Remains
The revelation convulsed all of Canada.
Ground-penetrating radar had found possible signs of 215 unmarked graves at a former residential school in British Columbia run by the Catholic Church that the government had once used to assimilate Indigenous children forcibly taken from their families.
It’s not as if the Catholic church and its ways with abandoned or poor or otherwise despised and powerless children have always been benevolent and helpful. I say that with deep sarcasm, because the Catholic church has notoriously treated such children with sadistic contempt and brutality. And it has sometimes simply thrown the ones who died in their “care” into garbage pits. Remember the mass grave recently discovered at Tuam?
Back to Kamloops:
It was the first of some 80 former schools where indications of possible unmarked graves were discovered, and it produced a wave of sorrow and shock in a country that has long struggled with the legacy of its treatment of Indigenous people.
But no physical remains have yet been found.
While there is a broad consensus in Canada that children were taken from their families and died in these schools, as the discussions and searches have dragged on, a small universe of conservative Catholic and right-wing activists have become increasingly vocal in questioning the existence of unmarked graves. They are also skeptical of the entire national reconsideration of how Canada treated Indigenous people.
Stop right there.
Finding or not finding unmarked graves is one thing, and how Canada treated indigenous people is quite another. (The same applies to how the US treated indigenous people.)
“There’s, so far, no evidence of any remains of children buried around residential schools,” Tom Flanagan, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Calgary and an author of “Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth About Residential Schools),” said in an interview.
“Nobody disputes,” he added, “that children died and that the conditions were sometimes chaotic. But that’s quite different from clandestine burials.”
“Chaotic.” Now there’s an exculpatory word. Also the indirect, agentless “conditions were” is an evasive tactic. It was worse than “chaotic” and it was people who did it. It wasn’t some vague thing that just happened, it was a system.
Murray Sinclair, a former judge who headed the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate the residential schools system, estimates that at least 10,000 students never made it home from the schools, which were established by the government and operated from the 1880s to the 1990s.
During that period the Canadian government forcibly removed at least 150,000 Indigenous children from their communities and sent them to residential schools, most of which were run by the Roman Catholic Church. Indigenous languages and cultural practices were forbidden, sometimes using force.
And when the children died the government refused to pay to return their bodies to the communities where they came from.
That’s what matters.
For Mr. Flanagan and others who share his viewpoint, their disbelief that there are many gravesites is part of a broader argument against the key conclusion of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission: that the residential schools were a system of brutality that led to “cultural genocide.’’
“The narrative that’s been constructed pulls out all the bad stories and retails those and minimizes the benefit of residential schools,” Mr. Flanagan said, adding that converting Indigenous people in nations colonized by Europeans to Christianity and eradicating their cultures was once common worldwide.
Why yes, it was, and that was a bad thing.
But Mom, everyone else is doing it!
It was NORMAL.
How were they supposed to know any better back then, 150 years ago, in 1996?
There’s only one direction these people want to go. They want to be able to say that things weren’t as bad as they’re made out to be, and that activists are exaggerating the bad parts and denying the good parts of European, and then Canadian, policies towards the peoples already living here at the time of First Contact. They want to be able to say that no “reconsideration” is necessary, that the past is past, and that “we should al move on.” They want to gloss over or ignore the facts of history. People and institutions who want to do that have something to hide, some project or goal that “bringing up the past” slows down, interferes with, or prevents from happening altogether.
The First Nations of Canada are still here. They are modern peoples, not figures from the past who need not be listened to or respected. They are trying to retain or revive their cultures, dealing with the ongoing legacy of the multigenerational, pan-governmental attempts to destroy their societies, to turn them into members of the imposed, dominant society, to get them off their lands so that these lands could be “developed” for the profit of others.Native peoples were in the way of “progress”, so they had to be removed. That was the point of most government policy until well into the twentieth century. Their determination and resilience in the face of attempts to eradicate them means they cannot be ignored, however much those wishing to forestall “reconsideration” of the legacy and results of past (and current) policy would like to. Indigenous resistance to energy, forestry, and mining interests is likely the main source of conservative pushback. Sure, the churches want to restore the good name they seem to think they once had, and think they still deserve, (not to mention any legal or financial liability), but my own guess is that if you want to know the real motivation, follow the money. Wealth generated by resource extraction is a bigger ticket item than lawsuits against the Catholic and Anglican churches.
In many cases, their nations are bound to ours by treaty obligations, treaties which have been often been unilaterally changed or ignored to the benefit of the government and those acting with their blessing. In some areas there are no treaties at all, with settlers and their governments essentially stealing the land from under peoples who had not ceded or extinguished their right and titles to it.
How not to destigmatize the concept of “colonialism.” Ultimately though, Holocaust denial envy is not a look you really want to go for.
The mass graves contoversy is an example of the left and right both screwing up, with the left’s screwups stemming from good intentions executed badly and then snowballing into madness, and the right’s screwups stemming from excessive cynicism and ill will towards the common good. Which is the shape of so many of today’s culture war controversies, from trans to BLM to Covid to Gaza.
The people who claim to have discovered mass graves, and the people behind them who push the story, absolutely have to come up with some concrete evidence to back it up already. It’s been several years and the amount of stalling over exhumation is ridiculous. There’s no good reason not to do at least a little digging, somewhere, anywhere, among the many, many sites across the country where locals all of a sudden “discovered” mass graves, all around the same time, based on flimsy and circumstantial evidence. If they don’t want right wing conservatives making accusations that the cascade of sudden discoveries of mass grave sites across the country was rooted in social hysteria rather than facts, they need to start ponying up some facts, and they need to stop with the hysteria.
I hesitate to use the word hysteria because there’s so much genuine and merited anger and anguish over the crimes committed at the schools. But after seeing our nation’s Justice Minister propose criminalizing those who express skepticism about the mass graves instead of, you know, seeking evidence for them, I can’t find a more apt word. When the nation’s top enforcer’s got his concept of justice this warped, what other word is there to use?
The two sides line up along their ideological lines, the left ignoring the lack of evidence for mass graves and painting their critics as cartoonishly ignorant “residential school denialists” out to erase the existence of the schools altogether, and the right ignoring the many very good reasons people have to be angry at the authorities over what was done to indigenous children, and painting their critics as cartoonishly ignorant hysterics whose complaints are mostly hot air.
Problem is, it’s getting harder for me to feel forgiving towards the left’s well-intentioned missteps as they increasingly reach for the tools of authoritarianism to hide their mistakes, instead of reaching for the tools of science and evidence-gathering to address and correct them.