Truth and Reconciliation and Appalling Ignorance

[sabotabby]

Here is a thing that happened:

The government of Canada, in collusion with various churches, kidnapped, tortured, starved, neglected, raped, and in many cases murdered aboriginal children. They robbed them of their families and culture. They beat them for speaking their own languages. When they died—and per capita, more of them died than Canadian soldiers in WWII—they were not returned to their families but buried in mass graves that were abandoned once the "schools" were closed. This fucking abomination, our own Holocaust, committed on Canadian soil with the full blessing of the law and with willful, savage brutality, took place from 1869 to 1996, involved 150,000 innocent children, and dealt a blow to indigenous communities that still echoes today. How can it not? 1996. Do you understand how recent this is, how raw this wound remains?

And it's not a secret. It hasn't been a secret as long as I can remember. The Truth and Reconciliation Committee's report on it was released today, but the information contained therein has been in the news for years. I looked back in my "first nations" tag and found a post I made about Kevin Annett, who did extensive research that revealed estimated death tolls and some of the mass grave locations, in 2008. I remember watching "Where the Spirit Lives," which depicts rape, torture, and murder in a residential school, in 1989. We had like five channels back then, but it was on CBC, which you could get even if you just had a coat hanger wired to the back of your TV. My whitebread honky school showed the movie to us in class (different times; these days it would be too graphic to show to children). Even my shitty Canadian history textbooks, which existed to spread a false image of Canada as a multicultural, democratic, benevolent paradise, had a little paragraph noting that this was a thing that happened. (Minus the mass graves and the death toll, which may not have been that well known back in the 80s and regardless is not a thing that instills national pride.)

I don't pretend to be particularly knowledgable about indigenous issues. I'm white as the driven snow. I know some First Nations people, though not many. I've been vaguely involved in some solidarity activism. But I didn't have to go out of my way to learn that my government kidnapped and murdered children.

Like any decent human being, the fact that this was done enrages me. (Decent human beings, judging by some of the comments to today's Star articles, are at a premium in Canada. But if you are not outraged by genocide there's something wrong with you and you are #gulagbait.) But what also enrages me is the number of people who are acting like they had no idea this happened.

"We didn't study it in school."

"I had no idea it was that bad, though."

JESUS FUCK, people, what did you think happened? Why Oka? Why Caledonia? Why Attawapiskat? Why Bill C-51? Don't you live here?

Like, I get how someone brand new to the country might not have heard about it, as the fact that we fucking slaughtered large swaths of the indigenous population is not something that Canada advertises to new immigrants. But do people just never read the news? Is everyone just relying on Grade 10 Canadian history to be an honest and truthful representation of the European conquest of Canada? I'm actually raging here at how willfully oblivious so many whites must be to have made it to adulthood without having any inkling of the blood that permeates the land they've stolen. It's a testament to the brilliance of our national propaganda machine that it can convince so large a percentage of the population that this is not information worth investigating. And it's a testament to the sheer ignorance and racism of settler culture that, proportionally, more children died in residential schools than in Auschwitz or of the Black Plague, and until today few were willing to call it genocide.

Fuck off. If you were born here and didn't know, it's because you didn't care to find out.

P.S. We also enslaved black people. That's not in the history textbooks, but now you can't not know that either.

Comments

[smhwpf.livejournal.com]

Horrifying. I'm not Canadian, but as a white European and a Christian, I'm part of two groups that are behind this and much else in other countries.

Yeah, it is willful ignorance. Filtering out, skimming over, choosing not to watch things that are "boring" or "Yet another thing about how guilty we should all be"... Using every possible conscious or subconscious strategy to stay ignorant until the truth is thrust right into their faces.

(Not sure about higher death rate than Auschwitz or the Black Death? But it does not need to be to be utterly monstrous and evil, and unquestionably Genocide, morally and legally.)

[princealberic.livejournal.com]

(Not sure about higher death rate than Auschwitz or the Black Death? But it does not need to be to be utterly monstrous and evil, and unquestionably Genocide, morally and legally.)

sabotabby did specify "proportionally", so I think she's talking about the ratio of people who lived to people who died. I haven't done the maths, though, so I don't know either.

[sabotabby]

I am. It's hard to quantify because we're talking about proportional deaths over a range of time. Death tolls in Auschwitz varied based on, for example, how many satellite camps there were to hold prisoners and how many ovens existed at a time, as well as when typhus broke out. Death tolls in residential schools also varied based on population and...when typhus broke out. Obviously there were a lot more people killed during the Holocaust in terms of numbers, but the proportions of children who died versus survived residential schools is quite comparable.

