To a certain extent, it would have been in line with the religious views of the time to impose stern discipline in order to rid the heathen of their old ways and impart them with Christianity. The pain of being whipped for backsliding is a small thing compared to the salvation of their immortal soul, etc.
Obviously, that wouldn’t pertain to the sexual abuse, etc. But it is a part of the framework within which these schools were conceived.
The part about forcibly converting non-believers by any means necessary.
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.
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.
But the situation being discussed didn’t involve the the United States, nor was Mr. Pratt involved.
This kind of question frankly annoys me a tad, and I don’t want to drift away from the norms of MPSIMS (where frankly I question if this thread even belongs), but I think the questions suggests a lack of knowledge of Christian history.
One of the most famed, revered, celebrated figures in the first thousand years of Christendom was Charlemagne. Much of his life was spent using brute military force to commit mass genocide against Germanic pagans. He would invade a Saxon region, and destroy sacred religious trees and groves with fire, and he would hold large gatherings of captured prisoners where they were forced to convert to Christianity on the spot. Any refusals were punished by summary and immediate execution.
Charlemagne is known to have ordered the massacre of over 4000 pagans at Verden in 782. Charles was crowned Emperor of the Romans by the Pope, and in Dante’s Divine Comedy we see Charlemagne in heaven, among the “warriors of the faith.” Frankly I question how any of this is news to anyone, and would say that anyone aware of Christian history at all would find exactly zero out of line with Christian practice and the cultural genocide of non-Christian native americans.
Bingo–said it much more succinctly than me. This is almost “Textbook Christianity.”
I agree there is a danger in interpreting history, which is written by the winners and is difficult to write objectively. Extremes of hero worship and picking on one bad part both underline that people are human, complex and imperfect. But I do not think all history takes one extreme view or the other. Often, views are more balanced. Even Napoleon’s most zealous supporters often concede his actions after 1807 were no longer in the spirit of the times.
Thank you for the history lesson involving Christianity a thousand or so years in the past.
Thanks, I have found most of your posts in this thread to be very low value so will not be responding to any future ones here, just as an FYI.
But was that the actual public norm for the Catholic Church? For the most part, when events involving coercion, torture and death are kept secret, it usually isn’t because the public at large supports(or even tolerates) such events.
Hi pot, meet kettle.
Word count <> value
There’s more than one kind of abuse involved here.
puzzlegal’s already phrased some of what I was going to say well:
Not only for the Christians. Religion wasn’t separate from the rest of life for a lot of other people also – including the children who were having theirs destroyed in those schools.
Well, yes. Not all the schools under discussion were run by Catholics, and it doesn’t seem that the non-Catholic ones were any better.
But because a problem is longrunning and widespread doesn’t make individual instances of it better. It makes them worse.
People who set up these programs had a responsibility to check how they were being carried out. They either failed that responsibility, or they did check and didn’t care. They’re not absolved of responsibility just because they might have been willing to also approve schools that fed the children and didn’t rape or torture them.
Don’t see anything in that post I disagree with (and consequently I see nothing that conflicts with what I have said, either, FWIW.)
Canadian history can be interesting but tends to be summarized briefly, rather than taught in the context of world history. The Illustrated History of Canada (2002) mentions residential schools in passing in one paragraph.
Macdonald achieving Confederation with so many diverse groups is a very significant achievement, kept the peace between the French and English, and helped Canada avoid ruinous civil war. Today, these groups cannot even agree to eliminate local trade barriers or that much else.
The Illustrated History of Canada states “Across the country, consolidated schools collected farm children… the greatest impact was on Canada’s half-forgotten native people. Improved health services sent birth rates soaring on the reserves. Education gave natives an awareness of their poverty, frustration and of a racism which seemed bound in the Indian Act and the white officials who managed its terms. Residential schools, with their harsh discipline and cultural insensitivity, created new generations of victims.”
Clearly a paragraph is not enough. A few brief words, still somewhat patronizing.
What I’m disagreeing with is that all of this:
is compatible with either deliberately allowing or deliberately ignoring rape, torture, and starvation.
Did they nevertheless think they were the good guys? Quite possibly. Lots of people seem to be capable of thinking they’re the good guys while torturing children to death, including in ways that their own official creed says are evil. Does that mean that we have to consider them good guys for doing that? No, it most certainly doesn’t.
If they did good things in some other areas, that shouldn’t be dropped out of history. But this:
is an absurd and unnecessary form of excusal. If a kid needs vitamin D, but it’s force fed to them mixed with poison, that is not a positive outcome. If a kid winds up dead, permanently physically damaged, permanently mentally damaged, that is not a positive outcome even if as a side effect they learned how to read. It’s entirely possible to provide vitamin D without mixing it with poison. It’s entirely possible to teach kids how to read without teaching them that everything their parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles ever did was evil; and it’s actually easier to do so if they’re not starved, ill, and terrified, let alone dead.
