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.
It’s good of the NYT to finally accept that there are no actual mass, unmarked graves, though it would be better if they had admitted their culpability for a complete lack of inventigative journalism at the time, and this …
… is rather grudging, trying to give the impression only the “right wing” would be critical, given that we’re over two years after sensible people concluded that the whole Canadian “unmarked mass graves” thing was a moral panic.
(Which is not to say that kids didn’t die, of tuberculosis and other causes, as was pretty common in those days, but it seems that the deaths were properly reported and the kids decently buried.)
The NYT is also playing diversion tactics, trying to conflate the issue of unmarked mass graves with the whole concept of residential schools, and this again seems intended to divert attention from their credulity and gullibility over the “mass graves”.
@Artymorty:
Does this right actually exist in Canada? We’ve all watched Rabbit Proof Fence and we all know that 1920s attitudes to indigenous cultures are not the same as 2020s attitudes to indigenous cultures.
Yes, Coel, that right exists in Canada, and one of them was quoted at length in the NYT piece. I think you’re an example of the worst kind of right wing extremist: to say that you exhibit excessive cynicism and ill will towards the common good is a vast understatement.
But the article doesn’t say that. It says
So, as yet exhumations have not been carried out. There is proof of grave-like structures in the ground, but no skeletons. The doubters are insisting on skeletons and saying ‘nothing to see here’ in response to the apparent grave sites. Given what is known about these Catholic run “schools” in both Ireland and Australia, colour me more than a little wary of protestations of absolute innocence.
@Rob
I agree entirely re: protestations of absolute innocence. And I do as well think that the details matter, especially as this issue has dragged on. The matter of the details went nuclear when figures within the Liberal government floated the idea that questioning the details was equivalent to Holocaust denialism, and they then proposed making it a criminal offence to deviate from the government’s position on *any* aspects of the party line, even the most specific points, framing any and all dissent as wholesale “residential school denialism.”
My heart is with the left on this becuase the scandal is truly horrible and I want to put my weight behind justice in any way I can, bleeding-heart liberal that I can’t help but be. But my mind is sending up emergency flares that this is just the kind of scenario that entraps well-intentioned people into turning a blind eye when injustices are carried out against individuals “in the name of the bigger picture of progress,” ignoring the possibility that overcorrection might be at play, that kind of thing. This is just the kind of dangerous trap the left tends to fall into. It’s cancel culture catnip.
Like trans, quite frankly. If anything, trans activism is a massive overcorrection against homophobia that turned into catnip for lefties.
And although the jury’s still out on whether mass graves exist in Canada (and there’s still a very high likelihood that they do, and also it doesn’t much matter one way or the other in terms of the already awfulness of what we know the Church and the federal government did to indigenous people here), the right to question the specifics is completely valid and necessary and you can even make a very strong point that getting the details right is a better way to do justice to the victims.
That typo is about a 9 on the old irony meter.
Ugh, I meant “turning a blind eye”, not “turning the other cheek.” Sorry!
(I’m working on my writing, trying to be more precise and less sloppy in these here comments at B&W. Because I respect this place tremendously, and I want to demonstrate my respect with better grammar, rather than sloppy toss-off comments.)
So the kids would have died anyway, and it was no big deal, and everybody else died too, and they were treated very very nicely once they were dead. The ripping them away from their homes and families was done for their own good, and their immune systems weren’t weakened at all by the trauma or the cruelty of the schools themselves, and everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.
Typo fixed, Arty. I won’t delete this comment as I usually would after a fix, because hey this place respects you right back.
To be clear: yes, beyond any reasonable doubt, the government of Canada and preceding colonial powers are responsible for a lot of horrid actions against indigenous people.
That acknowledged: there is a difference between “unmarked graves” and “mass graves”. The evidence thus far (which yes, currently is based on anecdotes and ground-penetrating radar anomalies rather than exhumations, and thus while not conclusive nevertheless hardly unconvincing either) is indicative of children being buried in unmarked graves – which may or may not have been originally marked – rather than mass graves that would involve multiple bodies haphazardly thrown into pits and covered.
Not much better, mind you; the circumstances of their deaths still unnecessarily cruel, but details do matter. No need to vilify the perpetrators more than their own actions actually did, lest they be deemed entirely inhuman and thus performing feats that surely no-one would ever do again.
