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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

#171

Post by frabbit »

mardifoufs wrote: post #127
plutonorm wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Canada likes to whitewash stuff like this because we have a weird superiority complex towards the US. We just treat people better, have less racism and everything is better just by the virtue of being Canadian and not American. It usually goes "Oh first Nations are getting forcefully sterilized? But what about x thing happening in the US?". Remember, Native men were literally kidnapped by the Saskatoon police departm…

Anyone interested in a skeptical take on Canada's self-presentation might be interested in the Canadaland podcast:

https://www.canadaland.com/tag/indigenous/

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

#172

Post by throwaway0a5e »

brailsafe wrote: post #134
throwaway0a5e wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

The only options are the fucking Catholics or the government!?

You can pick other religions or institutions. They're no better at scale.

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

#173

Post by maximilianburke »

dragonwriter wrote: post #145
maximilianburke wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the most notable genocides have involved murder, but that doesn't mean they all have. Look at what is happening to the Uyghur people in China; it appears to be more of an operation to destroy their culture and identity than to slaughter the people, at least at the moment.

> I think the most notable genocides have involved murder, They usually do, but sometimes the overt murder stops while the genocide continues. If, and this is debatable, an endpoint could be drawn for the Native Ameeican Genocide in the US, its definitely long after outright killing based on being a Native not assimilated into the White society stopped being an organized practice.

I totally agree.

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

#174

Post by behnamoh »

barney54 wrote: post #157
behnamoh wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it odd that some Christian conservatives in the US support policies which are essentially racist. I had a talk with my girlfriend about it and she mentioned one reason could be that they actually think they're doing the right thing according to the Bible. It's true that religion/belief-system "partitions" people -- you're either one of us or we must be against you. Not saying that some (supposedly) Christians…

Which policies are you talking about?

For example, travel ban for certain countries based on their religion, the wall between the US and Mexico (which I know has its own advantages, but the whole concept is kinda humiliating if you think about it from the Mexicans' perspective), no H1B visa for international students after graduation, etc.

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

#175

Post by FooBarBizBazz »

dragonwriter wrote: post #139
FooBarBizBazz wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if I take a million people into the gas chambers, and they are diverse in every dimension, then I have merely committed a mass-murder, but not a genocide? But if, in the minds of those people, just before I hit the switch, a collective identity forms -- "The People of the Gas Chamber" -- then my act is instead genocide, due to their internal mental state? (Interestingly, little would be so likely to cause such a s…

> So if I take a million people into the gas chambers, and they are diverse in every dimension, then I have merely committed a mass-murder, but not a genocide? Yes. > But if, in the minds of those people, just before I hit the switch, a collective identity forms -- "The People of the Gas Chamber" -- then my act is instead genocide, due to their internal mental state? No, acts directed at the extermination of a people…

So then the act rises to this special tier because of the belief, in the mind of the actor, that the victims believe themselves to belong to a common group.

And the goal, to the actor, is not so much killing, as it is the destruction of the belief in each victim's mind, that they belong to the group. The destruction of the body and mind holding the belief is just a means to this end.

This is all very strange.

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

#177

Post by Geezus_42 »

gogopuppygogo wrote: post #144
jmcan wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost destroyed an entire people? I think they where pretty successful in that regard.

Might makes right destroyed entire ways of life in North America.

Not just North America, all over the colonized world.

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

#178

Post by at_a_remove »

foolmeonce wrote: post #68
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…

> Bluntly put, when an institution is given power over children, more than that of a family, and the auditing is lax, you're gonna get maltreatment, and from there unmarked graves. Families are not particularly safe. Systems that pulled children from their family for placement in a "correct" family created similar horror stories and the natural families of many are also horror stories. Air crashes are more notable th…

I am not disagreeing with you on families. My point is about oversight, and graves.

Here, recently, we had a case of some missing kids where the children were killed and buried in the back yard. The difference is that there was a swiftness in catching them. Or that little girl that was starved to death by her parents near to me -- again, caught.

When it is an institution, there are no external checks on that institution, and so you get these mass graves and by the time people clue in, the perpetrators are dead. My point is that if you're the one auditing your own books, you can get away with a lot, for a long long time, and sometimes that means retiring with having gotten away with it.

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

#179

Post by colechristensen »

todd8 wrote: post #81
visiblink wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 genetica…

There are several different lineages of TB, one of which is global, arrived in populations at the same time as european colonists, and arose at a time long after humans had spread across the globe.

I wasn’t able to quickly find out if there are differences in expected outcomes from different lineages in different human populations.

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

#180

Post by SZJX »

FooBarBizBazz wrote: post #175
dragonwriter wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So if I take a million people into the gas chambers, and they are diverse in every dimension, then I have merely committed a mass-murder, but not a genocide? Yes. > But if, in the minds of those people, just before I hit the switch, a collective identity forms -- "The People of the Gas Chamber" -- then my act is instead genocide, due to their internal mental state? No, acts directed at the extermination of a people…

So then the act rises to this special tier because of the belief, in the mind of the actor, that the victims believe themselves to belong to a common group. And the goal, to the actor, is not so much killing, as it is the destruction of the belief in each victim's mind, that they belong to the group. The destruction of the body and mind holding the belief is just a means to this end. This is all very strange.

You have a very good point. Seems to me happened is that the definition of "genocide" connected to a specific "people" has its roots in the definition of other war crimes. The concept became especially prominent after WWII. Before that I don't think such a distinction was so firmly rooted in people's minds. Sure, it's a way to enshrine the historical importance of the Nazi extermination of the Jews, and it might have served as a way to more easily justify the UN/"peacekeeping" troops inserting themselves in the middle of certain conflicts such as the ones in Yugoslavia or in Rwanda.

It supposedly protects distinct cultural groups from being destroyed which is the right thing to do in today's definition. However, as Sapiens put forward, empires throughout the history have assimilated all sorts of people, and objectively speaking, they didn't necessarily made the lives of those people worse, and in many cases voluntary bi-directional cultural influence took place, until one is barely distinguishable from another. Therefore, I agree to some extent that it seems weird to elevate this definition of "genocide", even sometimes cultural, as something graver than the act of actual mass murder. Sometimes they do happen together, to some extent even in this example, where the children died en masse. But in many occasions throughout the history, the gradual disappearance of a cultural identity is a very distinct thing than people actually dying or having their living conditions worsening. As you said, group identities disappear and reappear in an endless ebb and flow, maybe not so much in the modern world with all these nation borders, but much more commonly throughout the history.

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