Ongoing Residential Schools Tragedy Discussion

[Duruss]

Originally Posted by PepsiFree

Imagine if you, as a child, went through what they went through.

Yup, its a comment about empathy.

I am finding this upsetting because I am connected to those kids and I am not indigenous. I've realized that in the years of the great scoop that they must have grabbed kids on the Spectrum, and that would lead to these kids being hard to control and that there is just no way some of those graves don't contain them. Autism crosses all boundaries and that means some of my kin are there too and that ties my empathy to all of the kids.


I also see why the governments took so long to investigate, no more rumors but hard tangible evidence changes everything.

[shermanator]

https://twitter.com/user/status/1408256443200028677

[GirlySports]

What was the thinking at the time? I'm trying to wrap my head around it. We've conquered this land but let's not completely annihilate them. Let them have their own territory and their own land but take their kids away and put them into essentially re-education camps and they will be 'Canadian' for future generations to come? And if they misbehave we'll just punish them to death then secretly bury them? Was it just one thing led to another, one bad idea led to another, one cover up led to another?

[Cecil Terwilliger]

Originally Posted by PepsiFree

Imagine if you, as a child, went through what they went through.

I know, I was just pointing out the awkward wording of the tweet encouraging me to imagine myself dead in an unmarked grave.

[stone hands]

Originally Posted by GirlySports

What was the thinking at the time? I'm trying to wrap my head around it. We've conquered this land but let's not completely annihilate them. Let them have their own territory and their own land but take their kids away and put them into essentially re-education camps and they will be 'Canadian' for future generations to come? And if they misbehave we'll just punish them to death then secretly bury them? Was it just one thing led to another, one bad idea led to another, one cover up led to another?

Prehistoric colonial thinking of civilizing the savages, that's pretty much it

Cant have a bunch of people who are content to just live off the land and have a simple life devoid of the rat race of being industrious and "productive"

[Weitz]

Originally Posted by stone hands

Prehistoric colonial thinking of civilizing the savages, that's pretty much it

Cant have a bunch of people who are content to just live off the land and have a simple life devoid of the rat race of being industrious and "productive"

Wouldn't it be more so that if you don't assimilate a group of people you have to be worried about rebellion or something like that?

[GirlySports]

Originally Posted by stone hands

Prehistoric colonial thinking of civilizing the savages, that's pretty much it

Cant have a bunch of people who are content to just live off the land and have a simple life devoid of the rat race of being industrious and "productive"

It's crazy. I guess this was seen as 'compassionate compromise' at the time.
"Hey, it's better than genocide". Residentials schools all the way from Canada to South America.

[stone hands]

Originally Posted by Weitz

Wouldn't it be more so that if you don't assimilate a group of people you have to be worried about rebellion or something like that?

i dont think so, if you read the words and intentions behind residential schools for example, it looks like theyre doing it in what their opinion is the best interest of the savages who dont know any better


its easy to look back and be like: yeah, that stuff they did was cruel and evil (and indeed it was), but like... if they were really in that buisness they would have just killed them all. missionaries go to save people with the best of intentions, however misguided they are

[PepsiFree]

I was reminded of this lady this morning, a clear indication of how far Canada has to go. After years of being a complete monster she was just forced out this year.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/bey...ment-1.5886435

I hope these findings lead to change and that people like this never find a position in power in Canada ever again. I'm sure there are more like her, maybe less outspoken people like her in government. Canada's horrific treatment of indigenous people did not end when residential schools ended, it's still going.

[undercoverbrother]

Originally Posted by PepsiFree

I was reminded of this lady this morning, a clear indication of how far Canada has to go. After years of being a complete monster she was just forced out this year.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/bey...ment-1.5886435

I hope these findings lead to change and that people like this never find a position in power in Canada ever again. I'm sure there are more like her, maybe less outspoken people like her in government. Canada's horrific treatment of indigenous people did not end when residential schools ended, it's still going.

Good, but we can agree the current set up/appointment/running of the Senate in Canada isn't optimal.

[FlamesAddiction]

Originally Posted by GirlySports

What was the thinking at the time? I'm trying to wrap my head around it. We've conquered this land but let's not completely annihilate them. Let them have their own territory and their own land but take their kids away and put them into essentially re-education camps and they will be 'Canadian' for future generations to come? And if they misbehave we'll just punish them to death then secretly bury them? Was it just one thing led to another, one bad idea led to another, one cover up led to another?

It was never conquered and much of it wasn't ceded. Even land that was ceded probably wouldn't stand up to modern day sensibilities and legality.

