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Notes -
Year of the Graves
I am somehow just getting to this now and from what I'm seeing, this seems to be one of the biggest culture war clusterfucks that has flown mostly under my radar. It started when media began reporting that the graves of 251 children (later 200) had been found near the Kamloops Indian Residential School.
Now, my understanding is that the evidence for the Kamloops graves are in fact very scant. The basis for the claim that 251 unmarked graves were found at Kamloops is based on the fact that ground penetrating radar or GPR identified irregularities in the ground near the Kamloops residential school that they simply interpreted as unmarked graves. GPR, however, can really only show disruptions in soil and sediment, and no excavations of the supposed graves have been done yet. In other words, nobody knows if it even is a burial site, let alone a children's grave.
At the Kamloops site, a juvenile tooth and a rib was cited as evidence of there being an actual grave underneath. Sarah Beaulieu, the person doing the GPR work, stated in her press conference that the tooth and rib were discovered in the late 90s and early 2000s. The tooth was discovered in an excavation by Simon Fraser University, and the rib was supposedly found in the area by a tourist and brought to the museum. However, when people reached out to Simon Fraser University, they replied that the juvenile tooth was in fact verified to be not human. Further attempts to get additional information about the tooth resulted in the university saying that the Kamloops legal team advised them not to respond to any queries from the public about the unmarked graves.
To be honest, there's been a serious lack of transparency surrounding this whole thing which really makes me think that a lot of the findings are suspect. Forget excavations, I am not aware of there being any kind of detailed writeup of the evidence surrounding the GPR findings, or any release of the work on the tooth and the rib bone. Pretty much nothing exists for the public to chew on, apart from a few very rigour-less media releases from the Kamloops band and a press conference from Beaulieu. Oh, and Indigenous "knowing", of course.
I want to properly cement just how inconclusive GPR findings are. In Sarah Beaulieu's press conference, when questioned about if the 215 number was still accurate, Beaulieu states that initially the estimate was 215 graves which had later been revised down to 200 because after the survey was done she became aware of previous excavations that had been done in the area that overlapped with her survey area. So if she can't with confidence distinguish between a burial and excavation work, that seems to suggest that GPR can't really tell you much.
Furthermore, there have been other attempts to find graves with GPR. For example, there was an attempt to find unmarked graves at the former Camsell hospital, where Indigenous people with tuberculosis were treated for decades. Some believed former patients may have been buried on the grounds. As the CBC article on the topic notes: "Thirteen spots flagged by ground-penetrating radar were dug up earlier this summer. Over the past two days another 21 such anomalies were uncovered but only found debris." They eventually wrapped up the search having found nothing. In other words, things that raise alarm according to GPR can actually be any number of other things.
It is also useful to note that most of what used to be the Kamloops residential school orchard has already been excavated prior to the new GPR findings, over 30% of the site has been excavated for various construction and research purposes and no graves were discovered. Note, these excavations started after accusations of the orchard being used to hide graves begun. As this article notes, with more than 30% of the orchard already excavated, is it probable that 200 burials were just missed by previous operations that Beaulieu is just finding now?
Additionally, the survey site Beaulieu was operating in is very disturbed by human activity, casting even more doubt on the idea that what she's seeing are graves. "Several of the 200 “probable burials” overlap with a utilities trench dug in 1998, and still other “probable burials” follow the route of old roads or correlate suggestively with the pattern of previous plantings, furrows and underground sewage disposal beds". I don't know for sure if that can create the GPR findings here, but given the fact that the excavation of multiple anomalies at Camsell hospital yielded no graves, other hypotheses should be considered.
So we basically have nothing here. But the Kamloops Band made a media release on 27 May 2021 stating that there was "confirmation of the remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School". Media reports on it in the very same way, and Canada goes crazy over this. Canadians desecrate church after church, something which even Indigenous leaders told them to stop doing.
While there are other "discoveries" of "unmarked graves" elsewhere near other residential schools which have been revealed after Kamloops, they seem to be similarly questionable. The other very publicised one is by the Cowessess First Nation, disclosing the "discovery" of 751 unmarked graves at a cemetery near the former Marieval Indian Residential School.
