UPDATED: Canada finds hundreds of graves at former indigenous school: media

[DonViejo]

Source: Raw Story/Agence France-Presse

Agence France-Presse
June 24, 2021

Hundreds of unmarked graves have been found near a former Catholic residential school for indigenous children in western Canada, local media reported late Wednesday.

Excavations at the site around the former school in Marieval, Saskatchewan began at the end of May. They followed the discovery of the remains of 215 schoolchildren at another former indigenous residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia, which sent shock waves through Canada.

The finds revived calls on the Pope and the Catholic church to apologize for the abuse and violence suffered by the students at these boarding schools, where they were forcibly assimilated into the dominant culture.

In a statement quoted by several Canadian media, including CBC and CTV, the native Cowessess community said it had made "the horrific and shocking discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves" during excavations at former Marieval boarding school.





Read more: https://www.rawstory.com/canada-finds-hundreds-of-graves-at-former-indigenous-school-media/

---

UPDATE:

751 unmarked graves found at former Saskatchewan residential school

Kelly Skjerven 31 mins ago

The announcement was made on Zoom by FSIN chief Bobby Cameron and Cowessess First Nation Chief Cadmus Delorme and comes weeks after 215 unmarked burial sites were reported found at a residential school in Kamloops.

Link to tweet

Chief Delorme said they cannot affirm that they are all children in the unmarked graves.

Marieval Indian Residential School operated between 1899 and 1997

More/NO PAYWALL
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/canada/751-unmarked-graves-found-at-former-saskatchewan-residential-school/ar-AALoAy2?ocid=uxbndlbing

[Sanity Claws]

1. And the US Council of Catholic Bishops

wants to deny Biden communion because he supports a woman's right to choose.
Unbelievable.
First, remove the beam out of your own eye, and then you can see clearly to remove the speck out of your brother's eye. Matthew 7:5

[Evolve Dammit]

8. Nicely posted

[Mysterian]

2. The catholic church is a murderous criminal organization

that preys upon the most vulnerable.

[twodogsbarking]

7. They threaten you with eternal damnation

and offer eternal salvation. Y'all can decide for yourselves.

[spike jones]

37. I am sure the Catholic Church will apolize then continue killing in the name of Jesus.

[link:https://www.cnn.com/2016/11/21/africa/rwanda-catholic-church-apology/index.html|

[luvtheGWN]

4. This is a new discovery in a different province.

Every former residential school in every province is being investigated. And the ones who survived their time at these schools are now having their stories heard. Most of the stories are filled with episodes of beatings, bad (or not enough) food, nasty punishments etc.

When will the Roman Catholic Church ever be brought to account?

[Pobeka]

5. Thx. From the summary I assumed it was the old report.

[luvtheGWN]

10. Well here's the latest (re the Catholic Church):

The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops really wants to take a page out of their neighbouring USCCB and deny Justin Trudeau the Eucharist because of his pro-choice commitment (plus the fact that all Liberal members of Parliament must continue to be in support of NO LAW against abortion).

But.......the discovery of all these bodies at Catholic-run institutions is putting the kibosh on that idea. And I just read that bodies in unmarked graves in the US are now being found -- again, in Catholic-run residential schools.

So I think Joe Biden will be able to safely take part in the Eucharist after all!

[kiri]

18. "bodies"... in Catholic-run residential schools

These are merely skeletons, not bodies or corpses. No word on whether there were coffins (unlikely, too costly) or even shrouds as the dead were put in.

In Kamloops, some were found face down and others with limbs oddly positioned, as if they had been just thrown naked into a pit.

[wnylib]

28. With all this focus on Canada, people are

overlooking the fact that THE SAME DAMNED THING HAPPENED IN THE US.

Hundreds of dead children. Their families were told that the children ran away. Some lucky ones actually did run away and made it back home.

But hundreds in the US as well as in Canada were murdered by neglect and abuse. The Catholic Church was just one of the culprits. All the schools were under government jurisdiction, subcontracted to various churches and local governments.

And today we subcontract ICE detainment centers to private prisons with ugly results.

[Andrew54125]

6. Wow

How come no one discovered it all this years?

