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In addition, the Supreme Court rules that you can now kill as many as you want and still apply for parole.
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May 30, 2022 • 45 minutes ago • 7 minutes reading • 80 comments Prime Minister Justin Trudeau places a teddy bear in front of a small flag in a field before a ceremony at the site of a former residential school in Cowessess First Nation, Sask., July 6, 2021. Photo by Liam Richards / Pool via REUTERS
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First Reading is a daily newsletter that tells you about the hardships of Canadian politicians, all curated by Tristin Hopper of the National Post. For an advance version sent directly to your inbox every Monday to Thursday at 18:00 ET (and 9:00 on Saturdays), register here.
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MAIN HISTORY
This week marks the one-year anniversary of Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc announcing the results of a ground penetration radar survey that had detected 215 underground anomalies suspected to be the unmarked graves of students who had died while attending Kamloops Indian Residential School.
The Tk’emlúps leadership may have believed that they were only posting an update on a fact that was already known to the indigenous community: thousands of children did not return home from residential school and were almost always buried on the site, usually as cost. savings measure.
But this single announcement kicked off one of Canada’s most seismic accounts with the traumas of the Indian residential school system. Canada Day was effectively canceled, historic churches were set on fire, and flags were held at half-mast for five months, the longest in Commonwealth history. Land radar surveys across Canada soon added hundreds of new suspicious graves to the initial 215 record.
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The first page of the press release of May 27, 2021 that started it all. Photo of Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc
Except that much of the media and political narrative that summer was false. There were no “mass graves.” There was no evidence of mass murder. There is no evidence that the graves were deliberately hidden. And in several cases, the First Nations explicitly pointed out that radar surveys were likely to find graves with no immediate link to nearby residential school sites.
In a full-fledged feature for the National Post, veteran writer Terry Glavin delved into how the national narrative about unmarked graves got off the rails so quickly, and how the story was largely hijacked by non-indigenous voices.
This story took weeks to assemble. I will have more background history here soon. For now: no, this is not a story about Indians telling lies. It’s a story about whites losing their minds. https://t.co/dQPWdhhoqK
– Terry Glavin (@TerryGlavin) May 26, 2022
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As Glavin wrote in his Substack, “What happened last summer was not that the Indians were lying or plundering the government. It would be more correct to say that it was the other way around.”
We’ve then completed the points on what’s true (and what’s not) about what you heard in last summer’s report on residential center graves.
(Before I begin, a brief reminder that the following points about unmarked graves do little to absolve a system that still clearly stands as one of Canada’s biggest national mistakes. The whole goal of the system was to assimilate Indigenous children by eliminating Beyond that, residential schools in India persistently suffered appalling child mortality rates that were disproportionate to those of non-indigenous schools.Physical abuse due to transgressions such as bed wetting or speaking the language It was common, and many alumni remember that they had suffered from an almost constant state of hunger. food.)
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IT WAS NEVER A SECRET THAT MUCH STUDENT DEATH WILL BE ENDEMIC IN RESIDENTIAL
Implicit in much of the political and international reactions to the discoveries of alleged residential school graves was that they were children whose deaths had been somehow hidden. While it is likely that most Canadians were not previously aware of the huge scale of mortality in Indian residential schools (some of which saw 20 per cent mortality rates in the late 19th century), this it was a fact that would have been easily known even by generations of Canadians who endorsed the continuity of the Indian residential school system.
Indigenous people have always been well aware that virtually every Canadian residential school is home to children’s graves, and First Nations leaders last summer quickly said that the discovery in Kamloops was no surprise. . As for all the others, Glavin has previously pointed out that there are actually multiple cases in the country’s Canadian history facing a national account of the horrific conditions in residential schools, only that they are quickly being forgotten for the time being. . The first such case occurred exactly 100 years ago, when the chief medical inspector of the Indian Affairs Department publicly resigned in protest of the astonishingly high rates of tuberculosis deaths in residential schools.
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NOT A FIRST NATION CLAIMS TO HAVE FOUND A COMMUNITY TOMB
The New York Times was one of the first publications to refer to the discovery of Kamloops as a “mass grave,” and the phrase was instrumental in helping to turn the tomb’s discoveries into international history. But of the four First Nations that announced the discovery of unmarked graves last summer, none claimed that they were anything other than individual marked graves that, for whatever reason, had seen their locations forgotten overtime. .
Evidence of unmarked graves at St. Mary is literally in a simple place. #MissionBCLeft: Funeral photo from 1958, displayed on a newsstand outside the IMO cemetery in Heritage Park. Right: photo taken today from the same place. pic.twitter.com/CJsH9kO1QK
– Patrick Penner (@portmoodypigeon) July 6, 2021
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These same First Nations were also uniformly cautious in defining the limits of ground penetration radar. Surveys could identify soil alterations that could be caused by human burials, but until no excavations were carried out, they could not explicitly confirm the graves or who was there. To date, these excavations have not been completed.
“Local indigenous leaders most directly involved in last summer’s‘ discoveries ’tended to be the most cautious of all the different participants in the resentful public debates,” Glavin wrote. “In some cases, these local leaders had not even intended to draw the public’s attention to the ‘basic truth’ work they supervised in residential school centers and which ended up being the subject of all those shocking headlines.” .
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MANY OF THE TOMBS REDISCOVERED EVEN IN KNOWN CEMETERIES (AND SOME WERE FOUND TO HAVE INCONCLUSIVE CONNECTIONS WITH RESIDENTIAL NEAR)
One of the most popular images last summer was Prime Minister Justin Trudeau kneeling at the suspicious site of more than 751 unmarked graves near the former site of the Marieval Indian residential school. What was not immediately seen in the photo, however, was that Trudeau was kneeling in a clearing that was evidently inside a larger cemetery of mostly marked graves.
A group of women walk through the cemetery next to where 751 unmarked graves were found on the outskirts of Marieval, Sask. Photo by Geoff Robins / AFP
In announcing the 751 suspicious tombs, the Cowessess First Nation was quite explicit in pointing out that these were tombs with a Roman Catholic cemetery whose markers had been lost, and that it was not entirely clear if they contained indigenous people, and far fewer students from residential centers. . As a former Marieval student at CBC later put it: “We’ve always known they were there … It’s just the fact that the media picked up the unmarked graves, and the story was actually created from ‘here because that’s how it happens’.
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Glavin found it to be a similar story with 182 suspicious graves advertised outside of Cranbrook, BC and 160 on Penelakut Island in BC. In the latter case, the figure of 160 reported by the Canadian media seems …