UpDate - First Nation in Kamloops Kid Burial Sites - Where Are the Bodies???

[Thiel]

Cowessess First Nation will retake jurisdiction of child welfare, according to Chief Cadmus Delorme. Cowessess has not had decision-making power over children in care since it was stripped of it in 1951, according to a letter distributed by Delorme on Monday.

A positive, but long overdue development. Over three quarters if the kids in foster care in Western Canada are Native.

[Anonymous]

Despite the sick shit that religious nuts running residential schools, and orphanages across Canada did, I have never seen a country try so hard to make accommodations for every sin, real or perceived.

Canada's acts of goodness far outweigh the crimes of past generations



If the sanctimonious and self-righteous mainstream media is to be believed, many Canadians did not celebrate our national holiday, Canada Day. A Toronto Star columnist even exaggerated the sins of our country to ask readers "how can we sleep at night."



There is no question that the discovery of over 1,000 unmarked graves of Indigenous children at residential schools in B.C. and Saskatchewan has left the country in shock and sorrow.



July 1, 1867, was the day our country came into legal existence as a confederation in a way that left out any mention of the First Nations, Inuit and Metis peoples of this land. Today, our shortcomings of yesteryears are visible to the whole world that saw many such tragedies resulting from European colonialism.



Back in India, my ancestors fought the first Indian War of Independence in 1857 against British troops that left a country in tatters with bodies of freedom fighters hung for hundreds of miles in all directions from Delhi.



On Thursday I did celebrate Canada Day to honour not just this adopted country of mine, but to view its successes and failures in the context of time and history. Those who showered disdain on our flag and fabric did so by displaying to the rest of the world the uniqueness of our values that permit such behaviour, which in many other countries would be considered treason.



On Monday, a Pakistani-based YouTuber asked me why so many South Asians migrated to Canada compared to other destinations around the globe. Before I could complete my answer and explain the phenomenon of there being more Sikhs in Canada's parliament than in India itself, she interjected: What are Canadians like?



"I am a Canadian," I responded. But she interrupted me saying she meant "real Canadians," not immigrants who settled here. She wanted to know about white Canadians of European ancestry who arrived centuries ago.



Perhaps I should have referred her to the quintessential Canadian aspect of our culture — to be humble.



Who else but a Canadian would say "I'm sorry" after winning the U.S. Tennis Open in September 2019? Shortly after defeating the crowd favourite, Serena Williams, Canadian sensation Bianca Andreescu took a moment to apologize for winning, acknowledging that the U.S. crowd would have preferred to see Williams triumph.



My interviewer's silence seemed to suggest she was lost in her imagination as I explained that Canada's prime minister is a Catholic of both Anglo and French ancestry, opposition leader Erin O'Toole is a traditional Canadian nationalist who has a military background, and the left-wing party is headed by Jagmeet Singh, a turbaned Sikh, while the Greens are led by a Black woman who is Jewish.



Canada is a country that despite being surrounded by an ocean of free-market capitalism was able to establish an island of socialized medicine in Saskatchewan under the guiding hands of the "greatest Canadian of all time," Tommy Douglas, who went on to head the CCF, which later became the NDP.



Douglas was preceded by Canadian surgeon Norman Bethune, who as a communist and First World War veteran went to fight alongside the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War against Gen. Franco and later settled down in China where he introduced modern medicine in rural areas during the Second Sino-Japanese War.



The tradition of the selfless caring Canadian set by Dr. Bethune in China continues to this day in the role former Ontario premier Bob Rae has played in Myanmar on behalf of the Rohingya Muslims who have been abandoned to their fate by all self-styled Islamic countries, except Bangladesh.



We opened our doors for Hungarians in 1956, Czechs in 1968 and Syrians in 2018 not to mention the "boat people" of Vietnam. Our acts of decency and goodness far outweigh the crimes of our past generations. The answer is to celebrate Canada Day by honouring our First Nations and the values we have inherited over 400 years of crystallizing the best of Britain, France and the United States.



