Leyland Cecco – The Guardian June 24, 2021
A First Nation in Canada’s Saskatchewan province is treating a now-defunct residential school as a “crime scene” following the discovery of 751 unmarked graves just weeks after a similar discovery in British Columbia prompted a fresh reckoning over the country’s colonial past.
Kamloops residential school in British Columbia was the site of another mass burial. Here more than 200 bodies were found. Click to enlarge
Chief Cadmus Delorme of the Cowessess First Nation said that the graves were found on the site of the Marieval Indian residential school, also known as Grayson, after a search with ground-penetrating radar was launched on 2 June.
“This is not a mass grave site. These are unmarked graves,” said Delorme at a press conference on Thursday morning, adding that the discovery has “reopened the pain” that many suffered at the school. “The grave site is there. It is real.”
From the 19th century, more than 150,000 First Nations children were forced to attend state-funded Christian schools as part of a program to assimilate them into Canadian society.
The children were forced to convert to Christianity and not allowed to speak their native languages. Many were beaten and verbally abused, and thousands died from disease, neglect and suicide.
Cowessess First Nation said that the number of unmarked graves at the site is “the most significantly substantial to date in Canada”.
It is not known how many of the remains belong to children or if any adults were also buried, Delorme said. He added that local residents alleged that the graves’ headstones were illegally removed. “We didn’t remove these headstones. Removing headstones is a crime in this country. And we are treating this like a crime scene.”
Last month the remains of 215 children, some as young as three, were found buried on the site of what was once Canada’s largest Indigenous residential school near Kamloops, British Columbia.
The Marieval school operated from 1898 to 1996 about 87 miles east of Regina, the capital of Saskatchewan. The Cowessess First Nation took over the school’s cemetery from the Catholic church in the 1970s.
News of the discovery prompted a fresh outpouring of grief and frustration from national leaders.
“We are seeing the results of the genocide that Canada committed – genocide on our treaty land,” said chief Bobby Cameron of the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous First Nation. “Canada will be known as a nation that tried to exterminate the First Nations. Now we have evidence.”
In 2015, Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission described the schools policy as one of “cultural genocide”. In recent weeks, there have been growing calls for the Catholic church, which operated many of the schools, to release its records on the institutions.
“Our people deserve more than apologies and sympathies, which we are grateful for. Our people deserve justice,” said Cameron.
The Assembly of First Nations national chief, Perry Bellegarde, who comes from Little Bear First Nation in the the province of Saskatchewan, tweeted that the latest discovery is “absolutely tragic, but not surprising”.
“I urge all Canadians to stand with First Nations in this extremely difficult and emotional time.”
The grim discovery brings the total of unmarked graves discovered in the past month to about 1,000, with experts predicting more will come as provincial governments announce funding to help Indigenous communities conduct their own searches.
“We will do a search on every Indian residential school site and we will not stop there. We will also search all of the sanatoriums and Indian hospitals and all the sites where people were abused or neglected and murdered,” said Cameron. “We will tell the stories of our children of our people who died, who were killed by the state, by the churches. We won’t stop.”
The Canadian government formally apologized in parliament in 2008 and admitted that physical and sexual abuse in the schools was rampant.
“I always wonder how a person who’s supposed to be a Christian person, a priest, can abuse a seven-year-old girl,” Carol Lavallee, who was taken from her home at age six in a cattle truck to attend Marieval, told a provincial healing gathering in 2007.
Many students recall being beaten for speaking their native languages; they also lost touch with their parents and customs.
Indigenous leaders have argued that the legacy of abuse and intergenerational trauma persists today as the root cause of epidemic rates of alcoholism and drug addiction on reservations.
“A lot of the pain that we see in our in our people right now comes from there,” elder Florence Florence Sparvier, a former residential school student, told reporters at the press conference. “They made us believe we didn’t have souls.”
Both Cameron and Delorme said the work was only the beginning in a long process of identifying and properly commemorating those who died.
“We will find more bodies and we will not stop until we find all of our children,” said Cameron.
These were Catholic schools. Catholics are not Bible -believing Christians. That cult worships and prays to Mary and many other deceased people. So don’t call them Christian schools. Catholics have been the murderers of Bible-believing
saints for many centuries. Remember the Spanish Inquisition and so much more blood shed by the Jesuits. The Catholic authorities performed experiments on orphans in Ireland in the 1930s, and so much more abuse and death came from that murderous organization. The facts are history. The Catholics rape and murder boys and girls. Don’t justify them and call them Christians!
Although it’s terrible what happened this revelation doesn’t have anything to do with reconciliation and truth. Naïve representatives of Canada’s First nation think this is because of them. Nope. This is to “prove” that ALL white and Christian people are bad, that they are monsters and need to be punished. And here we are not talking about official apology or one off payment as compensation, but of eternal punishment up to the point of introducing the system of reverse racisms as state ideology in which white people will be at the back of the bus in any area of life. It’s already started in USA.
FO I say. The school operated for over 100 years. They are individual graves. The head stones had been removed years ago because of deterioration. Divide 700 by 100 and you get 7 deaths a year.
