Another residential school, another unmarked mass grave cemetery.
Leaders of Indigenous groups in Canada said Thursday investigators have found more than 600 unmarked graves at the site of a former residential school for Indigenous children — a discovery that follows last month’s report of 215 bodies found at another school.
The bodies were discovered at the Marieval Indian Residential School, which operated from 1899 to 1997 where the Cowessess First Nation is now located, about 85 miles (135 kilometers) east of Regina, the capital of Saskatchewan.
A search with ground-penetrating radar resulted in 751 ’’hits,″ indicating that at least 600 bodies were buried in the area, said Chief Cadmus Delorme of the Cowessess. The radar operators have said their results could have a margin of error of 10%. “We want to make sure when we tell our story that we’re not trying to make numbers sound bigger than they are,” Delorme said. “I like to say over 600, just to be assured.” He said the search continues and the radar hits will be assessed by a technical team and the numbers will be verified in coming weeks.
Delorme said that the graves were marked at one time, but that the Roman Catholic Church that operated the school had removed the markers.
And why did they do that? Covering their tracks? Sowing contempt? What?
Florence Sparvier, 80, said she attended the Marieval Indian Residential School.
“The nuns were very mean to us,” she said. “We had to learn how to be Roman Catholic. We couldn’t say our own little blessings.”
Nuns at the school were “condemning about our people” and the pain inflicted continues generations later, Sparvier said.
“We learned how to not like who we were,” she said. “That has gone on and it’s still going on.″
It was the whole point – to try to make the children into Catholic Canadians instead of First Nation people. It’s colonialism in the most literal sense.
Comments
29 responses to “More victims”
There’s quite a bit of anger from at least some Catholics about the Church and it’s defenders.
It is not a mass grave, but an unmarked cemetery.
In terms of its own reality, the Catholic Church worldwide, has become a Satanic organisation. Faithful Catholics remain true to the faith of their ancestors despite periodic scandalous revelations.
Legally, it is setup in such a way as to be outside the civil law and impossible to sue for damages. Without such provisions, it would have been stripped of its huge assets, sold up, and victims compensated from the proceeds long ago.
Naif @ 2 – Is there a meaningful difference? I’m not clear on what it is. Individual plots? Coffins? Once it’s unmarked doesn’t it become a mass grave even if it didn’t start that way?
Ophelia,
There is no sign that there are multiple interments in individual graves, which makes sense in that it would have been children being buried one by one over the course of the years.
But the main reason I offered the correction is that the Cowessess wish to be very precise in what they are revealing and describing. Chief Delorme was clear in stating that specific point today (“This is not a mass grave site. These are unmarked graves,” Delorme said.). Similar to the way they are characterizing what is likely 751 as ‘at least 600’.
Further to my comment the last time around, this is again not a surprise. One of the reports of the Truth & Reconciliation Commission is entitled ‘Where are the Children buried’, and it has an 80+ page annex, with maps and charts showing precisely where. Kamloops and Marieval both have their own page.
Meant to leave the link
https://nctr.ca/records/reports/
It never stops, does it? Nor does the desire to sweep everything under the carpet, or the earth, or into the air (‘da liegt man nicht eng’), and to pretend that these things never happened, since it spoils the myth of our ever-progressing and fundamentally nice societies, in which there were a few unpleasant things along the way, but these were, and remain, trivial discords, unheard, really, amidst the great triumphal harmonies, and better left unheard – it’s just not nice to discuss them, it makes us feel uncomfortable, and anyway everybody else behaved as badly. I have just read the historian Mark McKenna’s ‘Return to Uluru’, which is about the murder in1934 by an Australian policeman of an aboriginal man in one of the caves at Uluru (‘Ayers Rock’ was the name it used to be known by among white Australians, and no doubt still is among the incorrigible). It explores the murder as the central point of a great web of colonialism, theft of land, white farmer settlers, and racist attitudes that are still far from extinct today, when, as we hear regularly from those who are too craven or dainty or prejudiced to look dispassionately and fairly on our pasts, individuals and their personal opinions are the only real things in our societies, and racist attitudes are therefore found only in certain individuals (whom the proponents of so evasive a strategy generally profess not to be) and so do not form a constitutive part of that illusion, society at large.
You will know them by their love.
And how did the Catholic Church gain quasi-state power in a British dominion? Ireland has groaned under the papal yoke for a millennium, But Canada? Does this rest on some Quebec exceptionalism?
John – Catholic orders ran the majority of the schools, but other denominations also ran some. I would not characterize what happened as quasi-state power to any of them, they were all subcontractors to the Canadian state of the time.
