The Essential Truth of the Residential Schools

 

Greg Piasetzki writes today in the National Post: “in 1946, decades after the first residential schools were built, the Globe and Mail reported that, ‘Of the 128,000 Indians in this country, only 16,000 last year received formal schooling. Of this number, few stayed more than a year and only 71 … reached Grade 9.’”

This simple fact explodes the myth of the residential schools. Attendance was not compulsory--even though school attendance was compulsory for non-native children. Had mistreatment occurred, or “cultural genocide” been on the table, parents could simply withdraw their children. The government, and the churches, were offering a service: education in useful trades, plus, in the case of the residential schools, free room and board.

Eventually, the truth will come out. But we will never be able to recover all the historic churches burned down, the statues pulled down, the heritage lost.

As Others See Us

 

A Blot on Canada's History

 

Not the residential schools--the reporting on the residential schools.

The Real Genocide

 

In a recent article, unfortunately behind a paywall, Greg Piasetzki, himself legally considered Metis, writes for the Epoch Times that a federal government commission back in 1944, and again in 1948, wanted to close the Indian residential schools. “Wherever and whenever possible Indian children should be educated in association with other children.”

The federal government had never wanted the schools: they were expensive. They were, in the first place, required by treaty. The Indians wanted them. Since some Indian families were transient, and some loving in extremely remote locations, boarding was often necessary.

However, they soon realized they could not close the schools for an additional reason—because too many Indian children had nowhere else to go. The residential schools were in effect orphanages for kids whose parents were unable or unwilling to care for them. “A census taken by Indian Affairs in 1953 found that 43 percent of the 10,112 indigenous children in residential schools nationwide were listed as neglected or living in homes that were unfit because of parental problems.” For others, their parents could not feed them as well as the schools would. The Truth and Reconciliation report cites this as a consideration: if the schools did not feed the children better than at home, the parents would not send them.

The Epoch Times article also notes that there was no drive to force Indian families to send their children to a residential school. School attendance became compulsory for non-native children in Ontario in 1871. It became compulsory for Indian children only in 1920, and even then the law was rarely enforced. “About half of all students who attended between the 1880s and 1950s dropped out after Grade 1, and few students made it as far as Grade 5.” Obviously, they were not being compelled to attend, and if they or their families did not find conditions satisfactory, they left. Those who stayed were largely those who had no place else to go.

The Epoch Times traces the problems of the Indian family to alcoholism and fetal alcohol syndrome (FASD), which the recent Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report admits is still an epidemic on reserves. “Studies suggest FASD occurs among indigenous children on and off reserves at rates between 10 and 100 times greater than in the rest of Canada.” “Tragically, these problems follow them into adult life and are reflected in high rates of family violence (including spousal and sexual abuse), suicide, and addiction, and often repeat down through subsequent generations.”

Alcoholism is not the real problem, though. It is a symptom. This is due to a general collapse of morale, a shared depression due to culture shock. Charles Darwin recognized in the nineteenth century that whenever Europeans came into contact with a significantly more primitive culture, the primitive culture tends to collapse into a sense of pointlessness, very much like depression on an individual level. Men stopped working; women stopped looking after the children.

The cure, as everyone knows who has gone through culture shock, is to get out there and assimilate. Learn what your new surroundings have to offer. This is now being discouraged as “cultural genocide.” And the, better, ultimate cure is to get a new grounding in the eternal verities and the ultimate purpose of life. In other words, to get religion. And this option too is being systematically removed from the reserves and from modern Indian life, with churches actually being burned down.

In order to shut down the residential schools, officials turned to adoption for at-risk Indian children: the “Sixties scoop.” This is now condemned as another attempt at “cultural genocide.” Still today, “Nationwide, according to the 2021 Census, native children under 14 account for 53.8 percent of children in care, despite representing less than 8 percent of children that age in Canada.” They are simply now no longer adopted, but must remain in long-term care.

And we pretend to wonder why there are suicide pacts among young people on reserves. And why there are so many “missing and murdered (young) indigenous women.”

We have systematically prevented and then punished any efforts to help them.

Will It Soon Be Illegal to Question the Official History of Residential Schools?

 

This is getting flat-out Orwellian.

