Posted on 05/29/2021 9:15:25 AM PDT by Roman_War_Criminal
The gruesome discovery took decades and for some survivors of the Kamloops Indian Residential School in Canada, the confirmation that children as young as 3 were buried on school grounds crystallizes the sorrow they have carried all their lives.
“I lost my heart, it was so much hurt and pain to finally hear, for the outside world, to finally hear what we assumed was happening there,” said Harvey McLeod, who attended the school for two years in the late 1960s, in a telephone interview with CNN Friday. “The story is so unreal, that yesterday it became real for a lot of us in this community,” he said.
The Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc community in the southern interior of British Columbia, where the school was located, released a statement late Thursday saying an “unthinkable loss that was spoken about but never documented” was confirmed. “This past weekend, with the help of a ground-penetrating radar specialist, the stark truth of the preliminary findings came to light
Is this an excerpt? If so, you should have posted it as such.
If this is the entire article, then it’s pretty useless.
Excerpt - and I thought I checked that box.
I remember an episode of the Canadian TV series “DaVinci’s Inquest” that dealt with searching for the remains of children on the grounds of an orphanage.
You should be ashamed of yourself! </sarcasm>
All anyone needs to know to understand the heinous abuses: The Kamloops Indian Residential school was one of the largest in Canada and operated from the late 19th century to the late 1970s. It was opened and run by the Catholic Church until the federal government took it over in the late 1960s.
Incredibly sad. Sincerely hope if people are still alive that were responsible, pay dearly.
“It was opened and run by the Catholic Church”
Well that does explain a lot.
When I lived in Mexico (80s), I remember the local paper printed a story about an old church wall being demoed for a new building and behind that wall were several skeletons of what later turned out to be pregnant nuns.
Sounds like the other Canadian serial killer, Robert “Willy” Pickton, who had a pig farm and was augmenting his pork sales with Vancouver prostitutes. I think he killed about 50. This indian reservation with the murdered children looks to be about 100 miles from Vancouver.
I am!
👍
Unless it was a very small school it does not sound like heinous abuse but a sad fact of life pre-antibiotics.
I recall watching a movie about an Canadian hockey player who was Indian. Went to a reservation school, if I recall correctly he witness several incidents he claimed resulted in deaths. He made it to the Montreal farm team. Wouldn’t be surprised if he attended the school.
But, this is Canada! I thought everything was perfect in Canada. /sarc
Incredibly sad. Sincerely hope if people are still alive that were responsible, pay dearly.
Are you suggesting that people connected to the school murdered these people and buried the evidence?
If you had a large school in the 19th century and someone died of natural causes, if shipping the body was judged impractical, then burying the body would be a responsible thing to do. I imagine that once it became practical to ship bodies back (both because of improved transportation and reduced mortality) then practices changed.
I imagine that many people here would have problems with the question: if a plane crashes on the Yukon/NWT border, where do you bury the survivor?
Or would take too seriously the news that a Cessna had crashed into a St. John’s Cemetery and thus far the Newfoundland government had recovered 263 bodies.
I read the “full report” and it doesn’t say anything about murder. Lack of health care causing tuberculosis deaths is all they actually said. It really doesn’t say much about how they died, or why they were buried where they were. Was it some kind of mass grave or a unofficial cemetery?
1. As you correctly point out, finding the remains of 200+ people buried at a site like this doesn’t necessarily mean these deaths were the result of foul play.
2. Check out the list of alleged “abuses” of the Canadian residential school program over the course of 150 years, and tell me how our current system of public schools and compulsory education laws is any different.
Some died from abuse, also many from TB and other diseases that easily spread due to the children being in close quarters and not very safe or hygienic conditions. I’ve read coverage of other such stories and most of these deaths were not publicized and there was little if any parental notification given as native children were not considered necessary to use rail transit to bring their bodies back to the parents for internment.
Willie Littlechild., played for farm team of Maple Leads. First indigenous hockey player.
The link eventually references the parent article which is on CNN.
Here is the story on some alternative websites.
I’ve read some books on Canadian history and early Canadian explorers and have admired Canada’s overall more humane treatment of its indigenous people compared to the near genocidal attitude of Americans in the 1800s.
The revelation that Canada separated families and forced kids into residential schools up until the 1970s stains my opinion of their native policies.
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