“Dr. Peter Bryce:
Medical Inspector for the Department for Indian Affairs (1904 -1920)
He visited 15 Western Canadian residential schools compiling mortality statistics from 1892 to 1907 finding that 30 to 60% of students had died from smallpox and tuberculosis over those 14-15-years and
further that 25 to 50% had died in the very first year of school. He suggested the overall numbers could be even higher, noting that in one school alone, the death toll reached 69 per cent. (Globe and Mail, April 24, 2007)”
https://www.omfrc.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/specialedition8.pdf
John, to add to what Naif said, we have a similar situation in the US, where there are lots of Catholic run schools, even in areas that are not Catholic in demographics. Also Catholic hospitals.Catholic charities. Catholic thrift stores. They are like an octopus, putting tentacles on everything. And for some reason, people let them. They believe the idea that Jesus is love, the church represents Jesus, therefore the church is love. I think all three parts of the equation can be shown to be wrong, rending the conclusion false.
I’m far from an expert on Catholic doctrine, but isn’t it hypocritical for a church to disrespect gravesites?
Depends on whether they consider the gravesites to be of civilized people.
In Ontario, Catholic schools are still, in this day and age, funded by the provincial government. So, as secular a country as Canada is touted to be, the Chorch still has it’s coffers filled by the taxpayers.
I’ve grown so disgusted by the Catholic Church that I, as a former Catholic, am an anti-Catholic first and an atheist second. With the recent ruling by the Bishops on politician receiving communion along with these revelations and the Pope refusing to issue an apology for anything, I can’t see them as any more than a sanctioned Costa Nostra for big families.
@15 – I love your typo: Chorch. Sounds like a cross between church and torch. Very appropriate.
It’s not really a type, it’s how it sounds to me when it’s said in an Irish accent. :)
Michael @#15:
Why should the Pope ever have to apologise for anything? He is infallible, is he not? To deny that is to open Hell’s Gate, for sure and bloody certain. (I speak here with all the authority of a lapsed Protestant.)
Pedantry: The Pope is infallible only when speaking ex cathedra.
Nullius:
I was away from school the day we had Latin, but at a guess I would say ‘ex cathedra’ means ‘outside the cathedral’, or maybe ‘when chucked out of the cathedral’, as some of them were. Then again, a Catholic schoolmaster I studied under told us as I remember that the Pope is NOT infallible when speaking ‘ex cathedra’; only when speaking ‘in cathedra’, (I assume that to be the expression) ie on matters of faith and morals only.
I understand that Gibbon in his ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ explained why the first Pope John XXIII had to be rubbed out of the Catholic history books Joe Stalin style. It was not because of the fact that he was a drunkard, fornicator, sodomite, despoiler of innocent virgins etc, etc, etc. No. It was because of his impiety. So he was binned, and his title of John XXIII bestowed upon the 20th Century heir to the papal throne.
And they all lived happily ever after.
Pedantry! ‘cathedra’ means a chair, usually with arms and a cushion, and originally, it seems, mainly for women’s use.
Right. Now I get it. The Pope is infallible as long as he is not sitting in a chair when sprouting forth. Glad we have cleared that up.
But that just raises another problem. Would he be infallible sitting on something other than a chair; say if enthroned on a porcelain thunderphone? Or only infallible when seated on the solid gold one he is no doubt used to? And are his utterances from his rear end when so enthroned also infallible? Or just those emeanting from his mouth?
This is indeed advanced theology, the like of which I have never before encountered on this site.
It’s the papal chair! It’s special! There are carefully positioned needles in the cushion that automatically provide a quick-acting vaccine against fallibility. It is not to be confused with the special chair on which, after time of Pope Joan, who was discovered to be a woman after giving birth during a papal procession and, quite naturally, put to death in a particularly horrible way, popes are, it is said, required to sit so that (I quote from Wikipedia), they may be ‘subjected to an examination whereby, having sat on a so-called sedia stercoraria or “dung chair” containing a hole, a cardinal had to reach up and establish that the new pope had testicles, before announcing “Duos habet et bene pendentes” (“He has two, and they dangle nicely”), or “habet” (“he has them”) for short.’
Wait, what?! I always thought it was the silly hat doing that. If the infallibility is coming from the chair, then what does the silly hat do? Even the Pope wouldn’t wear anything that ridiculous unless it served some vitally important function, right? RIGHT?! :-O
Alas, Bjarte, WRONG! It is the chair. And, pace Omar (pedantry again – sorry), ‘ex’ does not mean apart from or separated from the chair. It means he speaks ‘from the chair’, that is to say, while sitting in the magical chair that allows him to make infallible pronouncements. The hat is of course there to prevent any involuntary, physical response on the part of the Pope that is obvious to others when he makes a pronouncement that is not only infallible but hair-raising (assuming he has any hair – but some Popes have had some).
The noise you are hearing is the sound of my world view crumbling.
Bjarte, I am sorry to sound unsympathetic to your plight and severe, but the Vatican is not Hogwarts. Or not quite.
The magic chair! How did I not know this?!
Naif, thanks for the explanation @ 5. Sorry I missed it yesterday; I’ll blame it on the heat wave.