[Fuzz]

Originally Posted by BoLevi

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).

But despite occasional efforts at reform, even as late as the 1940s the death rates within residential schools were up to five times higher than among Canadian children as a whole.

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada...ential-schools


I haven't found anything comparing the death rate directly in general, but if, after efforts fo reform, it was 5 times higher, you can expect it was worse than that.

Odds of a student dying over the life of the program: 1 in 25 (if 6,000)

• Odds of dying for Canadians serving in the Second World War: 1 in 26
• According to Saturday Night magazine, reporting on residential schools, Nov. 23, 1907: "Indian boys and girls are dying like flies.... Even war seldom shows as large a percentage of fatalities as does the education system we have imposed on our Indian wards."

Odds of a residential school student dying in the early years of the program: 1 in 2

• Duncan Campbell Scott, then deputy superintendent-general of Indian Affairs, wrote in 1913: "It is quite within the mark to say that fifty per cent of the children who passed through these schools did not live to benefit from the education, which they had received therein."
• During the program's first half-century, tuberculosis and then influenza were the primary killers. The neglect, abuse, lack of food, isolation from family and badly constructed buildings assisted disease in killing residential school "inmates," as Scott termed them. A lawyer who conducted a review in 1907 told the government, "Doing nothing to obviate the preventable causes of death, brings the Department within unpleasant nearness to the charge of manslaughter."

https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/t...bers-1.3096185


It really doesn't matter how you look at the numbers, they are all really bad.