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Notes -
NYT has released an article about unmarked graves in Canada.
They quote Tom Flanagan about lack of concrete evidence for child graves:
Why are the denialists hurtful, Chief Rosanne? Wouldn't it be great news if there are no unmarked graves?
So, the current course of action is to continue not knowing for sure.
The article conveniently omits which evidence is compelling.
The comments seem like a breath of fresh air:
And now we come to the comment, due to which I started writing all this:
Quote from the article:
Another comment:
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:
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.
And then the obvious response of "come back to us when one of these ground penetrating radar discovered mass graves turns out to be real, when the success rate exceeds 0%".
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Some observations:
As multiple other commenters note, residential schools were a very progressive idea for their time. The kind of person running it was clearly the same kind of person now criticising it, even with largely similar values. Given that progressives are considered the side of empathy - most conservatives main complaint is their excess of empathy - this makes me weep for the project of empathy as a whole. If people fail to empathize with themselves, projected into the past, how can they possibly empathise with other people?
The contrarian in me obviously wants to just exhume everything and see whether there is anything at all; But to some degree that still buys into a framing that imo is entirely unfounded. To our knowledge, we know that conditions in foster institutions were generally quite bad independent of the skin color of the child for a long time, not to mention that many kids already were mistreated even before they entered them. We know some of them died due to this. Even if they were being buried locally, that is still no proof whatsoever for the wild claims of murderous racism.
It strikes me again just how little connection there seems to be between people getting into positions of power in native american councils and actually being, you know, native american. "Chief Rosanne Casimir", who argues against exhumations, looks much less native than "Rancher Garry Gottfriedson", who argues in favor! And sure enough, Garry is an actual former residential school student.
The left's "empathy" project has never been unlimited and all-encompassing. Only the good people (read the correct newspapers to learn who those are today) deserve empathy, and the bad people deserve nothing but hate. The left can be - and often is - horrendously vicious to those that are considered bad people. And that matters absolutely nothing that they may have held the same ideas or were members of the same movement in the past. Once they are declared the bad people, they are outside the empathy circle, and it is very, very dark on the left outside that circle. Is not the "excess" of empathy, it is very carefully directed allocation of it, deployed along very ideological guidelines.
This isn't true; the original hippies did actually buy into this (LSD and MDMA likely had something to do with this). Less so in the 90s-00s, but the window of "you're okay" was much wider than it has been since SJ congealed. And even SJers very rarely intend massacre as an end*, though that's a very low bar to clear.
*As in, given a sufficient stranglehold on power, the vast, vast majority of SJers do not want to massacre their enemies. Most are willing to fight a civil war (and many are willing to commit terrorism) if that's the only way to get that stranglehold, but that's a means, not an end in itself. Disenfranchisement, re-education, and institutionalised kidnapping to prevent enemy culture transmission all have significant (though in the latter two cases I'm not sure about majority) support as means to ensure permanent victory, but not massacre.
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I think that exhuming any suspected graves on residential school grounds where name and date + cause of death are uncertain is obviously the correct thing to do.
Many forms of murder would be still visible on the skeleton. Some signs of severe abuse might also be preserved.
Given what I know about Catholics, I think it is highly unlikely they ran death camps. They almost certainly employed violence against their wardens, probably of a severity for which today's society would feel that you should never have power over any kids ever again. I would not be shocked if an investigation discovered poorly healed fractures linked to child abuse. Very likely there was also some sexual abuse going on (a common outcome when men have a lot of power without oversight, even when not specifically selecting for men who decided to forswear church-sanctioned sex), but that will rarely be provable from the forensic record.
I also presume that the white staff had a higher caloric intake than the indigenous kids, and that the latter were much more devastated by infectious diseases. All in all, it was a terrible human rights abuse and might technically qualify as genocide.
The way I model Catholics, the kids were probably baptized before they had their first warm meal. And putting the bodies of your fellow Christians (even if they are of a 'lesser race') into anonymous, unmarked mass graves is not usually done. Of course, they likely would not have paid for tombstones either, so what was a marked grave in 1940 could very well be an unmarked grave in 2020 because wooden crosses don't last that long.
I have no sympathy for people who embellish atrocities. Typically, the historical consensus is damning enough. Adding "did we mention that the perpetrators lived on a diet of murdered babies?" is strictly counter-productive (unless true, of course) -- instead of just having the people against you who like to deny or diminish the atrocity for political reasons, you are suddenly opposed by all the people who care about the truth.
My understanding is that indigenous parents got to generally choose which residential schools their kids went to- so we can probably assume these kids were Catholic before they arrived.
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There were schools and orphanages in Ireland within living memory that were worse, and nobody outside that country cares, because the victims weren't part of a "marginalized group."
How I learned about this.
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What’s especially galling is that the indigenous kids dying is being framed as murder because communicable diseases that everyone died from back then killed those kids, because the schools lacked proper ventilation. Yes, that’s how Catholics planned to genocide the Indian children. Improper ventilation. How devious! How cunning!
Ironic also that it’s only Catholics bearing the blame, when the Unitarians and other churches also joined in.
Do you think this is independent of present day politics? The project 2025 scaremongering rabbit hole blames Catholics too. It’s just a progressive meme.
'just' a progressive meme undersells it a little I think -- there's a very real attempt to whip up anti-Catholic sentiment for social engineering reasons, and going after some Unitarians in bumfuck SK wouldn't advance this goal.
