The Truth On Residential Schools Is Suppressed

[CdnFox]

1 hour ago, BeaverFever said:

To be fully accurate they don’t pay taxes on income generated on the Reserve.  Off-Reserve income is fully taxable.  The question remains:  non-indigenous individuals can vote and receive public services without paying taxes

No they can't.

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and non-indigenous communities receive public funding disproportionate to their tax contributions.

Which communities.

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Most provinces receive equalization payments from the federal government  

That has nothing to do with anything.  That's a complete red herring. 

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So why a different standard for indigenous peoples?

That's a very good question.  Why DO we give a higher standard to the first nations peoples?  Some would say treaties and that's fair enough but  i think it's time we rethought that.  it doesn't seem to be doing them any good,

[Nationalist]

10 hours ago, CdnFox said:

That's a very good question.  Why DO we give a higher standard to the first nations peoples?  Some would say treaties and that's fair enough but  i think it's time we rethought that.  it doesn't seem to be doing them any good,

Exactly my point. Who does this all now serve? The natives? Not really eh? So who?

It appears to benefit the band chiefs, their councils and gives Libbies a nice rosie glow to think they're "saving" someone. Yet for all their meddling, all they've accomplished is to:

1. Perpetuate an unhealthy relationship and propagate segregation.

2. Justify a bloated bureaucracy.

3. Enrich the leadership.

Conclusion: Abject Failure.

Edited September 13, 2023 by Nationalist

[CdnFox]

10 minutes ago, Nationalist said:

Exactly my point. Who does this all now serve? The natives? Not really eh? So who?

It appears to benefit the band chiefs, their councils and gives Libbies a nice rosie glow to think they're "saving" someone. Yet for all their meddling, all they've accomplished is to:

1. Perpetuate an unhealthy relationship and propagate segregation.

2. Justify a bloated bureaucracy.

3. Enrich the leadership.

Conclusion: Abject Failure.

Precisely. it sure as hell isn't improving the quality of life for the average FN.

[Zeitgeist]

14 hours ago, BeaverFever said:

I addressed the undocumented part further in my post. 
 

You’re missing the forest for the trees. It was the law that they must attend. Children who didn’t attend or who didn’t return from leave were taken by force. The school had full authority to deny a child leave over holidays, thats assuming they even had the means to return yin the first place. Your “so they could leave if they wanted to” comment is unfair and disingenuous,  the boarding schools were deliberately located far away from Reserves for the exact purpose of making travel difficult. They did not want kids returning home they wanted to sever them from their culture and wanted graduates moving on to cities towns and farms to work rather than returning home. 
 

Yea TB was the biggest killer but that’s no excuse. Their death rates were 2x-5x higher than non-indigenous schools or the general population depending on the decade. They lived in cramped unsanitary conditions with poor nutrition poor ventilation and the infected were not quarantined from the others kids. This is well documented even by Indian agents and government doctors who wrote scathing criticisms of the conditions these kids were kept in. To top it all off the kids were exposed to it while they were in those places against their families will. 
 

That’s not true. Of the scant death records the TRC could find, 32% did not have child’s name,  23% did not have child’s gender,  49% did not have child’s cause of death. You can read the TRC’s 2015 Report on Missing Children and Unmarked Burials here, with the above stats on page 8:
 

https://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2015/trc/IR4-9-4-2015-eng.pdf

 

Im sure murders were the minority. We know sexual and physical abuse was rampant and some places had extreme corporal punishment such as the homemade electric chair at St. Anne’s in Northern Ontario. I expect that in the 100+ years of operation at least SOME kids were murdered and or died from abuse but everyone recognizes these would be a small minority of death, not that it excuses anything.  Death and suicide from neglect and mistreatment is not acceptable either. Especially since they were taken there by force. 
 

Doesn’t matter. The kids shouldn’t have been there. They shouldn’t have died there. They shouldn’t have been buried there. Their graves shouldn’t have been demolished once the schools had no more use for them. These things didn’t happen to non-indigenous people. 
 

This is all a false narrative. The TRCs report on Missing and Unmarked Burials is almost 10 years old and the calls to action which were unanswered for years include government assistance in searching suspected unmarked grave sites and release if government archives relating to missing and deceased children.

