[WSMDiscuss] In Canada : The beginning of national reckoning / 'It’s time to bring our children home from the residential schools'

[Jai Sen]

Wednesday, June 2, 2021

Indigenous Peoples in movement…, Turtle Island in movement…, Canada in movement…, Colonialism in movement…, White supremacy in movement…, Resistance in movement…, Justice in movement…, History in movement…

[Following up on my post on this tragic but vital issue this last Monday, May 31 2021 (‘Calls grow for probes into residential school deaths : Discovery of remains of 215 children at former Kamloops residential school prompts calls from Indigenous leaders to investigate all sites’, at https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-calls-for-action-follows-discovery-of-childrens-remains-at-kamloops/ <https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-calls-for-action-follows-discovery-of-childrens-remains-at-kamloops/>), here is more…. on what I believe is unfolding as a huge moment in the life of Turtle Island (aka ‘North America’) and of Canada and Canadian society, and of the original inhabitants of this land, its Indigenous Peoples.  Canada is, once again, like a deer (or any other animal) caught in the proverbial headlights, frozen, still, uncertain, waiting; but ‘life’ – organic, natural, life – is perhaps slowly appearing; and solidarity, and protests, and demands, are rising.

[Apologies from my side for this late posting on a rapidly unfolding situation, but for me too, ‘life happened’ – and is happening – over these days…

[In the meanwhile, the government of Settler Canada is… dithering, frozen, knowing that what has now been uncovered, finally – for this time, this moment, was always coming - is going to change history, this society, everything….  And so is lacking the courage to do anything; and so is so far only talking about “the money that we have already put in, but yes, yes, more needs to be done”…  But there is, finally, no stopping this one.  The time for reckoning has now come :

If you need a roadmap, complete with aerial pictures and graphics pointing to some sites where the children are, read Dr. Scott Hamilton’s report, “Where are the Children Buried?” <https://ehprnh2mwo3.exactdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/AAA-Hamilton-cemetery-FInal.pdf> on the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission website.

“In some cases information is readily available, but in others there was little to be found in the available archival documents. In those situations attention shifted to an internet-based search, coupled with examination of maps and satellite images,” he wrote.

If Dr. Hamilton can do it, why can’t Canada?

When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was first elected, he promised to fulfill all of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action. Mr. Prime Minister, we are calling you in on that promise.

Indigenous leaders say discovery of children’s remains at Kamloops residential school is beginning of national reckoning

Jana G. Pruden <https://www.theglobeandmail.com/authors/jana-g-pruden/> and Kristy Kirkup <https://www.theglobeandmail.com/authors/kristy-kirkup/>
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-indigenous-leaders-call-for-national-reckoning-after-childrens-remains/ <https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-indigenous-leaders-call-for-national-reckoning-after-childrens-remains/>



People gather to listen to drummers and singers at a memorial in front of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.  (DENNIS OWEN/Reuters)



As the discovery of the remains of 215 children at one of Canada’s largest residential schools <https://www.theglobeandmail.com/topics/residential-school/> continues to reverberate around the country, Indigenous leaders and community members say it is only the beginning of an important – but painful – national reckoning.

“Kamloops is one school,” said Assembly of First Nations National Chief Perry Bellegarde, referencing the more than 130 residential schools that once operated across the country. “I’ve said before that the residential school system was a genocide against First Nations people, Indigenous peoples. Here is the evidence. Nobody can deny that.”

The announcement by Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc Kukpi7 (Chief) Rosanne Casimir last week that the remains of 215 children had been found <https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-bodies-found-at-kamloops-residential-school-site-in-bc/> at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in southern British Columbia made headlines around the world, and has sparked mourning and action generations in the making.

The Kamloops residential school’s mass gravesite: What we know about the 215 children’s remains, and Canada’s reaction so far <https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/article-kamloops-residential-school-mass-graves-215-children-explainer/>
In the days since the announcement in B.C., neat lines of children’s shoes have appeared outside legislative buildings and churches, while ceremonies and vigils are held to honour the dead, and a country grapples with what should come next.

Chief Bellegarde said the discovery has opened painful wounds for many residential school survivors, who have long told of unmarked graves and uncounted deaths, but “the sad part is nobody believed them.”

“Now here’s your concrete tragic, horrific evidence of 215 bodies that have been found,” he said.

The gravesites were identified using ground-penetrating radar technology, as has been employed in other similar searches, including at the Muscowequan Indian Residential School near Lestock, Sask. Kukpi7 Casimir said the remains located in Tk’emlúps te Secwépemchas belonged to children as young as 3.

On Monday, Mr. Bellegarde called on Ottawa to work with chiefs and council and survivors in every province and territory to ensure proper research is done to identify gravesites at other former residential school sites.