Tried to post the link on Facebook, and immediately got the message, "this content is not available any more." More Trudeauvian censorship: cannot link on Facebook to any Canadian news...

Reminds me a lot of living in China back in the 90s.

No Mass Graves

 

Canada's reputation internationally takes another blow.

Getting Schooled on Residential Schools

 

Egerton Ryerson statue once standing in front of Ryerson University

Friend Euripides sends this New York Post piece to me from Korea. Word of the failure to find any evidence of the Canadian genocide is getting out.

I see the slogan in the video on Egerton Ryerson’s statue: “No child forgotten, no child left behind.”

Here in Saint John, I go into the Dollar Store, I go into WalMart, I go into Giant Tiger—all have prominent displays of orange T-shirts on sale with the slogan “Every Child Matters.” These are a protest against the residential schools. Uptown, I see two pedestrian crossings painted orange with stencilled feathers—again a protest against the residential schools. At the Art Gallery of Ontario, when I visited a year ago, there was a big display in the atrium of children’s shoes arranged in a circle, to represent the supposedly murdered children.

There has been a wave of arson attacks on churches across Canada--up to 83 now. Including to my mind the most beautiful building in Alberta, St. Jean Baptiste in Morinville, a perfect French Canadian church sitting incongruously in the middle of the prairie. Burned to the ground. Another uniquely beautiful and historic church in Fort Chipewyan, Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Burned to the ground. Canada, especially Western Canada, has too few historic or architecturally interesting buildings. And the authorities did not seem to care. Trudeau spokesman Gerald Butts said the attacks are “understandable.” 

That statue of Egerton Ryerson that is shown in the video splashed with paint has been taken down. He was the founder of the Ontario public school system, but he is now condemned for having advocated the residential schools for Indians. Ryerson University, named after him, has now been renamed “Toronto Metropolitan University.” This hits close to home, since both I and my grandmother are graduates. The statue of Sir John A. Macdonald in Macdonald Park in Kingston, his hometown, has been taken down. He is the founder of Canada, but his government also funded the residential schools, so he is now a villain. My ancestors, my family, are from Kingston, and would have known him.

In June, government official Kimberly Murray suggested it should be made a crime to deny that there was genocide in the Indian residential schools. Justice Minister David Lametti said he was “open to the suggestion.”

It’s all a hoax.

The original report of a “mass grave of indigenous children” came from the reservation in Kamloops. I have lived in Kamloops; the story immediately sounded impossible. The residential school is right across the river from downtown Kamloops. If large numbers of children had gone missing in this, or any other urban school, you can be sure it would have been noticed. The tribal government would have been on the case, the Kamloops police would have been on it, the provincial and federal governments would know about it; not least, the child’s family would notice if little Tommy did not come home for Christmas or summer vacation. There would of course have been records of all students entering and graduating, and any deaths. If nobody noticed at any level, the problem must have gone far beyond the school.

During the public announcement by the Kamloops band of a “preliminary indication” of unmarked graves, the one that spread the story of mass graves and genocide across the world, they promised to follow up soon with a further investigation. Other tribes soon followed suit with their own magnetic imaging and their own announcements. They were given federal money for said further investigations. And yet after two years no excavations have been made.  None are scheduled. This suggests strongly they have known all along there were no unmarked graves.

After two years, Pine Creek is the only band who has been naïve enough to excavate. The rest are apparently all hoaxing the public for more funding.

“The system forcibly separated children from their families for extended periods of time,” the NY Post piece explains. That is, at best, overdramatized. There was as now a legal obligation to send your children to school in Canada. In the case of Indians it was actually rarely enforced. Most Indian parents had the choice of a residential school or an ordinary day school; most Indian children attended day schools. Residential schools were available for parents too remote to have a school nearby, or families who did not want or could not bear the expense of supporting their own children. Most attendees in many schools were orphans or wards of the state.

The piece goes on: the schools “forbade them to acknowledge their Indigenous heritage and culture or to speak their own languages”

Think about it. If the plan was to separate Indians from their heritage and integrate them into the larger culture, the thing to do would obviously be to send them to the regular government schools with everybody else. The very existence of separate indigenous schools proves an intent to keep the Indians separate and distinct. They had a separate curriculum which featured elements of Indian culture, along with their reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic. The use of indigenous languages was sometimes restricted; for two reasons. First, for the same reason language schools usually  prohibit speaking L1 (the students’ first language) in class—because immersion is the most effective way to learn a language. Second, because most schools had students with a variety of first languages. The only common language was English or French. Using another language was excluding classmates from the conversation.

