Canadian residential school deaths: a calm look at the facts

Ed. here. At the risk of sounding like a Canadian, I'm going to start with a disclaimer (and apology, of sorts). Canadians have been agonizing for decades now about what to call the indigenous people who have inhabited the Great White North for 1000s of years. Names like "Indians" and "Eskimos" are no longer politically correct. 

In fact, the football team formerly known as the Edmonton Eskimos announced just a few days ao that it will now be called the "Elks". The people known as Eskimos would prefer to be called Inuit, so that's easy. But the people we called "Indians", wishing to avoid the stigma of being taken for south Asians [??? Ed.], can't decide if they want to be called "First Nations" or "Dene" or "Aboriginal" or "Indigenous" or just "the people". So in this article, I'm going to stick with "Indians" because this is about what were called "Indian residential schools". 

Last week, the remains of 215 children were uncovered in unmarked burial sites on the site of the Kamloops (BC) Indian Residential School. The school was established in 1890 and from 1892 run by a Roman Catholic order of religious, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. It was once the largest residential school in Canada, with its enrolment peaking at 500 in the 1950s. 

It was in operation until 1969, when it was taken over by the federal government to be used as a day school residence. It closed in 1978. The school building still stands today, and is located on the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation. 

It should be noted that the first such residential school had opened almost 60 years earlier, in Brantford ON. A handful of schools run by mostly Protestant missionary groups had been established even before that. In 1847, Egerton Ryerson, superintendent of schools in Upper Canada (today's Ontario), wrote a report recommending the establishment of residential schools for Aboriginal students in the province. Methodist missionaries established a number of such schools in southern Ontario in the 1850s. Other schools were opened in British Columbia and the Northwest Territories in the 1860s.

Following Confederation, the Canadian government became more involved in residential schools, but since education was left to the provinces under the Constitution, the federal government left the operation of such schools to various churches. About 70% of them were run by Roman Catholic orders, with the remainder being looked after by Protestants. 

According to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC), a body set up in 2015 to investigate these schools, they were boarding schools for Indigenous children, that didn’t exist just to teach them school subjects, but "primarily to break their link to their culture and identity."

Sir John A. Macdonald, the anti-French, anti-Catholic, racist drunk who became Canada's first prime minister, had this to say. "When the school is on the reserve, the child lives with its parents, who are savages; he is surrounded by savages, and though he may learn to read and write his habits, and training and mode of thought are Indian. He is simply a savage who can read and write. 

"It has been strongly pressed on myself, as the head of the Department, that Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence, and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men."

In other words, the aim of Sir John Eh was to turn Indian kids into "apples" -- red on the outside and white on the inside.  

According to TRC reports, at least 150,000 Indian, Inuit and Métis children passed through the residential school system. They were separated from their families, forbidden from speaking their own language or engaging in their cultural practices. In addition to attending class, students at many schools had to perform chores to maintain the school and even sometimes do farm work to feed the school.

Many were mistreated and abused, physically and sexually. Students were often malnourished or underfed, and lived in poor housing conditions that threatened their safety. Infectious diseases like tuberculosis and influenza often ran rampant among the students, leading to many deaths. 

The TRC identified 3,200 deaths as part of its investigation. They note that indigenous children in residential schools died at far higher rates than other Canadian children, even for the time. Many children died from infectious diseases (notably tuberculosis), fires in school buildings, suicide, drowning, and other accidents.

All too often, the schools and/or government failed to record students' names, gender, or even the cause of death. The deaths themselves were often unrecorded. Some students got sick and were sent home, where they later died. Métis students whose attendance at school wasn't funded by the federal government but who may have died there were not counted.

In its report, the TRC lamented that "due to the limitations in the records, it is probable that there are many student deaths that have not been recorded in the register because the record of the death has not yet been located. Most of these children died far from home, and often without their families being adequately informed of the circumstances of death or the place of burial."

Children who died at school were likely buried at the school, or in nearby municipal or church cemeteries. Some of these locations are known and the cemeteries still maintained, but some are not. As the TRC wrote, "For the most part, the cemeteries that the Commission documented are abandoned, disused, and vulnerable to accidental disturbance."

Such as the case at the Kamloops Indian Residential School. People had known and spoken for years about the existence of a graveyard, but until this year no-one had looked for it. Disturbing though it is, the discovery of the site is disturbing, but not unique. Nor is it evidence of an unspeakable atrocity. It is not one mass grave, but a hiterto undiscovered burial site. That's all.

For that reason, it is unhelpful for the usual gang of virtue-signalling politicians, SJWs and members of the human rights industry to use words like "genocide", and demand apologies -- not to mention "reparations" -- from the Roman Catholic Church and its supposed pope, as if they bear sole responsibility for acts and omissions of decades ago.

The Most Rev. Thomas Collins, Cardinal Archbishop of Toronto, expressed his sorrow in a statement released on June 3rd. Yesterday he told the CBC's Rosie Barton [naturally. Ed.] that the archived records of the OMI had always been available, so it was "unhelpful" for the Prime Minister of Canuckistan (who supports abortion but claims to be a Catholic) to threaten to take the Church to court to obtain production of those documents. 

In response, Carolyn Bennett, who carries Mr Socks's bags on "Crown-Indigenous Relations", told Cacklin' Rosie that it was "unhelpful for Cardinal Collins to call Mr Trudeau's statement 'unhelpful'." Expect more such name-calling, finger-pointing, virtue-signalling and scape-goating in the weeks to come. It's the Canadian way.

Footnote: Yesterday, a mob of iconoclasts ["mostly preaceful protesters", shurely! Ed.] succeeded in pulling down the statue of Egerton Ryerson which stood in front of the Toronto university named after him. It is rumoured that there may have been one or two Indians in the mob. 

A few days earlier, the city council of Charlottetown PEI caved to the pressure and removed the statue pictured in "What's wrong with this picture?", WWW 11/5/21. When it comes to promoting "truth and reconciliation", such actions seem to me "unhelpful"!