Comment by shagie
1 year ago
> What did the Canadian government do?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_and_Reconciliation_Commi...
> In June 2015, the TRC released an executive summary of its findings along with 94 "calls to action" regarding reconciliation between Canadians and Indigenous Peoples. The commission officially concluded in December 2015 with the publication of a multi-volume final report that concluded the school system amounted to cultural genocide. The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, which opened at the University of Manitoba in November 2015, is an archival repository home to the research, documents, and testimony collected during the course of the TRC's operation.
https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1450124405592/1529106060...
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It is a LONG, deep, and dark rabbit hole to dig through those documents that takes you through places such as undocumented graveyards behind schools. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/stó-lō-natio...
Specifically regarding the Inuit resettlement - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Arctic_relocation
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission is the opposite as advertised. It's a serious mistake to take the self proclaimed Ministry of Truth at face value.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/25/world/canada/canada-schoo...
And, in the end, the conclusion of the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission was unambiguous: “Children were abused, physically and sexually, and they died in the schools in numbers that would not have been tolerated in any school system anywhere in the country, or in the world.”
From the 1880s through the 1990s, the Canadian government forcibly removed at least 150,000 Indigenous children from their homes and sent them t o residential schools to assimilate them. Their languages and religious and cultural practices were banned, sometimes using violence. It was, the commission reported in 2015, a system of “cultural genocide.”
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Should that not be taken at face value?
I've not been following most of this thread of conversation, but this reply jumped out at me so let me throw my hat into the ring here.
I live in the US, but my mother went to what is known as a boarding school for native americans. They were beaten and raped, my mother got married at 15 just to get away from it all.
They would do things like lock the kids outside during the winter just for using their native language.
So while I don't know the specifics of this case, I also don't find it at all surprising.
And what makes it worse is that the man who ran that school got a humanitarian award years later. I remember it because it was announced a few weeks before one of our family reunions (I have a huge family, grandmother had 19 children) and the anger amongst all of the older family members was palpable. This man raped my mother.
I recently attended the funeral of an aunt (roughly 3 years ago) and met a woman who told me she tried to do research on the specific school my family went to. They've torn the school down and apparently you can hardly find any documentation on the school itself. The woman told me when she started trying to dig deeper into it she started getting death threats.
People who don't believe this kind of stuff happens don't live in reality (charmed life). I grew up hearing stories of them putting kids into communal showers, telling them to soap up, and then inspecting them. If they weren't white enough they'd get strapped while under the water.
I could go on and on with the stories I grew up with (not just from my mother either).
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There’s things that are left out that are important
Many indigenous wanted their kids to go to these schools
There was abuse in the school system everywhere and it seems like catholic schooling has been sexually abusive everywhere
Rural canada was extremely poor
Viruses like influenza ravaged everyone
The media reporting on the matter makes it seem like everything bad of the past was exclusively done to indigenous when it was a combination of life sucking for everyone and then it being a bit worse to the indigenous on top of that. But painting it as this extreme injustice to indigenous is misleading IMO. To say nothing of the extreme grifting and people looking for payouts from the government that only make the lives of the indigenous worse.
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