Many hundreds of unmarked graves of Indigenous children discovered at Canadian residential schools

[Martin_Hyde]

@Gorsnak

First and foremost, at all points during the time the residential schools were in operation, the rape, torture, starving, and neglect of children where horrifying crimes. There is no way to sugarcoat this. While harsh corporal punishment as discipline was widely accepted a century ago, sexual abuse was not. Withholding food to the point of starvation was not. Not bothering to inform anyone that children in your care had run away and died of exposure was not.

Oh, I’d agree. But I’d also note that sexual and physical abuse of children, entreated to the care of organizations like the Catholic Church, in orphanages, boarding schools, even just in parish activities, was a pervasive problem for much of the history of such organizations. The Catholic Church specifically has a terrible history in that regard. But there’s actually a lot of nightmare stories about non-Catholic reform schools and things of that nature that do this stuff. There’s a terrible truth that if you have a lot of kids in a custodial scenario, and people who are not their parents with power and supervision over them, the stage is set for abuse. That abuse will not occur or at least will be caught and stopped if it does occur, if various structural safeguards are in place and people have good intentions. But that is often not the case. Even relatively recently in the state of Ohio, a boys juvenile detention facility south of Columbus was found to have basically an epidemic of the adult male guards raping the young boys under their supervision.

Why is any of this salient? Largely because I do not believe the governments of the day put children into situations like this (Indians or otherwise) with that sort of mistreatment as an outright goal, I think it was a known, terrible “side effect” that people were far too willing to tolerate. There has been a many hundreds years tolerance of people with custodial roles over children being given a free pass on abusing them, and it’s wrong whenever and wherever it occurred. But I am not convinced as far as I know about the matter (and I’m always open to more knowledge on it) that this sort of custodial child abuse that was pervasive in all situations of child custody, was an intended goal of these programs.

Second, the idea that someone like Sir John A Macdonald was motivated primarily by wanting to improve the lot of the First Nations by turning them into white folk is belied by his other actions towards them.

I just don’t know enough about him or Canadian history to have an opinion/thought on that without reading a lot more. I do know guys like Pratt, who were instrumental in developing the system in the United States, seemed to be fairly genuinely believers in their own “reform” messaging.