  The idea was to assimilate.

[dialamah]

35 minutes ago, Zeitgeist said:

What?  You think abuse was planned from the top?  

I got this far and realized you didn't actually read what I wrote.

[blackbird]

Trudeau says he wants to help but won't subpeona the documents and records before they are destroyed.  So is this going to help the Catholic church escape accountability?   How can anyone in authority who is a Catholic be expected to act with impartiality?  Without documents how will anyone ever know if there was any criminality or negligence involved?  Even with records it may be difficult to prove anything.

"3 For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies."  Revelation 18:3 KJB

[Army Guy]

50 minutes ago, Zeitgeist said:

What?  You think abuse was planned from the top?  Get real.  There was no policy of abuse.  Different educators treated children in different ways.  The standards for discipline were much harsher for children of all backgrounds then.  The matter of being separated from parents was unavoidable if students from remote areas attended school.  Yes there was a suppression of “Indian” culture and by our standards today that was wrong.  Then it was considered progress because the living standards of most Indigenous were substantially lower.  Would it have been better not to provide free education?  Perhaps it shouldn’t have been mandatory, though I’m not sure that would’ve been a better scenario.  This idea of people living a thousands year old way of life as trains and automobiles and decent housing with modern conveniences became widespread is a bit unrealistic, and that’s putting it mildly.   

You've asked us to put ourselves into the shoes of someone living in that time. things were a lot different , That much we know already, you asked if the abuse was planned at the top... the Answer is yes thats where it started, here we have a government that refers to them as "Savages" not a term of endearment that much is true, but rather a term used to describe someone inferior, yada yada yada... the tone is set right from the start, the church and the government and all agencies involved would would treat them accordingly. slightly better than a stray dog.. and the facts bare that out. Where the main objective was to suppress their culture, how is that not abuse...

Next they the government wanted to educate them so they may fit into their white world, and yet they were not allowed in salons or hotels any where that white people hung out in townships, No one hired a Indian for work, so where would they use this education ? you paint a picture where these poor bastards where lost up until the government found them living like animals and yet they have history that dates back hundreds of years before white men came to North America...They seemed to survive just fine. 

How would this education be used in the north or place that was isolated, where contact with white people was rare or infrequent. You mentioned all the new inventions of the times, and yet how many were allowed to ride on a train, or or afford to own a car , or use a radio.... I'm thinking not many... 

[Army Guy]

4 hours ago, WestCanMan said:

No one knows right now whether those are unreported deaths, and it's almost impossible for it to be so. 

The Boer War was two decades earlier, but 1919 was a year unlike any other in Canadian history. I mean, honestly, what percent of the mass graves from after the Civil War in NA do you think are from 1919?  Probably all of them. Aside from maybe in Mexico, from drug wars.

Your right for the most part it is speculation, what we have right now is stories of hundreds of survivors, and no 100% proof. then again there is no proof that it did not happen either, hence why an investigation needs to be done...

Not sure what happened before the Boar war, or if their are any mass graves form prior to the boar war.

Most if  Canadian soldiers from WWI and WWII are buried in Europe, Every Canadian soldier that was found, was given a temporary grave marked with name rank service number and date of death if known, normally marked with a weapon hammered into the earth, that had dog tags hanging from it.  ...until it could be moved to proper burial sites that the European landscape today. each soldier was given a headstone, with their name, unit, rank date of death, and their religion.  Those that were not identified where placed in a single grave marked unknown soldier, NO mass graves.. even today, soldiers from both periods are being found where they died on the battle fields in Europe, they are dug up and placed with their comrades in arms, identified if possible, or buried as unknown soldier.

It would be possible that Canadians soldiers that were taken prisoner or sent to death camps may of been buried in mass graves, such as those killed by SS units on D-DAY but it was not common. 

After Korea all Canadian soldiers killed on operations  are flown home, and either buried in their home towns or in the National war cemetery in Ottawa. they are also given the same headstone, a cross, with their name, rank, date of death, and religion..