To the thankless and selfish do-gooders riding the coattails of our First Nations' tragedy, I suggest you burn your Canadian passports. As for me, I will wave the Maple Leaf and thank Canada for its humility, generosity and truthfulness and never forget the First Nations on whose land Canada exists.

https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/fatah-canadas-acts-of-goodness-far-outweigh-the-crimes-of-past-generations?fbclid=IwAR0vEUfPoevz563F0jsxEhGhKOhsHOmvni8yKs1f89YKi2vSiS93wtu49zg">https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnis ... S93wtu49zg">https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/fatah-canadas-acts-of-goodness-far-outweigh-the-crimes-of-past-generations?fbclid=IwAR0vEUfPoevz563F0jsxEhGhKOhsHOmvni8yKs1f89YKi2vSiS93wtu49zg

[Thiel]

Despite what the Toronto Star would have us believe, collectively Canadians have done nothing to deserve a guilty conscience.

[Anonymous]

Native Act fact of the day,

While Canadian women were first granted the right to vote through the suffrage movement  in Canada in 1916 (Manitoba provincial election) that right was not extend to First Nations people's until 1960, when Conservative Prime Minister John Diefenbaker's government began drafting the Canadian bill of Rights. With an emphasis on equal rights for all Canadians the Conservative government at the time believed Indians could not be ignored.



Another fun fact-residential schools ended under a Conservative Prime Minister-Mulroney

And our first official government apology came from a Conservative Prime Minister-Harper

The Trudeau family gave us the "White Paper" and a black face wearing PM

Allies not apologies, pay attention to actions not words.

[cc]

Native Act fact of the day,

While Canadian women were first granted the right to vote through the suffrage movement  in Canada in 1916 (Manitoba provincial election) that right was not extend to First Nations people's until 1960, when Conservative Prime Minister John Diefenbaker's government began drafting the Canadian bill of Rights. With an emphasis on equal rights for all Canadians the Conservative government at the time believed Indians could not be ignored.



Another fun fact-residential schools ended under a Conservative Prime Minister-Mulroney

And our first official government apology came from a Conservative Prime Minister-Harper

The Trudeau family gave us the "White Paper" and a black face wearing PM

Allies not apologies, pay attention to actions not words.

And in the US, despite current phony positioning, it was mainly Dems who owned slaves and it was Reps who freed them ... followed by Dems being KKK & Dems fighting segregation. In fact some Dem governors were ready for war in the 50s to keep segregation  .. Wallace, Faubus etc etc

[Anonymous]

George Wallace was a Democrat.

[cc]

And all Governors opposing desegregation were Dems

[Anonymous]

George Wallace was a Democrat.

Yes, he was.



The Democratic Party has elected members of the KKK to Congress. The aforementioned Robert Byrd was not only a recruiter for the KKK, he also rose to the position of "Exalted Cyclops" in his local chapter.



During the Lincoln-Douglas debates it was Lincoln who called for the end of slavery and it was Douglas who wanted it to continue.



The KKK was founded as a militant arm of the Democratic Party.



The 14th Amendment was pushed through over the objections of the Democratic Party.



It was a Democratic president named Bill Clinton that made light of the KKK involvement in Democratic politics.



It is the Democratic Party that has refused to allow African-Americans to prosper. They are the party of slavery in the past and they still enslave African-Americans today.

[Anonymous]

So far all we have are preliminary findings.



Six things the media got wrong about the graves found near Residential Schools

https://tnc.news/2021/07/07/six-things-the-media-got-wrong-about-the-graves-found-near-residential-schools/?fbclid=IwAR0bUHepAZS_RjPoWtQS-4Oyd2hDbgveDQTRBBATR11m5q6kw0OnWjDk6uU">https://tnc.news/2021/07/07/six-things- ... 0OnWjDk6uU">https://tnc.news/2021/07/07/six-things-the-media-got-wrong-about-the-graves-found-near-residential-schools/?fbclid=IwAR0bUHepAZS_RjPoWtQS-4Oyd2hDbgveDQTRBBATR11m5q6kw0OnWjDk6uU



1. Unverified Reports

It is standard practice in journalism to clarify whether or not an allegation has been proven, in court or otherwise. But when the Tk'emlups band issued a press release stating that they had used ground penetrating radar to locate 215 unmarked graves, the media accepted the story without question or any verification.



The band said a report was forthcoming in mid-June – but no report has been released to date. No evidence of any sort has been put forth for public consideration. We don't know who carried out the research, whether it was a company or a university, or how the technology was used. At this point, we have a few claims, and nothing else.



This may be a minor point, but it's an important distinction nonetheless.



2. What exactly was "discovered"?

There has been incredible confusion over what exactly was discovered, and media outlets have used tremendous liberty in describing what the bands have claimed.



JJ McCullough has made this point on Twitter, showing all the various ways the media have described what was discovered.





