94 Replies to “Compared To What?”

  1. Exactly. Absolutely meaningless without:

    (a) non-ndian child death rates in remote rural areas on a decade by decade basis

    (b) child death rates on reserves for the same periods

    1. I am demanding ground penetrating radar scour the “First Nations Lands” (“reservations”) for dead Native children.

      This GPR ploy is obviously a highly planned affair. And since the compliant media is determined to ask no questions, and challenge no assumptions … I will.

      Let’s start comparing the Native graveyards to the Catholic school graveyards.

  2. unmarked graves were very common. I’m reasonably sure there’s a unmarked grave of a child that died in the 30’s on or near the current location of my farm yard. I know for a fact there is an unmarked grave belonging to a set of twins who would have been my great great uncle’s at my grandfather’s homestead a couple miles from my home. And no, we’re not First Nation.

    1. Indeed. Across the road from us in a rural part of the Lower Mainland, a neighbour discovered a set human teeth – remains of a ‘settler’ farmer who wished to be buried on his homestead.

    2. Thor, in many areas graves were marked by a simple wooden cross or a wooden marker of some sort. They go back to earth just like we do and there is no evidence that a grave was marked. I can take you to one place in Canada, my home town, where there is an old grave yard with many unmarked graves.

      1. Same in my home town. The graveyard is over a hundred years old, and as in most small towns, only the well off could afford a monument style marker. Everyone else had a wooden cross. After a generation these disappeared from of all things, lack of upkeep. Who would have thought that could ever happen? Anybody with an intellect above room temperature!
        There is no mystery to residential school graveyards, no great conspiracy, no dastardly deed uncovered, there are only the forgotten graves of the dead. Their deaths were no different than that of my mother’s two sisters, both died from illnesses that were common and not limited to the first invaders to this continent.
        Death was and still is, a part of life, and graveyards will always be graveyards.
        I expect we’ll have another investigation by select party insiders and after years of grovelling to the first invaders the committee will make its findings known. “All white Canadians are racists, here’s X billion dollars courtesy of whitey!”
        Big yawn.

    1. yes, easy to find this information. Much harder to find the death rate for school aged children aged 5 to 15.

    2. How the left longs for the good old days. You know, back before that nasty climate changing energy use.

  4. If people alive today are expected to fix all the problems that existed in the past, we’re going to need better time machines.

    1. Queen Anne had 12 children and none survived to succeed her. End of the House of Stuart. I remember visiting the Churchyard at St. Andrews, north of Winnipeg. Almost all the graves from the 19th century were kids. There are a few graves from before 1920 sprinkled on farms where I grew up. As far as I know, none were marked. Wood markers don’t last. Poor dirt farmers couldn’t afford granite. I likely farmed over 2 or 3 of these graves. I didn’t know they were there at the time.

  6. My mom remembers the smell of kerosene in her and her sibling’s hair for head lice, back in the ’30s in small town Saskatchewan. Kids regularly showed up to school with their long hair shaved off because of a lice outbreak. All my grandparents remembered lots of children dying back then from many things which are uncommon today. Before antibiotics, a simple cut could lead to a fatal infection. My mother-in-law’s mom’s family grew up in a tar-paper shack. And at times there weren’t enough shoes for each kid.

    Yes, let’s find out how these children died, and what happened to cemetery maintenance since it was handed over.

    1. THE DATES YOU QUOTE ARE BEFORE UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE IN CANADA, VERY FEW GOT TREATED BY DOCTORS OR RECEIVED HOSPITAL TREATMENT.

      1. True, and that applied to both indigenous and non-indigenous populations. Mainly because there was not a lot of good treatments – no vaccines, no antibiotics – maybe you could get a broken bone set. But if you were kicked in the head by a horse – no first responders taking you to a well equipped clinic or hospital. You were taken home and cared for by your mother and then you died 2 weeks later. Life was cruel and only the strong survived

  7. I wonder how many children died in orphanages, poor houses, work houses and the like in Britain or Europe over the same time period? Not questioning the abject stupidity and cruelty of the Indian Act in all it’s hideous manifestations, but these ‘discoveries’ of unmarked graves seems to imply there was some sort of mass extermination being carried out. As with most social engineering plans, this one ended up creating more misery and trouble than the ‘problems’ it was supposed to address.

