“Recently, the remains of 215 Indigenous children were found in a grave near a Residential School in Kamloops BC. Pierre Elliott Trudeau was the Prime Minister of Canada while this school was open, and refused to take action.”
history
The North West Company Statement on the Discovery of the Remains of 215 Indigenous Children at Kamloops Residential School
“North West stands with Indigenous Peoples in Canada who lost their loved ones within the Residential School system and we extend our caring thoughts to those directly impacted by the Kamloops discovery. This discovery is jarring and traumatic for Indigenous Peoples, and for all Canadians it starkly speaks to the physical conditions and racism that were forcibly endured under the Residential School system and the continuing pain created by it.
NDP seeks emergency debate following discovery of children’s remains at Kamloops residential school
In a letter to the Speaker on Monday, Singh said questions need to be asked about the Kamloops residential school and other schools, and immediate concrete measures need to be taken.
“This discovery of these children last week is a sad reminder of Canada’s genocidal actions against Indigenous peoples,” Singh wrote to the Speaker of the House in a letter on Monday.
🚨BREAKING NEWS: Jagmeet Singh breaks down and gets emotional on National TV today
*Thoughts?#FirstNations #ResidentialSchool pic.twitter.com/LHiZ6j3gAe
— 🍁🇨🇦CanAditude🇨🇦🍁 (@CanAditude) May 31, 2021
Your Afternoon Musical Interlude
Today is Cinco de Mayo.
It is also Children’s Day.
Today’s selections are from Chingon and Patty Griffin:
Slowing it down a bit with Elizabeth Mitchell’s, “You Are My Sunshine”:
Lessons of the River War
Churchill’s history of the conquest of the Sudan remains as instructive to us today as it was for its first audience.
“…Churchill was indeed an imperialist, but his critics seldom meet his argument for imperialism. Throughout the modern West he sees young men who belong to “the only true aristocracy the world can now show”—the aristocracy of “brains and enthusiasm.” What will these young men do? In the United States, they go into commerce, building great corporations. In France and Germany, they go into the military. In England, they venture “to the farthest corners of our wide Empire, and infuse into the whole the energy and vigor of progress”—ending slavery in the Sudan, for example, and building irrigation systems, railroads, and other infrastructure that would benefit men and women who might otherwise fall prey to squalor, disease, “war, slavery, and oppression.”
What these 10 graphics say about Black people on the Prairies
Nearly 175,000 people identified as Black on the Prairies during Canada’s 2016 census.
Like all data, this figure may not say much on its own. It is limited to the number of respondents who specifically identified as “Black.” Also, a lot could have changed in the five years since the last census was conducted.
However, when put in context, a closer look at the statistics reveals stories about a rapidly growing Black population with deep roots in the region and branches stretching across the Black diaspora.
Below are 10 graphics that illustrate where Black people on the Prairies live, how long they’ve been here, where they were born, the languages they speak and the religions they practice.
Mind the gap
One of the lessons of European history is that corridors are bloody dangerous. When we heard Vladimir Putin accusing the west of staging a military coup in Belarus to topple Lukashenko, we listened up because European land grabs are usually preceded by fake allegations and staged incidents. Hitler’s invasion of Poland was preceded by the so-called Gleiwitz incident, an attack on a German radio transmitter – allegedly perpetrated by Polish soldiers, but actually carried out by the Nazis themselves.
Woke Canadian City Council to Remove Statue of First Prime Minister
After a vote of seven to four, the city council of Regina, Saskatchewan, approved the relocation of the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald from Victoria Park.
How C.S. Lewis Predicted the Woke Nightmare
A masterful piece of religious prose disguised as satire, C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters is a series of messages from senior devil Screwtape to his protégé Wormwood on how best to corrupt mortals. Originally released during World War II, its tight 175 pages provide charming, timeless wisdom.
U.S. Constitution: Original Intent of the Founding Fathers
As a social contract between the States and the newly formed federal government, the U.S. Constitution grants to the federal government a limited number of powers, reserving the remaining powers to the States (Tenth Amendment). The limiting principles set forth by the U.S. Constitution were designed to protect the States’ sovereignty while giving the federal government enough authority to properly protect and preserve the union of individual states. As a result, the United States of America was not designed to be a nationalistic entity, but rather a federation of sovereign states that have granted the authority to maintain the union to a federal governmental system. To understand that the Founding Fathers looked upon the new country as a federation of states, and not a nationalistic entity, one must only look to the language they used.
The Second Amendment, the Founders, and Original Intent
The Amendments were written to amend the Constitution because the state delegates demanded that it be done. That is why we call them the Bill of Rights. They are rights that the people demanded be written to ensure the Federal government could not abuse them.
Both of these articles are several years old but they do a good job of explaining what the Founders’ intents were.
You Must Pass the Bill Before You Read It
It’s that famed Liberal transparency and vigilance I’ve heard so much about:
Then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau gave his own cabinet scant minutes to hurriedly review the National Energy Program the very day it was introduced in Parliament, say declassified secret records obtained by Blacklock’s. Cabinet members complained they could not “get an adequate grasp of the details” of the landmark tax plan: “Ministers were generally surprised.”
But Pierre wasn’t done with his @$$holery:
Then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau proposed to introduce a permanent federal lottery “in support of the Liberal party” but vowed to keep planning low-key, say declassified records. The secret 1980 plan was stymied by an agreement signed by a previous Conservative cabinet: “There did not seem to be a reason for the federal government to avoid acting in this area as a trade-off.”
Today is #TorontoDay
Today is #TorontoDay. 187 years ago today, Toronto was incorporated as a City! Follow us as we share photos of iconic moments from the last 187 years. Toronto in 1834, looking west. Plan by Jas Timberlake https://t.co/O20pNI1lB7 pic.twitter.com/t0xZDrZzvv
— Toronto Archives (@TorontoArchives) March 6, 2021
Hominid Footprints on Crete Could Change Evolutionary Theory For Good
He was not looking for hominid footprints from the prehistoric past. Paleontologist Gerhard Gierlinski, from Warsaw, Poland, was just trying to get away from it all in the summer of 2002 and enjoy the warm seas and soft sands on the Greek island of Crete with his girlfriend.
A researcher at the Polish Geological Institute, he was always ready to take samples of interesting things he spied on vacations, and he traveled with a hammer, a camera and a GPS for just such occasions.
What he discovered along the Mediterranean shores of the town of Trachilos would rock his world and send some researchers who were convinced that humans evolved solely in Africa, into angry denial, resulting in many of them casting aspersions on his jaw-dropping find.
Gierlinski asked colleagues from Poland, Sweden, Greece, the US and the UK, among them Dr. Per Ahlberg, for their opinions on what he saw as human-like footprints that had somehow been made into a flat rock along the shore.
The 5.6 million-year-old footprints made in Trachilos, Crete 5.6 million years ago. Photo: The Conversation.
The team of experts came to the conclusion that indeed, the impressions had been made by ancient human ancestors 5.6 million years ago, making them by far the oldest footprints ever discovered in Europe.
h/t Marvin
Black history must become part of Ontario’s curriculum to help fight systemic racism in schools, advocates say
Natasha Henry, the head of the Ontario Black History Society, told CTV News Toronto that her organization has been trying to push the province for decades to have Black history part of learning mandated in Ontario.
“It’s an example of systemic anti-Black racism in the country,” Henry said. “There isn’t a level of recognition that’s consistent as it relates to the 400-year presence of Black people here in Canada.”
But Poppy Day bad!