[sabotabby]

Filtering out, skimming over, choosing not to watch things that are "boring" or "Yet another thing about how guilty we should all be"... Using every possible conscious or subconscious strategy to stay ignorant until the truth is thrust right into their faces.

I recognize these tendencies in myself to a point, and I know there's a temptation to just read these things and go, "oh, how horrifying" and move on, but it's an ongoing thing that we all benefit from.

(Not sure about higher death rate than Auschwitz or the Black Death? But it does not need to be to be utterly monstrous and evil, and unquestionably Genocide, morally and legally.)

The death rate in Auschwitz varied over time. Some discussion on where the 15-25% per year number comes from. (I'm not a stats person so correct me if I'm wrong.) Deaths from the Black Plague were between 30-60% (record-keeping being way less accurate back then!)

The estimated death rate at residential schools during their peak was 40-60%. I mean, one child would be too many, but that's just staggering.

[smhwpf.livejournal.com]

Right, I was looking at the overall death figures in the reporting on the TRC - minimum (confirmed, counted) of somewhat over 3,000, and Sinclair's guestimate of 6,000 total.

But with a bit of Googling, I see that in the early decades it was at the 30-60% levels.

So, maybe not at Auschwitz levels when looked at over the whole period, but at its worst... Canada ran death camps.

Gods. :-(

I wonder how much of the denial is to do with the extent to which Canada's sense of national identity (or so it seems to me) is bound up with being Not American, and specifically, being better than the Americans. Kinder, gentler, much politer (yet also tougher due to the winter), free health care, and less beastly to the First Nations. "We kept our treaties," I remember a young Canadian guy, whom I met on my travels, telling me proudly.

But Canada was not better. Different evils maybe, but not in any real moral sense 'better'.

Letting go of claims of moral superiority is something most people - and especially nations - are very reluctant to do.

[ironed_orchid]

Yeah, it is willful ignorance. Filtering out, skimming over, choosing not to watch things that are "boring" or "Yet another thing about how guilty we should all be"... Using every possible conscious or subconscious strategy to stay ignorant until the truth is thrust right into their faces.

Yes, I see a lot of that in Australia. And the good old "I can't bear to watch the depressing stuff on the news," which I do sympathize with, but as a person with a conscience, I feel a duty to have at least some idea of what's going on, so if I can't watch news programs for visceral reasons, I read articles instead.

[sabotabby]

I go through media blackout phases but you'd have to have been phased out your entire life to avoid knowing about something this huge here.

[kryss-labryn.livejournal.com]

Overall, there was about a 50% death rate for the students that attended the residential schools.

Some places were worse than others, but holy shit, fully half of the students who went to these places died, either from abuse, illness, or neglect (they weren't fed anything like proper meals, and typhoid was rampant, aside from everything else that went on).

It was awful, a literal systematic attempt to uproot these poor kids from everything they had known and were, and to make them into good little white Christians. Which of course they never could be, because aside from anything else, they could never change the colour of their skin.

Parents were persuaded to give up their kids with the promise that they would have a better life, and would be better looked after, and (and this was a big one) that they would never go hungry again. Hunger was a real concern for the parents when the whole thing started, trying to make sure there was enough food to last through winter. Lean times.

And those who weren't persuaded had their kids forcibly removed anyways, and a lot of them never saw their children again. Siblings were deliberately split up and sent to different schools, so they might have as little as possible around to tie them to their former lives and cultures. They were usually beaten severely for speaking their own languages, even when they didn't yet know English. Occasionally parents would try to visit, but they were forbidden from entering, and the kids were never told. And the parents were never even told when their children died, and as Sabs said the bodies weren't even returned.

And they made the other kids dig the graves.

It honestly makes me sick to my stomach, what those poor kids went through.

And actually, there was apparently a school near me when I was growing up, although I didn't really find out about it (or at least the full import of what "residential school" actually meant) until much, much later. I remember at some point as a kid (no idea when this was, I'd guess maybe early-to-mid-Eighties?) a few of us standing around, I don't remember why, and one of the kids there was from this residential school, and she told us it was awful, that they starved the kids and beat them up and stuff, and I think we probably told her she was wrong. Because, you see, we also went to school, and we certainly weren't starved or beaten, so schools didn't do that. She said this was different, it was a residential school. But my Mum had gone to boarding school in England, and they certainly didn't starve or beat them there (although they were very strict by our standards). I think she got pretty mad at us, and looking back on it later, knowing what I do now, I feel really, really, unutterably bad about it. I don't know if anything would have changed if us white kids had told any adults about it; I suspect even if she had managed to convince us, we wouldn't have been able to convince anyone else, but I don't know.