      1. “Britain not only sent children to Canada, they also sent them, up to the early 1970’s to Rhodesia, South Africa Australia, and New Zealand. In 2009 the Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologized to the Child migrants who were sent their and in 2010 British Prime Minister Gordon Brown offer their country’s apology. To date, Canada has offered no apology. Canada claims there is not enough interest in the British Home Children and it wasn’t even on the political radar.”
        Or on Weirdeau’s Gaydar.

        1. MANY KIDS CAME FROM DR BARNARDO’S, NAZARETH HOUSE AND OTHER ORPHANAGES,
          ORPHANED FROM THE BLITZ. iN CANADA AS IN THE UK AND IRELAND WHEN A FATHER OR MOTHER DIED THOSE WHO THE SURVIVOR COULD NOT SUPPORT PLACED IN THE CARE OF CHURCH OR PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS. I KNOW THIS FROM PERSONAL EXPERIENCE. THESE SCHOOLS OR HOMES WERE BUILT AND ADMINISTERED BY EUROPEAN STANDARDS. DO IT PAY AFFENTION OR GET WHACKED!!!

  8. Heard there are some ‘ancient burial grounds’ somewhere. Heard the graves are unmarked.
    Better dig it up and get to the bottom of it.

  9. From Captain Obvious:
    – government requires kids to go to schools
    – in the 1800’s and early 1900’s, you walked to school
    – if you can’t hike back each morning and afternoon, you need to board
    – big distances to hike in remote areas
    – not many towns in remote areas where a kid can board
    – government / church accommodates by building residences

    Around my area, there were many 1 room school houses. If a kid wanted to go to high school in the town, they had to board and might go home on weekends or not.

    1. I think the Anglican church had more residential schools for white kids than for Indians. This was a charitable exercise. They weren’t death camps.

      1. I read this sometime but I can’t seem to confirm it. A search has found some white Anglican residential schools but nowhere near as many as Indian Schools. Anglicans ran a lot of girl’s schools and boy’s schools that were not residential. Catholic’s get the prize on all counts.

    2. Choosing to go to boarding school or to send your child to boarding school is different from having your children taken from you to go to a boarding school. Families were not allowed to bury the children who died at the residential schools. Funerals are important psychologically for helping people to accept the loss of of their loved one and the impact on a community of not being able to do that is a different kind of suffering. It is not necessary to exaggerate the problem in order to recognize that what happened was wrong and communities need a chance to grieve publicly. The lack of funerals due to the COVID lockdowns helps us recognize something of that loss. Families and communities need public expressions of grief which is why funerals exist.

      1. It was federal government policy that the children were buried at the school UNLESS it was cheaper to hand the body back than dig a grave. Further, staff at the school would also have been buried in the same graveyard as well as – sometimes – neighbours.

      2. 100 years ago, they would be a little high by the time they got back home. The largest source of students at reserve schools was the local reserve.

      3. “Choosing to go to boarding school or to send your child to boarding school is different from having your children taken from you to go to a boarding school.” Your concern should be addressed to the native leadership who demanded residential schools separate from the WHITE “settlers.” Treaties 1-7 forced the issue upon the government. The children were also clothed and fed by the taxpayers. How many “private” schools do that? Would you have preferred NOT educating any of these children? Most of the children that attended residential schools had HAPPY memories – most, not all like in the public school system.

        “Families were not allowed to bury the children who died at the residential schools.” Not allowed by whom? Since most of the residential schools were on Indian land how do you know there was no funeral? And since most of these ‘boarding schools’ were run by religious I’m betting Mass or a funeral was said for each departed.

        BTW, was transporting a corpse back to remote areas an issue? Did most of these children die prior to telephones and cell phones being available? Did families receive letters from the Department of Indian Affairs informing them of the death of their children? Where I live, most of the graves of the recently departed natives have been left unmarked by choice or indifference. The ones clearly marked are from church goers.

  10. People being paid to “clear bush” for $0.20 / day, and how much did a gravestone of any type cost in those times?

    A post on FB today mentioned medical experiments conducted on these kids in the 40’s – 50’s like it was new information. The CBC reported on this 1. Aug. 2013 and others have since then.
    Doubtful though that they’ll mention who held gov’t at that time. Mackenzie King and then Louis St. Laurent. I’m not aware of the Catholic Church (or the Anglicans, who also ran the residential schools) employing scientists.

