Friday, May 22, 2015

Mass Graves Of Canada's Indigenous Children

It was eighteen years ago this month that I first handed to a Vancouver Sun newspaper editor a list of possible mass grave sites of Indian residential school children on Canada’s west coast, based on government documents and statements from eyewitnesses who buried children there. I and these witnesses were flatly ignored: not only then, but every other time over the subsequent years that we presented such evidence to the same newspaper.

Year after year, despite all our public protests, forums, and documenting of the location of the mass graves of these children, the Vancouver Sun‘s indifference to the worst crime in Canadian history continued. And this same blind eye approach was replicated by every other “mainstream” media outlet across Canada - even when, in December of 2011, these media received from me evidence of bone and clothing samples unearthed from the Brantford residential school mass grave.

But lo and behold! Suddenly this past week, as if I’d never spoken to them, the Sun newspaper finally reported on residential school graves! I wasn’t mentioned in their article, of course; nor was the word “genocide”, or any of the hundreds of witnesses to these crimes that our work has given voice to since 1997.

Instead, a young, fresh faced graduate student nobody’s ever heard of received front page billing for her supposed “identifying” of children’s graves at the United Church residential school in Brandon: one of the very sites we had named to an oblivious Sun newspaper in March of 2008.

Did somebody say spin doctoring?

This past week, I searched for our eyewitnesses in Vancouver’s downtown eastside. I didn’t find one of them. They’re all gone now, either dead, bought off, or drifted off somewhere. So it’s safer these days for the killers in church and state to talk about the undeniable mass graves of their victims, through carefully manicured media stories that lead us nowhere.

That’s what the guilty do, after all: and they do it successfully, thanks to the cowed indifference and the five second memory of not only the drugged up public, but the legions of bought and paid for academic “experts” on our home grown Genocide that killed many tens of thousands of little children.

http://dissidentvoice.org/2015/05/canadian-media-finally-discovers-mass-graves-of-indigenous-children/

By the way, there also are similar graves of indigenous children at US "Indian residential schools". Many of them have individual grave markers, like the ones at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School:


That's supposed to wash away our guilt, I suppose. After all, we didn't intend to kill them, did we?

2 comments:

  1. I am sick of being made to feel guilty for alleged offences that occurred many years ago and are nothing to do with me or my generation. The Catholic priests of the time have been blamed for much abuse of the Inuit and 'First Nation' inhabitants of Canada, yet these people still support the Catholic church. The RCMP and others who ply their trade in the Canadian Arctic, Nurses, Social workers and Physicians know that Inuit children are abused on a daily basis yet nothing is done for fear of the 'politically correct' attitude that prevails. My wife worked as a RN for some years in the Arctic but left in 2011 as the problem will not be taken seriously.

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  2. I'm not surprised that people don't feel guilty for what our ancestors did. I am disturbed that, as you say, the problem still exists and is not taken seriously, either in Canada or the US.

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