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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   28778 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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NYT has released an article about unmarked graves in Canada.

They quote Tom Flanagan about lack of concrete evidence for child graves:

“There’s, so far, no evidence of any remains of children buried around residential schools,” Tom Flanagan, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Calgary and an author of “Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth About Residential Schools),” said in an interview.

“Nobody disputes,” he added, “that children died and that the conditions were sometimes chaotic. But that’s quite different from clandestine burials.”

The arguments by Mr. Flanagan and other skeptics have been roundly denounced by elected officials across the political spectrum who say evidence clearly suggests that there are many sites of unmarked burials.

Chief Rosanne Casimir of the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc Nation, who made the announcement about the Kamloops site, said: “The denialists, they’re hurtful. They are basically saying that didn’t happen.”

Why are the denialists hurtful, Chief Rosanne? Wouldn't it be great news if there are no unmarked graves?

“We’ve had many conversations about whether to exhume or not to exhume,” Chief Casimir said. “It is very difficult and it is definitely very complex. We know that it’ll take time. And we also know that we have many steps yet to go.”

“We have to know for sure,” she added, “that we did everything that we can to determine: yes or no, anomaly or grave?”

So, the current course of action is to continue not knowing for sure.

“Will every one of those anomalies turn out to be an unmarked grave? Obviously not,” Mr. Lametti, a former law professor now practicing law in Montreal, said. “But there’s enough preponderant evidence already that is compelling.”

The article conveniently omits which evidence is compelling.

The comments seem like a breath of fresh air:

So having read this article, I’ve learned that native children were in the past treated horribly by the government, and that today there is a vigorous debate about how to remember that. But the article doesn’t tell us whether there is actual evidence for mass graves.

The ground penetrating radar results showed disturbances that could be bodies, or tree roots, or something else. There's simply no way to tell unless there are excavations.

When these results were announced in 2021, the country was led to believe these were likely children's graves. Flags were lowered for months. It was reported as a deeply shameful fact, and it really undermined people's pride in their country.

Shockingly, no one in authority has tried to actually get to the bottom of what actually lies underground. If these were clandestine graves there should be criminal investigations. If these are tree roots, then this should be a very cautionary tale against preliminary investigation results being taken as fact and then used for political purposes.

All of the above is totally separate from the real and well documented suffering of Indigenous children wrongly taken from their parents and placed in those awful schools. But it does their memory no credit to make unproven claims in their name.

And now we come to the comment, due to which I started writing all this:

It is sad this is the most recommended comment, which is simply refuted in the second sentence of the article.

Racism abound.

Quote from the article:

While there is a broad consensus in Canada that children were taken from their families and died in these schools, as the discussions and searches have dragged on, a small universe of conservative Catholic and right-wing activists have become increasingly vocal in questioning the existence of unmarked graves. They are also skeptical of the entire national reconsideration of how Canada treated Indigenous people.

Another comment:

Same old rightwing playbook. Deny, obfuscate and rely on sophistry to prove that nothing is real unless they agree with it.

There are so many known and proven ways, in which First Nations were harmed. I can't imagine my child being taken away from me to be reeducated in some way in general, let alone experimented on. Taking away children from their parents causes a visceral reaction in me. I can't imagine the pain and which downstream effects this would cause to a community.

Setting all of the compassion I feel on the personal level aside, why do we need to invent new ways for the indigenous people to be oppressed? Is it acceptable to just lie for victimhood points at this point? Why do liberals seem to be content with this state of affairs?

It all comes down to this, and it's a very cynical and bitter conclusion: it's profitable to lie. Would, for example, this documentary* be made? Would the feds give $27 million to National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation? Would provinces pledge more money for searches? (god knows which unreliable methods would this money be spent on in the future. Divination? Remote viewing? Not out of the question apparently).