[READ MORE AT LINK]

It’s time to bring our children home from the residential schools

Tanya Talaga <https://www.theglobeandmail.com/authors/tanya-talaga/>
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-survivors-of-residential-schools-share-their-stories-call-on-the/ <https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-survivors-of-residential-schools-share-their-stories-call-on-the/>
There was a moment at Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation on Sunday evening, when a young boy suddenly sang out as he banged his hand drum on the powwow grounds.

Everyone listened in quiet awe, as we heard him sing, his echoes caressing the grounds of where the remains of 215 children were discovered <https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-indigenous-leaders-call-for-national-reckoning-after-childrens-remains/> at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.

As his voice waned, he was answered by nearly 100 hand drummers who boomed forward in unity, gathered here from other nations and communities throughout Okanagan and Kamloops.

This is the sound of the drum. The beating of a heart.

It is the sound of all Indigenous Peoples <https://www.theglobeandmail.com/topics/indigenous-peoples/> on Turtle Island as we mourn what we knew – what Canada knew all along. That the children are buried here. Underneath our feet. Where they have been for decades.

The survivors of the Indian Residential School system told stories of their brothers and sisters, their friends and family members who went missing without a trace and no one did anything about it. Nothing at all. It was as if Canada did not believe them.

The Kamloops residential school’s mass gravesite: What we know about the 215 children’s remains, and Canada’s reaction so far <https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/article-kamloops-residential-school-mass-graves-215-children-explainer/>
Discovery of children’s remains at Kamloops residential school ‘stark example of violence’ inflicted upon Indigenous peoples <https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-bodies-found-at-kamloops-residential-school-site-in-bc/>
Where is the list of the children’s names?

Why didn’t the police investigate?

What in God’s name are they doing now?

In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) published an entire volume called Missing Children and Unmarked Burials that is 266 pages long. “The most basic of questions about missing children – Who died? Why did they die? Where are they buried? – have never been addressed or comprehensively documented by the Canadian government,” the report  reads.

The TRC recorded 3,200 deaths – but that is just a small fraction of the true number. Former senator Murray Sinclair has told me it is more likely 15,000 lost as there were 1,300 different types of schools across Canada that Indigenous children were sent to or attended.

Canada only sanctioned 139 schools to be part of the commission.

Yes, that is another dirty secret – 1,300 schools that were privately run, run by other religious dominations or provinces. Survivors have tried to petition <http://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2012/cvrc-trcc/IR4-4-2012-eng.pdf> the government to add more schools to the list since the 2007 Indian Residential Settlement Schools Agreement was signed.

And, of the 3,200, the TRC notes that for just under one-third of those deaths, the government and the schools did not record the name of the student who died. For under one-quarter of the deaths, they did not record the gender of the student and for almost half of them they did not record the cause of death <http://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2015/trc/IR4-9-4-2015-eng.pdf>.

Canada knows the story. Has held it in its hands and has repeatedly looked away.

The TRC sought additional funding from Canada to find and preserve the resting places all of the lost children. But Canada callously said no to this request <https://www.aptnnews.ca/national-news/harper-government-obstructed-search-for-children-who-died-in-residential-schools-trc/> – first by former Conservative Indian Affairs minister Jim Prentice and then former Indian Affairs minister Chuck Strahl.

If you need a roadmap, complete with aerial pictures and graphics pointing to some sites where the children are, read Dr. Scott Hamilton’s report, “Where are the Children Buried?” <https://ehprnh2mwo3.exactdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/AAA-Hamilton-cemetery-FInal.pdf> on the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission website.

“In some cases information is readily available, but in others there was little to be found in the available archival documents. In those situations attention shifted to an internet-based search, coupled with examination of maps and satellite images,” he wrote.

If Dr. Hamilton can do it, why can’t Canada?

When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was first elected, he promised to fulfill all of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action. Mr. Prime Minister, we are calling you in on that promise.

In the case of the Kamloops school, the silent-on-this-matter Catholic Church, said this Monday <https://www.cccb.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/CCCB-Statement-on-discovery-at-residential-school-in-Kamloops-31-May-2021-EN.pdf>:

“As we see ever more clearly the pain and suffering of the past, the Bishops of Canada pledge to continue walking side by side with Indigenous Peoples in the present, seeking greater healing and reconciliation for the future.”

The survivors knew the truth. That their playmates disappeared. They got sick and never came back. They ran away, were never seen again. And worse.

Pope Francis must apologize at the very least. Canada, who sanctioned the Catholic Church to take care of the students, must demand it.