The official policy of at least the Catholic Church, which ran most of the schools, was not to restrict use of the original language outside of the classroom. Many staff members were themselves aboriginal, and would address students in their own shared language.

Conditions at the schools might sound harsh in modern terms, too much macaroni and cheese and not enough fresh fruit in the cafeteria, perhaps, but we were all poorer then. The schools were sometimes not well-funded. However, conditions had to be better than the children would experience at home, or their parents could and would pull them out of the schools. Administrators worried about this—showing, of course, that parents had that choice.

This is not, of course, to deny that school is hell. That goes without saying.

Canada's Disappearing Genocide

 

Thought Crimes in Canada

 

The Real Genocide

 

Moloch: the pagan attitude towards children.

I can’t locate the clip, but Stephen LeDrew recently did a three-minute interview with Brian Lilley in which they lamented a teacher who was fired for questioning whether the Indian residential schools were so bad. I suspect it has actually been pulled. Too controversial?

Both Lilley and LeDrew took care to make clear in the interview that they themselves thought residential schools were bad—but why can’t we discuss the matter?

They ought to know why. When an opinion or viewpoint is suppressed, it is usually because it is right. Because those who oppose it, and are in power, do not believe they can convincingly argue against it. Nobody cares to silence claims that the earth is flat, or that the US never went to the moon.

Lilley does point out that he has interviewed many “survivors” who remembered the schools fondly. This despite the fact that anyone who attended has a financial incentive to say they were as bad as possible: compensation is being offered. Lilley also notes that he has read the historical documents, and knows that, when they were set up, they were the “progressive” option. They were intended, if mistakenly, to help the Indians. There was no genocide in mind.

Most of them were mostly orphanages: refuges for kids whose parents had died, or who came from a profoundly dysfunctional family, or whose parents were too poor to properly care for them. And the Indian family is still broken. Simply closing them, without offering an alternative, is in callous disregard of the interests of Indian children. This is the real ethnic genocide, and it is happening now. Scapegoating the residential schools looks like a cover to get away with it.

We pretend we have no idea why there is this problem of “missing and murdered indigenous women.” We keep demanding more investigation and more commissions. The answer is obvious: most of them are adolescent women fleeing some intolerable situation at home. We pretend we have no idea why there are so many suicide pacts among young people at remote reservations. The answer is obvious.

We don’t give a damn about Indians. We don’t give a damn about young people in general. Whether consciously or not, we want to kill them all. We abort them, we surgically mutilate them, we mock mothers who spend their time raising them, we will not give them a proper education, but force them into factory schools and indoctrination centres, we declare them “mentally ill” and refuse to listen if they say they are abused at home.

To most of us, in our post-Christian society, the young seem only to be an unwanted consequence of our sexual pleasures. Just a damnable inconvenience, and to be punished for it.

Breaking News: A Child Died 125 Years Ago

 

LeBret Indian Residential School, Saskatchewan

A human jawbone has been found at the site of the former LeBret Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan. Coroners say it is the jaw of a child 4-6 years old, and he or she died somewhere around 125 years ago.

This is being played as big news in the media, as proof that children were subject to genocide at the residential schools and were buried in mass graves. However, one cannot help but notice that, after loudly and internationally declaring there were mass graves, and after a year and a half of searching since across the Canadian West, this is all the solid evidence anyone has produced. One child’s jawbone.

Was it ever in an unmarked grave? Perhaps the grave marker has been lost. Perhaps the remains were inadvertently exhumed from a marked grave by gophers or ground squirrels or the spring rains.

Did he or she die of unnatural causes? Child mortality 125 years ago was high. “One third of all children born in 1830 [in Canada] did not make it to their fifth birthday. Child mortality remained above 25 percent for the remainder of the nineteenth century, before falling at a much faster rate throughout the 1900s.” (Statista, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041751/canada-all-time-child-mortality-rate/#:~:text=Child%20mortality%20in%20Canada%2C%201830%2D2020&text=This%20means%20that%20one%20third,faster%20rate%20throughout%20the%201900s.) Tuberculosis was common among native children, in the schools or on the reserves.