And while formal logic certainly has its uses, I’m not at all sure it’s not part of the problem here. Formal logic rests, among other things, on the either/or principle. And a very great deal of this and other disasters rests on people using the either/or principle without stopping to think whether it applies. It turns into “Either we are right or we are wrong. Either our religion is right or it is wrong. Either our way of living is right or it is wrong. We believe that we’re right – therefore everybody else must be Wrong!”
A huge portion of Christian people, maybe. There were plenty of other people prior to pre-modern times who were capable of thinking ‘we’ve got our religion over here, you’ve got yours over there, that’s normal’ and/or ‘over there they call our god X by the name Y and do a different ritual and the god seems to be OK with that.’
There’s a lovely explanation of why some people are terrified of Christianity.
I believe you’ve got some other things in your textbook, too. Certainly there have been Christians throughout history who preferred to practice some of the other ones.
So you are essentially making the argument, “if someone suffers something to happen, that thing is their goal.” Do you think that is a universal maxim? If so, are you familiar with how absurd that would be in a number of ways? E.x. we have food stamps, which we know will be used fraudulently, since we suffer to allow that, that is an intended goal of the food stamp system. That seems logically deficient.
Uh, I don’t think Pratt or the Canadian politicians were personally torturing any children to death. There was systemic torture and rape of children in an Ohio juvenile facility within the last ten years. Is it fair to say then Governor John Kasich raped children? That seems to be the line of logic you are establishing with your chosen word usage.
As for good buys and bad guys, I don’t do that. I specifically believe that thinking is in the “dumb dumb” school of historical analysis. If all you care about is finding guys to label good and bad, you aren’t much worth a bucket of warm piss as I reckon, in terms of historical analysis.
I think you’re struggling to associate this, frankly stupid, analogy of yours to what actually happened here. The larger portion of the students of these schools did survive to adulthood and benefitted undeniably from being educated and literate. A better historical example might be something like Mao’s “Great Leap Forward”, it actually did pay serious developmental dividends for the Chinese people. There is danger in being ignorant if you do not recognize that. There is danger in being barbarous if you don’t recognize the unacceptable cost of those programs. That maxim would apply here as well, which is all I have said. If anyone has attempted to “exonerate” someone here I don’t know who, I certainly haven’t. I’m simply advocating rational context and not emotional nonsense. No one here went to one of these schools, and I believe from all we can tell during the worst period of these schools operation virtually none of the men who ran them are alive. We’re talking about history here, properly understanding the context is important. “Exoneration” isn’t a goal, nor should be.
True but irrelevant. Christianity has been aggressively about forced conversion and religious violence for the lion’s share of its history, and at a level most would consider “quite common” up until the 19th century and arguably into the early 20th.
I mean this is a major aside and getting way off topic. But yes–I believe Christianity is a violent and evil religion. I believe the same of Islam and Judaism. I.e. all the major Abrahamic religions. I believe all three religions contain some beautiful philosophies and ideas that can bring out the best of us, but I don’t ignore the worst of them, and in many ways the closer one gets to the orthodox or actual historical forms of these religion, the closer you get to evil, as far as I see it.
No, I am not. I am making the argument that if your goal is to do x, and the readily foreseeable consequences of trying to accomplish x by technique y are z, and you choose to use technique x, you are responsible for z; even if it wasn’t your goal.
If my goal is to stop my neighbor’s dog from barking, and I choose to attempt to do that by shooting at the dog, and the dog dies of the shot, I’m responsible for killing the dog. If my intent is to shoot at the dog, and the neighbor’s child is standing behind the dog, and the shot kills the child, then I’m responsible for killing the child.
If he knew it was happening and didn’t do anything about it, then he’s complicit.
If he deliberately set up the system with no oversight to check whether it was happening, then he’s complicit.
If a system exists for oversight of the facilities, and he knows of its existence, and he has reason to think that it’s working, and he supports it as is suitable for his position, then he’s not complicit.
I am going to take a deep breath and presume that was a general “you”.
Everybody’s a mix of good and bad; some people more one way, some the other. I am certainly not trying to define everybody, or even the specific people who set up these programs, as solely one of the other. I said they may have seen themselves as the good guys; that’s not at all the same thing.
What I care about is that people are not taught that meaning well is a good excuse for doing things that were known to be terrible at the time.
An unknown but apparently quite large number of those survivors were seriously damaged by the experience, making them overall less capable of dealing with life. And all of them lost, by intention, valuable and in some cases unrecoverable knowledge from their own heritage. To claim that they “benefitted” from being able to read if the overall enjoyment and usefulness of their lives were destroyed by the process is indeed the equivalent of claiming that a vitamin-D deficient child benefits from being given vitamin D that’s mixed with a poison that permanently damages their bones, thereby leaving them overall no better off and quite possibly worse off than if they’d developed rickets. I do not see anything “stupid” about saying that.
Yes, that is way off topic. Please, everyone, stick to the topic at hand.
This sort of comment is completely unnecessary and insulting. Refrain from this in the future. No formal warning issued but it was close.
RickJay
Moderator
These schools were required, since turn of the 19th century, to record all deaths.
The school in question registered 55.
There were 215 graves discovered.