Shame: remains of indigenous children in Canada

The reprehensible issue of what many deem “mass murder” of indigenous children in Canada’s Catholic school system has been in global headlines in recent weeks. But this should have been in the headlines decades ago.

The nearly 1,000 bodies of indigenous children in mass graves were recently found by ground-penetrating radar, said the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous First Nations (FSIN) and the Cowessess First Nation.

A reported 150,000 indigenous children were abducted and imprisoned in the Catholic schools, where they were tortured with the intent of erasing their culture and language, as were also sexually abused, had needles driven through their tongues for speaking their own language, were sterilized, among many other horrific practices.

After these findings made the news, people were rightly outraged. Catholic churches in British Columbia and Alberta have since been vandalized and set afire, including churches currently used by indigenous communities as meeting places, acts met with disgust by many indigenous, saying vandalism isn’t justice.

The vandalism continued on Canada Day, with another 10 churches in Calgary targeted.

The premier of Alberta, Jason Kenney, denounced the vandalization of an African Evangelical Church, noting that the congregation is “made up entirely of new Canadians, many of whom came here as refugees fleeing countries where Churches are often vandalized & burned down.”

While some have justified the vandalization of the churches as a push for justice, others questioned whether vandalized or burned mosques or synagogues would also receive the same approval.

After Prime Minister Trudeau spoke of “reconciliation” and how “our relationship with indigenous peoples” has evolved, people rightly called out the government of Canada for empty talk, noting indigenous communities around the country frequently lack clean drinking water. Then, there’s the issue that aside from an official apology, the government hasn’t charged or tried anyone for these crimes.

A report first published in March 2016 by the International Tribunal for the Disappeared of Canada (ITDC) has since apparently been heavily censored and removed from Google search results.

It addressed the “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” carried out by the government and churches, calling it “a rapid in-house response by church and state designed to present their own self-serving narrative of their Indian residential schools crimes,” noting it “was created by the same institutions of church and state that were responsible for the residential school crimes being investigated.”

The synopsis notes that the crimes were “legally authorized, sanctioned and protected by every level of government, church and police in Canada,” and “amounted to deliberate genocide.”

It refers to horrifying facts that the average Canadian likely doesn’t know, including that “Native children began dying in droves the very first year the residential schools opened in 1889, at an average death rate of nearly 50%.” This, it emphasized, continued for the next five decades, “despite constant complaints and reports by doctors who inspected the schools.”

The deaths were caused by “a continual denial of regular food, clothing and proper sanitation to children interned in the schools, amidst a regime of routine and systemic rapes, beatings, tortures and killings: conditions that continued unabated for over a century, from 1889 to 1996.”

Why now?

While I fully stand with the push for justice for the manifold crimes committed against the indigenous peoples in what is now Canada, I do wonder, why is this making headlines now? It’s not like these are new revelations.

Ostensibly the reason these mass graves are in the news now is due to their recent discovery. But, others point out that indigenous have for decades said there were mass graves, but were met with silence.

Indeed, an article first published in May 2008 – and according to the author, rejected by Canadian media – spoke of a 1996 lawsuit launched by residential school survivors on the issue of the death and torture at residential schools. It noted that “residential school children were being buried ‘four or five to a grave’, and that the death rate in these schools stayed constant at fifty percent for over forty years.”

It rightly asked: “Why is the disappearance of tens of thousands of native children in these schools not the subject of a major criminal investigation?”

That was 13 years ago, the lawsuit over two decades ago.

Eva Barlett

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/528360-crimes-indigenous-canada

Indigenous people in Canada grapple with ‘unthinkable loss’

Remains of 215 Indigenous children were found at a former residential school in the province of British Columbia this week.

The Kamloops Indian Residential School, founded in 1890, became the largest school in the residential school system with enrollment peaking in the early 1950s at 500

Indigenous people across Canada are grappling with the discovery of the remains of more than 200 Indigenous children, including some as young as three, at the site of a former residential school in the western province of British Columbia this week.

Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation chief Rosanne Casimir announced on Thursday that the remains of 215 children were found on the grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, saying “an unthinkable loss that was spoken about but never documented” had been confirmed.

 “To our knowledge, these missing children are undocumented deaths,” Casimir said.

“Some were as young as three years old. We sought out a way to confirm that knowing out of deepest respect and love for those lost children and their families, understanding that Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc is the final resting place of these children.”

The discovery of the mass grave has spurred “a collective pain and trauma” for Indigenous communities across Canada, said Danielle Morrison, an Anishinaabe lawyer. “Currently there [are] fires being lit, pipes are being lit, and ceremonies being held to honour all of those lost lives of those precious children,” she told Al Jazeera.

“This news is a stark reminder of the violence inflicted by the residential school system and the wounds carried by communities, families and Survivors into the present,” the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation at the University of Manitoba also said in a statement.

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For more than 100 years, Canadian authorities forcibly separated thousands of Indigenous children from their families and made them attend residencial schools, which aimed to sever Indigenous family and cultural ties and assimilate the children into white Canadian society.

The schools, which were run by churches from the 1870s until 1996, were rife with physical, mental and sexual abuse, neglect, and other forms of violence, and they created a cycle of intergenerational trauma for Indigenous people across Canada.

Founded in 1890 and run by the Catholic Church, the Kamloops Indian Residential School eventually became the largest school in Canada’s residential school system, counting 500 children at its enrollment peak in the early 1950s.

“The residential schools were opened with the sole purpose of removing the Indian from the child,” Morrison said. “It was to assimilate Indigenous people in Canada and it’s essentially, in the words of one of the superintendents at the time, to get rid of the ‘Indian problem’.”

During an online commemoration on Saturday, Karen Joseph, CEO of the Reconciliation Canada charity, said the discovery in Kamloops marked the first time a “whispered knowing was made real” and its effect is being felt across the country, especially by residential school survivors.