And the same tired tactics are used to browbeat the skeptics into "believing science", again. Who cares that for now ground scanning radar found exactly 0 buried kids? It doesn't matter, Catholics killed kids. It's plain and simple, champ. Just be more centered. Do better. Be less racist. Catholic churches on fire be damned. What's one church against maybe existing child remains?

Chief Nepinak from the CBC article above:

“I think the vocal majority in the room, in the community engagements, wanted certainty. They wanted to find the truth. They wanted people held accountable,” Nepinak said. “And to that end, you know, we prioritized that, that voice.”

Apparently, it's easy to exhume, even if the act of doing so violates religious beliefs. And now Pine Creek First Nation knows for certain: no unmarked graves where the ground scanning radar found the anomalies. Tk’emlups te Secwepemc Nation, on the other hand, would prefer to not know.

* This documentary is stunningly scare on content. Julian Brave NoiseCat shows us a lot of tears over the dead children, lying in those unmarked graves. A lot of interpersonal trauma. People hurting other people - there's a scene where he confronts his absentee father about spending the childhood without him. They find a survivor of residential schools who recounts a story about putting a newborn baby, who was the result of an indigenous girl being raped by a priest, in an incinerator. Of course there's no evidence outside of this single account. The whole RAPE BABY INCINERATION is mentioned in passing. One of the main characters is an activist woman, who's trying to uncover the whole truth about the residential schools for 50 years and the only thing that she now clings to is... unmarked graves. Widespread evidence of abuse is so widespread, one person can apparently dig for 50 years and come up with nothing.

Is it acceptable to just lie for victimhood points at this point?

Earlier today I started doing a writeup on these events after seeing headlines to the effect of, "box knife used to carve racial slur into flesh of college student." My first thought was "if it's not a straight up hoax, then it may be the most unambiguously racist crime I've ever heard of." But I ended up abandoning the post because I couldn't figure out what to say beyond "I'd like to say 'wait and see' but I kind of doubt we'll ever see."

Reading between the lines, it seems like the actual events were: two college kids who were friends got up to some shenanigans with a sharp object, including writing "the N-word" on the chest of the black friend. The writing is variously described as "scratching," "cutting," and "carving," depending on who is talking about it, and the implement is variously described as plastic, ceramic, a box cutter, a box knife... no pictures of the implement or actual slur appear in evidence. Some upperclassmen reported these shenanigans to their coaches, who kicked both the perpetrator and the "victim" off the team.

To carve a legible word into someone's flesh requires either dramatically overpowering strength, a gang of lackeys holding the victim down, or the cooperation of the victim. The victim also was apparently not the one to report the events, though the victim's family is quite upset about the whole thing. So my best guess is that the two friends decided to do something edgy together, or maybe the victim is easily suggestible for some reason. But of course the whole story now is about racism instead of about the general foolishness one gets when young athletic males are gathered together with no purpose but to "have some fun." And not just any racism, but "carving the N-word into the flesh" of the victim! Now that's a headline to sell some papers! Nuanced discussion of how racial slurs have become one of very few kinds of language young people can use to genuinely shock and disturb, such that most utterances of racial slurs are probably disconnected from actual racism (of the "race X is inherently superior to race Y" variety), is right out.

Now, for all I know the perpetrator is 6'7" and can bench press a horse, while the victim is 5'5" and 100lbs. soaking wet, and the perpetrator is a Good Old Boy who always wanted his own scarified slave or something, and this was every bit as horrific as the headlines imply. But I don't know, and I doubt I ever will, and as long as no one really knows, we can all just tell ourselves whatever story we want to tell ourselves about how these events totally reinforce all our existing beliefs and biases.

Hopefully you can see how that's not a tangent at all, despite me not commenting on the exhausting superposition of "gravesites" which are probably mostly not gravesites. But so long as they might be, well, then there is money to be made and power to be grabbed by peddling a narrative. The story is more useful--arguably to both proponents and opponents--as long as it remains uncertain.

Truth is the only casualty, and who (but the occasional Internet autist) cares about that?

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