The Colonization of North America

[LM K]

My mister told me about this this morning. He couldn't bring himself to read it.

My mister is 1/2 Japanese and 1/4 Cherokee. Some of his indigenous family members were able to pass as white. Those who couldn't pass hid in the hills ... to protect their children from being kidnapped and sent to institutional schools. Truly; that was the reason his family and their fellow tribe members hid in the hills.

A mass grave containing the remains of 215 children has been found in Canada at a former residential school set up to assimilate indigenous people.

The children were students at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia that closed in 1978.

The discovery was announced on Thursday by the chief of the Tk'emlups te Secwepemc First Nation.


Rosanne Casimir, the chief of the community in British Columbia's city of Kamloops, said the preliminary finding represented an unthinkable loss that was never documented by the school's administrators.

Canada's residential schools were compulsory boarding schools run by the government and religious authorities during the 19th and 20th Centuries with the aim of forcibly assimilating indigenous youth.

Kamloops Indian Residential School was the largest in the residential system. Opened under Roman Catholic administration in 1890, the school had as many as 500 students when enrolment peaked in the 1950s.

The central government took over administration of the school in 1969, operating it as a residence for local students until 1978, when it was closed.

What do we know about the remains?
The Tk'emlups te Secwepemc First Nation said the remains were found with the help of a ground-penetrating radar during a survey of the school.

"To our knowledge, these missing children are undocumented deaths," Ms Casimir said. "Some were as young as three years old."

"We sought out a way to confirm that knowing out of deepest respect and love for those lost children and their families, understanding that Tk'emlups te Secwepemc is the final resting place of these children."


What were residential schools?
From about 1863 to 1998, more than 150,000 indigenous children were taken from their families and placed in these schools.

The children were often not allowed to speak their language or to practise their culture, and many were mistreated and abused.

A commission launched in 2008 to document the impacts of this system found that large numbers of indigenous children never returned to their home communities.

The landmark Truth and Reconciliation report, released in 2015, said the policy amounted to "cultural genocide".

In 2008, the Canadian government formally apologised for the system.

The Missing Children Project documents the deaths and the burial places of children who died while attending the schools. To date, more than 4,100 children who died while attending a residential school have been identified, it says.

[Suranis]

Ok I don't want to seem heartless here, but I feel we have to put that death number into context.

First similar mass graves have been fount here in Ireland and other places around the world. They aren't exclusive.

Secondly You have to remember these was from the era that Smallpox Polio, measles and other diseases were not eradicated and health care wasn't that great. Children died all the time. Its a painful fact. There is also the fact these places could be overcrowded and the government never bothered with giving them enough money. Again, not exactly an exclusive problem to North America.

So lets say this place was running for 70 years. I don't know how long it was running for so feel free to correct me.

215 children in 70 years equals 3.07 per year on average. Which is not a massive amount and is kinda what you might expect.

I'm not saying you should dismiss the idea of mistreatment completely, but its important not to look at the 215 number and just think they were killing them deliberately. You have to look at how many children went though it, the staffing, the health facilities in the place if any, whether they were overwhelmed and overcrowded and so on.

[sugar magnolia]

Ok I don't want to seem heartless here, but I feel we have to put that death number into context.

First similar mass graves have been fount here in Ireland and other places around the world. They aren't exclusive.

Secondly You have to remember these was from the era that Smallpox Polio, measles and other diseases were not eradicated and health care wasn't that great. Children died all the time. Its a painful fact. There is also the fact these places could be overcrowded and the government never bothered with giving them enough money. Again, not exactly an exclusive problem to North America.

So lets say this place was running for 70 years. I don't know how long it was running for so feel free to correct me.

215 children in 70 years equals 3.07 per year on average. Which is not a massive amount and is kinda what you might expect.

I'm not saying you should dismiss the idea of mistreatment completely, but its important not to look at the 215 number and just think they were killing them deliberately. You have to look at how many children went though it, the staffing, the health facilities in the place if any, whether they were overwhelmed and overcrowded and so on.