The first nation band leaders say they used ground penetrating radar.



To be clear: nothing was "uncovered." No "bodies" were found. There was no excavation, nothing was unearthed, nothing was removed, no identities were confirmed.



So anything you may have read saying these graves belong to children, including some specific claims about the ages of these children, is speculation at this point.



Let me refer back to a National Post story that explains what ground penetrating radar actually does. They interviewed a professor of Anthropology who is also the director of the Institute of Prairie and Indigenous Archaeology. She said this of ground penetrating radar:



"It doesn't actually see the bodies. It's not like an X-ray."



"What it actually does is it looks for the shaft. When a grave is dug, there is a grave shaft dug and the body is placed in the grave, sometimes in a coffin, as in the Christian burial context. What the ground-penetrating radar can see is where that pit itself was dug, because the soil actually changes when you dig a grave. And occasionally, if it is a coffin, the radar can pick up the coffin sometimes as well."



We're talking about pretty rudimentary technology here, and a relatively imprecise process. The numbers are more or less a rough estimate.



So why have media reports been so bold in asserting these numbers as facts?





3. We don't know whose graves were discovered

The Tk'emlups band claimed the graves belonged to children at the school. So when the second two bands (Cowessess and Lower Kootaney) came forth with their own claims, many in the media jumped to the conclusion that these too were the graves of children from residential schools.



But that wasn't the claim made by the bands. In fact, in both Cowessess and Lower Kootaney, the graves are believed to be in community cemeteries, belonging to both First Nations and the broader Canadian community.



Tucked away at the very end of a report in the Globe and Mail on the findings at the Cowessess reserve in Saskatchewan, it said this:



"It appears that not all of the graves contain children's bodies, Lerat (who is one of the band leaders) said. He said the area was also used as a burial site by the rural municipality.



"We did have a family of non-Indigenous people show up today and notified us that some of those unmarked graves had their families in them – their loved ones," Lerat said."



So what we have here is an abandoned community cemetery, where people of different backgrounds were buried.



That's quite a leap from the original storyline that these graves belong to children who had died at a residential school.



4. NOT mass graves

These are not mass graves. Several media outlets, both in Canada and international outlets like the BBC, Al Jazeera, the New York Times and the Washington Post have recklessly and erroneously labeled these findings as mass graves.







This is incredibly irresponsible.



All three chiefs themselves have explicitly stated these are not mass graves.







Why is this important?



Mass graves are a hallmark of genocide. They conjure images of pure evil, the kind of evil that characterized collectivist governments in the 20th century.



Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot.



These were truly evil leaders who used mass graves to cover their atrocities and crimes against humanity. These leaders carried out mass murder, and the mass graves went hand in hand.



The use of the term mass graves is wrong, and it is reckless. It conflates Canada's policy of forced assimilation through mandatory universal education, with Nazi death camps.



Let me be clear. Canada's policy was wrong. It was misguided and in too many cases, those who were responsible for caring for children in this country let them down, and let all of us down.



But that does not put Canada's residential schools on any level of equivalence with Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps.



It's good to see that the Washington Post made a correction on their story. Others should follow.



5. Cause of death

Many children who died at these schools died of natural causes. According to the Truth and Reconciliation Committee report in 2015, the number one cause of death was Tuberculosis.





You can argue that these children didn't receive proper health care, or that some of their immune systems could't handle living in close proximity to other children.



But negligence resulting in accidental death is quite different from murder, which is what many in politics and the media have suggested.





Since this news came out, there has been a near universal assumption in the media that these graves are evidence of Canada's Holocaust, as if the children had been deliberately killed.



Genocide requires intent. It requires a concerted and systematic effort to conduct mass murder and eliminate an entire race of people.



Canada's residential schools, however misguided, had the intent of educating children, assimilating them into the broader Canadian population, and ultimately lifting them out of poverty.



The policy was wrong, clearly. It was flawed and much harm resulted.



But there are a few orders of magnitude that separate the misguided intent of Catholic priests, nuns and Canadian government officials versus those of Nazi firing squads and gas chambers.





6. It's possible these weren't even unmarked graves.

Wooden graves, which were and are still the norm in First Nations communities in Western Canada, erode and disintegrate over time. It's possible these were once marked graves.



This is the claim being made by the former chief in the Lower Kootenay region (the third band to have announced the finding of graves.)



This is from a Global News story (my emphasis added):



The detection of human remains in unmarked graves at the site of a former residential school in B.C. was not an unexpected discovery, according to the area's former chief.