[Evolve Dammit]

9. I suspect there are hundreds of these around the world and not confined to Catholicism. Welcome

[NCjack]

12. Africa.

[csziggy]

17. South & Central America and the Caribbean Islands

I'm thinking of the missionaries that went to South America - my uncle went in the fifties and sixties as an Evangelical Baptist preacher. And the "christians" who set up missions in Haiti after the earthquake. And so many others across the globe.

Given how prejudiced my uncle was against people of color, I am not at all sure he did the people he claimed to help any good.

[Faygo Kid]

14. How come I never heard of Tulsa until now?

You know the reasons. And I will be 70 this year, and thought I was well informed as a history buff. What else is out there?

[knightmaar]

20. Because no one gave a flying fuck until now.

The number of indigineous women that we've been watching die from rape and murder, basically the police saying, "Meh, they were prostitutes" was already disturbing.

We. Just. Didn't. Care.

And, yes, I'm Canadian.

[wnylib]

29. Nobody looked. No external oversight of the schools.

Nobody outside of the schools had a clue to what was going on. When a few children escaped and told people, nobody listened. When children "graduated" and were sent away carrying with them the trauma they had grown up with, nobody listened to them - if they even told anyone. Who could they tell? They were already conditioned to take it in silence, in fear for their own well being and lives.

Even after Amnesty International in recent years collected their stories of abuse, nobody wanted to deal with it. To their credit, Canada did issue a formal apology and offfered counseling for survivors and their families. The US has never acknowledged its role in this genocidal abuse of children.

The social and cultutal damage to Native communities is immense. Thousands of children spanning generations grew up with horrible abuse and extremely limited family connections from age 5 to age 16. No warm or affectionate experiences. They turned to alcohol and drugs to relieve themselves of the memories and nightmares. They were totally unprepared for parenthood when they had their own children, so the effects reached into the future, even after the schools were either shut down or turned over to individual tribal nations.

[Bayard]

11. Genocide

"the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group."

Cloaked in Christianity.

[Faygo Kid]

13. +1, tearfully.

[wnylib]

33. And nationalism. The movement

for forced assimilation schools began with an army officer who advocated, "Save the child but kill the Indian" as an alernative to the Indian wars of the 19th century. He established the first school, Carlisle Indian School, run with military discipline.

The US government then sponsored the boarding schools as a solution to enhancing Manifest Destiny, and turned over the operation of individual schools to various churches and local givernments with zero oversight. It was hailed then as a humanitarian movement to replace war (and save the lives of US soldiers).

The schools had carte blanche to operate as they chose, without adequate funding for their "mission" to eradicate Native cultures. They hired untrained, often uneducated people to run the schools and ran "charity drives" for donated clothing, food, and medicine. The poorly paid "teachers" and administrators took the best donations home for their families. They hired the kids out to do manual labor for local farmers and businesses and pocketed the money for themselves to supplement their incomes.

Amnesty International published their collection of reports from adults who had survived the schools. People who knew or suspected what was happening in the schools looked the other way because they were "only Indians."

The schools were publicly praised in newspapers and speeches for their service in making the nation safe for expansion and control of former Native lands. A lot of politics were involved in the name of nationalism. Some schools were secular. Some were run by the Catholic Church. Some were run by other churches. All of them had the destruction of Native cultures as their goal.

[cbabe]

15. Suffering is big part

of Catholic teaching.

Christ suffered on the cross to show his love for us. So we suffer to show our love for Christ.

Mother Teresa was well-known for the suffering she inflicted on her nuns and their patients.

So suffering little children fits right in.

Overly simplified but the Catholic teaching of suffering is key to understanding 'how could they do that'.

[kiri]

21. Theresa was a doctrinaire monster.

Theresa was a monster. She steadfastly refused any palliative drugs, like morphine, or even aspirin! to the dying. "Suffering is good for the soul", eh?

The doctrine of an "immortal" soul is extremely pernicious and is used to justify all manner of evil.

No human mother would do to any child what Theresa did to thousands.

[Ziggysmom]

22. Very true and I remember it every day. Mom insisted I attend Catholic grade school.

Their control over the young 1st graders began with instilling intense fear. GOD WILL PUNISH YOU IF YOU………. Having that told to you for years, beginning at age 5-6 brainwashes you for a long time.
If I let myself listen to my inner fearful child voice, I still have these thoughts when things go wrong in my life. Got a flat tire? You did something wrong and God is punishing you! I know it’s not true, but the thought still pops into my head.