Yes, the 1929s all the way up to 1995 were so long ago… everything is lost in the past and so has no bearing on the present. As we know from L.P. Hartley, “”The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” To which we might add Christopher Marlowe’s “but that was in another country and, besides, the wench is dead.” And a lot of other people, including murdered children, are dead, too. “What has our timeless New Jerusalem to do with Rome?” cry our new Tertullians. So all attempts to come to terms with the past in its fullness and acknowledge its relevance to the present are meaningless. The past doesn’t matter — unless, of course, it can be whitewashed and presented as a splendid success story that has consistently brought good to all and sundry (though it might be better to forget about the sundry).
I recommend the Irish writer Claire Keegan’s brief & harrowing novel ’Small Things Like These’, which concerns the Irish ‘laundries’.
@Rob:
No, there is no “proof of grave-like structures” unless you’re using “grave-like” so loosely as to be meaningless. All there is are results from ground-penetrating radar. This says only that the density of soil a couple of feet down is slightly different in one place than in others. That can have natural causes (rocks; past location of a now-dead tree; rabbit burrows, etc) or man-made causes (post holes, drainage ditches, anything that disturbs the ground, which could — yes — include burials).
Excavations (your word “exhumations” rather begs the question) have indeed been carried out at some of the sites. Nothing has been found.
We’re now over 3 years since the media reporting of “unmarked mass graves” sent shock-waves around the world, and so far, adding up from all the Residential School sites across all of Canada, we have a grand total of zero actual graves of improperly buried children.
It’s fairer to say that the “doubters” are just asking for proper evidence, anything beyond some GPR anomalies which could be all sorts of things. GPR is widely used, e.g. in archeology, but really only tells you where to start digging.
The fact is that the media, lead by the NYT, very much jumped the gun on this and went into a complete moral panic, completely omitting the basic due-diligence that “paper of record” journalists should do, and they still have not properly admitted it. (See, for example, this comparison of two NYT articles by the same author.)
@Ophelia:
I’m baffled as to why your comment #12 is placed below a quote from me, since it bears no relation to it.
@The Thread:
There’s a good commentary on this by Jonathan Kay here.
So, to sum up:
1. Over the last few decades, Catholic “special educational” institutions the world over have been exposed at best (at *best*) as safehouses and private gardens for pedophiles, and at worst as infanticide factories where the mothers of neglected-to-death babies were also enslaved for years, most famously in Ireland but really in every country where the Catholic Church has any presence at all. (Germany’s own pedophile scandal hit in those halcyon days of 2021 and caused a large number of lapsed Catholics to actually strike their names from the Church’s rolls, which in this country means the government finally stopped giving the Church taxes on those peoples’ behalf.)
2. In the wake of George Flloyd, and on the back of decades of First Nations activism and many scandals within Canada itself (such as multiple reservations being so horribly mismanaged they didn’t, and probably still don’t, have reliable access to potable water), some activists and academics revived Canada’s longstanding conversation over its own Christian-run “residential schools”, the last of which closed down less than thirty years ago. It’s notable that the State allowed the Catholic Church to run more than half of these, in a country that also had policies discriminating against Catholics into the 1960s that effectively barred them from becoming public servants or working in large private companies (except within the province of Quebec, of course, where there weren’t enough Protestants to staff the required positions).
3. These activists and academics gathered some anecdotes and made inferences based on the Catholic Church’s horrible track record in other countries, and began speculating quite…forcefully…on the probable existence of mass graves in Canadian residential schools on a scope and scale of the Irish “mother-and-baby homes” aka infanticide factories. As part of their speculative research, they organised ground-penetrating radar of residential school grounds which indeed showed that those grounds were not uniform.
4. The Canadian government, at the same time it was classifying protesters against COVID restrictions as domestic terrorists, took the foregoing speculations and hypotheses and dubious evidence as dispositive, and publicly toyed with the idea of criminalising any public or private statements against the existence of mass graves in residential schools in an analogy to Holocaust denial, which itself was only made illegal (at least in the context of “promoting antisemitism”) in Canada in 2022 on the same wave of woke religious fanaticism.
5. Wherever these putative “mass graves” have been actually excavated, no evidence for any human remains has been identified. Not one single time. And as this process has gone on, the claims have been walked back from “mass graves” to “unmarked graves”, some of which may well exist, possibly because any original markings had at some point been removed or worn away without having been replaced.
I am no friend at all of the Church (Catholic, Protestant, or otherwise), and I am certainly not a “conservative Catholic”, but I admit to raising a bit of a skeptical eyebrow when the government demands, on pain of imprisonment, that I have to affirm belief in facts which are not in evidence simply because they affirm a general narrative that is currently in-vogue with a bunch of people drunk on their own sense of righteousness.
