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Remains of 215 children found at former residential school in British Columbia

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Re: Remains of 215 children found at former residential school in British Columbia

#81

Post by todd8 »

visiblink wrote: post #70
todd8 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, TB was present in pre-Colombian North and South America. TB is a very ancient disease according to [1,3] and has been present in humans since the dawn of humankind according to [2]. There is evidence of the disease in human remains from the Neolithic era and Egyptian mummies from 3000 BC. Furthermore there are references to the the disease in writing from both ancient India [5] and ancient 2700 BC China, see [4].…

It's worth pointing out that the abstract of the Nature article appears to suggest that the pre-Columbian evidence is for a different variant of TB: "Here we present three 1,000-year-old mycobacterial genomes from Peruvian human skeletons, revealing that a member of the M. tuberculosis complex caused human disease before contact. The ancient strains are distinct from known human-adapted forms and are most closely rel…

I wondered about this myself, but in the second sentence of the Abstract the authors say: "This notion [that TB was introduced post-contact], however, is incompatible with archaeological evidence of pre-contact tuberculosis in the New World." As you speculate, wouldn't the aboriginal inhabitants be more susceptible to TB from Europe even if it was the same disease, but separated by perhaps thousands of years genetically.

PBS claims that by the 1900 one-seventh of every person that had ever lived had died from TB[1], and according to The World Health Organization, "About one-quarter of the world's population has a TB infection, which means people have been infected by TB bacteria but are not (yet) ill ..."[2]

Significantly, The WHO goes on to say that lifetime risk of falling ill with TB if infected is between 5 and 10 percent. The poor treatment of the aboriginal peoples alone could have caused an epidemic of TB illness due to the crowding, malnutrition, and forced displacements.

My own father had TB, I wasn't allowed to visit him in the hospital as a child that year. Fortunately, he was able to obtain the relatively new antibiotic course of therapy in the early 60's that enabled him to be cured over a long period of time.

See also the Canadian Public Health web page on TB and Aboriginal people [3].

[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/plague-...

[2] https://www.who.int/en/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/tubercul...

[3] https://www.cpha.ca/tb-and-aboriginal-people

Re: Remains of 215 children found at former residential school in British Columbia

#83

Post by nerdponx »

plutonorm wrote: post #23
fmajid wrote: post #9

And then there is the forced sterilization of indigenous women that is still happening , specially in Alberta: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/sterilization-indigenous-1....

This is unbelievably shocking. Why is this not front page new across the world? Or at least the west? Good god, it’s unbelievable. The doctors should be instantly arrested, why haven’t they been arrested? This isn’t a law suit it’s a criminal investigation. I’ve not heard anything so absolutely disgusting about a first world country in quite some time.

I imagine whenever the major news outlets try to investigate, they get phone calls from people they don't want to get phone calls from.

Re: Remains of 215 children found at former residential school in British Columbia

#84

Post by j45 »

at_a_remove wrote: post #21

This is one incident among many, but it has less to do with indigenous children as it does with any system wherein the accounting of "disconnected" children is left to that system. Tuam, County Galway ... eight hundred infants with missing graves. St Mary's Cemetery in Lanark, four hundred left in a single mass grave. In Germany, nuns pimping out orphans. The Sisters of Mercy scandal. I could go on. Bluntly put, when…

It’s dangerous to comment on this article without knowing what residential schools were.

Children were forcibly taken from their families by the Canadian government for no other reason than the families they were born into.. to be converted to a different culture and faith and endured horrific abuses across the board in every residential school.

A good place to learn why these children specifically suffered, and how monstrously wrong it was (some schools operated into the 1980s and 1990s) is the Truth and reconciliation commission that took place in Canada.

https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1450124405592/1529106060...

http://www.trc.ca/

Re: Remains of 215 children found at former residential school in British Columbia

#85

Post by gedy »

elliekelly wrote: post #67
at_a_remove wrote: post #21

This is one incident among many, but it has less to do with indigenous children as it does with any system wherein the accounting of "disconnected" children is left to that system. Tuam, County Galway ... eight hundred infants with missing graves. St Mary's Cemetery in Lanark, four hundred left in a single mass grave. In Germany, nuns pimping out orphans. The Sisters of Mercy scandal. I could go on. Bluntly put, when…

It seems like the Catholic Church is often (always?) somehow involved in these systemic child abuse/mass grave stories and it’s mind-boggling to me that we continue to allow an organization with that kind of track record to take responsibility for caring for and placing at-risk children.

I'm not defending the church, but others here have pointed out that public schools have as much sexual abuse as churches or parochial schools.

