Hanaguma

Leave them at home. OK. And then what... Ignore the law that says all children must attend school. Would you say the same for the rest of the kids in the country too? Let them all stay with their families, no compulsory education?

Well, what was the alternative available at that time? A lot of people are quick to use their 20.20 hindsight to point out the wrongs of the past, yet are slow to say what would have been better. Any thoughts? Native communities had, and still have, many deep and serious problems. These simplistic views of the past do nothing to help them.

Yes, because his brother's views are more important than the actual man in question. Please. I don't see how this is relevant at all.

Yes, absolutely. The alternative was permanent misery and illiteracy. Of course with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, it could have been handled far better and more compassionately. But the basic premise of helping bring the native community into the 20th century was a good one. It is sad but inevitable that primitive societies and cultures dont survive contact with more technologically advanced ones. The government was trying to ease that transition, however clumsily.

You certainly sound like you have an axe to grind. And yes the Residential schools (at least those run by churches) did try to convert the natives. That was part of their mandate. Not zealotry or evil. Part of the whole package of integrating into the larger Canadian society at the time. As for doing nothing good, read a little about Tomson Highway.

Yet the outcome was not the same, either in place or in time. Myriad stories of people who enjoyed positive experiences at the schools abound. Tomson Highway for example (one of Canada's most famous native writers) describes his time in residential school as the best years of his life. It isn't a simple story that can be explained by a simple narrative. Yet many people insist on doing so.

The TRC was a politically driven body that leaned exclusively on survivor stories and not enough on any information that might possibly counter the prevailing narrative. Anyone who dares to do so is vilified and hated. No wonder the only people who came forward had bad things to say. It DID, however, net another $40 billion in guilt money from the government. If you have evidence of planned abuse, present it.

I freely admit there were faults with the system, the implementation, and most of all the horrid behavior of some of the staff. Also clearly explained the rationale behind the system and the motives of the people who ran it. It seems that for a lot of people, this is a good chance to have a go at the Catholic church. That colours their perceptions and drives their thinking past the point of being able to think logically. I haven't heard a viable alternative though, from you or anyone else. Do you think it would have been better to just leave the children in their isolated and remote communities, cut off from the world, with no chance at getting an education? The era and the geography of Canada dictated a lot of what happened.

Really? If the intention was to kill all the native people, they did a pretty poor job of it. Now you might not like the intentions, and looking back through the lens of the present their intentions may seem abhorrent, but they were not evil. One of the traps many people fall into is judging the past through the knowledge and morality of the present. At the time the Residential schools were established, their architects thought that their predecessors were evil They were thought of as evil because they had denied a good Christian education to their native charges. So the proponents of the schools sought to redress that evil by providing education to the unenlightened savages, and thereby giving them the gift of civilization and entry into Canadian society. Of course this sounds patronizing and egotistical, and it is. But it was best practice as known at the time.

Undeniably so. The people who did it should be punished. In fact, the Canadian government is trying to extradite one of the Oblate brothers from France now to face criminal charges. But the French won't allow his extradition. I think he should face the music. As for the schools, they were a tragic example of "the road to hell is paved with good intentions". Progressive (for their time) do-gooders who thought they could reshape society in their own special image.

...which was tragic, but over the course of the century plus the schools were in operation was fortunately not common. Perhaps you dont know a lot about Canadian history, but life was quite harsh in the western part of the country in the late 19th-early 20th centuries. Diseases and sickness took a lot of people, especially the young and the old. The Residential Schools were no different, and often worse.

From the University of Manitoba NCTR; https://web.archive.org/web/20160420012021/http://umanitoba.ca/centres/nctr/overview.html By the 1930s, there were over 70 federally funded, Church-run residential schools in operation in all parts of the country. By then, approximately one-third of school-aged Indigenous children were attending Residential Schools. Eventually more than 150,000 students would pass through the system. Over approximately130 years, nearly 140 residential schools were part of the federally funded and administered system.

It cheapens the word and is effectively meaningless. Serves only to inflame but not inform. And did not happen in Canada. Assimilation, yes, it was the policy of the day a century ago for ALL non-Anglos.

First of all, the article neglected to mention exactly WHICH sites contained the graves. Assuming they are the ones from the summer of 2021, there were 4 in total. The Kamloops one I already wrote about. No evidence of graves or human remains has yet been discovered. The other three? They were community cemeteries which had fallen into neglect over the years. Local people knew about them- nothing to do with any secret burials or the like. They were Catholic cemeteries used by everyone. Here is what Lloyd Lerat, who actually attended the school in the town, had to say about the largest such site: "We've always known these were there," said Lerat of the unmarked graves. He said the idea that the graves were primarily of children who attended the school took on a life of its own. "It's just the fact that the media picked up on unmarked graves, and the story actually created itself from there because that's how it happens," Lerat said. https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/marieval-cemetery-graves-1.6106563

Again with the whole "graves" nonsense. The only places graves have been discovered are at cemeteries. These were community cemeteries, not secret burial grounds run by satanic priests. People in those communities have known about them for decades- they were for the entire community, not just the schools. The "ground zero" case of secret graves, in Kamloops BC, is still under investigation. The local native group has yet to allow any actual scientific work to be undertaken. Also again, nobody is denying that crimes and abuse happened in the schools. But there is no evidence of a genocidal conspiracy between the Catholic Church and the Canadian government to systematically kill all the aboriginal people. It was policy that was thought to be effective in civilizing the children (as people said at the time) and also fulfill Canada's treaty obligations with various native groups. Today we know better about the deep problems such a policy brings. That is why it was stopped.