And don’t get me started on how cruel some of the nuns were. My dad said that the main cause of Catholic mistreatment of kids stemmed from their idiotic celibacy rules. He felt the priests and nuns were all sexually frustrated, creating deviant and spiteful treatment of children. He may have had something.

[ZonkerHarris]

16. i have a feeling a few more Catholic churches are going to burn in Canada.

[roamer65]

24. Oh well.

Shit happens.

[ZonkerHarris]

31. yup

[Cobalt Violet]

35. 🔥 yes indeed.

[Warpy]

19. More likely they died from diseases they had no resistance to

which means everything form measles to TB. The horror of it is that they were just dumped into holes, no records kept, no families notified, not even tribes notified.

It happened here, too.

[roamer65]

25. My gut tells me some will be found to have been murder victims.

I hope I am wrong, but It would not shock me.

[Warpy]

27. They did cram children from enemy tribes together

so that's entirely possible, too. Even with their hair cut off, their tribal clothing burned and stuffed into city clothes, they still knew who they and everybody else were.

Most of those places were run by Christian true believers who sincerely believed they were saving kidnapped children from lives of savagery and the fires of hell. The arrogance is staggering and not restricted to the US and Canada.

[pnwmom]

32. Actually they were interred in graves in this instance. But for some reason

the headstones were eventually removed.

[wnylib]

38. BIG EFFIN' BS!

That is a whitewash story used too often to cover abuses and murders of Native people.

In the earliest contacts with Europeans, there were many Native people who died of European diseases because they had no immunity, like the huge numbers of Europeans who died in the waves of Bubonic Plague.

But then lack of immunity to disease became the catchall whitewash story to spread over every case of genocidal action against Native people.

Children who froze to death standing outdoors nude in winter as sadistic punishment for using words in their own language did not die from lack of immunity to disease. The same is true of children who were force fed lye soap, and the ones who were killed by horsewhip beatings, and the ones who were locked in closets and denied food.

Resistance to and recovery from TB is not much different between Native people and non Natives. But non Natives got rest and care in clinics built for TB patients. Native children in assimilation boarding schools were malnourished to begin with from inadequate diets that weakened their immune systems. They saw no doctors when they got sick. When they got sick, they were accused of being malingering, lazy Indians and forced to work until they dropped dead.

It's time we stop covering up deliberate abuse and homocide with the old "no imnunity" excuse. The disease that those children had no immunity to was the sadism and racism of the psychologically warped people who ran the schools.

[Warpy]

40. The difference is that I've talked to people who survived the system

Don't discount those European diseases. First contact typically killed 80-90% of native people. They had no resistance to the diseases of crowding. Usual childhood diseases were lethal to people with no resistance, at all.

Kids in those schools were packed in tight in their dormitories, a prime way to spread disease.

The purpose of those schools wasn't to destroy the children, it was to destroy their various cultures. I'm delighted to say they failed spectacularly on both accounts. While there are horror stories about religious sadists, most weren't any worse than those running boarding schools back east, arrogant and ignorant people with limits on corporal punishment.

Undoubtedly, forensic science will have a look at the remains, both to determine where the kids came from and to try to ascertain a cause of death and I will be interested in the results. I expect them to paint a picture of disease and neglect rather than sadistic slaughter. They wanted to produce patriotic workers and farmers, not corpses,

[Cobalt Violet]

42. you have your centuries mixed up.

The Great Dying was centuries before these crimes.

[Warpy]

43. This shit went on around here until the 60s.

Usual childhood diseases still killed until we got vaccines. We got an effective MMR just about the time the last of those places was shut down, the tribes taking over their own education systems.

I'm not the one quoting apocryphal stories as fact.

We're done here.

[wnylib]

45. Apocryphal stories as fact?

I'd laugh if the subject and damage were not so serious.

When you get your head out of the sand, try reading my post #44. If you are still around and looking at responses to your post. But I have a hunch that you are not.

[wnylib]

46. Thank you for pointing that out.

[wnylib]

44. What "dlfference" are you talking about

in your first sentence? I have also talked to people who survived the schools. Some of them were my relatives.

