If you think there’s another Kamloops
The Toronto Star says there are more mass graves.
“If you think there’s another Kamloops just coming around the corner, there is one — trust me,” says Lyle Keewatin Richards, the child of a residential school survivor who is part of a group trying to preserve an unmarked cemetery near the former Red Deer Industrial School in Alberta.
According to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, approximately 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Métis children attended these residential schools. Estimates vary, but the commission put it at just over 4,000 dead, which would mean that more than one in 50 children who went to the schools died there. Most experts say the toll is likely higher.
It was a rate of death driven by far higher levels of malnutrition, disease and abuse than the norm at the time in white schools, experts say.
Many schools refused to send the dead children back to their families because it cost money; instead they dropped them into mass graves. Much cheaper.
H/t Your Name’s not Bruce?
In one sense, it is remarkable that this discovery is such a big deal. During the course of the TRC, the estimate of about 4000 was made. But known graves plus returned bodies was well short of 2000. There were at least 2000 children unaccounted for. Where the hell did everyone think they would be found but large scale unmarked graves, or worse. The only new information is where exactly 215 of them were all along.
I will. I am. But it is difficult, I have to say.
Well, yeah. What’s more important: money, or the feelings and wellbeing of people with a different skin colour?
/sssssssss
The point of the schools was to make the godless savages into good Christians. If they died, then their transformation failed, and therefore they didn’t deserve the dignity of a Christian burial.
Feelings of savages don’t matter; they are savage feelings. What matters is saving their immortal souls. A 40% death rate is acceptable if the converse is a 60% salvation rate. Jesus totally understands.
Naif @ 1 – True, but as you say, in one sense. The reality is that for us crude primates there’s a huge difference between “2000 unaccounted for” and “look at this mass grave.”
Ophelia – Understood, but what I am getting at here is that it would not take a great deal of time to translate that ~2000 into a breakdown by school (it is in the TRC report). From there, it really would not take much work to establish the trail. There are already eyewitness accounts telling us where else to look.
Ah yes, I see your point.
It’s interesting, again, that the people in charge – priests and nuns – generally have a lot of rules and ceremonies around death. It’s a big part of what religion is for, and what it does. Yet when it’s children of unmarried mothers without a lot of money and power, and children of indigenous people without money and power, well – just throw them into that pit behind the barn.
The Catholic Church can trace my Québécois ancestors back to 1640, and my Irish ancestor to the coffin ship that orphaned him. They kept records obsessively. The fact they could lose count let alone the names tells it all.
To be clear though, other churches were running some of the schools.