Time and again, be it the children who died in Thunder Bay while going to high school from 2000 to 2011, to our murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls, we have seen a lack of investigations, a turning away, done by press release from police authorities who are quick to say a “sudden death” occurred, “no foul play suspected,” and they move on.

Across Canada, governments, schools and institutions are lowering their flags. People are wearing their orange T-shirts – a trend started by Phyllis Webstad after she attended the St. Joseph Mission school when she was six years old.

Do you hear the sound of the drum, Canada?

It is time to find our children. Show them they are not forgotten. That they mattered and are loved.


Where Are the Children Buried ?

School Magazine <https://socialistproject.ca/author/school-magazine/>
https://socialistproject.ca/2021/06/where-are-the-children-buried/#more <https://socialistproject.ca/2021/06/where-are-the-children-buried/#more>

The discovery of the bodies of 215 children in an unmarked grave outside the former Tk’emlúps Indian Residential School is another horror to add to the long list of genocidal acts against Indigenous people and their families. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission <http://www.trc.ca/> (TRC) estimated that at least 3,213 children died in the Indian Residential Schools over the 140 years they operated.


Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission


Scott Hamilton, the anthropologist who wrote the section of the TRC report “Where are the Children Buried? <https://ehprnh2mwo3.exactdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/AAA-Hamilton-cemetery-FInal.pdf>” based on what he knew in 2014, called it a conservative estimate “in light of the sporadic record keeping and poor document survival.” That number could be as high as 15,000 if you include children who just disappeared.

One hundred and twenty-five years ago, Dr. Peter Bryce, the chief medical officer for Indian Affairs described a cycle of disease amongst Indigenous children forcibly taken from their families and sent to these crowded, unsanitary places where they infected one another, primarily with tuberculosis, and where thousands of them died. True to the science of his time, he even calculated a death rate for children of 8,000 per 100,000 – compared to children from the rest of Canada at 430 per 100,000. Officials knew that children were dying – Bryce himself told Saturday Night Magazine in 1907 that “Indian boys and girls are dying like flies… Even war seldom shows as large a percentage of fatalities as does the education system we have imposed on our Indian wards.”
They Knew

That didn’t matter to both Liberal and Conservative governments of the time. It clearly didn’t matter to the churches that ran them. Duncan Scott, the civil servant who ran the residential system from 1913 to 1932 wrote to his counterpart in BC around 1910: “It is readily acknowledged that Indian children lose their natural resistance to illness by habituating so closely in the residential schools, and that they die at a much higher rate than in their villages. But this alone does not justify a change in the policy of this Department, which is geared toward a final solution of our Indian Problem.” A colder heart surely doesn’t exist.

The Indian Residential Schools were not schools in any human sense. The term “school” used in connection with them, doesn’t deserve to be associated with an expression of illumination, growth of knowledge and insight, delight in learning, considering possibilities and different perspectives. These were instruments of genocide, as Duncan Scott so coolly noted: “a final solution.”

Yet, we can still learn from these places – they still have the power to outrage as we discovered this past Friday. Let’s learn to demand that governments stop shuffling responsibilities for agreements back and forth between them; let’s learn not to push unwanted pipelines through Indigenous lands; let’s learn to do the work necessary to clean up mercury-tainted water in Ontario’s northern reserves after 50 years of dithering; let’s learn to stick with our agreements to teach our young people about Indigenous history and culture.

Let’s finally learn that there is a fundamental racial and class arrogance that underlies our notions of nation-building, cultural ascendancy and the consequent need to set others aside and “school” them. •

This article first published on the Education Action Toronto <https://educationactiontoronto.com/articles/where-are-the-children-buried/> website.



____________________________

Jai Sen

Independent researcher, editor; Senior Fellow at the School of International Development and Globalisation Studies at the University of Ottawa

jai.sen at cacim.net <mailto:jai.sen at cacim.net> &  <mailto:jsen at uottawa.ca>jsen at uottawa.ca <mailto:jsen at uottawa.ca>
Now based in Ottawa, Canada, on unsurrendered Anishinaabe territory (+1-613-282 2900) and in New Delhi, India (+91-98189 11325)

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Jai Sen, ed, 2017 – The Movements of Movements, Part 1 : What Makes Us Move ?.  New Delhi : OpenWord and Oakland, CA : PM Press.  Ebook and hard copy available at PM Press <http://www.pmpress.org/>; hard copy only also at The Movements of Movements <https://movementsofmovements.net/>
Jai Sen, ed, 2018a – The Movements of Movements, Part 2 : Rethinking Our Dance.  Ebook and hard copy available at PM Press <http://www.pmpress.org/>; hard copy only also at The Movements of Movements <https://movementsofmovements.net/>
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