I think there’s a lot of large burials that the Catholic Church has been involved in where there were no permanent markings. There were sometimes temporary ones that did not last long. Orphanages, sanitariums, hospitals for the poor, etc lot of those were ran by Catholics and the paupers that mostly were involved in them, to my knowledge, were not customarily given permanently marked graves.
Edit: In some parts of Europe it was always fairly uncommon to get a permanent marked grave, in some places it was customary for bodies to be stacked in crypts, and when only bones were left, the bones collected in an ossuary for space saving reasons.
I don’t know, and I think the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc are, I believe, very carefully planning the next move. They have been very deliberate in this matter, and I would imagine they’re putting a lot of detective work into figuring out what families should be contacted first, and their wishes consulted. The likelihood of a successful criminal investigation here is minute, given how long ago this happened and the fact most or all of the perpetrators of any possible crimes are dead.
That may well be true - but I don’t think anyone is expecting that there should have been permanent markers over these children’s graves. I do think that there is an expectation that records should have been kept of who these children were, with the names that were given to them by their parents. I think there is an expectation that records of when and how these children died should have been made and preserved, as there were for children of the other settler residents of Canada at that time.
And further, I think there is an expectation that when the horrific abuses at these residential schools were brought to light YEARS AGO, and any and all records were requested from the authorities that ran these schools, that perhaps they should have complied, and maybe even helped find these unmarked gravesites that they themselves dug and put bodies into.
I’m not sure anyone has, or would, disagree with that. But I’m also not sure American orphanages and boarding schools of non-minority persons from the 1890s, still have extant records today, at least not universally.
To me I see a pretty clear story of deliberate cultural genocide, which is what I think seems like the most egregious thing, particularly the taking of people’s children and imposing an alternative-to-their-native culture onto them to try to stamp out their people’s cultural beliefs. Additionally known stories of child abuse and mistreatment in the schools. Then I see a focus on things like unmarked graves and lack of records that I’m not actually sure, without more research, indicates much aside from norms of the time.
I think I mentioned in my first post if this is just being used to highlight a not-well studied aspect of Canadian history, I think that’s a good thing. It just feels like the placement of the headlines and such are making the controversy entirely about the unmarked graves which at least in my knowledge of other history elsewhere, doesn’t surprise me in the least.
Like I think the problem here was much more the putting of these kids into these schools and the actual, official goals of the schools. Not the shitty record keeping. It seems like at least in the U.S., where a few articles on this have made it to the “front” page, the focus is on the latter, not the former.
I think there’s a feeling that the shitty record keeping was intentional, to cover up the abuse and other issues. And THAT’s why the shitty record keeping is newsworthy.
That may well be a point, depending on the particular article. But I don’t think minimizing the fact that they apparently dumped the bodies without marker, memorial, reporting, or recordkeeping is a good way to make that point.
These were not orphans. Not to belabour the point, but these children were forcibly taken from their parents, sometimes at gunpoint. Sometimes the parents were arrested for trying to hide their children.
And boarding schools? If you can find me several dozen examples of boarding schools where hundreds of children died and no records were kept or destroyed about when and how they died, and the dead children were not returned to the parents for burial… well I’ll just wait here.
I said “records” not records of burials. Boarding schools were typically used by the wealthy, so I would be surprised if they buried many if any of their students on premise.
I’m just saying “burial records” in the 1890s aren’t some special class of records that got better record preservation treatment, as a rule, than other forms of records. Whether they will exist or not will be very hit or miss, and that applies to basically all late 19th century institutions, not just Canadian indigenous residential schools.
Like the entire master file of the 1890 census for example, is missing due to being lost in a fire. Something that is a consternation to many genealogists because the response records can be vital links in tracing familial history. All I’m saying is I don’t think people should say things that are not true, and I don’t think you should assert things unless you can demonstrate they are true. That principle and my knowledge of how commonly records from the late 19th century are lost, and even from the mid-20th century when an institution has closed, means that it is not unusual for any such institution to have lost records. Before digitization, if any sort of organization was shut down, maybe some of their paper files would get archived…somewhere, but for how long and under what conditions? How long before they were chucked? There’s even some NASA and FBI records we don’t have from the 1960s, as another example.
To me it is deeply strange to assert that the record keeping is a major part of the heinousness of these institutions when they were already known to be practicing cultural genocide. I guess to me it’s like someone having a discussion about the Nazi death camps and spending a lot of time saying and they didn’t even keep good records! [I am not trying to equate the residential schools to Holocaust death camps, just picking the most obvious comparison.]
Hmmm I seem to have been unclear. I did not intend to assert that record keeping was a major part of the crimes here. I have just seen no evidence that records were accidentally lost in a fire, or misplaced or anything else comparable, such as your census example.
From what I’ve read, the government of Canada themselves deliberately destroyed many residential school records in the 30’s and 40’s, and the Vatican has steadfastly REFUSED to release any records they have. The cultural genocide is abbhorent - and the continued coverup that is happening today needs to be pointed out as well.. Not just excused.
I think the RCC keeps pretty good records given the breadth of records they keep, but as others have posted here, they didn’t seem to keep particularly good records in these schools. Nor would it be the first records the RCC has kept poorly. I was a Catholic at one point in my life, the Catholics are very diocese oriented, and not all organs of the church keep records in a uniform way. From a genealogical perspective (which is some of my personal involvement with Church records), the Church is often the only source of record for some types of things, to which the existence of any records before about 1880 is a boon given governments as a rule have only minimal “personal” records from that time and earlier. But these are still people (diocesan record keepers) who were mostly working with paper and ink records stored in physical buildings. Losses are going to be high.
Why do you keep saying 1890’s? Do you have some evidence that all those children died in the first 10 years of the school’s operation?
The article quoted in the OP says
The Kamloops Indian residential school was established in 1890 under the leadership of the Roman Catholic church, and closed in 1978.
You keep trying to present this as both normal behavior, which it wasn’t for any sort of remotely observant Christians even in 1890, and as having happened as long ago as you can possibly push it. Yes, I notice you also mentioned the possibility of later records being lost – and then went right back to talking about the 1890’s, and at one point 1880.
The fact that the bodies were disrespected after death is indeed part of the horrors of those camps. Should we pretend it didn’t happen? If we found more such bodies now, should it not be reported?
Yes, any article that reports the lack of burial records as if it had been the only problem with the schools would be a bad article. I haven’t seen any such articles. Certainly the one in the OP isn’t one of them.
I would assume most of the burials occurred a long time ago because I think unmarked grave burials are generally much less common in the U.S./Canada in the second half of the 20th century than in the 1890-1950 period, and without other definitive proof I would assume that pattern follows here.
The newspaper articles claim that the death rate at residential schools was two to five times that of non-residential schools depending on area and era. Other schools will now be, one hopes, examined for similar findings.
Children are stolen from their parents, their names and heritage are stolen from them, their very language is whipped out of them, they are unduly punished, die at a much higher rate than other children, and are buried in an unmarked grave without notice to their parents.
Tell me-how does all this fit into your “pattern”?
One reason the discovery of the graves is big news appears, according to multiple articles I’ve read, to be because the survivors and their families have been insisting for years that children at the schools had disappeared and that many might be buried on the grounds; but, for many years, they were ignored or disbelieved. Authorities would say there was no evidence and would refuse to look for the evidence.
Here’s the proof, at one school at least. And here’s the physical evidence that may, finally, force authorities to investigate many such reports; both from the USA and from Canada.