 

As above: a false narrative BY YOU of what has been said. Armed Police officers literally came to people’s houses and took kids out of the arms of crying mothers. Other kids were picked up by police or Indian agents from the side of the road while out for a bike ride or walking to a friends house and put in transit to a school without even seeing their family. That may not quite be “abducted at gunpoint” but it’s pretty close  

 

You’re editorializing, exaggerating, and assuming.  What evidence do you have that Residential Schools were purposely built far from reserves to keep kids from their families?  It was financially impossible to build multiple schools close to small remote communities. Most parents wanted their kids to attend these schools and parents could opt out if their kids had responsibilities at home.  No doubt the Indian Act had real problems.  The Indian Agent was a strange kind of warden, but you can’t have different rules for different groups without enforcement.  The reserve system comes at a cost.  In one post someone said people weren’t allowed to leave the reserve (untrue).  You said people were prevented from returning to the reserve (untrue).

You fail to take into account the context of those schools, a context where abuses took place in almost all schools because there weren’t the checks on authority that we have today and most people were grateful to have publicly funded education.  These schools were considered progressive in their day.  Our notions of abuse have changed significantly.  Generally accepted discipline just 30 years ago, such as use of the strap, is considered abuse today.

You also fail to see the activist aspect of the TRC.  Everything and the kitchen sink is thrown into their recommendations, including a basic income for all.

 I too have read books about these subjects from people like King and Talaga.  There are sad stories and cases of injustice, but much of what happened was the result of people trying to find a best case scenario to deal with a seemingly intractable problem, like today.

We still have mandatory public education and most people want to keep it that way.  We still have residential schools, except now they’re run by Indigenous.  There are still suicides and separated families.

It’s very hard to reach through the charged rhetoric and get to the truth, because we seem caught between narratives of total denial and the false narrative of genocide.

Even when we look at evidence based accounts, the question of what to do about the Indian Act remains unresolved.  I only know that the decisions for change must come from Indigenous, must involve self-determination (and the privilege of paying taxes towards one’s community upkeep), and must be revenue neutral (or taxpayers will rightfully demand a say).

Edited September 13, 2023 by Zeitgeist

[CdnFox]

14 hours ago, BeaverFever said:

I addressed the undocumented part further in my post. 
 

You’re missing the forest for the trees. It was the law that they must attend. Children who didn’t attend or who didn’t return from leave were taken by force. The school had full authority to deny a child leave over holidays, thats assuming they even had the means to return yin the first place. Your “so they could leave if they wanted to” comment is unfair and disingenuous,  the boarding schools were deliberately located far away from Reserves for the exact purpose of making travel difficult. They did not want kids returning home they wanted to sever them from their culture and wanted graduates moving on to cities towns and farms to work rather than returning home. 
 

Yea TB was the biggest killer but that’s no excuse. Their death rates were 2x-5x higher than non-indigenous schools or the general population depending on the decade. They lived in cramped unsanitary conditions with poor nutrition poor ventilation and the infected were not quarantined from the others kids. This is well documented even by Indian agents and government doctors who wrote scathing criticisms of the conditions these kids were kept in. To top it all off the kids were exposed to it while they were in those places against their families will. 
 

That’s not true. Of the scant death records the TRC could find, 32% did not have child’s name,  23% did not have child’s gender,  49% did not have child’s cause of death. You can read the TRC’s 2015 Report on Missing Children and Unmarked Burials here, with the above stats on page 8:
 

https://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2015/trc/IR4-9-4-2015-eng.pdf

 

Im sure murders were the minority. We know sexual and physical abuse was rampant and some places had extreme corporal punishment such as the homemade electric chair at St. Anne’s in Northern Ontario. I expect that in the 100+ years of operation at least SOME kids were murdered and or died from abuse but everyone recognizes these would be a small minority of death, not that it excuses anything.  Death and suicide from neglect and mistreatment is not acceptable either. Especially since they were taken there by force. 
 

Doesn’t matter. The kids shouldn’t have been there. They shouldn’t have died there. They shouldn’t have been buried there. Their graves shouldn’t have been demolished once the schools had no more use for them. These things didn’t happen to non-indigenous people. 
 

This is all a false narrative. The TRCs report on Missing and Unmarked Burials is almost 10 years old and the calls to action which were unanswered for years include government assistance in searching suspected unmarked grave sites and release if government archives relating to missing and deceased children.

 

As above: a false narrative BY YOU of what has been said. Armed Police officers literally came to people’s houses and took kids out of the arms of crying mothers. Other kids were picked up by police or Indian agents from the side of the road while out for a bike ride or walking to a friends house and put in transit to a school without even seeing their family. That may not quite be “abducted at gunpoint” but it’s pretty close  

 

Sigh.