This one, however, is even more questionable than the Kamloops one. What makes this especially incredible is that this was indeed a graveyard, but it was not an unmarked grave. The discovery was made at a community cemetery where basically everyone was buried, apparently including non-First Nations people. And the reason why they found "751 unmarked graves" was because many of the graveyard's crosses and headstones were simply taken down, not because they were clandestinely buried. According to the register of baptisms, marriages and burials from 1885 to 1933, there are graves of adults as well as preschool-age children as well as those who died at birth. It is at the moment unclear how many of the graves are actually from the residential school. Given that this was a community cemetery, there are almost certainly some, but the inflated numbers being quoted now are almost certainly wrong. "Some people died at a school and were buried at a community graveyard" isn't nearly as dramatic as "hundreds of unmarked graves" is.
The article notes that there are some survey flags dotting areas outside the cemetery, however this again runs into the very same problem that the site has not been excavated and has simply been assumed through GPR sensing disturbances in the soil.
Probably the most interesting one so far is the Star Blanket Cree's discovery of 2,000 anomalies near the Lebret Indian Residential School, and their accompanying find of a jawbone. Again, these were found using GPR, which carries all the previous caveats. Sheldon Poitras, the ground search lead for the investigation, scoped the findings appropriately, stating "Does that mean there’s 2,000 unmarked graves? We don’t think so. GPR can’t definitively say that’s something. It could be a stone under the ground, it could be a clump of clay, it could be a piece of wood or it could be something. We don’t know yet." So the people doing the work here are telling people not to jump to conclusions based on GPR alone.
As to the jawbone finding, we know almost nothing at all about it. Supposedly it was found near a gopher hole. However, as this article states "the provenance of ex situ bones – objects found away from their original site and the valuable context this provides – should always be treated with caution. A bone fragment could have been dug up where it was found or it could have been carried there from elsewhere, such as the community’s cemetery, by a gopher or other animal, or even deposited by a mischievous person". And even if this is a gravesite, one can't simply assume that it is a residential school gravesite. They could be older Indigenous gravesites unrelated to the residential school, for example, and only excavation can tell you what it is.
I'm not going to make predictions at this point, but the reaction of people has been disproportionate considering the at best inconclusive evidence thus far, and anyone who actually cares about accuracy runs into this problem: If you question the findings on the basis of the weakness of the evidence, you're basically tantamount to a Holocaust denier. If you ask for excavation and confirmation, you're just asking for Indigenous people to be retraumatised. The only non-racist thing to do is to nod your head and demonstrate a sufficient amount of piety.
Also, I have no stake in this. I'm not Canadian, and as a result I have no impetus to avoid accounting for any Canadian history. And if Canadians want to destroy their country in paroxysms of guilt and shame, I certainly won't stop them. But this seems insane.
Data point: it used to be extremely common and is still somewhat traditional in Western Canada to bury one's own garbage/compost in an unused (or garden, in the case of compost) area on one's property. I should think that a residential school would produce a lot of garbage, and this school was operating for a long time in which "town dump" would not have been a thing, and even longer when taking garbage there would have meant a pretty long trip on a wagon.
Make of it what you will.
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What you’re seeing is the rise of anticatholicism.
Definitely something that we as a society need to be more aware of. Anticatholicism has no place in society. Canadians at all levels need to take a stand against it.
We're not seeing the rise of anything new. Catholicism is just one line in the long list of 'oppressive structures' the woke vilify in fiction and history, like conservatism, meritocracy, western civilization, old white men and so on. This has nothing to do with the anticatholicism of the past based on anticlericalism or wasp-y fears of the pope's influence.
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Anti-christianity has been around awhile and is a big theme in media these days.
A recent example of this is the Yellowstone prequel 1923 with a graphic depiction of a native american girl being beaten and raped across a few episodes. When she lashes out at the nuns that did this to her and escapes, the evil priests go to track her down. The police that go to question her mother back on the reservation, kill the mother while searching the house. The show really goes out of its way to ascribe the worst of past events to the church. There is no sympathetic christian figure in the show. All are evil.
Anti-Christianity is one thing, but anti-catholicism is especially dangerous because of the places it leads to. I think we need to be specific about calling out anti-catholic sentiment, and yellowstone is a perfect example of it. That type of hateful depiction belongs in the KKK meetings of the 1920s where it came from, not in a mainstream television show. Imagine that it's 2023 and things like that are being pushed on mainstream TV. Insane how far backward we've gone.
I think this is hyperbolic.
I am reminded of that racist hoax from the UK that was discussed in the thread last month, about a suspiciously misspelt letter that was sent to some BAME Brit calling her a "Yoruba scum". This was a glaring red flag because No True Racist cares one whit what precise tribe of black she is. Whereas blacks care a great deal about what tribe of black they are; hence the false flag diagnosis.
