Do You Remember the Kamloops Anonymous Children Cemetery at an Indian Residential School in Canada?

It was international news for a while, evidence of white contempt for Indian lives.  This article tells how a septic system map from the 1920s exactly matches the anomalies found by the Ground Penetrsting Radar.  (No one ever excavated to see if there were bodies there.  The story would be less compelling with you know, actual evidence.)

"It is important to note that it was the so-called indigenous Knowledge Keepers at Kamloops who claimed to have known that the Kamloops apple orchard was a clandestine burial site. The reason ground penetrating radar (GPR) searches were conducted was due to the Knowledge Keepers “knowings” – which derive from indigenous oral traditions (also known as “traditional knowledge”)....

"Former KIRS student, Emma Baker admitted in an interview with CTV that when she attended the Kamloops residential school from 1952 to 1956, she and her friends made up stories about graves in the apple orchard.

“There was a big orchard there and we used to make up stories of the graveyard being in the orchard,” Baker told CTV News Channel on Saturday. “There was rumours of a graveyard, but nobody seemed to know where it was and we didn’t even know if it was true.”

"Those lurid stories, or more likely, highly implausible urban legends, were for decades circulated by defrocked former United Church minister and debunked conspiracy theorist Kevin Annett. It appears that Annett had heard the tales of unmarked graves and murdered children, most likely remnants of the gruesome yarns exaggerated by former IRS students like Emma Baker."

It seems that any really bad idea the U.S. has gets copied by the Canadians (internment of citizens of Japanese ancestry, the 1934 gun laws).  Do they copy or just make the same dumb fixes because they are a similar culture confronting the same challenges?

Indian Residential Schools in both nations suffered the liberal delusion that the best result for the Indians would be assimilate them into white society: break their language and cultural associations with the old and make them little Americans and Canadians.   

That this often led to really destructive practices was not because liberals bore Indians any ill-will, but like liberals throughout the 20th century,  their good intentions included a large dose of arrogance and ignorance. 

The article linked above indicates that children could only be admitted after an application by the parents.   While American schools seem to have been less concerned about parental consent, I have seen documentaries about American Indian Residential Schools where parents sent their children to them in the hopes of breaking the poverty by getting their kids familiar with the dominant culture.  This is unsurprising,  even if it often did not work out as hoped.

Remember that one of the biggest lies often starts out. "I am from the government, and I am here to help you."