“Unmarked graves”

It’s instructive to see how “mass graves” are discovered in countries that are believed to have committed war crimes, but they suddenly become “unmarked graves” when the bodies are found in Canada or the USA:

A Saskatchewan First Nation says it has made the “horrific and shocking discovery” of hundreds of unmarked graves — many believed to be children — near a former residential school, with a total expected to be over three times higher than the 215 discovered recently in Kamloops, B.C., according to a source briefed on the file.

Leaders of the Cowessess First Nation, a roughly two hour drive east of Regina, are expected to reveal details of the macabre discovery near what was once the Marieval Indian Residential School during a press conference Thursday morning, as well as the latest count of newly-identified remains.

“The number of unmarked graves will be the most significantly substantial to date in Canada,” says an advisory published Wednesday evening by the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations, which represents 74 First Nations in Saskatchewan.

The remains are in unmarked graves in a communal gravesite first used in 1885 but eventually taken over by the Marieval Indian Residential School, founded and operated by the Roman Catholic Church beginning in 1899 on what was then the Marieval Reserve.

Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) determined that at least 3,200 Indigenous children died while attending residential school, and that general practice was “not to send the bodies of students who died at schools to their home communities.”

If you ever wondered what happened to all those kids on the back of milk boxes, now you have a pretty good idea. It appears there have been predators in the schools and orphanages and foster homes for a very long time. 

Homeschool or die isn’t just a catchy rhetorical phrase.

UPDATE: Keep this in mind before you attempt to defend the schools, the Church, or the Canadian government.

The federal government is being sued by 7,258 former residential school students. Almost every lawsuit alleges a variety of suffering, from forcible confinement and loss of language to loss of family ties and forced religious indoctrination. Ninety per cent of all claims also allege sexual or physical abuse. A small number of these cases have already been validated by the criminal conviction of a sexual abuser.