Likewise, the 2020s Canadians who are vandalising churches are not going to care what sect of Christianity you're from. People who are trying to exact revenge for indigenous killings from people who are 100 years removed from a crime... that didn't even happen? If they're gonna smash up a church with such poor attention to detail on the temporal and factual aspects of responsibility, I hardly think they'll be splitting hairs on the theological distinctions.
Therefore I put it to you that making the distinction between anti-christian and anti-catholic will decrease your predictive power in the Canada case. You are not cleaving reality at the joints here, due to an inaccurate model of the mental state of the people doing church desecrations.
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These people seem to have no issue with pope Francis. It’s specifically the social conservative wing they have an issue with.
Anti-catholic rhetoric is still anti-catholic and has no place in any modern society. The rise of anticatholicism is dangerous and should be called out and stopped immediately whenever it's seen.
Dangerous how? For a long time, North America operated on definitely-not-Catholic-Christianity and has managed to come all this way (modulo a few wars), and there was indeed a time where Catholics were discriminated against for being such. However, in the US, the Catholic minorities have been assimilated into the greater civilizational project with no issue, and today, all of Christianity is regarded rather equally, for good and bad. Unless I am missing something here, "anti-Catholicism" seems like something that would have been more of a problem back when the Americas were first being colonized. (ETA: This is to say, maybe it's different in Canada, I dunno.)
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It's fair to compare questioning the basis of the Kamloops mass grave to Holocaust deniers, because Holocaust deniers make the exact same arguments you make here. People like you saying "the story around alleged mass graves seem to be motivated by a propaganda campaign and culture-war hysteria- GPR results are not conclusive so excavations should be done to get to the truth of the matter" actually are making Holocaust denier arguments.
And your opposition: the people saying that excavations should not happen because it would violate the religious practices of the victims in order to satisfy the perversion of evil deniers, are also making the same arguments as the orthodox Holocaust believers on the question of excavating alleged mass graves.
This entire affair is an astonishingly similar discourse to the Holocaust deniers and anti-deniers on the question of alleged mass graves in a known location.
You have a good and clear point about the parallels. The main differences, SS, are the extensive photographic documentation of the Holocaust sites and the eyewitness testimonies from the sites’ captives and liberators.
However, the sheer industrialized scale of the Final Solution does not excuse the actual abuses and rights violations which occurred at those schools. Morally, the abuses of indigenous residence schools were equivalently as bad as ethnic work camps - that is, seen as a decent (if harsh) solution at the time, but now untenable to any society of freemen.
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Can you give an example?
Researchers who believe the orthodox Holocaust story seem to be looking very hard for mass graves, in some cases successfully, in other cases explaining their absence by mass cremation.
Holocaust historiography claims that up to a million Jews were murdered in a gas chamber disguised as a bath house and buried in a small camp near Treblinka. Holocaust deniers don't believe that story. But despite the alleged graves containing this enormous amount of human remains existing in a precisely known location, no mass grave has ever been excavated from the site and it is in fact forbidden to do so because it would allegedly violate Jewish burial law.
The most extensive archaeological investigation of the area was only done very recently with non-invasive methods: most prominently consisting of (you guessed it) GPR results where various disruptions in the soil are speculated to be "probable mass graves" in her research, with no subsequent excavation. Holocaust deniers do not believe her assignment of various GPR results to mass graves are accurate as they do not reflect the size, shape, or location of the alleged graves, and only excavations can ascertain the truth of the matter. Holocaust believers claim that a convergence of evidence already proves that these GPR results are mass graves, and a call for excavations would only serve to placate deniers.
Of course the exact same line of argument is presented in the Kamloops story. There are long-standing rumors, cultural memory, hearsay, and eyewitness testimony to atrocities and burials of children in the area. There are now GPR results showing soil disruption in the area surrounding these atrocity rumors. To tie it all up, there is essentially a confession and apology from the Canadian government and Catholic Church. The Canadian government wouldn't confess to a crime it didn't commit, would it? It wouldn't admit the existence of mass graves the aren't real, right? There's a convergence of evidence, so at this point if you are demanding these graves be excavated you are just a racist denier.