I think your second part is pretty accurate though. Canada started basically as an economic venture, at least English Canada west of Lake Huron. The idea was to get in there and do whatever stop gap moves they could to establish order long enough to collect recourses to enrich the elites. As time went on and outposts became permanent, there was a need to bring in additional settlers to become labourers and farmers to relieve supply chain issues, and to hold off American expansion. Eventually the population grew to the point it required homegrown political mechanisms and "Canada" was born. It's pretty much an accidental country.

A lot of this is still going on an why Canada is still deep down inside, a country of settlers ruled by elites. That is not to say that there isn't economic opportunity for others, but the mechanisms that created Canada are still ingrained. Canada's political landscape is still dominated by British and French descendants and it's still a settler/resource-based mentality.

There was very little forethought put into how those stop-gap decisions would affect a future nation and indigenous peoples before confederation. I would say until the 1920s at the earliest, Canadians didn't think too much about a future not tied to the British/French homelands.

[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by GirlySports

What was the thinking at the time? I'm trying to wrap my head around it. We've conquered this land but let's not completely annihilate them. Let them have their own territory and their own land but take their kids away and put them into essentially re-education camps and they will be 'Canadian' for future generations to come? And if they misbehave we'll just punish them to death then secretly bury them? Was it just one thing led to another, one bad idea led to another, one cover up led to another?

I’ll steelman this.

Before the 1930s, there was no public welfare state in Canada (or anywhere else). People who couldn’t work had no money. People who had no money could not house, clothe, and feed themselves. They had to rely on the charity of religious organizations (the only charities that existed at the time) or they would literally starve. Or more accurately, be weakened by malnutrition to the point where they would readily succumb to the diseases like TB, measles, or cholera that were rampant. Infant and maternal mortality rates were 30 or 40 times higher than today. In short, it was often fatal to be poor or without work.

Most Canadians worked in agriculture or resources. They farmed, logged, worked in mines. The rest did work that required numeracy and literacy - store clerks, bank tellers, teachers, etc.

Native Canadians for the most part lacked those skills. Efforts were made to teach them farming, but it didn’t take. The vast majority were innumerate and illiterate. Many did not speak english or french. They, and their children, could not participate in the regular job market.

So why couldn’t they just be left to live traditional lifestyles? Because those traditional lifestyles were no longer viable. A substinence hunter-gatherer lifestyle can support only very small numbers of people in a climate as hostile as Canada. And most of the big game was gone, hunted to near-extinction like the buffalo. There was fishing, and still a market for trapping (though not what there once was), but not enough to support indigenous populations that were growing due to modern medicine - which while still dire by our standards, enabled populations to grow larger than pre-columbian population levels that were effectively capped by horrific infant-mortality rates and periodic famines.

So keeping the old ways was not an option, even if cultural bigotry wasn’t in play (which it certainly was). The status quo at the time was dire, with endemic poverty in indigenous communities. That left assimilation as the best hope for future generations to improve their conditions in life. The thinking was that since their parents did not have modern work skills, and were themselves illiterate and often did not speak english or french, they could not raise their children to function in the modern world. For that, they would need to be immersed and raised in modern institutions where they could learn to read and write and make themselves employable.

Public government-run education was not widespread before the 30s, not in rural Canada anyway. Townsfolk in rural areas would often raise their own private money to build school houses and hire teachers. The state did not have anything close to the reach and resources it has today.

So the job of educating native children was outsourced to an institution that did have that reach - the Catholic Church. The Church had been running schools for centuries before the first government-schools were opened, and still ran most schools in Quebec right into the 50s. It happened to also be an institution with literally medieval notions of discipline, pedagogy, and suffering. And, we know now, rife with sadists and abusers.

Anyway, that’s a good faith attempt to present the thinking at the time. It’s tempting to imagine that the world’s evils are carried out only through deliberate malice (which undoubtedly played a part in the residential school system). But most of the evil done in the world has been carried out by people who believed they were doing good.

[FlamesAddiction]

Originally Posted by stone hands

i dont think so, if you read the words and intentions behind residential schools for example, it looks like theyre doing it in what their opinion is the best interest of the savages who dont know any better


its easy to look back and be like: yeah, that stuff they did was cruel and evil (and indeed it was), but like... if they were really in that buisness they would have just killed them all. missionaries go to save people with the best of intentions, however misguided they are

I think it's a little bit of both to be honest.

There was a secular component that was concerned about control and order. Canadian and British politicians back then used to debate "The Indian Problem" which was about how to subjugate a group of people that were resistant to it. Conquering wasn't economically viable, so subversion was strategy they went with. That's where religion largely comes in.

I don't think the colonial nations ever could have physically conquered the people. Russia tried that in Siberia during their colonial expansion eastward to North America, and it ended badly almost every time. They eventually found that cultural subversion through enticing indigenous peoples to accept the Russian language and Orthodox religion was the more profitable route.

[GGG]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

I’ll steelman this.