Your revisionist history highlights the problem here.

the truancy laws applied to everybody. And yes plenty of other groups weren't happy about it  But no - they did not send people around to forcably run off with children. That just didn't happen. Any more than they sent armed troops to fectch ukrainan or polish or chinese kids.

And which kids were denied the right to go home on break. Give me examples.

As to the schools being deliberately placed away from the tribes - that's SO amazlingly daft it deserves it's own response which i'll give after this.
 

And no - we don't know that sex abuse was 'rampant'.  We're pretty sure it happened - it happens in todays schools and churches with a hell of a lot more supervision. But there's no evidence at all it was 'rampant' throughout the system.

And yes - TB being the biggest killer IS IN FACT AN "EXCUSE'.  And they lived in cramped unsanitary conditions on the reserves. They didn't live worse at the schools. The death rate for FN's on the reserves was just as high. So the kids in the schools didn't die any more than the people at home did

And of course the kids should be there. As already discussed - that's where they died, most of them with contageous bodies at a time when transportation of bodies was difficult and expensive.  If the familes wanted them they could have come and gotten them.

The 'narrative' is accurate i'm afraid.

 

Basically EVERY ONE OF YOUR POINTS is a gross exaggeration or just wrong. Period.

The first nations kids were not hauled off at gunpoint, they DID go home on holidays and summer breaks, they were under the same truancy laws as everyone else, they agreed to all of this and they got better food and lodging at the schools than many of them would have gotten at home, even if it's cramped and dirty compared to today's standards.

Your entire line here is just  a dramatization of the facts. This is how HBO would portray it - it is NOT reality.

[CdnFox]

14 hours ago, BeaverFever said:

the boarding schools were deliberately located far away from Reserves for the exact purpose of making travel difficult

This comment deserved special attention. The rest of what you said was wrong but this is just insane.

I mean use your brain.  It should take you 2 second flat to realize why that is not accurate.

Here's where the schools were:

https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1FQT02WuinFtAe6bgWrJm74G97uie_gA7&femb=1&ll=45.26169791955141%2C-113.42452069269129&z=4

First off - they put them EVERYWHERE THEY COULD.  EVERYWHERE THERE IS A FORT OR A TOWN ETC.

IF they wanted to keep the first nations far from their homes all they had to do is have JUST ONE in each province and demand the kids went there.  They very deliberately spread them all over just TO BE CLOSER TO THEIR HOMES. ANd in fact MANY report deliberately having elders from their bands come to the schools to do cultural days and such - so they were NOT isolated entirely from their people year round.

It takes ONE SECOND of research to realize that they obviously made an effort to distribute them as much as reasonably possible.  The majority of first nations would have lived within a few days travel of the schools.

Second - the whole problem was that because first nations were so scattered and in such small groups that it was IMPOSSIBLE for each group to have a school.  Especially not one they could travel to every day.

So there was NO WAY whatsoever to put schools close to the children So you're mad that the gov't couldkn't do the impossible.

The choice was to have schools as close as reasonable OR to send teachers into every single first nations band to live there. That wasn't possible - so they considered trying to teach a first nations person from each band who would then go back and teach others.  THAT had issues.  So this was the best they could do.

 

It is BEYOND IGNORANT to suggest that the gov't tried to move schools as far away from the first nations as possible. It's untrue, and an example of the re-writing of history we're seeing in ALL your comments.  No - they did NOT build them away from reserves deliberately to make it hard to travel - they went as close as they could to as many reserves as they could even tho having a central school would have been cheaper.

[Zeitgeist]

16 hours ago, BeaverFever said:

To be fully accurate they don’t pay taxes on income generated on the Reserve.  Off-Reserve income is fully taxable.  The question remains:  non-indigenous individuals can vote and receive public services without paying taxes and non-indigenous communities receive public funding disproportionate to their tax contributions. Most provinces receive equalization payments from the federal government   So why a different standard for indigenous peoples?

I still don’t understand what you mean by disproportionate.  Have you visited any Indigenous elementary schools lately?  Nicer than any I’ve seen off reserve. Taxes from Indigenous come nowhere close to covering the costs paid by non-indigenous taxpayers.  Having said that, families deserve clean drinking water and decent basic infrastructure.  One way or another it must be there.