Kamloops deniers make the exact same line of argument as Holocaust deniers: there is no "convergence of evidence", there is substantial evidence of atrocity rumors and "cultural memory" formulating a campaign of mass propaganda, and GPR results are not a substitute for excavations to scientifically study the truth of the controversy.
To give a more concrete example, you can compare this article denouncing Deniers for demanding excavations of the Kamloops graves:
Genocide deniers ask: Where are the bodies of the residential schoolchildren?
This can be compared to a recent conversation here where someone denounced the call for excavations of the alleged Holocaust graves for essentially the same reason:
So Treblinka does seem to be an example where some people have made the argument you note, though this did not stop excavations:
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/archaeologists-delicately-dig-nazi-death-camp-secrets-treblinka-n66241
https://www.livescience.com/44443-treblinka-archaeological-excavation.html
Of course, whether that is evidence against "Holocaust denial" depends on what you mean by that term, since it covers many different possible positions. Not all "Holocaust deniers" actually deny that there were mass killings of Jews by the Nazis.
I linked the documentary portraying her research where Poland's Chief Rabbi (with a New York accent) told her she has to stop excavating if she comes across a mass grave.
However, I am certain that she did dig trenches in search of mass graves, so she could have at least found one and stopped per the orders of the rabbi and that would have by far been the most important discovery of her research. But none of her trenches discovered any mass graves. She can say after the fact that she wasn't looking for them per orders, but I think she did dig trenches to try to find them and has a built-in plausible deniability for why she didn't find any.
But in any case, officially the excavations were not looking for mass graves and indeed she did not find any. The GPR results are what have been used to identify the alleged mass graves- not excavations. Any sane person who was actually dedicated to the scientific truth of the matter would of course follow up the GPR analysis with excavations, and in both cases when the parties refuse to do it that should be regarded as highly suspicious.
Holocaust deniers emphasize the sheer quantity that human remains that would have to exist in this small area at the scale alleged, for example:
Her excavations didn't find any graves containing these huge quantities of remains, but she did find fossilized shark teeth from when Poland was covered by an ocean millions of years ago. The narrator concludes, "it appears here that the Nazi coverup was effective." So it goes.
Thank you for clarifying that you're talking about weak Holocaust denial (it happened, but not on the orthodox scale) rather than denying that there were mass killings of Jews, on a greater scale than, say, David Irving would argue.
Her excavations weren't on on a scale to find such quantities as you describe, so that's not an interesting result. However, insofar as they looked, they apparently found lots of remains:
The part of the Holocaust denial debates that you are describing doesn't seem parallel to the current state of the dialectic with respect to the Residential Schools mass graves, where the question is their existence rather than scale.
I feel like there's also a substantial clouding with the fact that life on the Canadian frontier was genuinely tough with high youth mortality, and there's reasons why a residential school might have earnest reasons to have a mass grave nearby due to Tuberculosis outbreaks et al. People seem to reflexively frame this as though the region at that point in history was operating on 2020 healthcare norms.
True, although it's also the case that a lot of people were dying in Europe during WWII, though not on a scale that would explain all the missing Jews.
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There is no aspect of Holocaust denial that claims Jews were not killed. It was a war where 50 million civilians were killed, including many Jews.
The Holocaust claim is that 750,000 - 1 million people were murdered and buried on the site. I strongly deny that, not just the scale being a little inflated. That is not the same as claiming Jews were not killed in the war, any more than denying the Kamloops graves is not "soft denial" if you acknowledge that children did indeed die of various causes at the time in question.
It is exactly the same. Mainstream historiography says "we identified the graves containing the remains of up to a million people with GPR, here they are, but we have not and will not excavate them." Holocaust deniers say they should be excavated, while mainstream authorities claim they do not need to be excavated to prove their existence. It's the same thing.
The point is that the sheer scale of the crime in such a small, known location would make trivial to find huge quantities of remains. A small scale excavation ought to be able to find enormous quantities of remains extremely easily.
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Thanks for the extensive write-up. This whole thing reminds me of the news stories about the children's mass grave* in Tuam, Ireland, and of supposed mass graves in Tulsa, Oklahoma where racist mass-murdering demons buried the victims of the 1921 "race massacre", or so we're told.
*See here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bon_Secours_Mother_and_Baby_Home
When I try looking at these affairs without bias and prejudice, I try putting myself in the shoes of the average Western middle-class suburban white normie NPC, and frankly I realize that, unless some heretic specifically makes an effort to educate me on this, I'll probably have zero understanding of the following hard facts about the bygone days of the West:
It was normal to bury people in unmarked (mass) pauper's graves if nobody claimed the corpse, or if the relatives were too poor to, or unwilling to, afford a proper burial. This, in fact, was not rare.
