Again, just because you can find events elsewhere that weren’t supposedly about ethnicity, it has no bearing whatsoever about what is being discussed in this thread.
I went to school in North York through the seventies and never heard the prayer said. Ever. Not even once.
Sounds like people had cause to be upset by it.
We had the Lord’s Prayer in school in Saskatoon in the early 80’s. I remember my grade 3 teacher had hair like Crystal Gayle and we would sing the groovy Sister Janet Mead version:
Okay, if the state has owned up to its role, and tried to make amends, then I withdraw my objection. It felt to me like people were trying to deflect blame from institutions that they are associated with (the Canadian government) to those they aren’t (the Catholic Church). But if the Catholic Church is the last guilty party that is unrepentant, sure, go after just them.
God knows there is plenty of blame to go around.
Yeah, Catholic schools never quit with the prayer, understandably. But public schools did.
I went to public school, not Catholic school.
Public and separate schools in Saskatchewan have a constitutionally protected right to use the Lord’s Prayer at the beginning of the school day.
Again, they were unquestionably targeted by design in the case that’s the subject of this thread. Are you trying to deny that?
ETA: I didn’t know about that incident in the 60’s, and am not automatically ceding that as having nothing to do with ethnicity before I have time to research it. But even if it didn’t, that has nothing to do with the fact that this one did.
I think attitudes which are common can regrettably be accepted without much thought or judgement by any prominent member of society. Is there any evidence some members of either the government or any church strongly disagreed with the policy?
Please let me emphasize that the government response has not by any means adequately made amends. There is much remaining to be done, and the pace at which it is being done is infuriatingly slow. However, the government has admitted wrongdoing and apologized, and made a start at making amends. We can’t seem to get the RCC over even that low bar. They don’t need to apologize for coming up with the scheme of destroying indigenous culture by forcible cultural assimilation. But they do need to apologize for participating in that scheme, and I’m moderately confident that the government’s instructions didn’t include the sexual abuse or physical torture that the RCC actually inflicted on the children in its care. Although, to be entirely fair, I’m sure the government of the day would have countenanced stern discipline even by the standards of the time, and some of what we might currently be inclined to call torture might have fallen into that category, if you are charitably inclined towards the church and squint a lot. Still, the details of some of these horrors were not carried out on the instruction of the Ministry of Indian Affairs. They were the creation of the agents of the Church, and the Church needs to accept responsibility for them:
The church needs to accept responsibility, and every living person who worked there needs to go to prison. Yikes!
This.
The Indian residential schools like the one in Kamloops with a mass grave of children beside it were started and EXPLICITLY with a race-based ethnic cleansing doctrinal system in mind. They were created to destroy the indigenous people’s culture by removing their children, and wiping out their traditions and language. This was accomplished by taking children away from families at gunpoint, and then subjecting the children to horrific violence, abuse and death.
The assholes in government at the time came up with the plan, and the Catholic church at the time embraced the plan and implemented it. The government plan was to destroy the culture. The Catholic church put the trimmings of physical, mental and sexual abuse on top of it.
And now the Catholic church continues to this day to cover up, to hide records and to try to minimize the horrors that they themselves inflicted on children.
So being deeply unfamiliar with the history of these Canadian residential schools, what is exactly being brought to attention here? I’ve seen cursory reporting on this, always in ominous terms. Is there any actual substance to allegations that these children were murdered or etc? Or is it more the case that they died of natural causes and were just buried in unmarked graves?
From the rhetoric in the thread, it sounds like the residential schools were awful. But it likewise sounds like people have known the specific ways in which they were awful for a very long time, even if it wasn’t “talked about a lot” in polite society. Is the discovery of the mass graves more seen as a good starting point for a larger dialogue about the schools? If that is the case, it makes sense to me the attention it is getting.
But if it’s just outrage at the mass graves, it seems like it may lack historic context. I think most people died and were buried in unmarked graves before modern times, and maybe even in present times outside of North America. I also do not believe it was ever common before modern times to ship bodies long distance at all. There are specific instances in which wealthier or figures of state had their bodies shipped, or the infamous stories of famous sea captains dying and being brought home inside a cask of liquor and such, but most people historically were buried very close to where they died. In some cases the family might erect a small memorial at home in remembrance of them.
This is incidentally, approximately as well documented as, say, the fact that John McCain was once a Senator, or the fact that Hawaii is located in the Pacific Ocean. The fact the residential schools were meant to eliminate indigenous culture and language was just an openly discussed objective that until quite recently wasn’t considered at all shameful. As recently as 1970 or so, Pierre Trudeau was openly talking about how this sort of thing was a desirable outcome.
What is ominous about this particular case is that the school did report deaths - about 51 or 52 of them. Yet 215 bodies have been detected. Canada, even in the recent past, was not a place that it was customary for 150-160 children to die - roughly one unexplained child death every six months the school was in operation - without someone thinking to jot that down, and after all the Catholic Church has a long history of reasonably sharp recordkeeping when it comes to things like births and deaths. As it is well know these schools, and Catholic clergy, are systematically guilty of physical and sexual abuse of children, this finding is orders of magnitude more alarming than just “records weren’t the same back in the olden days.”
If someone took your child away from you, didn’t allow you to see your child, told you your child died from disease, and didn’t tell you where your child was buried, I think you would probably find that upsetting.
That seems like a non-answer to anything I said. It was already widely known all of this occurred, no? Hence why I was asking for more context.
The recent discovery is bringing the subject up in the news again, and at a time when racial injustice is prominent in the national conversation.
That makes a lot more sense in that context–are there plans to exhume and examine these bodies?
Spot on.
I think many of us suspect that the 51 or 52 reported deaths were due to natural causes, and the other hidden deaths were due to… something that the Catholic church does not want to reveal. Thus the reluctance to release records, or to tell anyone when the records were destroyed (and why).
Even among the deaths that were reported, often the children were only given first names… sometimes first names that were not even their own, but were non-native names that the priests had given them.
I am, additionally, quite confident that while the subject of residential school abuses is a reasonably well known fact, the idea that two hundred children, most of whose deaths were a secret, were dumped into unmarked graves, is not a fact Canadians were previously aware of. It’s not even something that First Nation was entirely sure of, that being why they were engaged in the investigation.
Just to be clear - and the media is guilty of misreporting this a lot - the Kamloops school did not have a “mass grave.” It’s apparently a field of unmarked graves (and since when did the Catholic Church not mark graves?) The Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc nation, which has conducted the investigation, has clarified this.