In reality the parameters of the project were determined by the (largely Liberal) government of the day -- so if anyone should be getting the hate it's like Robert Borden or something. This does not serve the agenda either, which is why old John A gets so much demonization despite being removed from power around the time the residential school system got really fired up.
I won't disagree with that, but at the same time there's a limit to how far the cathedral is willing to go there. Hit pieces on St Mary's Kansas seem ambivalent and conspiracy theories about the knights of Malta involvement in project 2025 are not being pushed by DNC attack ads.
I think the lawfare and literal conquest by fire of the churches are doing the job well enough.
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Louis Riel did nothing wrong.
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From what I can gather, the idea of residential schools at the time was a rather progressive idea: "we can make these kids lives better by bringing them up assimilated with Western education and values." And several prominent Native Americans were at least loosely supportive of the idea (Charles Curtis, Vice President of the US during the Hoover administration comes to mind).
It strikes me as very similar to the far-left/communist meme about who gets to educate your children. And I think even now there would be support for it among progressives as long as you make sure it's for children of the right "undesirables."
Nothing has changed. The Catholics get it worse simply because they're the easiest target for Progressives to engage (for various reasons). They also tend more often to be actually located on the reserves.
Progressives already act like this, with force of law.
What do you think "we'll send
Indian AffairsCPS to take your kids away if you use their birth name at home" is?What do you think "if you complain about the teacher's pet raping your kid, you'll be arrested" is?
What do you think "if you engage in your native customs, like letting your kid outside to play unsupervised, you'll be harassed by the State" is?
They'll
beat the Indian out ofcolonize you eventually.Remember, land acknowledgements are about forcing you to admit that these colonizers own the land.
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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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Yes. An example of this has stuck in my mind the past couple months. I was listening to this Bari Weiss podcast on a run. It focuses on the story of Matthew Shepard which was "the most notorious anti-gay hate crime in American history." A national tragedy and outrage of the 90's, so city liberals had so more evidence to deride the experience of small town bigotry. They wrote a play and made a movie about it.
Matthew Shepard was a young gay man living in a college town in Wyoming. He was found murdered and tortured to death in 1998. The narrative of "gay man butchered to death for gaying too gayly" galvanized gay rights advocates for the follow decade. Contemporary reporting very quickly turned to gay hate crime. This podcast is an hour long conversation with author Ben Kwaller who did first-hand reporting in Laramie, Wyoming and research on the murder for a book with a different conclusion.
Turns out that there is a fair bit of evidence and testimony that Matthew Shepard probably wasn't murdered for being gay. Because Matt used and sold meth. He was murdered by a guy he sometimes had meth dealings with, and probably had sex with according to other testimony. The gruesome nature of his murder was possibly not the product of virulent gay bashing, but a meth fueled macabre butchery. Done by a desperate, indebted addict whose life was falling apart. His murderer had not slept or consumed anything except drugs for several days.
In the Honestly episode Ben Kwaller shares recordings of one of his visits to Laramie. Ben (who is gay) goes to some college LGBTQ+ group and interviews them. He asks what the town thinks of the countervailing narrative. He wants to know if they at all consider the implications that their narrative was wrong. One of students says that Ben, the guest and author, should stop asking these questions, because they make him uncomfortable. I won't find the time stamp unless asked, but I can hear his voice say the words "read the room."
The student meant that this is our rallying cry. Think of all the good that has come out of this noble lie. Imagine a world where gays across America didn't believe Matthew Shepard, their avatar, was brutally murdered for being gay. We might not even have gay marriage! We might not have all these vigils and community and influence. Stop asking questions. Let us have it.
"Read the room." I'm not particularly black pilled, but conflict theorists do be winning sometimes.
Now I expended all my typing on a semi-related event. I do appreciate the write up. It's good. But, frankly, I am tired of the mass graves story. I can't draw the energy to care that the NYT finally reported on a story with marginally more integrity than the CBC has ever had. This specific article was written just over a year ago. It has the mainstream framing of the topic in August 2023, which is years after journalists had plenty of reasons to ask meaningful questions about the narrative. I'm sure we have had dozens of top-level mass graves threads in the Culture War Roundup's various forms. It keeps on chugging along.
The mass graves story, and how deep its roots grew into Canadian society, was an eye opener at the time. First, it demonstrated that Canadians had ended any and all resistance to the American culture war waged at their doorstep. Not only did Canada capitulate, but Canada picked up the banner and dedicated itself wholeheartedly to the cause. Progress. Truth seeking doesn't always scratch an itch. People want to prostrate themselves before a greater power. Canada's elite, advocacy groups, certain tribal leaders, and media saw they could leverage that desire for gain. Why not? A new national past time is born.
Canada doesn't really have the same sort of adversarial media presence that the US does, does it? If a few Native American leaders enrich themselves, a few politicians win elections, and some money gets embezzled because we're telling a noble lie, so what? Think of all the good that has come out of this. Read the room.
I will caveat that while the Shepard murder is definitely murkier than the mainstream sanitized version of events, the Jimenez version has its own limitations.
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I’m sure I’m preaching to the choir here, but one problem with this approach is that it requires ever more sordid lies to be concocted in order to generate the same level of activist outrage…nominative determinism strikes again?
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