Back when national economies were yet too undeveloped to produce a surplus to be spent on, frankly, luxuries, there was exactly zero public support for spending tax money to improve the material conditions of single mothers so that they have the same prospects in life as wives.
(Milking the impregnators for child support wasn't an option either in most cases, because they were either dead, in jail, or too poor to be milked for money.)
Also, a society that poor is also unable to pay for lavishly equipped, professional, extensive police forces. This means extrajudicial punishment and mob justice was seen as normal and necessary by most people.
Stray dogs were normally killed off and their corpses were used for industrial purposes, because you could be sure absolutely nobody was going to contribute material resources to founding and running comfy dog shelters. (I know this has nothing to do with these 3 news scandals, but I included it because we know that white liberals just love dogs.)
Exactly. People don't realize exactly how frequent early deaths were in prior eras, especially in hardscrabble frontier areas.
Even with the reservation schools, shouldn't the important mark of success be '% of a child entering the reservation school making it to adulthood v % of a child staying with the native population making it to adulthood'. It's frustrating how consistently historical inequality is compared to a benchmark of 2020 health & educational outcomes instead of actually doing some sort of historical apples to apples. Australia's Stolen Generation is very similar where, yes, it was a brutal practice but also the life outcomes of the 'stolen' were better than those who remained in the bush.
Indeed. And let's not forget that the same leftist propagandists are, of course, themselves mostly capable of such cool-headed historical clarity and awareness of context, when it comes to undermining the arguments of their enemies.
Are they? I feel the majority of leftist content on history is very much 'the eternal 2023' when it comes to moral condemnation and measuring historical outcomes.
Back when New Atheism was still a thing (and the Atheism+ split did not yet happen), its adherents routinely highlighted the dangerous spectre of international Islamic terrorism and violent extremism. In turn, the leftists accusing them of Islamophobia, racism etc. took up the habit of putting Islamism in the historical context of terrorism as a whole, pointing it out that international terrorism used to be more serious and prevalent in the 1970s. Suddenly the historical context mattered. But, of course, they never applied the same logic to, say, the history of sexual harassment, rape, sexism etc. Or look at leftist liberal arguments about Ukraine in the past year. Suddenly, things that happened more than 1000 years ago matter. Suddenly it's relevant that Russia was under the Tartar yoke, that Kiev was founded before Moscow etc.
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The other side:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/opinion-residential-schools-unmarked-graves-denialism-1.6474429
Notice how "denialist" is being used, in an openly misleading way, to mean those who question that these methods can reveal unmarked graves - something that the author admits later in the article. "Denialists" are also apparently "distorting" the facts, but without the author citing an example. And of course, the author subtly tries to guilt readers about even asking for evidence of what Indigenous people already know to be true.
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You're not including the religion angle - these were Catholic residential schools. Other denominations like the Anglicans also operated residential schools, but that doesn't have the same impact - people are a lot more resentful around Catholicism than Protestantism, unless they're talking about a small fundamentalist sect that was exceedingly strict and which they left when they were adults.
So we have the Indigenous angle, which allows for a lot of white liberal virtue signalling and there is the anti-Catholic angle, where people who have animus for whatever reason against the Church get to invoke the entire litany of abuse scandals all over again.
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This example fits the following narrative pattern:
An institution X used to have broad support, but now we* recognize it as harmful or bad, though they* still defend it.
Breaking news: evidence E that X was far worse than we* knew! (But not worse than we* can imagine!) So X was altogether evil!!
(Whisper among us*:)
"Isn't that evidence kind of weak? I mean, X still evil, but ..."
"Shh! X was evil, don't undermine the narrative! They* will latch on to it!"
[* For some variation of we and they.]
Once the narrative transitions from "X bad" to "X evil", any questioning of evidence E that precipitated that transition is questioning that X is evil, as opposed to merely bad (from the narrative's perspective).
In the Kamloops graves case, there is a competing impetus: physical anthropologists and archeologists (who are part of we* in this case) very much want to preserve their status as scientists, so they have a strong stake in upholding the rigor of their methods. The Wikipedia entry for Kamloops Indian Residential School reflects this process. The "Possible Unmarked Graves" section is written in a cautious neutral tone, and points to specific plans for corroboration of the evidence:
The Kamloops graves case, therefore, is a very interesting case to watch, and I thank you for putting together such a great effort post on its progress.