On Wednesday, it was confirmed that ground-penetrating radar found 182 unmarked graves in a cemetery at the site of the former Kootenay Residential School at St. Eugene Mission just outside Cranbrook, B.C.



The remains were found when remedial work was being performed in the area to replace the fence at the cemetery last year.



Sophie Pierre, former chief of the St Mary's Indian Band and a survivor of the school itself, told Global News that while the news of the unmarked graves had a painful impact on her and surrounding communities, they had always known the graves were there.



"There's no discovery, we knew it was there, it's a graveyard," Pierre said. "The fact there are graves inside a graveyard shouldn't be a surprise to anyone."



According to Pierre, wooden crosses that originally marked the gravesites had been burned or deteriorated over the years.  Using a wooden marker at a gravesite remains a practice that continues to this day in many Indigenous communities across Canada.



So when we're talking about so-called unmarked graves, at least in the context of the Lower Kootenay Band, what we are more likely talking about is abandoned graves at an existing cemetery.



Abandoned graves where people of different backgrounds — not just children from residential schools — were buried.



What an amazing leap to go from an uncared for community cemetery to mass graves, mass murder and genocide.



Mark Twain once said to never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Well for journalists, they might say never let the facts get in the way of a good narrative.

[Anonymous]

Prog media is jumping to conclusions.

[Anonymous]

I don't think there can be any doubt that some children died while in the care of Catholic nuns.

[Anonymous]

The Penelakut Tribe in B.C.'s Southern Gulf Islands says it has found more than 160 "undocumented and unmarked" graves in the area, which was also once home to the Kuper Island Residential School.

[Anonymous]

The Penelakut Tribe in B.C.'s Southern Gulf Islands says it has found more than 160 "undocumented and unmarked" graves in the area, which was also once home to the Kuper Island Residential School.

terrible

[Anonymous]

Woke mobs are tearing down this country's history based on incorrect stories of mass graves of kids.



https://tnc.news/2021/07/12/malcolm-more-hidden-facts-about-the-unmarked-graves/">https://tnc.news/2021/07/12/malcolm-mor ... ed-graves/">https://tnc.news/2021/07/12/malcolm-more-hidden-facts-about-the-unmarked-graves/

Media reports were quick to characterize the graves as belonging to children who attended the nearby Marieval Indian Residential School. But according to a band councillor, that's not necessarily the case.



"It appears that not all of the graves contain children's bodies," Jon Z. Lerat told the Globe and Mail, noting that this was also the burial site used by the rural municipality.



"We did have a family of non-Indigenous people show up today and notified us that some of those unmarked graves had their families in them — their loved ones," Lerat said. Delorme added that oral stories said the graves belong to "both children and adults" as well as "people who attended the church or were from nearby towns."



Unlike the Tk'emlups band — who claims the unmarked graves were discovered on the grounds of the former residential school — the unmarked graves at Cowesses are in an existing cemetery. Delorme noted that the graves were once marked, but that the markings were removed at some point.



Interestingly, the same band was in the news two years ago touting its relationship with the local Catholic Church — after the church donated $70,000 to the Cowessess Band for the purpose of helping to "identify unmarked graves, and add fences and trees in the Cowessess Cemetery."



Emails and phone calls to the Cowessess Band went unreturned. It is unclear whether the 751 unmarked graves announced in June 2021 are the same as the graves discussed in the media in June 2019. It is also unclear how the Band spent the $70,000 donated by the church to upgrade the cemetery.



Next, on June 30, 2021, a third band, the Lower Kootenay Band near Cranbrook, B.C., announced its own finding of 182 unmarked graves.



Once again, the media emphasized a connection with the St. Eugene Mission Residential School — again implying these graves belong to children.



Like the Cowessess cemetery graves, the Lower Kootenay unmarked graves are within an existing cemetery — and again the cemetery was used by the broader community.



Perhaps this is why former chief Sophie Pierre told Global News: "there's no discovery, we knew it was there, it's a graveyard."



"The fact there are graves inside a graveyard shouldn't be a surprise to anyone."

[Odinson]

The manner of the deaths should be investigated.



There has been a number of epidemics within the 100 year history of those schools.





Child death rate used to be a lot higher.



Spanish flu, diphteria, polio, tuberculosis etc.





Those things could also explain why so many kids have died.





Just saying that there is a possibility.



Schools are a real breeding ground for all kinds of diseases.