Do We Have Shoes For This?

A year on and no results to show that Canada is riddled with mass graves everyone knew about:

The Mohawk Institute opened in 1828 in Brantford, Ontario. The federal government took full responsibility for the school in 1945 and closed it in 1970.

Indeed, there are 48 allegedly missing Mohawk IRS children listed on the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation Student Memorial Register. Where they died is unknown, and only two of the deaths are from the post-1941 period. 

But calling these children “missing” is inaccurate. They are not missing, they are known to be dead. 

Yes, their cause of death and place of burial are both unknown, but only because these were never investigated by the Centre’s many researchers. 

The result is that there is no reason to suspect that they are any more “missing” than the two children still not accounted for among their 51 Kamloops Indian Residential School counterparts. Those children were found in historical school records, backed up by death certificates (see here and here) by a lone unpaid researcher, Nina Green. All were buried in named cemeteries – mainly on their home reserves.

Even though Ms. Green sent droves of information to dozens of media outlets, Indigenous leaders, academics, and government officials months ago, they were ignored.  ...

In the same piece, Globe and Mail columnist Tanya Talaga also writes that “thousands of children are now being recovered from the sites of schools just like the Mohawk Institute.” 

This is plain factual nonsense since no confirmed missing children have ever been “recovered” from any newly discovered putative grave anywhere in Canada.

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The most revealing of these documents are the chronicles kept by the orders of Sisters who taught, nursed, and cared for the children, and the codices of the Oblate priests who administered the schools and were largely responsible for preserving Indigenous languages in Canada.  These historical documents do not support the story of misery, abuse, neglect and murder now almost exclusively told, and for that reason have been suppressed and treated as though they do not exist, even though the National Centre for Truth and Reconiliation (NCTR) has had almost all of them in its possession for years.

Similarly, photographs of children at residential schools do not support the narrative of misery, abuse, neglect and murder. Most of these old photographs show children who look happy, healthy and well nourished, and often depict them enjoying a variety of indoor and outdoor activities.

The Sisters’ chronicles and the old photographs produce cognitive dissonance – how could such allegedly abused, neglected and malnourished children appear to be so healthy and happy? 

Also - history is SO over-rated!:

On Friday, Horgan’s office announced a $789-million grant to build a “safer, more inclusive and accessible” provincial museum.

The grant only represents the provincial contribution, and the final construction costs could be increased even further by federal and private grants. But even at $789 million, the cost is already well beyond any other museum construction or expansion in Canadian history — all the more so because the RBCM already owns the land and artifacts for the new facility.

The Royal B.C. Museum is one of the province’s most-visited attractions, and one of the top-ranked museums in the country. But the building has been under partial closure since January, when management abruptly decided to dismantle its popular human history galleries in the name of “decolonizing” an attraction they said was shot through with “systemic racism.”

And - no, it's stupid to give your kid a name with four Ms, a silent Q and the numeral 7 just to stick it in the eye of people who tend to eschew such conventions (themselves guilty of giving their kids stupid-@$$ names):

A First Nations family's push to convince Manitoba to recognize the traditional name of their newborn daughter has landed in the provincial legislature.

Parents Carson Robinson and Zaagaate Jock were on hand Wednesday to endorse an Opposition NDP bill that would formally recognize Indigenous names like the one granted to their daughter.

They named their daughter, now three months old, Atetsenhtsén:we, which translates to "forever healing medicine" in Kanien'kéha, the Mohawk language.

Except her name cannot be spelled like that on Manitoba birth certificates.

When registering a child's birth, the given name and surname must consist only of the letters A to Z, and only accents from English and French, but may include hyphens and apostrophes, according to the Vital Statistics Act.