A lethal “school”
Via Your Name’s not Bruce? at Miscellany 6 – The Toronto Star reports:
KAMLOOPS, B.C. – The remains of 215 children have been found buried on the site of a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C.
Chief Rosanne Casimir of the Tk’emlups te Secwépemc First Nation said in a news release Thursday that the remains were confirmed last weekend with the help of a ground-penetrating radar specialist.
Casimir called the discovery an “unthinkable loss that was spoken about but never documented at the Kamloops Indian Residential School.”
She said it’s believed the deaths are undocumented, although a local museum archivist is working with the Royal British Columbia Museum to see if any records of the deaths can be found.
Meaning, I take it, the school neither reported nor recorded the deaths, which means…I guess that the school (the officials, the government bodies in charge of the officials and the schools) saw the children as…vermin?
Some of them were 3 years old.
The school was once the largest in Canada’s residential school system.
As Auschwitz was one of the largest in Germany’s extermination/forced labor system.
The school operated between 1890 and 1969. The federal government took over the operation from the Catholic Church to operate as a day school until it closed in 1978.
Which seems to indicate that the school was initially run by the Catholic church, just as similar hellholes were run in Ireland.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission issued its final report on residential schools more than five years ago. The nearly 4,000-page account details the harsh mistreatment inflicted on Indigenous children at the institutions, where at least 3,200 children died amid abuse and neglect.
While Mister God watched approvingly.
Ah, well done, Your Name’s Not Bruce; I saw this in the Guardian this morning & was thinking of passing on the appalling if unsurprising news.
By the way, is there some special key to enter the Miscellany Room? I have no idea how to enter it – doubtless because of my general incompetence where computers are concerned.
Just the search box in the top
leftright corner. Crude but it works.Even if it was not specifically the Catholic Church in charge at the time, the morals of the operators would certainly have been informed by that religion anyway. Truly a god of squalor and suffering.
I gloss Abrahamic religion as “Mediterranean death cult”.
I find that helps with my cognitive dissonance.
Even in the U.S. and Canada, with ostensibly ‘protestant’ cultures, the Catholic church was permitted to commit atrocities for decades with no legal or civil restraint.
The whole scheme was set up to destroy Canadian aboriginal culture. Children from four years old (the bodies were located with ground penetrating radar and none have been unearthed so saying “as young as three” is not definitive) were taken from their families and put into these “schools” (there were many) where speaking their language or doing any traditional practices was prohibited and punished.
This was openly designed to “take the indian out of the indian” as a cultural genocide, but described as a benevolent program to take the poor kids out of the “squalor and poverty” of indigenous life to give them a better life. From the late 1800s to the 1960s. Despicable.
The Canadian government has apologized for the whole evil racist program and we have had several commissions, inquiries, and some reparations have been made. The scarred survivors suffer on. Physical (and of course sexual) abuse was far from uncommon.
It is one of several black stains on Canada’s past.
Yes the catholic church ran this particular “school” at least for some or most of its existence. Others were run by protestants as well. The catholic church, so far, is refusing to release their remaining records regarding this particular facility.
There are no accurate counts of the young people who died here and elsewhere in “care”. These 215 burials at one place is shocking, but hundreds more families across the country reported children taken away from their homes who never returned.
I’m horrified, but not surprised by this news.
Well, the United States has never owned up to our own residential schools. One of the main thoroughfares in Phoenix is Indian School Road, which refers to a residential school. There is an exhibit at the Heard Museum, which is a museum for Native American culture and art in Phoenix. The exhibit doesn’t “dwell” on the negative aspects of the residential school, if I recall correctly, except only obliquely.
Here’s more detail. The goal was “anglo conformity” and served to alienate the kids from their families.
https://archive.archaeology.org/online/features/phoenix/
The United States and Canada will probably never examine our roles in the attempted genocide, but will happily recall the uplifting stories of the brave settlers who tamed this land. (Cute music swell.)
I don’t know about Canada, but in the US they still are. Catholic schools (religious schools in general) do not have government oversight, though they receive government funding in many ways. Stories of restraints, beatings, locking in closets. and so forth, are still with us, and likely will be as long as we allow churches to run schools. It’s time people learned: schools are institutions for educating children; churches are institutions for indoctrinating children. The two should never cross.
And yes, I do realize some teachers in public schools engage in indoctrination. This is not technically allowed, but is rarely enforced, even when parents complain. I know from personal experience as a parent complaining about my son being indoctrinated into conservative ideology. The school told me (about the teacher): Well, you have to understand, she’s a Republican. Nothing was said to her, nothing was done, nothing changed. Fortunately my son thinks for himself, and for all her talk of polonium halos and the glories of McCarthyism, he remained skeptical and checked with credible sources. (Starting with me, and moving foward to other good sources.)
There is also the case of Australia, and the treatment of the aboriginal people. That is not a pretty story, either.
I’m sensing a pattern here…
Mind you it’s probably a human pattern. “We want to take over this place and you have to get out now. The reasons will be divulged in due course, when we’ve made them up.”
Oh, there is a definite pattern here. It is of course a human pattern (there is the treatment of the Ainu by the Japanese, or the infinitely worse treatment of the Herero & Namaqua people in Namibia for which Germany has just paid something carefully not labelled as ‘reparations’, or the Chinese treatment of the Uighur people, and many other examples), but in the Anglosphere, because one is more intimate with one’s own culture and its motley moral nature, it is the effortless superiority & sense of their own rectitude that allowed people to ‘steel themselves with science’, in Karl Polyanyi’s words (probably slightly misquoted), as well as with religion, so that terrible cruelties could be practiced without stirring any moral qualms – it is this fundamental moral blindness and hypocrisy that is so enraging.