“Residential School Mass Grave Mania”

Canada marks 4th annual National Day for Truth and Reconciliation

Canada marks the fourth annual National Day for Truth and Reconciliation today.

The day is a time to remember Indigenous children who died at residential schools, the survivors, their families and communities. Also known as Orange Shirt Day, it takes place Sept. 30 each year and is a federal statutory holiday.

More than 150,000 First Nations, Métis and Inuit children were forced to attend church-run, government-funded residential schools between the 1870s and 1997. The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation estimated that more than 4,100 children died while attending the schools.

The fake graves cottage industry just keeps on going … Stanley C. Hunt says it’s hard to describe how he felt in May 2021 when he heard around 200 potential burial sites had been found at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.

It’s easy to downplay the residential school system. Here’s one example: It wasn’t as bad as the Holocaust, which saw millions of people exterminated, or the Holodomor, which saw millions more intentionally starved to death. That doesn’t mean it didn’t harm people, but it wasn’t as bad as the full-on genocides that had happened in the same time period. There, I just did it.

For now, a 911 call reporting this blasphemous paragraph won’t go far. But that could change.

“Be politically correct or we’ll call you racist” doesn’t cut as deep as it used to, but it’s an approach line that the BC First Nations Justice Council is willing to bludgeon over the heads of lawyers who favour truth.

As an archeologist, it’s impossible to ignore evidence of harm at Indian Residential Schools

I am an archeologist. It’s a field that I was initially drawn to because it felt comfortably distant from the things that got people upset. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

In recent years, we archeologists have found ourselves drawn into deeply acrimonious debates about Canada’s history with Indigenous Peoples. It makes sense. Our profession puts us into a physical encounter with the past. We collect evidence.

Recent articles in some corners of the media landscape have made much of the fact that the number of suspected graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia has been revised downward. Indeed, some columnists have gone so far as to suggest this proves the Indian Residential School system was not genocidal and that Canada has been libeled.

There are indications of unmarked graves at a former residential school site in Opaskwayak Cree Nation near The Pas.

Community leaders announced the findings from a team that specializes in searching for graves and human remains detection dogs at the Former Mckay Indian Residential School grounds Friday.

Band says cadaver dogs found something.
CBC jumps to conclusion that it’s graves.
CBC doesn’t report they’re of children murdered by their teachers but the band takes that additional leap:
“Children want to be found.”
Why?
Because they were murdered.
Duh. https://t.co/UxOWeg76qa

— Jim McMurtry (@JimMcMurtry01) August 31, 2024

h/t XC

A Must-Not-See Film About a Terribly Difficult Subject

When it comes to stories that hold the potential to slide from sensitive to sensational, documentarians can take several approaches. There’s the talking-head driven journalistic approach, in which the story and its analysis are laid out, beat by beat. There’s also the more lurid approach that films about cults and crime can employ, with re-enactments and ominous musical cues.

But a third way — and the one that Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat take in “Sugarcane” (in theaters), to their great credit — is to invite the audience to dwell alongside those affected by the story, letting their experiences and emotions guide the film. This one tells a horrifying story: In 2021 and 2022 in a series of cascading discoveries, unmarked graves were found on the grounds of a number of Indigenous Canadian residential schools. On investigation, they revealed horrifying mistreatment of Indigenous communities, where parents were virtually forced to send their children to the schools as part of the government’s quest to “solve the Indian problem.”

I wonder how much this cost tax payers.

Last week, Joseph Quesnel wrote a column in the Western Standard asking folks to stop referring to the alleged burial of children at the Kamloops Residential School site as a hoax.

I have nothing but respect for Joseph. He has been an excellent voice on indigenous policies in Canada and I don’t doubt he will continue to be so. In this case though, I can’t disagree more strongly with him. Perpetuating a hoax is far more damaging to indigenous Canadians than appearing insensitive in calling it out is.

Increasingly, when it comes to Canadian indigenous grievances and adversities, truth-telling is being redefined as denialism, a term chosen because of its genocide denial allusions.

This is my take on Joseph Quesnel’s July 26th Western Standard opinion piece titled, “Those on the right shouldn’t call residential school grave issue a ‘hoax.’” It is an essay driven by hurt indigenous feelings ultimately rooted in myths and other fanciful stories transmitted by “knowledge keepers,” rather than by hard evidence and rational contemplation grounded in Western science.