Was he or she a student at the school? School starts at six; they didn’t do kindergarten back then. This skeleton is just within possible range. The school sits in a reserve; this might have been any child living on the reserve.

Finally, if this was a student at the school, and there was foul play, murders happen everywhere. Why does this reflect on the school, and not on the government of the reserve?

A child died about 125 years ago. For those who care deeply, there is a more immediate problem. One word. Abortion.

More on Residential Schools

 

Tom Flanagan points out that nobody has ever actually done research to determine whether the Indian Residential Schools did any harm. Nobody has compared the life outcomes of those who attended with those native children who never attended. Why not?

As with the “mass graves,” the powers that be simply want a particular narrative, and will ignore or suppress any evidence that does not support it.

Tom Flanagan on the Residential Schools

Professor Flanagan loves my book, by the way, and wrote a blurb endorsing it.

Order it above or at a variety of online retailers.

Apologizing to the Waves

 

As predictably as the spring rains, Pope Francis’s apology for the residential schools, delivered in Edmonton only two days ago, has already been rejected by many native leaders, notably Senator Murray Sinclair. And the media refer to it as, at best, a “first step.” All the previous apologies have been rejected—there have now supposedly been no steps before this. No surprise that this one too is rejected. By obvious implication, there will never be a last step. Every step taken will ever remain a “first step.”

It never mattered what the Pope said, or whether he came or not. Someone is not acting in good faith. The last thing the aboriginal leaders or the left ever want is reconciliation, and they will always refuse to be reconciled. The moment reconciliation is achieved, they lose their funding. And they lose their scapegoat.

Is the pope such a fool that he could not see this? I, for one, think he slandered the Church, and the residential schools, with his apology. Is this helpful? The media quote some attendees triumphant at the supposed fact that the pope has now “admitted” that “native spirituality” was right all along, and the Catholic Church was wrong. This puts native people in peril of their souls.

The media have been aggressively complicit, as usual, in this con game. For example, the CBC asserts that Lac Ste. Anne was an ancient sacred site to the Indians, “God’s Lake,” long before the first missionaries arrived. By implication, Christianity and the Ste. Anne pilgrimage are an imposition on the authentic “native spirituality.”

No, it was not called “God’s Lake.” It was called “Devil’s Lake.” That is how the HBC factors translated the Indian name, and this translation is more accurate. The place was feared and avoided, because there was believed to be a great monster in the lake that devoured people. The lake became sacred when the first Catholic missionaries consecrated the waters to St. Anne and drove away the monster.

The confusion, or deliberate misrepresentation, comes because the native groups had only the one word, “manitou,” for any spiritual being. God is of course a spiritual being; so he would in theory be a “manitou.” As were the pagan gods of Greece and Rome. However, the only spiritual beings the First Nations were aware of in their environment before the coming of Christianity were hostile toward man. “Manitou” to them was something to be feared, not to be worshipped. “Devil” or “demon” is the English equivalent.

I hope, probably in vain, that the Pope’s visit, and the immediate refusal to accept his apology, may end up calling the bluff of the swindle. It may open eyes to the fact that the left is not honest. The optics of immediately refusing to accept the apology of an aged and infirm pope may be damning. The left’s arrogance may at last be its undoing.

-- Written by a day school survivor.

There May Be a Reason Why No Graves Were Marked

 

Because there weren't any.

Terry Glavin Defends Reality in the National Post

 

In the cont4ext of the residential schools "mass graves" fraud.

New York Post Blows the Whistle

 

The truth is coming out on residential schools.

National Post at Last Breaks Silence on the Residential Schools

 

But you might have been expecting a different take.

The truth is out there, and I think it is starting to come out.

Update on Those Mass Burials at Indian Residential Schools

 

From a Manitoba judge, an Alberta professor, and an independent researcher.

Some Facts on the Residential Schools

 

Note that attendance was never mandatory.

It follows that,m if treatment was bad, students would have been pulled from the schools by their parents.

There are apparently no or almost no "missing children" either. The records are available.

It was all urban legend.

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