They really were more innocent times, and we just didn't expect adults to hurt kids. Okay, sure, spank them, but not hurt them. And what she was describing was so far outside our own experiences that we couldn't comprehend or accept it.

There were a lot of aboriginal kids in our regular, public school system so it wasn't all the kids in the area going to the residential school, but that this stuff was going on even after I fucking left college is terrible. It's not something that was just happening a hundred years ago when the missionaries first came through; it's something that was actively continuing on until "Independence Day" came out!!

So hopefully this latest report will finally force the government to take action, although I suspect we'll have to get Harper out before anything useful actually happens.

[disastrid.livejournal.com]

I find wilful ignorance and staunch denial to be the traits that, for me, really sum up Canadian culture. I always knew it but it was driven home for me so much more firmly when I left - a great many evils can be glossed over because it was declared the best place to live in 1991. Historical genocide? Lalala best place to live! Removed from the UN Security Council for appalling foreign policy? Lalala best place to live! Harper dismantling everything you know as democracy? Lalala best place to live!

I despair, I really do.

[sabotabby]

Hello fellow Canadian in despair.

A thing I've noticed is how the character of our racism differs. It's all about erasure, whereas American racism is about servitude and warfare. We would prefer our inconvenient minorities quietly go away, whereas they seem to really wanna fight them.

[radiumhead.livejournal.com]

well the first one is how the north would like to deal with them, the second is how the south would like to deal with them.

[princealberic.livejournal.com]

This is fucking horrifying. I didn't know about any of this until you told me some time ago. It's scary, and scarier still that it was going on until 1996 (so the "those were other, less enlightened times!" excuse doesn't work).

I've noticed that people rarely go beyond what they are taught in school, if they even paid attention to that. I've also noticed that some people are very knowledgeable in theory, but then can't really apply it to real life scenarios.

But still, I think that the specific ignorance your post is downright baffling because it's something that was happening until the 90s (and it sounds like it wasn't exactly a secret).

[sabotabby]

I can forgive not knowing that it went on until 1996, since that was just one school (but it was still kind of big news when it closed!). But about the whole thing? You can't not know. And the people I'm mainly ranting about are Star online readers, and while the paper is framing this as, "LOOK AT THESE HORRIBLE REVELATIONS WE ONLY JUST FOUND OUT ABOUT! never mind that indigenous people have been demanding justice for years." to their credit they have been publishing articles about it for years. So we're talking about a population that, at the very least, reads a Canadian newspaper that has been talking about it for awhile.

[princealberic.livejournal.com]

Yeah, like you've said, even if they didn't know about it ending only in 1996 and the effects it still has on people today... how would someone not know at least a bit since it's in a newspaper they read? That's so damn weird. O.o

[kryss-labryn.livejournal.com]

The CBC talks about it fairly regularly so I've been hearing about it for ages; I forget that most people usually just have their car radio tuned to the local rock station, if they even use the radio anymore.

But good lord, how little news does one have to expose oneself to, to not know this is a thing, and has been generally known about for going on two decades now?!

[sabotabby]

That's what I thought. It was like when I was in Germany and there were towns right by the concentration camps filled with people who claimed, afterwards, that they had no idea.

[symbioid.livejournal.com]

Yeah :(

I don't have much to say except be sad at the continuation of history, and the horrors into the "modern" age, especially by a "liberal" government.

[sabotabby]

Well, our government is by no means liberal (small or capital-L) and is pretty active on the genocide front. So it comes as little surprise that the horrors continue.

[matrixmann]

Everytime your texts build a piece of my doubt that Canada also isn't that calm and more lawful country that people mystify in Europe about.

[sabotabby]

Yeah, no, it's pretty shit here. Not for me, because I'm a middle class white lady (with job instability but still), but for pretty much any marginalized group. Especially indigenous people, though. One FN woman I knew characterized Canada as a wonderful place where people of all ethnicities come together in peace to shit on FN.

[matrixmann]

During the Ukraine conflict Canada already drew negative attention on it for me, and admittedly, compared to the United States, you don't hear pretty much about it, even though it's overseas. I don't if that is because the United States always are a greater focus in general, or if really no-one wants to look deeper beneath the surface. And then I pick up what other people write about it beyond commercial journalism and see the dirt it also has in its crypt. Espionage, refuge of WWII nazi war criminals (especially Ukraine), causing trouble in South America for their enterprises that deal with natural resources...
Well, and then the obvious rest that always comes with conservative politicians in power.
Makes you wonder which orginal purpose they introduced the hard immigration laws for...

