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Notes -
Excavation after 14 anomalies detected at former residential school site found no evidence of graves: Manitoba chief
Although these excavations were at a different residential school than Kamloops, the technology and methodology used to identify the "potential" mass graves, GPR analysis, were the same that motivated the Manitoba excavations. Similar to Kamloops, the GPR results were combined with rumors and witness testimonies of atrocities to formulate a belief in the existence of mass graves on the Manitoba site which did lead to a 4 week excavation...
From the beginning I strongly suspected we were never going to see excavations at Kamloops, because this would be the result. This is a familiar M.O when waging culture war. Hysterically allege an atrocity that didn't happen, base those sensational claims on very thin evidence combined with rumor and witness testimony, and then claim some religious or spiritual dispensation for minimum-standard scientific investigation of the alleged mass graves. Lastly, make sure to denounce everyone who demands excavations as a genocide denier:
Genocide deniers ask: Where are the bodies of the residential schoolchildren?
I suspect we will continue to see smaller-scale excavations elsewhere, because finding any remains at all anywhere would at least be able to provide some fuel to the Kamloops narrative. But the alleged site of the Kamloops mass grave will simply become a memorial where the alleged victims can wage racial-grievance politics for financial and political gain, and it will be sacrilege to be so hateful as to demand excavations to actually investigate the claims which have been made.
Can anyone who is not Holocaust denier, with SS-man as nickname, can confirm is this summary above is true and accurate?
Broadly correct, but I would quibble with parts of the framing.
It's certainly true that the 'bodies' found at Kamloops have never been anything more than anomalies found on ground penetrating radar, and that media and activists have never really made any attempt to communicate this to their audiences. The vast majority of people would never realise that these bodies are entirely theoretical and could easily just not be there. Chalk another one up to the media being bullshitters.
However, what I would disagree with in SecureSignals post is the implication that this stuff therefore didn't happen, or that the backlash against the Catholic Church is unjustified. I personally see the 'graves' at Kamloops as a catalyst for action, rather than the substance of the grievance itself. It is undeniable that the Canadian government in association with the Catholic Church basically kidnapped tens of thousands of native children and stuffed them into places like Kamloops, where the conditions were pretty awful (though perhaps not so awful by the standards of the time). Many deaths resulted. Official records from Kamloops say 50 children died there; the true total is likely higher. Though I admit I have little sympathy for the Church to begin with, I don't see the arson of a couple dozen churches to be an outsize reaction to the Church's involvement in residential schools. You reap what you sow.
One of the problems with excusing misrepresentations that you think are directionally correct is that many of the people doing so don't know how their own views have been shaped by lies or misrepresentations, building a new layer of bullshit on top of the old one. For instance:
This is how it is often described, but sending your children to residential school was optional.
https://fcpp.org/2018/08/22/myth-versus-evidence-your-choice/
Now if you lived in a location without local schools residential schools were the only ones available, and the percentage of natives living in such locations was higher. But conversely getting out of sending your children to school was easier than it is today, and indeed native enrollment was low:
And absenteeism among those enrolled was high:
The punishment for your children being truant was mild, seems easily avoided by giving an excuse like chronic illness, and most importantly hardly ever enforced to begin with. That is not the sort of coercion required to get parents to send their children to a concentration camp. Native children didn't go to residential schools because they were "kidnapped", they went because their parents believed it was better than the alternatives, including the alternative of not going to school at all. That is compatible with them being low-quality schools, it isn't compatible with the insane rhetoric about them that is prevalent today.
Many deaths resulted from native americans being biologically more vulnerable to diseases like tuberculosis. Is there even any evidence that the death rate of native children at residential schools was higher than the death rate of native children elsewhere? Skimming chapter 16 ("The deadly toll of infectious diseases: 1867–1939") from the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it looks like the closest they come to an overall comparison instead of talking about individual outbreaks is this:
https://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/9.807830/publication.html
Good finds. Reading those articles seems to indicate that the entire narrative is wrong and this story is one part bigotry against Catholics and one part they are lying to use because that’s what they do.
I wouldn't say the entire narrative is wrong -- regardless of the laws on the books, there was definitely considerable coercion involved in 'encouraging' attendance -- this spin is similar in nature to how the authors of COVID restrictions said things like "nobody's forcing anyone to be vaccinated, we are just stopping them from eating out/leaving the country/etc if they don't".
What is quite pernicious (and I believe originates with the current government) is the spin towards blaming the church (churches actually -- many of the schools were run by protestant denominations, and at least some by non-religious entities) for the issues.
Whoever was running a given school was acting as an agent of the Canadian government -- so that fault for individual behaviour like molestation etc lies with the individuals involved, and the systemic issues (coercion, underfunding, 'cultural assimilation) with the sitting governments. Government has been trying to downplay this since forever, but have suddenly succeeded due to the surge in people who somehow didn't learn about this in elementary school (starting in the late 70s) and think they have discovered some new thing. (which happens to be the government narrative, and has only tenuous relations with the truth) Plus the general propensity for hating Catholics in the water these days I guess.
The Catholics were known to sometimes cover up instances of molestation and other misbehaviour by moving the offenders around and not reporting to authorities -- like many aspects of the story this is bad enough in itself! Yet someone there is the need to invent other things which would be even worse if they were true, but weaken the case IMO considering that they are not.
I guess Id say the systemic issues was just being poor. Which isn’t something your guilty of. It’s not like the Canadian government had unlimited resources. And it sounds like the schools outperformed alternative Options.
Eh, it shades towards Copenhagen Ethics I suppose, but "you touch it you own it" is still pretty valid in this situation. Conditions on reserves (govt related!) and in generally remote areas (not so much) were not great in the late 19th/early 20th centuries -- but if you want to take people away from their homes the bar should be pretty high to ensure that the results are much much better than just leaving them alone. Which very clearly seems not to be the case -- there's the odd satisfied 'customer' of the residential school system out there, but it's legitimately unusual. And normally the super-succesful FN people that you see in business/law/politics had their education in regular mixed day-schools, whether due to not living on the reserve at all or being in the sweet spot of 'reserve too small for its own school' and 'not too far away from regular towns' where it made the most sense for them to go to school with everyone else.
I guess I reject Copenhagen ethics. That’s basically saying we should only build gated communities because then we never interact with the lower class and can’t be blamed for it. Comes up a lot with trade. Like Nike getting yelled at for using cheap labor. Yet those people are better off because the factory is there.
So I disagree the bar needs to be very high. Improving the world should just be improving the world. 21st century mostly leftist ideology leads to worse outcomes.
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