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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

#91

Post by refurb »

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.

Not necessarily. The Anglican Church and other Protestant churches ran many of these schools.

And interestingly, Dartmouth College in New Hampshire was created to educate native Americans. Now it’s an Ivy League college.

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

#92

Post by prestigious »

AutoDisorder wrote: post #22

These shouldnt be called residential schools because they werent schools and there was nothing residential about them despite the racist myths. Their primary purpose was not the assimilation of Indigenous children. Their primary purpose was a tool in the war of destruction against all Indigenous peoples -- the only rightful owners of the land illegally occupied by the canadian settler state and its illegal citizens.…

Not true.

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

#93

Post by throwaway0a5e »

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.

>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.

What's the alternative?

The government is no better here.

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

#94

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

tw04 wrote: post #62
gchamonlive wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when an institution is given power over children, more than that of a family, and the auditing is lax, you're gonna get maltreatment I don't follow your logic leap. You exampled a lot of incidents with institutions but that only, in the best case advocates for institutions being nasty, not family, because it doesn't account for abuse within a family context. Is it quantifiably greater in institutions? We can't answ…

The average family doesn't have a child buried in their yard. So yes I think we can say with confidence these institutions were and are quantifiably worse.

> The average family doesn't have a child buried in their yard.

Abortion?

Whoops, sorry for the thoughtcrime, carry on in your approved discussion.

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

#95

Post by joshlemer »

lriel wrote: post #60

The residential school are a very sad state of affairs with regards to the thinning down of the aboriginal stance and culture in Canada before, during and after the Dominion. My country has had a very bad holier than thou attitude with regards to history and culture. In typical aboriginal kickassness, the Ktunaxa took one of those residential schools and turned it into a luxury golfing resort for the rich gentile fol…

> In all of english Canada, he is presented as a man consumed with mental illness fighting along side the natives, whereas in Quebec, which is francophone and healthily feuding with the anglos on all sides, Mr Riel is presented as a franco hero without any mentions of mr Riel's illness and our country's treatment of the man and his condition.

I don’t get why Quebecers always think they are the only ones who remember Louis Riel. In Manitoba he’s the biggest cultural and historical icon people identify with. He has grandiose stately statues at the legislature, around town and in universities. Schools, school divisions, libraries, streets, bridges, colleges and community centres are named after him. His mother’s house in Winnipeg is a national park preserved and staffed with period role play actors. He is buried in a prominent scenic grounds where people visit all the time. If you go to tourist shops you’ll find t shirts with Louis Riels portrait. There are handsome murals agrandizing him in the trendy parts of town. He is widely accepted to be the founder of Manitoba (having even chosen the name "Manitoba"), and a hero both within and outside the Indigenous 13%, Metis 6% and French ~12% populations here. He has a provincial Stat holiday in February for gods sake! Try not to paint with an overly broad brush.

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

#96

Post by kube-system »

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…

Yes, and this is the most difficult form of racism to recognize and avoid. Hatred is easy to recognize. Racism without hatred is often discounted.

It’s the people with good intentions who are acting with inherent biases and preconceived world-views who often commit acts of blatant racism without anyone realizing until it’s too late.

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

#97

Post by DanHulton »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #86
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 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.

I was about to disagree with you, when my brain finally made sense of the double negative in that first paragraph. So I figured I'd just leave a comment to that effect to save anyone else the same potential mistake.

In short, above is saying that the abuse and neglect was a feature, not a bug, as far as the government was concerned, and is absolutely correct.

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

#98

Post by FooBarBizBazz »

dragonwriter wrote: post #90
FooBarBizBazz wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> “Killing a people” is genocide.

But people do change their identities all the time. And sometimes the destruction of one identity leads to the creation of a new one. This has been a key part of all nation-building exercises. It is a purpose of education and mass-media.

Is the unification of tribes, the destruction of difference, necessarily "genocide"?

Also, if you can speak of the "death of a people", surely you can also speak of a "birth"? What is the source material of the new group?

A grouping is an abstract concept. Individual people have a right to exist, but do abstract groups, just because we anthropomorphize them? Any adjective is an abstract grouping of all nouns to which it'd apply.

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

#99

Post by bryanrasmussen »

tw04 wrote: post #73
koheripbal wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average institute also doesnt have children buried in the yard. Your conclusion isnt logical.

> The average institute also doesnt have children buried in the yard. Your conclusion isnt logical. I dont think you have any idea what you're talking about. The average residential school does. That's why they're looking. The estimate was 6000 dead children across Canada and they expect that's low. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/06/canada-dark-of... > As many as 6,000 children died in residential institu…

It seems like a rewriting of terms, it started out with any time you move the power from the family to an institution, but somewhere about 2 or 3 posts above here it has turned into these particular institutions - in which case there is no argument, these institutions were especially bad but not just because they removed power from the family - probably the more sure cause of their badness was because of the project they were engaged in, the reasons they had for doing what they did, and their viewpoints regarding the children and the family they came from.

If you remove children from under the control of their family and you have a theory that the children are naturally bad and less than human in some ways, yes, that is probably going to lead to exactly this kind of thing.

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

#100

Post by kyralis »

dragonwriter wrote: post #90
FooBarBizBazz wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I suspect you'll find relatively few people who will use "genocide" to refer to the eradication of a culture without concurrent mass killing of the members of that culture.
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