I am fully aware of the effects of disease on Native Americans on first contact with European diseases. Smallpox, for instance, killed both Native Americans and European colonists in large numbers. But Europeans had some resistance because they had cattle, which exposed them to the related cowpox and built up antibody resistance to smallpox. European colonists in cities had higher rates of serious illness and death from smallpox than their country counterparts on farms, due to proximity to cows more than to city crowding.

My father grew up on a dairy farm. When he had a smallpox inoculation, it didn't "take" because he already had natural immunity from the cows.

Your figures for the numbers of Native deaths from European diseases look too high. The death rate varied from one region to another. Crowding, by itself, was not the main or only cause of disease in the residential schools nor was lack of immunity to Euroamerican diseases. Factors include lack of sanitation, a substandard diet in the schools that lacked vital nutrients, lack of medical care (no medicines or doctors), no separation of the sick and healthy children, continued forced labor of sick children. It was environmental, not genetic.

There were a few schools where conditions were not so severe, but all of them were psychologically and culturally abusive. Regarding your claim that the goal was to destroy cultures, not kill the children, your view is either naive or steeped in denial about racism and the helplessness of children in the hands of adults who despised them as "inferior savages." It sounds a lot to me like the apologists for slavery who claim that abuse of enslaved people was minimal because slaveowners wanted their labor. It makes me wonder if you deny the reality of the Holocaust, too.

There are numerous articles available online that detail the conditions in the schools. The one that I would recommend for its depth and documentation is called Civil Claims for Uncivilized Acts filing suit against the American government. It was published in the Hastings Race and Poverty Law Journal, volume 4, number 1, in the fall of 2006. I was not able to get a working link, but a search will bring it up. Some search sites give only the abstract, but others have the entire article.

It is a lengthy article that begins with background history on Native experiences with government agencies. For the info on Native residential school conditions and abuses, you can scroll on down to the section that itemizes them as follows:

A. Forced Attendance
B. Destruction of Cultures
C. Living Conditions
D. Forced Labor
E. Death and Disease
F. Physical and Sexual Abuse
G. Government Knowledge and Complicity
H. Impact on Generations

[Cobalt Violet]

41. 1000+

So true I can't believe someone is trying to pull this shit here. All of this happened centuries after the Great Dying.

[usaf-vet]

23. Is there any plan OR should there be a plan to do DNA testing on the remains to try and return.....

..... the individuals to their families or at least to their tribal lands.

The military has been very successful in identifying recovered remains some dating back to WW II.

Leading this effort is a specialized unit out of Hawaii called the Defense P.O.W./M.I.A. Accounting Agency, or D.P.A.A., which was established in 2015 after the Joint P.O.W./M.I.A. Accounting Command and the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office were merged. D.P.A.A. is responsible for locating and identifying the bodies of the tens of thousands of American military personnel who died as prisoners of war or who were considered “missing in action” from World War II to the present.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/02/magazine/korea-remains-identification.html

[wnylib]

39. It would be very difficult, nearly impossible.

The children were intentionally sent to schools far from their tribes and family and mixed in with children from other tribes in order to control their use of Native languages, customs, and beliefs. There is a very small database of DNA among Native people. Many distrust the use of science against them from past experience. So what could the DNA be compared with to match up with a specific tribe?

Also, there were intermarriages between friendly tribes and with non Native people that makes specific tribal identies by DNA difficult to determine.

It might be possible to trace family DNA rather than tribal DNA, but that would require individual Native people to be DNA tested to see if there is a close enough match. That would involve thousands of Native people across the entire nation. It would require getting the word out to people in some very remote and isolated locations. It would require overcoming Native mistrust of science that was often used in the past to "prove" their inferiority. And it would require dredging up past experiences and traumas that the victims would prefer to forget rather than relive them. That includes the grief of relatives who never saw their children again, and the family members who also went through the trauma of the boarding schools.

[Spazito]

26. These numbers are only the tip of the iceberg...

There are at least 139 residential school sites, probably more, that have yet to be searched for unmarked graves. We only have two sites reporting their numbers to date and they already number over 1100, many more reports yet to come.

This is Canada's shame and we must come to terms with it. Records must be released by both the Catholic church and the federal government so the identity of those children can begin and their return to their loved ones finally happen.

[GusBob]

30. "In the 1960's the Catholic church removed the headstones"

and there may be some adults buried there as well? There must be some records somewhere

[Solly Mack]

34. K&R