Or you could read another paper, which says; "Cultural genocide cannot, at least directly, be considered an established or accepted legal concept, either under treaty law or customary international law." https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1353009/FULLTEXT01.pdf You are failing to see the role of the grievance industry, as has existed in Canada for 30 years, in muddying the waters of what actually happened. And also in trying to create a feeling of guilt amongst the Canadian public that they need not feel.

There is no such thing as "cultural genocide". By definition, a genocide means trying to eliminate a group of people from the human gene pool- gene+homicide = genocide. The term is just a sneaky way to get the word "genocide" into the conversation. Many Canadians for their part play along in ecstatic self-flagellation. It feels good for morally insecure people to feel bad about something. There WAS a policy of assimilation, which today we know is wrong and horrid. At the time, not so much. It is all too easy to look at the past from a position of smug moral superiority and sneer. I am glad that your "personal favorite" is the lack of evidence of any human remains. One would think that evidence was crucial to determinine such serious crimes. There is no denialism. Just a simple request for evidence and an honest accounting of what happened. These are deep and complex issues that deserve to be treated as such. "Church bad, Indians good" doesn't do justice to the situation.

You are doing the right thing, keep it up! A lot of people used to follow the One Language, One Parent rule for raising kids. That is, each parent speaks their native language to the child. But that ignores the influence of environment. If you are in Thailand, everything around you is in Thai- school, TV, friends, etc. So English gets a bit pushed back. You are using the MLaH system- Minority Language at Home. Both parents use the non-local language with the children as much as possible. This helps a lot. Especially when the parents use the non-local language when communicating with each other. Your kid(s) will see the two of you using English, so this will make English seem valuable and worth knowing. We did the same with my son (bilingual English/Japanese). It worked out very well for him. He grew up in Japan with all the advantages of good education here, and stlil learned English to a native speaker level.

Have you really read my posts though? If so, you would have read; "There was criminal behavior by a minority of those entrusted with caring for the children. Those people need to be named, shamed, and prosecuted. " or "Yes there was abuse at the schools, which is despicable. Unfortunately, we now know that the priesthood as a profession attracts both the best and the worst of men. In those cases, the victims need to be compensated and the criminals punished/shamed. " or "Nobody denies that there were abuses, and that people 100 years ago didn't understand how psychologically damaging it could be to remove children from their communities and put them in schools like this."

Typical Trudeau, can't miss an opportunity to pander and virture signal. This has been going on for 30 years now, getting more and more hysterical as time goes on. It never fails. "There is much more that needs to be done" or "this is only the first step towards..." are the catchphrases of the perpetually victimized. But it was easily predictable. The rent seekers in the indigenous industry are reluctant to let their cash cow get away. There are hundreds of millions of dollars in play for the lawyers and consultants and media people. The Canadian government has already pledged $40 Billion (with a "B")- what more do they want?

Because nothing has been done yet. And the native band in question has been very coy and secretive about the whole situation for more than a year. THere has been nothing stopping them from starting to investigate except their own reluctance. The cynic in me says that they have made the political decision that the legend of 200 plus missing children is far more profitable than taking a chance on learning the truth. What if nothing is found? That is a risk they are very unwilling to take. Imagine the same situation but not involving native people. Someone suspects that a local park is the site of more than 200 possible murder victims. A radar survey suggests that there just might be something there. What would happen next? Certainly not a one year delay.

True, but the report will only be based on the radar survey. Nothing will be actually done in the suspected burieal sites other than that. And the article clearly states that the survey cannot detect organic matter, so (sorry to be graphic) unless a body was buried recently, it is almost impossible to detect. At least without doing some excavation of the site, which the local native community has resisted up to now.

Yes they have, but those are not what is in the news today. Those seem to be almost accidental incidents. In the past year, there have been numerous discoveries. None of them, to my knowledge, have undergone any kind of forensic examination. All rely on radar data plus local anecdotes. Like Pegman, I am from the Great White North. I do watch the media from home and there haven't been any stories about actual evidence being collected.

This is one of the few advantages of being Canadian. Lottery winnings are not taxed. Neither are inheritances. Neither are casino winnings.

It has been more than a year since the 'discovery' and not one shovel full of earth has been moved. Nobody knows if they are graves. Nobody knows who (if anyone) is buried there. Certainly nobody knows that children are buried there. If, God forbid, the story is true, then there needs to be a criminal investigation. No more faffing about with "knowledge keepers" and lurid tales. And certainly no waiting a year. Just imagine if it was suspected that more than 200 people were secretly buried under the football field of a regular high school. Do you think the police would sit on their hands for a year and do nothing?