Quote:
Originally Posted by belsarius
Your questions imply conclusions.
If the death rate for residential schools are in line with the death rate of FN communities, what conclusion does that intuitively draw?
If the death rate for all FN communities is in line with Canada, what conclusion comes from that?
By just asking for rates of death, it is searching for a justification that Residential schools weren't as bad (or as deadly) as being advertised. Or that FN communities weren't as bad off as the rest of Canada. Neither of which are good conclusions as there will be a complex set of circumstances around each.
The problem is that we don't need to ask questions like this. We need to listen, we need to believe and look for ways to improve.
Ultimately death rates don't matter to this conversation. I don't care if more kids survived in residential schools than in FN communities. They were ultimately abused, neglected, forbidden from their culture, ripped from their homes and genocide was committed against their people.
Saying 4.5 children per 1000 died in Canada overall and 5.5 did on FN communities changes none of that and does nothing to the conversation but provide a reason to escape or justify the ultimate conclusion that Canada committed atrocities against FN people.
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Depending on how we slice things, there are three dominant narratives here:
1. The kidnapping of children and sending them to schools to be forcibly assimilated.
2. The consequences this had on the mental and physical health of the children (up to and including death).
3. The nature of the treatment of the children and their families after their death.
All three of these topics are worthy of our discussion, and we can discuss them all at length. However, my question addressed #2. It in no way suggested we should not talk about #1 and #3.
Further, the answer to #2 doesn't impact what conclusions we should draw about #1 and #3. I'm certainly not comfortable saying we don't need to ask questions about how deadly the Residential Schools were. That's a pretty important question in my view. And I am asking to what degree Residential schools increased the risk of death. (Incidentally, this is the inverse question that that people ask in the covid vaccine threads: to what degree does an intervention prevent death is just the inverse of asking to what degree an intervention increases death. Just in this case the "placebo" is either the Canadian population at large or FN in their own communities).