It's more important to look at the fact that these kids were forcibly removed from their homes and placed in what amounted to internment camps. One death in that scenario is too many.

[Lani]

215 is big number because the children disappeared. Their families were not told where the children were and that they had died. Likely the records of the children's homes and family were destroyed. The children were punished if they spoke their original language. Corporal punishment was the preferred way to train the children to act in a way accepted in a white society..

The US snatched Native American children and sent them to what amounted to juvenile detention. Punishment for speaking their language, punishment for not acting white. It continued through the 1950's at least.

The Brits snatched children from "inferior" families, such as unmarried mums. The children were sent to British colonies in Africa and also Canada and Australia well into the 1960's. As British presence in Africa and elsewhere faded, the people in charge of the children were told to destroy all records. There was a documentary about it when I lived in Oz. Most of the stolen children were put in dangerous situations. They were not treated well and were mainly used for work in factories or on ranches. Sexual violence was common. Ageing adult survivors in Australia were frantically trying to find their birth families. The saddest person who spoke was in his 70's when he found his mum. She passed away just before he learned her name. He was interviewed at her grave site.

My next door neighbor was Aboriginal. Apparently, that was how I bought a house well below average price. We weren't close, but friendly and often chatted. My son frequently went to see if he could play in her backyard. She had restored it to its original nature, all Aussie plants, winding path through the yard. He loved playing there and learning from her about the plants. Sometimes she held a corroboree which we loved to hear.

In time, she told me about being a little girl in a state run camp for Aboriginal mothers and children. One day she was taken away and wound up in Canada. She eventually found out that her home was in the Northern Territory and went on a search for her family. Her parents had passed. She met relatives and learned as much as she could. Then she was conflicted because she was in a better place than her relatives. She had a good education including a university degree. On the other hand, why wasn't that available to her in NT instead of stealing her from her family?

[Suranis]

It's more important to look at the fact that these kids were forcibly removed from their homes and placed in what amounted to internment camps. One death in that scenario is too many.

Yes, I didn't comment on that.

[Uninformed]

As a coincidence the BBC are currently airing a programme on “forced adoption” (legally consented to ) in the UK including cases from the 1970’s. (There are still concerns about the forced adoption laws currently in place that are intended to ensure the child’s best interests).

Obviously these cases are somewhat different from the almost genocide carried out against some ethnic/indigenous peoples, but it’s still treating others as “lesser people”.

[Lani]

And there was also eugenics. Unmarried women and girls went to institutions to give birth, only to learn years later that they were sterilized. https://www.facinghistory.org/resource- ... arrie-buck

[RTH10260]

At the Bottom of Lake Huron, an Ancient Mystery Materializes
By Aaron Martin on June 1, 2021

The air was likely frigid as the hunter lit a small fire. The caribou would come in the morning—forced through the narrow strip of marshland where he camped. There was nowhere else to go. The land was flanked by water on both sides, and large stones had been laid out in slanting lines to funnel the animals into this bottleneck. The hunter struck his weapon to sharpen its edge in anticipation. In that moment, two glassy flakes splintered away from the point of impact and fell to his feet. They would be buried there for nearly 10,000 years.

In 2013 those two shards of obsidian, a natural volcanic glass, would be recovered from a sample of earth, roughly the volume of a quart of milk, pulled from the bottom of Lake Huron, under 100 feet of water. And the story the flakes would tell was one of an even longer journey.

John M. O’Shea of the University of Michigan and his team of underwater archaeologists have found something extraordinary about these two pieces of obsidian: they traveled nearly 2,500 miles from central Oregon before coming to rest at what is now the bottom of one of the Great Lakes.

The samples were recovered from the Alpena-Amberley Ridge, a geologic formation below Lake Huron that connects Michigan to Ontario. O’Shea and his team have been diving at the site for more than a decade, collecting artifacts and environmental samples to prove that 9,000 years ago—as ice age glaciers were receding and the Great Lakes were forming—the area was dry land inhabited by Native Americans, who built hunting structures on it to trap and kill caribou.