I am fed up with the Masonic and secular humanist focus in my province on alleged and exaggerated abuses in Catholic institutions in the past. I am fed up with their ignoring all of the abuses in other denomination and government institutions just to pressure the secular humanists agendas being imposed by their rotten establishment in all of our institutions. I am totally fed up with gutless prelates who do not strike back at the media, the government and even the courts showing the bias and revealing the actual history, which is essentially an Anglo apartheid system in North America, and not a Catholic one, where natives were separated and put on reservations, and virtually forgotten, until mainly Christian and mostly Catholic communities, volunteered or were invited to establish hospitals and schools to help improve health conditions, and to educate the natives with at least the aim of the educators of integration, and improving their chances against all of the prejudices of those times in the alleged “superior” society of the Whiteman. No one but the French who were mainly Catholics in any great numbers in our past really went to live and intermarry with the natives. But the the differences where huge regarding life style, standard of living, and education, and most people were very racist compared to present-day norms. The nurses and teachers volunteering for jobs would not live in the primitive conditions of the reservations and in order to teach and English immersion was simply necessary. No one complained in those days about the kids not being able to speak their languages in order to learn English. It was all about giving the natives some kind of chance to better themselves and in fact there was nothing else going on at the time from being forced into reservations and left in poverty and need. These days the government-paid schools and clinics are right in the native communities, and apart from keeping them dependent and separated which I think is wrong, none of that would have been possible without all of the work and sacrifices of the people who ran the hospitals and schools in those days past after the reservations were set up. Sure there was abuse, but that is still the case in any institution where perverts and unstable people are attracted, and there is a lot more of that stuff going on these days than in the past.
What is wrong with too many people today is that they have these strong media-generated opinions and they close their minds off to any actual facts to the contrary. They judge the past with their own prissy, present-day standards, and then cast a blind eye to their own cherry picking of the facts. They love to paint everyone in an entire religion or even tribe they dislike with the same brush of the few who have done some wrongs or evils in that group, while ignoring all of the good.
Wolf is right on the mark. I live in one of these areas. The constant pummeling of victim consciousness on these people has created a completely apartheid system, all the benefits to them, none to “whites”. Yet they still feel a stronger and stronger sense of grievance. It has totally destroyed the social fabric. I don’t for one minute believe the schools set up here were all or even mostly bad. There were good intentions. They were trying to help the natives assimilate to the inevitable civilizing that was coming. This story has been turned into a monster. Many children were brought to them for help when they were sick or injured. There was no metal for grave marking, and wood rots quickly. It is a crime to be digging up these graves.
Kstroller9@aol.com
Ann blue that is true. These devils like to say that it’s Christians to make true Christians look bad.
Remember, Jews created Christianity/Roman Catholicism; not white gentiles…
Fins a photo of the Vatican auditorium exterior and interior. This building was completed in 1971. The
exterior clearly shows the profile of a snake’s head. There are many interior photos on the internet that
show the interior of a snake’s head with eyes on both sides (windows), and the fangs coming down at the
rear of the stage. The Vatican is under the control of Satan. I do not know how long that has been the
case. I think Benedict and Francis are Satanists. To be fair, I am reluctant to be critical of Catholics as I
am not a Catholic. But, any Catholic who sees the interior and exterior photos of the Vatican auditorium
and denies what their eyes see is just dumb, or evil. The Brotherhood of the Snake is at the Vatican.
Boring. There are 7 500 000 000 wogs.
The Canadian political establishment, now one of the most corrupt in the world, want you to believe these children were deliberately murdered. All of these announcements come out before any investigation that would show the vast majority died of disease that was running amuck throughout Canada and the world, most definitely the Spanish Flu killed thousands in Canada and certainly not just in these schools. The government has known all along of these graves but chose this moment to break it to the corrupt media, especially the CBC.
The killing of most of the indigenous was the killing of those who revered the land, the life of all things and held no ownership of what our “Laws” which are not natural, what belonged to future generations. Many tribes stated that what we do now is for the benefit of the next 7 generations. We live off only what we need and hoard nothing. The water, land and air belong to all life and should be available to them just as much as any human. This to me is wisdom. What used to be plentiful and life giving in the western hemisphere is almost gone around the world and we are now fighting for the last crumbs in a planet that soon will be bereft of life. If you can, watch, “Planet of the Humans” which is free, and “Seaspiracy” on Netflix and also watch the dimming as this has much to do with transhumanism, as “science” has utterly failed in turning a living world into that of greed and conquer.
Thank you for letting me write this. I am going to turn off the computer and go mostly into gardening and growing wild and domestic flowers, taking care of those that are innocent that are almost gone now. I miss those times of butterflies, beetles, moths, ants and the small creatures I used to play with, and abuse when I was young and the ground was much closer to my eye level and amazing to watch.
There’s is a circle in Hell reserved for those who harm children .. The tenth circle ! Dipped in a boiling pig’s excrement’s basin, up to the nostrils !
@ VitoX – Jews did NOT create Christianity.
They were repeatedly expelled from Christian lands for the reason that back then Christians recognised their subversive influence
Re the Catholic church – read Anne Blue’s comment above. She is correct in that Catholicism is not Christian . (She just needs to realise that “jesuits” were in fact Jews )
Christians today are all judeophiles.This is due to the influence of Scofield who was commissioned by wealthy Jews to write a study companion to the Bible in the late 19th century to make Jews the supposed “chosen people” and propagate the falsehood that Jesus himself was a Jew. Christianity has been dumbed down ever since.
Wouldn’t it be a good idea to make a research on children mortality rate from 1830 to 1930?
My researches showed that half of children died at a very young age.
No surprise that these kinds of institutions had graveyards where to bury those who did not make it.
Bullshit as usual.
@Frog…problem is according to your own New (Jew) Testament, Jesus was a circumcised rabbi (Luke 2:21; Mark 9:5) who went to Synagogue (Luke 4:16) & taught ‘Salvation is from the Jews’. (John 4:22) All the Apostles were Jewish too.