The Catholic church is getting a lot of criticism since the remains of 215 Indigenous children were discovered using ground-penetrating radar outside a boarding school in Kamloops, British Columbia. Remember, the schools were doing exactly what the Canadian government and the majority white culture wanted them to do: forcing native kids to assimilate into modern life by obliterating their backgrounds.
"The whole point was to erase their Indigenous identities," says a University of Alberta professor quoted in the article below. The 2015 report of a government Truth and Reconciliation Commission (I believe that's Canadian for "OMG, how bad was it?!") said that the system was "cultural genocide." To date, the Canadians have spent $1.6 billion in reparations to the survivors.
I'm bemused at how we today tend to think we would have been like the Kevin Costner character in Dances with Wolves -- you know, smarter, wiser, more savvy at child development than the population-at-large back then.
I think that in any era, an individual would draw the line at the casual tolerance of the high death rate for these children -- if bystanders had known of it. But not even the children's families knew of their deaths. Because they were undervalued as who they were, these kids died of abuse, neglect, poor health care, and accidents.
Still, the idea that assimilation is a good thing -- even at the cost of breaking children away from their families -- was inescapable back then. Would we, today, have done a better job of helping these kids? I'd like to think so, but frankly, I'm unsure.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kamloops-residential-school-survivor-abuse/?fbclid=IwAR0kJSBhC9guPNogIzBRtFSplIV2OIA6ojnQNpL1-ODwUMVWk3-EKCVg9Aw
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