Before the 1930s, there was no public welfare state in Canada (or anywhere else). People who couldn’t work had no money. People who had no money could not house, clothe, and feed themselves. They had to rely on the charity of religious organizations (the only charities that existed at the time) or they would literally starve. Or more accurately, be weakened by malnutrition to the point where they would readily succumb to the diseases like TB, measles, or cholera that were rampant. Infant and maternal mortality rates were 30 or 40 times higher than today. In short, it was often fatal to be poor or without work.

Most Canadians worked in agriculture or resources. They farmed, logged, worked in mines. The rest did work that required numeracy and literacy - store clerks, bank tellers, teachers, etc.

Native Canadians for the most part lacked those skills. Efforts were made to teach them farming, but it didn’t take. The vast majority were innumerate and illiterate. Many did not speak english or french. They, and their children, could not participate in the regular job market.

So why couldn’t they just be left to live traditional lifestyles? Because those traditional lifestyles were no longer viable. A substinence hunter-gatherer lifestyle can support only very small numbers of people in a climate as hostile as Canada. And most of the big game was gone, hunted to near-extinction like the buffalo. There was fishing, and still a market for trapping (though not what there once was), but not enough to support indigenous populations that were growing due to modern medicine - which while still dire by our standards, enabled populations to grow larger than pre-columbian population levels that were effectively capped by horrific infant-mortality rates and periodic famines.

So keeping the old ways was not an option, even if cultural bigotry wasn’t in play (which it certainly was). The status quo at the time was dire, with endemic poverty in indigenous communities. That left assimilation as the best hope for future generations to improve their conditions in life. The thinking was that since their parents did not have modern work skills, and were themselves illiterate and often did not speak english or french, they could not raise their children to function in the modern world. For that, they would need to be immersed and raised in modern institutions where they could learn to read and write and make themselves employable.

Public government-run education was not widespread before the 30s, not in rural Canada anyway. Townsfolk in rural areas would often raise their own private money to build school houses and hire teachers. The state did not have anything close to the reach and resources it has today.

So the job of educating native children was outsourced to an institution that did have that reach - the Catholic Church. The Church had been running schools for centuries before the first government-schools were opened, and still ran most schools in Quebec right into the 50s. It happened to also be an institution with literally medieval notions of discipline, pedagogy, and suffering. And, we know now, rife with sadists and abusers.

Anyway, that’s a good faith attempt to present the thinking at the time. It’s tempting to imagine that the world’s evils are carried out only through deliberate malice (which undoubtedly played a part in the residential school system). But most of the evil done in the world has been carried out by people who believed they were doing good.

“Efforts were made to teach First Nations farming but they didn’t take” is a great euphemism for intentionally gave them sub standard land and didn’t fulfill treaty obligations in the supply of equipment and for some reason it just didn’t work out.

Also read Ryerson, the belief wasn’t that the indigenous just needed to be re-educated to fit in modern society and it went horribly wrong. The view in Ryerson’s own words was that indigenous people couldn’t be re-educated like the poor farmers child. Instead they needed to have religion instilled in them and then maybe you good make them sober members of society.

[redforever]

Originally Posted by GirlySports

What was the thinking at the time? I'm trying to wrap my head around it. We've conquered this land but let's not completely annihilate them. Let them have their own territory and their own land but take their kids away and put them into essentially re-education camps and they will be 'Canadian' for future generations to come? And if they misbehave we'll just punish them to death then secretly bury them? Was it just one thing led to another, one bad idea led to another, one cover up led to another?

Well, they kind of knew that they would not be able to change the thinking and ways of the adult Indigenous people...so where did they start? with the children...not much different than ISIS taking young boys as young as 3 to train them.

The various tribes were given land but certainly not all the land they were traditionally living on. In many many cases, they were given land that was basically useless. They were not able to exist as before and that is the main reason so many were starving in a short period of time. Starve them out and they will come running to us to save them.

Ulterior motives were present in more ways than one.

[Two Fivenagame]

2 more catholic churches burn to the ground on indigenous land in BC.

[getbak]

This morning, the Catholic School Board voted unanimously to rename Bishop Grandin High School.

https://twitter.com/user/status/1409558588998172680

[Wormius]

Why not just keep that name, Haysboro permanently? Seems pretty obvious.

[transplant99]

The Catholic church on Siksika was torched overnight.

I get the desire and anger behind this but it has to stop.

Its putting first responders in danger every time this happens.

https://globalnews.ca/news/7987968/i...c-church-fire/

[Weitz]

Originally Posted by transplant99

The Catholic church on Siksika was torched overnight.

I get the desire and anger behind this but it has to stop.

Its putting first responders in danger every time this happens.

https://globalnews.ca/news/7987968/i...c-church-fire/

Unfortunately if it continues it will also erode support amongst the general population.