Obsidian was highly prized by ancient stone toolmakers. The flakes identified by Brendan Nash, a member of O’Shea’s team at the University of Michigan have strike marks and sharp, feathered edges—both telltale signs of human modification. This evidence, combined with the distance to the obsidian’s original source, paint a picture of an extensive trade or exchange network that spanned the continent nearly 3,000 years after the end of the last ice age.

Stone tools recovered from the Alpena-Amberley Ridge are much smaller than artifacts found nearby that date to the same time period. This suggests that a group of ancient people, with a different way of life and system of hunting, existed on the ridge around 9,000 years ago.


https://www.scientificamerican.com/vide ... erializes/

[LM K]

Ok I don't want to seem heartless here, but I feel we have to put that death number into context.

First similar mass graves have been fount here in Ireland and other places around the world. They aren't exclusive.

No shit. How does this make this specific mass grave any less horrific?

They're finding mass graves at many of these schools.

You're correct about child mass graves being everywhere. Ireland has a shockingly high number of child mass graves. The grave at Tuam is beyond my understanding. Mass graves of children exist all over the world.

Secondly You have to remember these was from the era that Smallpox Polio, measles and other diseases were not eradicated and health care wasn't that great. Children died all the time. Its a painful fact. There is also the fact these places could be overcrowded and the government never bothered with giving them enough money. Again, not exactly an exclusive problem to North America.

The purpose for these schools was to turn indigenous children into Christians whom would "blend in". Let's beat the savage right out of them!

These schools were unnecessary. Issues of overcrowding and disease are issues only because the church and government made it legal AND mandatory for CHRISTIAN GROUPS TO KIDNAP CHILDREN.

So lets say this place was running for 70 years. I don't know how long it was running for so feel free to correct me.

215 children in 70 years equals 3.07 per year on average. Which is not a massive amount and is kinda what you might expect.

Are you fucking serious?

These are 215 deaths that were never acknowledged or recorded. That number doesn't include deaths that were recorded.

I'm not saying you should dismiss the idea of mistreatment completely, but its important not to look at the 215 number and just think they were killing them deliberately. You have to look at how many children went though it, the staffing, the health facilities in the place if any, whether they were overwhelmed and overcrowded and so on.

You forget. This article discusses one school in Canada. Canada and the US had these schools EVERYWHERE.

A 2001 report by the Truth Commission into Genocide in Canada documents the responsibility of the Roman Catholic Church, the United Church of Canada, the Anglican Church of Canada, and the federal government in the deaths of more than 50,000 Native children in the Canadian residential school system.

The report says church officials killed children by beating, poisoning, electric shock, starvation, prolonged exposure to sub-zero cold while naked, and medical experimentation, including the removal of organs and radiation exposure. In 1928 Alberta passed legislation allowing school officials to forcibly sterilize Native girls; British Columbia followed suit in 1933. There is no accurate toll of forced sterilizations because hospital staff destroyed records in 1995 after police launched an investigation. But according to the testimony of a nurse in Alberta, doctors sterilized entire groups of Native children when they reached puberty. The report also says that Canadian clergy, police, and business and government officials “rented out” children from residential schools to pedophile rings.

Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC)

[Suranis]

None of which changes the fact that there is no evidence that they were deliberately mistreating the children IN THIS PARTICULAR PLACE.

And ya I bet you heard of Tuam from the NYT. The problem is that the NYT, of course, Left out that there was a report in around 1952 that said the place was was horrifically overcrowded, and in another report 3 years later it said they had rectified the problems and were now a model center. PLUS Tuam was open longer than this place and had a lot less Children deaths. AND the indications were that they were NOT tossed into a septic tank, but had been buried in Crypts and the Septic Tank had been installed afterwords in the same field. AND I bet your article didnt mention that the place was owned by the state and that the State has apologized for their part in the deaths, very reluctantly.