[joysilence.livejournal.com]

I must admit that I have only ever heard about this stuff from you. People in the UK do still fantasize about Canada being a peaceful, ecologically unspoiled wonderland, like a sort of massive, idealized Britain of the 1950s but with more progressive politics. I can't blame them for wanting that dream but I'm afraid Rob Ford has actually succeeded in forming a substantial crack (no pun intended) in the British perception of Canada. Killing a load of brown people is one thing, but this guy did drugs and pushed over an older lady, and that's just not something that can be swept under the carpet.

[sabotabby]

People in Canada used to fantasize about the UK being a socialist paradise (I mean, you guys had a party called Labour in power!), but I know better 'cause friends there.

I can't blame them for wanting that dream but I'm afraid Rob Ford has actually succeeded in forming a substantial crack (no pun intended) in the British perception of Canada. Killing a load of brown people is one thing, but this guy did drugs and pushed over an older lady, and that's just not something that can be swept under the carpet.

Hahaha thank you Rob Ford, in that case.

[matrixmann]

Somehow similar impression they also spread about it in Germany. Wonderful peace country with a lot less crime taking place, people being not in need to lock their doors, nothing will be stolen, silent, calm and more political considered country... The freedom and peace you can't get over here.

[sabotabby]

I admittedly had a wonderful impression of Germany when I was there. But that was over a decade ago.

[matrixmann]

As a tourist it might still be a nice country, and sure there are worse places to live these days (Libya?).
But telling you, more than a decade ago it was better than now.
Think, actually the best time was in the 90s, shortly after the turnaround. At least if you had a safe job and some money. (Just to point at what they've done with the Eastern new inhabitants.)
People just took things less with a pinch of salt and let you live as you wanted to live.
Now with 15 years after this decade, you have the impression running into anyone everytime which begrudges what you have and do and he tries to smash it.

[sabotabby]

Yeah, that doesn't surprise me. When I was there, people seemed to have free or very cheap education and low cost of living, and as a result, the arts were thriving. It doesn't sound like it's like that anymore.

[matrixmann]

Depends on when that was, which currency was then on here. Was it already Euro or still Deutsche Mark?
After the introduction of the Euro, I think, prices dropped a bit for the moment because the numbers halved.
One says openly today, the Euro was introduced just to get this effect because inflation and economy growth (as capitalism practices it) had driven the prices up, it was barely takeable anymore at the end of it. Also, for the strategy to be an exporting nation it was definitely inconvenient (too expensive) - which is now very much doable because of the cheapened Euro.

[sabotabby]

Yeah, it was definitely pre-Euro.

[matrixmann]

Hm, then in the 90s you could say people just had a bit of money in their pockets to live.

[kakodaimon.livejournal.com]

One of my professors at the U of T was an elder. He was wonderful at teaching some things, and in some ways awful, like for example he once said that the Jews who escaped the Holocaust as refugees should have stayed and died rather than leave "their own" country (he was basically against the whole idea of refugees regardless of circumstances). But again, in some ways, phenomenal, and although I know not everybody is into this I personally cut a lot of slack to people whose worldviews were obviously shaped by their own trauma.

Anyway he once described how he was taken to a residential school. He was out playing with his friends and a helicopter came down seemingly out of nowhere and took them away without getting any chance at saying goodbye to his familiy. He had never seen or felt a helicopter before, only the tiny Cessnas that delivered things to the Reserve (and never been on it, of course). He described pasting his face to the window and watching everything on the ground become small and shaky.

[sabotabby]

I can't imagine how that must feel. Like being abducted by aliens. Worse, because the aliens probably just want to mind-probe you.

[kakodaimon.livejournal.com]

Exactly, at the end of the alien abduction comes some sort of (troubled) return to your waking life. For the residential school kid the helicopter and the world it comes from are real forever, around you forever.

[kryss-labryn.livejournal.com]

Holy shit that's awful. Holy fuck.

[kakodaimon.livejournal.com]

It makes me sad and confused to think about just how many people were involved even in this one small story in a huge nightmare (e.g., the helicopter pilot, the other children, were there adults watching, running to the helicopter, away from it?). All the more so in your comment which gives more of the history (which I hope people read) -- all those teachers, for example. I really hope we can imagine how people could justify participating in residential schools, so we can recognise those same feelings in ourselves when we are called on to enforce suffering.