Some People Are "Special"

As one can see:

Violence, burnings, riot — these are extremely dangerous practices in any society. Yet the ease this executive director in Vancouver felt in pushing out a call to “burn it all down” was chilling. To do so in so fraught a moment, careless even of the views of those she presumed she was speaking for — the surviving relations of residential school children — is even more alarming. Our executive director put no brace on her mouth and gave her brain no second or better thought.

Violence, deep breaches of our civil code, are always dangerous. Violence is an oil on its own fire. We, or the executive directors of civil liberties associations, should never encourage violence, most particularly the burning of sacred buildings.

My point is made for me by a former Canadian ambassador to China, David Mulroney, who recently wrote that for some time, “political elites have been signalling that certain acts of criminal violence are ‘understandable’ as long as they align with elite sensibilities. They assume that such violence can be managed, like a controlled burn of old timber. They’re dangerously wrong.”

There’s a world of wisdom and truth in that remark.

Because facts are dreadfully inconvenient:

It is standard practice in journalism to clarify whether or not an allegation has been proven, in court or otherwise. But when the Tk’emlups band issued a press release stating that they had used ground penetrating radar to locate 215 unmarked graves, the media accepted the story without question or any verification. 

The band said a report was forthcoming in mid-June – but no report has been released to date. No evidence of any sort has been put forth for public consideration. We don’t know who carried out the research, whether it was a company or a university, or how the technology was used. At this point, we have a few claims, and nothing else. ...

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A lack of clarity among reporters regarding what ground-penetrating radar does seems to have led to a lot of inconsistency in how the Kamloops residential school discovery has been characterized. Which one do you think is the most accurate? (added the press release for context) pic.twitter.com/M25NLEUqy3

— J.J. McCullough (@JJ_McCullough) June 5, 2021

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More:

The Tk’emlups band claimed the graves belonged to children at the school. So when the second two bands (Cowessess and Lower Kootaney) came forth with their own claims, many in the media jumped to the conclusion that these too were the graves of children from residential schools. 

But that wasn’t the claim made by the bands. In fact, in both Cowessess and Lower Kootaney, the graves are believed to be in community cemeteries, belonging to both First Nations and the broader Canadian community. 

Tucked away at the very end of a report in the Globe and Mail on the findings at the Cowessess reserve in Saskatchewan, it said this: 

“It appears that not all of the graves contain children’s bodies, Lerat (who is one of the band leaders) said. He said the area was also used as a burial site by the rural municipality.

“We did have a family of non-Indigenous people show up today and notified us that some of those unmarked graves had their families in them – their loved ones,” Lerat said.” ...

Many children who died at these schools died of natural causes. According to the Truth and Reconciliation Committee report in 2015, the number one cause of death was Tuberculosis. ...

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The Liberal Party was the ruling government of Canada from 1968 to 1979. The prime minister throughout this eleven-year period was Pierre Trudeau.

What a fascinating discovery this is. On this basis, it is fair to state that the prime minister most responsible for the residential school debacle is Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.

 

(Sidebar: cringe-worthy photo ops aside, the entire narrative is framed as "the church's fault" even though it appears that these graves were well-known and the children sadly succumbed to things like tuberculosis, common at the time. This is the figurative fuel for those with axes to grind and those with coffers to line need. They are doing the work of the autocrats in charge and Justin gets to smugify in front of the camera.)

An MP who will never have her permanent pension taken from her (as another won't, either) demands a special prosecutor to be appointed from a government that hides its own culpability in all kinds of matters:

Nunavut’s member of Parliament is calling on the federal government to appoint a special prosecutor to delve into crimes committed against Indigenous people.

Mumilaaq Qaqqaq says perpetrators of abuse at institutions such as residential schools and tuberculosis sanatoria need to be brought to justice.

 

Good luck with that.

These "colonists" built the infrastructure on which others rely.

Putting that out there:

A federally-subsidized history society in a published commentary says British Columbia should be renamed to purge its colonial past. “It’s not British; it never was,” Canada’s National History Society wrote in the August issue of its taxpayer-funded periodical: “These names direct us to a history of bloodshed and violence.”

 

Will they also make an effort to gloss over or otherwise ignore the Holocaust in keeping with the current government's hatred of Israel?

 

 

When is it never about money?:

Three Quebec-based religious orders that staffed residential schools in the rest of Canada have earned millions of dollars from property sales in recent years, even as the Catholic Church said it couldn't raise enough money to pay its share of a settlement meant for survivors.

In a class-action settlement with Indigenous survivors of the schools reached in 2006, Catholic entities involved in residential schools pledged, among other things, to use their "best efforts" to raise an additional $25 million to help fund healing and reconciliation programs.

Nine years later, after raising less than $4 million, the church entities said they had done all they could and a court absolved them of having to pay the rest.

But with evidence emerging of hundreds of unmarked graves at former residential school sites in British Columbia and Saskatchewan, Indigenous leaders are calling on the church to fulfil its original commitment.

 

I don't know. Four million can buy a lot of shoes.