I haven't read that 2001 report that Amnesty said as your link to it only goes to a wayback machine version of the amnesty page not the report itself, and your second link goes to a collation page for a 2015 report. I.E. Proves bugger all without a lot of extra work on the reader. So I have no idea what the report actually said, or even if it existed.

So here is the introduction to volume 4 from your link.

http://publications.gc.ca/collections/c ... 15-eng.pdf

Canada’s Residential Schools: Missing Children and Unmarked Burials

Executive summary

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s “Missing Children and Unmarked Burials Project” is a systematic effort to record and analyze the deaths at the schools, and the presence and condition of student cemeteries, within the regulatory context in which the schools were intended to operate. The proj-ect’s research supports the following conclusions:•

The Commission has identified 3,200 deaths on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Register of Confirmed Deaths of Named Residential School Students and the Register of Confirmed Deaths of Unnamed Residential School Students.•

For just under one-third of these deaths (32%), the government and the schools did not record the name of the student who died.•For just under one-quarter of these deaths (23%), the government and the schools did not record the gender of the student who died.•

For just under one-half of these deaths (49%), the government and the schools did not record the cause of death.•Aboriginal children in residential schools died at a far higher rate than school-aged children in the general population.•

For most of the history of the schools, the practice was not to send the bodies of students who died at schools to their home communities.•

For the most part, the cemeteries that the Commission documented are aban-doned, disused, and vulnerable to accidental disturbance.•

The federal government never established an adequate set of standards and reg-ulations to guarantee the health and safety of residential school students.•

The federal government never adequately enforced the minimal standards and regulations that it did establish.•

The failure to establish and enforce adequate regulations was largely a function of the government’s determination to keep residential school costs to a minimum.

Thee failure to establish and enforce adequate standards, coupled with the failure to adequately fund the schools, resulted in unnecessarily high death rates at res-idential schools. These fndings are in keeping with statements that former students and the par-ents of former students gave to the Commission. They spoke of children who went to school and never returned. e tragedy of the loss of children was compounded by the fact that burial places were distant or even unknown. Many Aboriginal people have unanswered questions about what happened to their children or relatives while they were attending residential school. e work that the Commission has begun in iden-tifying and commemorating those students who died at school and their gravesites needs to be nished.

e work that the Commission has commenced is far from complete. e National Residential School Student Death Register established by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada represents the rst national effort to record the names of the students who died at school. ere is a need for continued work on the register: there are many relevant documents that have yet to be reviewed. ere is a need for the development and implementation of a national strategy for the documentation, maintenance, commemoration, and protection of residential school cemeteries. Such a program, carried out in close consultation with the concerned Aboriginal communi-ties, is necessary to properly honour the memory of the children who died in Canada’s residential schools.

[Estiveo]

But LM K, you don't understand, the mass graves in Ireland were at facilities run by the Catholics, so those deaths were all perfectly fine.

Mass graves elsewhere were at facilities run by other Christian denominations as well as the Catholics, but since the deaths at Catholic run facilities were perfectly fine, the deaths at the other facilities were also perfectly fine too.

These people were just trying to save the souls of these pagans, heathens, sluts, & offspring of sluts the best way they knew how. If some of them died along they way? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Besides, I'm sure all the dead were properly baptized before being quietly buried, so they all went to heaven despite being pagans, heathens, sluts, & offspring of sluts.

Hope that put everything in perspective for you.

[Suranis]

Yes Estevio. Lets just ignore where her link quoted a report which said

deaths of more than 50,000 Native children in the Canadian residential school system.

And then she posted a link to a later report wherein there was a link that said

The Commission has identified 3,200 deaths on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Register of Confirmed Deaths of Named Residential School Students and the Register of Confirmed Deaths of Unnamed Residential School Students.•

Which, I might note, is less than 50,000 glorious torture filled deaths with Priests for you to cream themselves over.

[roadscholar]

Mousie, will you ever, EVER, admit that the Church has, in fact, committed atrocious acts? Or will you just continue to deny, minimize, and “whatabout” every single sin they have committed?

