Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, president of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, previously told CBC News there are "mixed emotions" about the Catholic Church among Penticton Indian Band members.Phillip said some members of the community have "an intense hatred for the Catholic Church in regard to the residential school experience."
What they're talking about is the recent discovery of 751 graves of children located at government-funded boarding schools, which were largely staffed by nuns and priests. The story is being told in Canada (and in the United States in certain circles) that this was a kind of Catholic colonialism and genocide against Native Americans.
“This was a crime against humanity, an assault on a First Nation people,” said Chief Bobby Cameron, of the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations, the provincial federation of Indigenous groups. “The only crime we ever committed as children was being born Indigenous,” he said.... A National Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established in 2008 to investigate the residential schools, called the practice “cultural genocide.”
However, undermining that narrative is the fact that there is an exactly parallel story in Ireland. There, the issue is just said to be that there were high levels of child mortality in the early 20th century.
The discovery confirms decades of suspicions that the vast majority of children who died at the home were interred on the site in unmarked graves, a common practice at such Catholic-run facilities amid high child mortality rates in early 20th-century Ireland.
Naturally, the Biden administration is rushing to investigate American-based schools from the same period to see if any more bodies can be found. Expect this to be a productive field of inquiry since it hits all the right notes: anti-American, anti-Catholic/Christian, with just the right tone of oppression, allegations of racism, and colonialism.
UPDATE: Another reason this narrative has legs: the Chinese government is pushing it as a hedge against its own current practice of actual genocide against the Uighur and cultural genocide against the Tibetans.
5 comments:
Anecdotes are more powerful than statistics, unfortunately.
I imagine someone has tried to discern the child mortality rate among First Nation peoples (and Irish children) across the same years, which would give some context.
The “graves” being reported are ground penetrating radar (GPR) anomalies - parabolas on radar grams indistinguishable from those produced by logs, pipes, boulders and other cylindrical to spherical objects. There are no reports of any exhumations. This is what happens when you let anthropologists play around with geophysical instruments they don’t understand and feed the results to credulous native band leadership & the press. It really triggers some native people who have terrible memories of residential schools. It also provides an opportunity for latent anti-Catholic sentiment to flare up and a cover for Church burners.
Here's a chart for Ireland just from 1950; you can see how much the child mortality rates have fallen off in that time.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IRL/ireland/infant-mortality-rate
Presumably that steep slope falls off somewhere back further in time, but maybe not for a while: in 1900 in the United States, child mortality was a hundred for every thousand live births.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4838a2.htm
The CDC report suggests the improvement happened suddenly, then gradually. "The discovery and widespread use of antimicrobial agents (e.g., sulfonamide in 1937 and penicillin in the 1940s) and the development of fluid and electrolyte replacement therapy and safe blood transfusions accelerated the declines in infant mortality; from 1930 through 1949, mortality rates declined 52%."
Every few years there's a media panic about rural B/black church burnings--before I retired from my local/regional history archive I was accustomed to getting calls from journalists (who of course already knew that they were started by . . . take a guess) asking about the history of the practice.
IIRC--and I only know what I see on the Interwebs--most of them could be blamed on substandard materials, amateur labor, and prolonged vacancy, at least in recent times.
The differences--national-ethnic-religious--from the Canadian goings-on are interesting.
Cousin Eddie
The First Nations are not allowing any excavation of the "graves", so there is no way to determine if the anomalies are indeed graves of children, or graves of adult staff (who were also buried at the schools), or just items in the ground.
Also, keep in mind, some of the schools were in use for decades, so three hundred "graves" for a school that was open for 75 years, including during the 1918-19 flu, the Canadian TB epidemics, and the years of lethal measles, whooping cough, diptheria, and other childhood disease outbreaks . . . Wouldn't be that many deaths per year, especially not when children outside the Residential Schools were also dying. Several Canadian historians have gone through the Residential School records and waved caution flags on the rush to reparations, but the government's not accepting the caution.
LittleRed1
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