Re: Remains of 215 children found at former residential school in British Columbia

#86

Post by throwaway0a5e »

dade_ wrote: post #53
at_a_remove wrote: post #21

This is one incident among many, but it has less to do with indigenous children as it does with any system wherein the accounting of "disconnected" children is left to that system. Tuam, County Galway ... eight hundred infants with missing graves. St Mary's Cemetery in Lanark, four hundred left in a single mass grave. In Germany, nuns pimping out orphans. The Sisters of Mercy scandal. I could go on. Bluntly put, when…

These children weren’t abandoned, they were forcefully taken from their families by the government. They were sent vast distances to these boarding schools to “kill the Indian in the child”, where they were often mistreated, sexually abused, and went missing ( murder/neglect/ abuse). So it is all the more egregious in this case. The government turned a blind eye to the Churches, and the Churches were doing God’s work…

The government would have never let the Church (run schools) take responsibility for the kids if the Church wasn't mistreating them like this. They would have just run their own abusive boarding schools.

Slow moving genocide and generally treating these populations like crap to the point where they chose to forgo their culture was the whole point.

Re: Remains of 215 children found at former residential school in British Columbia

#87

Post by refurb »

dade_ wrote: post #53
at_a_remove wrote: post #21

This is one incident among many, but it has less to do with indigenous children as it does with any system wherein the accounting of "disconnected" children is left to that system. Tuam, County Galway ... eight hundred infants with missing graves. St Mary's Cemetery in Lanark, four hundred left in a single mass grave. In Germany, nuns pimping out orphans. The Sisters of Mercy scandal. I could go on. Bluntly put, when…

These children weren’t abandoned, they were forcefully taken from their families by the government. They were sent vast distances to these boarding schools to “kill the Indian in the child”, where they were often mistreated, sexually abused, and went missing ( murder/neglect/ abuse). So it is all the more egregious in this case. The government turned a blind eye to the Churches, and the Churches were doing God’s work…

The whole system makes a lot more sense if you imagine it through the belief in the “white man’s burden” at the time - it was the white man’s responsibility to educate and assimilate “inferior” cultures into the “superior” Western system. Not to excuse the damage done, but the people doing these things felt like it was their moral responsibility - if they didn’t do it, these cultures would forever be stuck in their inferior ways.

That attitude hasn’t disappeared.

Re: Remains of 215 children found at former residential school in British Columbia

#88

Post by j45 »

elliekelly wrote: post #67
at_a_remove wrote: post #21

This is one incident among many, but it has less to do with indigenous children as it does with any system wherein the accounting of "disconnected" children is left to that system. Tuam, County Galway ... eight hundred infants with missing graves. St Mary's Cemetery in Lanark, four hundred left in a single mass grave. In Germany, nuns pimping out orphans. The Sisters of Mercy scandal. I could go on. Bluntly put, when…

It seems like the Catholic Church is often (always?) somehow involved in these systemic child abuse/mass grave stories and it’s mind-boggling to me that we continue to allow an organization with that kind of track record to take responsibility for caring for and placing at-risk children.

Seems can be a weak entry into such a serious topic.

https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1450124405592/1529106060...

Re: Remains of 215 children found at former residential school in British Columbia

#89

Post by throwaway0a5e »

refurb wrote: post #87
dade_ wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These children weren’t abandoned, they were forcefully taken from their families by the government. They were sent vast distances to these boarding schools to “kill the Indian in the child”, where they were often mistreated, sexually abused, and went missing ( murder/neglect/ abuse). So it is all the more egregious in this case. The government turned a blind eye to the Churches, and the Churches were doing God’s work…

The whole system makes a lot more sense if you imagine it through the belief in the “white man’s burden” at the time - it was the white man’s responsibility to educate and assimilate “inferior” cultures into the “superior” Western system. Not to excuse the damage done, but the people doing these things felt like it was their moral responsibility - if they didn’t do it, these cultures would forever be stuck in their i…

>That attitude hasn’t disappeared.

It's undergone a very successful rebranding and PR campaign.

Re: Remains of 215 children found at former residential school in British Columbia

#90

Post by dragonwriter »

FooBarBizBazz wrote: post #79
garyrichardson wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While that may be true, it’s only part of the situation here. Residential schools in Canada were part of a system by the gov of Canada to eliminate/assimilate the First Nations people. Many argue this was genocide.

The slash between "eliminate" and "assimilate" is doing a lot of work. It highlights two very different meanings of "genocide". It's the distinction between "killing people" and "killing a people". You're right regarding the history, of course. Also sadly, one has a way of turning into the other. Well, both are sad anyway.

> It highlights two very different meanings of "genocide". It's the distinction between "killing people" and "killing a people".

“Killing a people” is genocide.

“Killing people” is murder, mass murder if it is lots of people.

The latter is sometimes part of the mechanism by which the former is achieved, but there aren’t “two different meanings of ‘genocide’” involved.

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