[Suranis]

Who the fuck is denying anything? I just linked to a 2015 report that said that 3000 kids died in the hands of Canadian residential schools run, in part, by Catholic orders. A Link that was pointed to by LMK.

If you are not satisfied by the facts being other than lurid tales of Catholic Vampire Pedo blood cults, that's your problem.

[Patagoniagirl]

Mousie, will you ever, EVER, admit that the Church has, in fact, committed atrocious acts? Or will you just continue to deny, minimize, and “whatabout” every single sin they have committed?

This. It's a constant screeching defense of the Catholic Hierarchy which resulted in horrific abuses, deaths, and ridiculous denials. The whataboutism in your posts, Sur, is exhausting. You seem to think we are attacking Catholicism. Well, yes, in a way.

I feel like I push back and attack any organized religion who hides abuse - which is the problem. Justifying the history of abuse by the Catholic Hierarchy by pointing out other similar situations does not vindicate one of the most powerful religious mafia mogul organizations for their nefarious deeds.

[Suranis]

https://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action ... 0-2002.pdf

The only study done on US clerical abuse - the John Jay report in 2004. Everything in this report is likely true.

This report was rejected by people like you becasue it was commissioned by the Catholic Bishops themselves. And, I guess, becasue it wasn't horrific enough for your tastes. You want your worldwide Catholic Vampire Torture cult, and the report just didn't show it.

Grow the hell up. I've been getting it in the neck about this shit for 30 fucking years, and you are expecting me to be just as apologetic as I was on year 1 before reforms and before reports. It's no longer 1992, Stop acting like it, and stop expecting me to crawl as though it is.

And stop letting other orgs off becasue they haven't commissioned the same reforms the Catholic Church has. If you want to enjoy the thoughts of kid fucking and torture, you have to also suffer through hearing about the Reforms the CC have done since 1992. You poor dears.

30 fucking years, bitches. Imagine how wearing hearing that crap for that length of time is. The German nation might be able to clue you in, as they have been getting it in the neck about WW2 for 80 years.

But ya, its still 1992. And the Church is still the same as 1992, right?

And by the way I'm sneering at the NYT article becasue that's the paper that FALSELY accused Pope Benedict of helping pedos get away with it, and that turned out to be completely false. For example the NYT made a big show of a Pedo on Trial writing to the then Cardinal asking for help, and soon after the Trial was stopped. They left out the fact that Cardinal wrote back telling Him a big fat NO! and the Trial was stopped as the Abuser died. I cant think why they left that part out.

And I bet you still believe Pope Benedict did it, huh?

AND by the way, this started becasue I wanted to give a bit of context to the raw number of deaths. and I deliberately did NOT talk about the removal of children issue as I know fuck all about that issue, and anything I say on it would therefore be insensitive.

Of course being you, you took my silence on that to mean I was ignoring and covering up for "the Church killing kids." Fuck you. Ya, ya, It's my fault that I read your fucking links and showed they didn't mean shit, and not your fault for using links that were flawed. I was just covering up for the CC by reading the links.

The Catholic Church abuse scandal was not as huge as you desperately want it to be. Its been 30 years and all the insults don't work as things have changed, the Church is better, and abuse in other organizations has been allowed to flourish as they are not Catholic and have not done the reforms the CC has done.

And ya you can be cynical and say the Church has been forced to change by 20 years of lawsuits. Who cares? Either way, you have to admit the reforms have happened, and the CC has dealt with this over 30 fucking years of effort.

In short; Grow up, start pulling the planks out of your own eyes, and Fuck off.

[filly]

You need some mental health attention. Pronto.

[Patagoniagirl]

The church hasn't changed. The church has been forced to change.

And your fuck off comments above are why your claims that you are unfairly attacked prove why.

[Suranis]

And I'm sick of having to ignore threads becasue the Blindy Bunch starts presuming I'm covering shit up and probably assuming they are making such great points becasue I don't respond. Sorry dearlings, its just becasue I have the discipline to walk the hell away and never open a thread again.