Notwithstanding the dubious justness of their own cause, they don’t seem to understand that one day the winds will shift again, and the positions they insist are true today will one day be vilified as calumny. It would be wise if, at such a time, those villains did not have a precedent of having been thrown in prison for saying things the governing regime insisted (based on very little evidence) were false. It seems to me plainly obvious that dismantling our hard-won norms of free speech, giving all-too-human governments the power to arbitrate what is true, is simply a terrible idea destined to backfire and redound to the detriment of everyone, very much including its proponents.
But perhaps that makes me a “right-wing extremist”, after all.
@Der Durchwanderer:
Good summary.
“Their hearts were in the right place, but …” and similar apologiae grow tiresome. They too often are a way to avoid recognizing problems in one’s ideological assumptions, whether they be Right or Left. The willingness, no, eagerness to see the other side’s actions as the result of bad intentions and one’s own side’s actions as well-intentioned is classic psychological splitting.
If they were overzealous, then their hearts were not in the right place. If they tried to achieve their goals by the destruction of free speech, then their hearts were not in the right place. If they tried to punish the son for the sins of the father, then their hearts were not in the right place. If they ignored their evidentiary obligations, then their hearts were not in the right place. If they needed to remove Constitutional protections from discrimination in order to enact their policies, then their hearts were not in the right place. If they thought two wrongs would make a right, then their hearts were not in the right place.
Der Durchwanderer:
“in a country that also had policies discriminating against Catholics into the 1960s that effectively barred them from becoming public servants or working in large private companies”
That’s new to me, though it doesn’t sound wildly unlikely.
Please provide a link.
Nullius, thank you for putting more succinctly and eloquently what I could not.
Jim, there is no single link that I can scrounge that gives a comprehensive overview of Canadian anti-Catholicism before the 1960’s, and I am not the person to bring such an overview together. The best I can do (unsatisfying though it will be) is this old Quora thread with similarly unsourced claims, along with a reference to the Orange Order which was (and indeed remains) an influential gentleman’s club whose singular organising principle is how not-Catholic its members are. The Canadian branch of this order counts multiple Prime Ministers, nearly every Mayor of Toronto, and other highly-influential political posts across Canada.
Major Canadian employers, along with the Canadian government, screened for religion on employment applications into the 1950’s (and sometimes beyond). Catholics were severely under-represented among the highest echelons of either (again, outside of Quebec) until at least the 1970’s; my wording of “effectively barred” is likely an exaggeration, especially toward the Civil Rights movement and the Quiet Revolution, but despite this intemperance it remains the case that Canada understood itself for a long time as a thoroughly Protestant country and regarded Catholics, and in particular French Canadian Catholics, with a deep suspicion.
But then again religion isn’t like race or sex or nationality or immigration status. Catholicism has beliefs, and some of those beliefs are disastrous, especially for women. Catholic hospitals let women die rather than terminating an already doomed pregnancy.
Indeed, religion is not like those other things (though those other things aren’t all quite, or even very much, like each other either). But again I come to the point that the tools we develop will one day be used by people we deem unwise, or even evil.
It was not out of progressive identitarian hierarchy-inversion, nor even out of feminist restitution, that Canada and the United States had “Irish/French/Catholic need not apply” as matters of course for more than a hundred years (not to speak of members of other religions or no religion at all). It took many decades of hard work to wrest the levers of power from WASP men and open them to the rest of us. Opening the toolbox of religion-based descrimination would not be wise, in my estimation. (That isn’t to say we should overinterpret “religious freedom” to mean someone can claim a religious exemption to the course of their normal duties — if their religion tells them they cannot dispense contraceptives, for example, they are free to pursue a career as a pharmacist, but they should not be allowed to refuse to dispense contraceptives. They have to choose between the job and how deeply their convictions lay.)
But despite this institutional prejudice, Canada allowed the Catholic Church to run many educational institutions, including more than half of the so-called “residential schools”, which shows the depths of contempt the State held for the indigenous populations it pretended (and still pretends) were not under its authority. That is my point; it makes the “residential school” story *worse* that an anti-Catholic State let its Catholics have a more-or-less free hand in that way.
Der Durchwanderer:
Your mention of the Orange Order brings up a bunch of stuff I was vaguely aware of that makes your claim now very plausible to me. Thanks.
DD @ 24 – No, I know – hostility to Catholics (and exclusion of them etc) was more akin to racism than to a liberal secular outlook. In the US at least it was very much about class and immigration. But, but but but, it’s also different, because Catholicism does have content, aka instructions for how to be good, which race does not.
And, again in the US, the Catholic church is taking over hospitals every chance it gets, and then banning abortions in them even to save the woman’s life. It’s their official policy and they’re carrying it out. They did it to a major hospital here (Virginia Mason) a few years ago.
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