Blacklocks reports that since 2010, when the Truth and Reconciliation (TRC) commissioners began making the claim in interviews and in interim reports that thousands of indigenous children had died at residential schools under suspicious circumstances, more than 400 Christian churches have burned in Canada.
Those allegations were false, and based on a conspiracy theory.
Orange Shirt Day arose from the experience of a 6-year-old orphan named Phyllis Webstad in a hostel in Williams Lake, B.C. In 2018, she published the eponymous book The Orange Shirt Story, which is now in school libraries across Canada. The plot is of a young child in a forbidding-looking residential school losing her shirt to faceless, black-habited Catholic nuns who force her to shower, give her new institutional clothes, crop her hair, and hover over her while she prays at bedtime.
Jim McMurtry's Back to talk about schools in Canada https://t.co/Rgojvh33dR
— Peyman Askari (@PeymanAskari451) October 1, 2024
Canada’s state broadcaster published a story where a woman claims her grandfather was forced to dig graves for other children at a residential school.
No graves have been found to date, despite millions of federal dollars spent excavating sites where the remains allegedly would have been uncovered since the claims were made in 2021.
112 Christian churches in Canada have been vandalized, burned down or desecrated since the announcement of the apparent discovery of graves found near a residential school in Kamloops, BC.
Since then, three other first nations have announced similar findings of burial sites located near former residential schools.
h/t Mauser
A group of residential school survivors and their supporters are asking the federal government to reverse what they’re calling a funding cut and come up with more money to help find the unmarked graves of students who went to these institutions.
The request comes the same day Canada marks the fourth annual National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, established in 2021 to honour the survivors of residential schools, and the children who never came home from them.
The Survivors’ Secretariat, which is parsing through decades-old records and searching the grounds of the former Mohawk Institute near Brantford, Ont., is leading the charge against a series of changes that Ottawa announced earlier this year that it says will reduce the total pool of money available to Indigenous communities to document residential school atrocities and deaths.
Canada marks 4th annual National Day for Truth and Reconciliation
Canada marks the fourth annual National Day for Truth and Reconciliation today.
The day is a time to remember Indigenous children who died at residential schools, the survivors, their families and communities. Also known as Orange Shirt Day, it takes place Sept. 30 each year and is a federal statutory holiday.
More than 150,000 First Nations, Métis and Inuit children were forced to attend church-run, government-funded residential schools between the 1870s and 1997. The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation estimated that more than 4,100 children died while attending the schools.
The fake graves cottage industry just keeps on going … Stanley C. Hunt says it’s hard to describe how he felt in May 2021 when he heard around 200 potential burial sites had been found at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.
It’s easy to downplay the residential school system. Here’s one example: It wasn’t as bad as the Holocaust, which saw millions of people exterminated, or the Holodomor, which saw millions more intentionally starved to death. That doesn’t mean it didn’t harm people, but it wasn’t as bad as the full-on genocides that had happened in the same time period. There, I just did it.
For now, a 911 call reporting this blasphemous paragraph won’t go far. But that could change.
Two hundred million dollars. Dozens of church arsons. No confirmed bodies. That’s Canada’s balance three years after the New York Times dropped a bunk story about a “mass grave” discovered in the apple orchard of the former Kamloops, B.C. residential school. And on Friday, the newspaper continued to push the story.
“Despite possible evidence of hundreds of graves at former schools for Indigenous children, challenges in making a clear conclusion have given rise to skeptics,” reads the headline.
Despite possible evidence of hundreds of graves at former schools for Indigenous children, challenges in making a clear conclusion have given rise to skeptics.
The revelation convulsed all of Canada.
Ground-penetrating radar had found possible signs of 215 unmarked graves at a former residential school in British Columbia run by the Catholic Church that the government had once used to assimilate Indigenous children forcibly taken from their families.
It was the first of some 80 former schools where indications of possible unmarked graves were discovered, and it produced a wave of sorrow and shock in a country that has long struggled with the legacy of its treatment of Indigenous people. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ordered flags to fly at half-staff, as many Canadians wore orange T-shirts with the slogan “Every Child Matters.”
Three years later, though, no remains have been exhumed and identified.
What lies beneath is called Bullshit.
“Be politically correct or we’ll call you racist” doesn’t cut as deep as it used to, but it’s an approach line that the BC First Nations Justice Council is willing to bludgeon over the heads of lawyers who favour truth.
Former Abbotsford School District (ASD) teacher Jim McMurtry, who was fired for challenging the narrative about unmarked graves at the Kamloops Indian Residential School, encouraged people to order an orange T-shirt asking about them.
McMurtry had purchased one of the orange T-shirts, which can be worn to commemorate children who died in residential schools.
As an archeologist, it’s impossible to ignore evidence of harm at Indian Residential Schools
I am an archeologist. It’s a field that I was initially drawn to because it felt comfortably distant from the things that got people upset. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
In recent years, we archeologists have found ourselves drawn into deeply acrimonious debates about Canada’s history with Indigenous Peoples. It makes sense. Our profession puts us into a physical encounter with the past. We collect evidence.
Recent articles in some corners of the media landscape have made much of the fact that the number of suspected graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia has been revised downward. Indeed, some columnists have gone so far as to suggest this proves the Indian Residential School system was not genocidal and that Canada has been libeled.
There are indications of unmarked graves at a former residential school site in Opaskwayak Cree Nation near The Pas.
Community leaders announced the findings from a team that specializes in searching for graves and human remains detection dogs at the Former Mckay Indian Residential School grounds Friday.
Band says cadaver dogs found something.
CBC jumps to conclusion that it’s graves.
CBC doesn’t report they’re of children murdered by their teachers but the band takes that additional leap:
“Children want to be found.”
Why?
Because they were murdered.
Duh. https://t.co/UxOWeg76qa— Jim McMurtry (@JimMcMurtry01) August 31, 2024
h/t XC
“Sugarcane” reviews are all over the press, all positive, and all are super spreaders of more deceptions about Indian Residential School history in Canada. National Geographic picked up this documentary for distribution after its win at the Sundance Film Festival. Carolyn Berstein, Executive Vice President of National Geographic Documentary Films said at the time: “National Geographic Documentary Films has a long track record of championing epic and important stories that awaken audiences and transcend their moment.”
According to a report in “Deadline” of Feb. 21, 2024, “Deadline understands that the Disney-owned factual brand has struck a deal in the low seven-figures.”
Let’s awaken National Geographic’s factual brand and its audiences with some behind-the-scenes facts.
Following criticism, Ottawa removes funding caps for residential school searches
OTTAWA – The federal government is backtracking on a move to limit funding for searches of former residential school grounds.
Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Gary Anandasangaree said in a statement Friday the government has heard concerns from Indigenous leaders and communities “loud and clear.”
Communities could previously receive up to $3 million per year through the Residential Schools Missing Children Community Support Fund, but the government had moved to cap funding at $500,000.
