“Residential School Mass Grave Mania”

Northern Manitoba First Nation reports 187 anomalies found at or near site of former residential school

A First Nation community in northern Manitoba says ground-penetrating radar has found 150 anomalies at the site of a former residential school, including what are believed to be 59 unmarked graves at a nearby cemetery.

The chief of Pimicikamak Cree Nation also says 37 anomalies have been found off-site, more than a kilometre away from St. Joseph’s Residential School.

The anomalies — places where the ground has been disturbed — were found at depths of between one and two metres, Chief David Monias said Wednesday.

The Canadian government has launched a new interactive online map pinpointing the location of residential schools, and experts say it will help in the search for unmarked or forgotten graves of children forced to go to the institutions.

Many residential school buildings have been torn down, paved or built over since the first one opened in Canada in the 1830s and the last one closed in the mid-1990s.

The Indian Residential Schools Interactive Map will help searchers get accurate locations of former buildings.

With the focus on colonial oppression as an evil in contemporary society, people who are not aware of history tend to imagine that life was like the Garden of Eden in North America, before those nasty white Europeans arrived.

No. As Hobbes wrote: “Life in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

And it was cruel — especially if you were an Indigenous orphan or disabled.

Canadian journalist Tanya Talaga has a new book coming out this summer called “The Knowing.”  In this CBC report about it, Talaga is quoted as saying: “We have all heard of someone who didn’t come home — this is The Knowing. It is Canada’s shame. If every Indigenous person looked for our missing family, found out what happened to them, we could change the narrative of the story of Canada. Family by family. Truth by truth.”

Okay, Tanya. Give us the list of names, besides your twice-married great-great-grandmother, Annie (nee Carpenter) Gauthier (1871-1937), who never went to a residential school.

Turns out there aren’t lists.

Conrad Black is a lot of things…a Donald Trump and Richard Nixon apologist, a big fan of Henry Kissinger and Rex Murphy, and an optimist about the future of democracy in Canada.

But it was the former newspaper magnate’s outright denial of the death of Indigenous children at residential schools that caused a contingent from the CRTC and a delegation from Northern Native Broadcasting to walk out of Thursday’s Western Association of Broadcasters (WAB) conference.

Our media sucks.

Canada needs a public inquiry into what has become known as “The Kamloops Graves Hoax.”

The May 27, 2021 claim of the Kamloops Indian band was that “human remains”  were found in the apple orchard area of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, resulting in what has been described both as a “national hysteria” and a “moral panic”. The band subsequently extended the claim to include other even more graphic  terms, such as “bodies”, “graves” and even “mass graves.” Emotional articles and books followed.

There is much lamenting — and much to lament — about the state of journalism in Canada. How can the truth be found, the common good served, if our networks and newspapers are in a parlous state? Who will provide the information we need when digital giants vacuum up the revenue that in the past provided for the essential-but-not-click-generating work of careful and dogged reporting?

Children who attended Residential School had better health than those who did not.

MORE AND MORE, serious writers on the Indian Residential Schools issue are rejecting the label “genocidal” to describe the record of the Schools in their treatment of indigenous people. It is now less widely believed that the Schools routinely raped and murdered the children in their care and threw them into furnaces, or buried them secretly in unmarked mass graves.

On the other hand, writers often qualify their rejection of these extreme, unsupported claims by conceding that the Schools were, all the same, places of terrible abuse and unrelieved misery.

But were they in fact? Fortunately a great deal of evidence is becoming available from the study of archival records that enables us to make an objective assessment of this indictment.

It’s been three years since Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc Chief Rosanne Casimir announced “the confirmation of the remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School.”

The news rocked the nation and made headlines around the world. Demonstrations erupted, and apologies were offered by the government along with hundreds of millions of dollars to investigate alleged burials of residential school children. Up to 100 churches in Canada were vandalized or burned to the ground in reaction to the news. The Canadian flag was kept at half-mast for nearly six months, and the Pope came to Canada to beg forgiveness.

Long before Stephen Harper’s Conservative government launched the multi-billion-dollar Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement that established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2007, it was already commonplace to refer to the legacy of those schools as a “dark chapter in Canadian history.”

B.C. First Nation now referring to 215 suspected graves as ‘anomalies’ instead of ‘children’

Three years after Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc first published the explosive news that they had uncovered the graves of 215 children, the First Nation is now officially referring to the 215 as “anomalies” rather than confirmed graves.