I think this is one of the most important mechanisms underlying the culture war today. There's strong social pressure against questioning or denying claims that are favourable to the ingroup's preferred narrative, even when those claims are unambiguously wrong. Why are certain memes with low factual basis (e.g. racist police are murdering black men en masse) so prevalent? The pat, cynical explanation would be to say that everyone on the left is willing to lie to push their preferred narrative, but I don't think that's actually correct. The vast majority of the tribe truly believes these claims, because they haven't been exposed to any serious counter-arguments. Why? Because counter-arguments from within the tribe are socially proscribed, and bring the risk of ostracism, and counter-arguments from the outgroup are assumed to be in bad faith. Because of this mechanism, a false claim which is highly favourable to the tribe's priors can spread rapidly once it enters the memetic landscape (which only takes one bad actor, or even just an innocent error or cascade of minor rhetorical exaggerations). The "a black woman invented the telescope" meme kind of speaks to this dynamic.
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Americans had slavery, and institutionally confessed to it during the civil rights era, which gave bien-pensants a huge opportunity for performative guilt, righteous feeling, and financial grift. Canadian bien-pensants never had a similar stick to wield. Even residential school, which absolutely sucked, could not compare with the horrors of slavery. How are you supposed to condemn your political enemies in the 2020s if you can’t prove their historical analogues were racist? Then George Floyd happened, and turbocharged every aspect of the situation, including Canadian atrocity-envy. So when they found these “graves,” people jumped on it hard and in about 3 days the narrative was permanently burned into the minds of everyone in the respectable classes. After about a week, news websites started quietly walking back the story -no retractions, mind you, just stealth edits, but the damage was done.
I don’t think indigenous communities themselves set out to scam anyone, but, speaking generally, they are plagued with widespread dysfunction and are grievously (and even understandably) addicted to copium, and so are prone to scamming themselves. There is always a hunger strike, or 500km awareness walk, or traditional hunting camp for kids going on. While these absorb enormous effort, they never change anything, which eventually leads to the conclusion that all the effort is in fact a defence against change, a way of telling yourself change is impossible because you’ve tried lots of solutions. The grave story is the best copium of all: “They were literally murdering our children to exterminate us; who could recover from that?”
For these two reasons, the grave thing is likely to stick around for a long time.
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Another interesting thing is that Franz Boas did excavation work near Kamloops from 1897 to 1900 and noted in his journals that there were stories of the site being an Indian burial ground. He specifically mentions “on the field near the school”, that there were childrens’ graves particularly, that it would take months to exhume all the bones, that the Indians didn’t want him to take any of the bones as they knew it was a burial site, and that some graves were marked with crosses from many decades ago due to possibly Christianized fur trappers.
pages 135-140 or so
That’s obviously enough to call Kamloops a hoax, but if someone needed even more, the death rate of tuberculosis and small pox is significantly higher among Native Americans than Europeans which we know from contemporaneous accounts of death rates. So even if there weren’t a literal children’s grave at Kamloops from before the school was built which we know courtesy of the father of anthropology, we also have to deal with the fact that a higher death rate and thus burial grounds is entirely explained by disease rate susceptibility.
wait so there are graves? Or is he saying there aren't?
The issue with the wording 'mass graves' is that some parties assume that it's inherently indicative of malpractice or massacres via the schooling system. Youth death rates were exponentially higher during the period, especially on colonial frontiers.
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Boas says there are a number of graves from before the school were founded, which were on the field of the school grounds. Boas was excavating 1897, the school was founded in 1890, but the graves were from much earlier
ah ok. Understood
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You're underplaying this. There's strong evidence (which you posted) that the issue is 100% fake and is being pushed for purely political reasons by both the indigenous groups and various levels of government. But no one wants to say so because of the power of those groups. We have something similar in the US where there are supposedly mass graves from the Tulsa Race Riots, but they were never found until someone had the bright idea of digging in a known potter's field. What do you know? We found bodies in a cemetery!
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Nature abhors a vacuum. The guilt-proneness of whites, and more specifically white women requires they feel guilty for something.
I'm guessing that since religion is no longer a common option, this is the answer.
Could be worse - far more bizarre religious movements were out there in the past. For example, Russian empire had a sect that kept getting rid of sinful body parts in the name of holiness.
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