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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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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.

The way I model Catholics, the kids were probably baptized before they had their first warm meal.

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.