I'm not wasting my time being the punch bag.

And I got the word "Dearling" from a book about a homosexual wizard called Vanyel, by the author Mercedes Lakey, that I read 25 years ago. Whata homophobe, huh?

Exunt.

[filly]

Go to the emergency room and see a psychiatrist. I'm serious.

[Patagoniagirl]

You do realize this isn't just about the death of children, right? This is also about the survivors who were beaten and sexually abused. It's about the fact that a blanket "were sorry" in general doesn't make amends. This is about a systematic dogma which harmed children all over the world. And indigenous families suffered horribly.

"“I’m seeking justice for the 215 children and for the children yet to be found. I’m seeking justice for residential school survivors,” she said in a phone interview. “As a residential school survivor, we shared our stories over and over again – and the Catholic Church never acknowledged them or admitted what they did to us in the school.”

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/6/6 ... 45258439=1

[LM K]

Yes Estevio. Lets just ignore where her link quoted a report which said

deaths of more than 50,000 Native children in the Canadian residential school system.

And then she posted a link to a later report wherein there was a link that said

The Commission has identified 3,200 deaths on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Register of Confirmed Deaths of Named Residential School Students and the Register of Confirmed Deaths of Unnamed Residential School Students.•

Which, I might note, is less than 50,000 glorious torture filled deaths with Priests for you to cream themselves over.

Confirmed and unconfirmed deaths. The 215 children found at this mass grave were unconfirmed deaths ... that will change.

I still need to do more research. I think that the 50,000 is a typo. I'll provide more info once I have time to do so.

I'm not going off on Catholicism. Catholics and Protestants ran these schools. Both Canada and the US made these schools legally compulsory.

Could you please not imply that folks are deriving sexual pleasure when talking about Indigenous Residential schools? I'm not.

[LM K]

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission's final report

https://nctr.ca/records/reports/

[northland10]

Why is this argument about the "evil Catholic hierarchy" only? Multiple denominations and the government itself were mentioned yet it seems we are making sure that we must argue about the blame that must be on the Roman Catholic Church and not on Americans and Canadians in general. While he's, the various church's did wrong, so did the non-church entities and yet, we must heap blame only one segment.

The same can go with the dreadful child abuse. Yes, the Roman Catholics did extremely poorly and will have to recon with this for a long time but they are not the only ones. All denominations (and now I am hearing it bubble up in the Southern Baptist Convention), various youth groups, and secular schools also have a host of the blame for turning a blind eye to abuse for a long time. The only problem is that I see the nastiness only in one direction and very little encouragement to fix the problem going forward. We want to punish, not move forward.

This vitriol from both sides here is getting us nowhere and is tiresome. Yelling at each other for who is to blame does not fix a thing.

Colonizations may have had the church at the lead but they were doing the bidding of what the people wanted and did fail their mission. That does not mean we are turning a blind eye now. The Episcopal church was just as culpable as others and they are discussing their way through this but it will take a while.

[LM K]

At the Bottom of Lake Huron, an Ancient Mystery Materializes
By Aaron Martin on June 1, 2021


John M. O’Shea of the University of Michigan and his team of underwater archaeologists have found something extraordinary about these two pieces of obsidian: they traveled nearly 2,500 miles from central Oregon before coming to rest at what is now the bottom of one of the Great Lakes.


Obsidian was highly prized by ancient stone toolmakers. The flakes identified by Brendan Nash, a member of O’Shea’s team at the University of Michigan have strike marks and sharp, feathered edges—both telltale signs of human modification. This evidence, combined with the distance to the obsidian’s original source, paint a picture of an extensive trade or exchange network that spanned the continent nearly 3,000 years after the end of the last ice age.

Stone tools recovered from the Alpena-Amberley Ridge are much smaller than artifacts found nearby that date to the same time period. This suggests that a group of ancient people, with a different way of life and system of hunting, existed on the ridge around 9,000 years ago.

That's incredible!