    The CBC article…
    https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/aboriginal-children-used-in-medical-tests-commissioner-says-1.1318150

    1. Most of the graves’ markers would have been made of wood,so rotted away to dust decades ago. The Kamloops Residential School where 215 graves were found was in operation for 80 years, so the death toll is about 2.7 persons per year. Tuberculosis and an influenza pandemic occurred in the school’s time,so it’s fairly easy to hypothesize that most of the deceased are victims of those diseases. But there is NO money in that theme,so now FN activists are making the insanely outrageous claims on how kids died in the schools.

      In the last week I have read claims allegedly by FN RS survivors that: many girls were raped by the priests and when they had the baby it was flung alive into the school furnace. Another claimed the babies were put into a sack along with a rock and thrown into the nearest body of water to drown. Another claimed that after she ran away and was caught, the nuns pulled her fingernails out with pliers as punishment.
      As today’s generation has no knowledge of history and no perspective,they probably believe this bullshit,and it IS bullshit. Yes,there was child molestation, beatings, poor food, pedophiles, sadists, bullies,brutes and thugs among the thousands of people who worked at the schools over a century, but some of the claims are so outrageous they are simply not credible.The Priests and Nuns were human with all the faults and failing, but they were not a bunch of psychopaths whose actions would have made an SS Totenkopf Division veteran blanch.

      How much money is this going to be worth to the FN Chiefs, noble warriors all,who only seek justice and closure for Their People. Billions,and the average Native won’t see much of it or an improvement in his life.

      1. Indeed you are correct, lost in this mindless grievance orgy are the positive attributes of the schools.

        As one example, the first aboriginal MP from BC, attended Kamloops Residential School and rose to senior positions in the Chretien Lieberal government. Leonard Marchand would have surely spoken out about any of these genocidal abuses had he witnessed them, which leads me to believe once again that the veracity of “aboriginal oral history” is severely flawed and can be more accurately described as made up “facts” or in the vernacular damned lies.

        1. I don’t claim to know what the facts are but I know this. You start throwing money around to victims and you find a lot more victims especially if no proof is required.

      2. That priest’s would kill babies is unbelievable. Where did all the babies come from that were given to white people and supposedly abused? I’m sure a lot more father’s impregnated Indian kids than priests ever did. I know someone who taught kid’s from grades 7 to 12 off an Indian reserve, back in the day. He barely had a student past puberty. Most of them quit after grade 6. This was over 50 years ago.

      3. I was reading a personal story of the abuses of RS on social media — until I got to the part about children being killed by firing squad.

        Well, that was something I didn’t know. So there’s that.

      4. To emphasize your point … none of the outrage brigadiers are interested in history. The only History they believe-in is the revisionist history which makes historic primitive conditions equivalent to their cushy lifestyle of today. The two have nothing whatsoever in common.

    2. For goodness sake remember that the government in Canada did not institute universal health care until 1960 or thereabouts. what about records in these hospitals they write about, did these institutions did they give care free?
      Furthermore, the only good thing that the federal Canadian government did at the start was to place the native people into reservations so they could keep them and feed them. Was that a crime too?

      /

  11. In any event, we all know it’s bullshit.

    But there’s no one in our bought-and-paid-for press or in our nutless, spineless Opposition who has the balls or honesty to bring up these points.

  12. Burn him he’s a white!
    When you’re piling on the white man – and in some instances there is validity, no doubt – you’re not looking for evidence, but for a conviction.
    The insinuation must be completely negative, no half measures.
    And know this: they’re playing for keeps.

  13. The COVID moral panic is abating (because it was never a real panic to begin with) and this is the newest moral panic, something that will keep outrage and anger stirring while the politicians, social justice wankers, and wokesters fleece the sheep.

  14. GET IN THE GRAVY TRAIN (Second edition)
    An article in the Toronto Sun on the weekend names 9 politicians still living who should/or did know what was going on and should have to attend an enquiry..Like Kim Campbell, Cretien, Mulroney.Put the blame where it should be.

  15. We all know no actual graves or bodies have been found anywhere, right?

    All that’s been done so far are preliminary GPR surveys. GPR lacks the resolution to determine anything other than “the soil isn’t smoothly continuous x feet below the surface at this spot”. That’s it. Could be rocks, an old foundation, water subsidence, a dead badger. There’s no way to know short of digging the spot up and looking, which no one has done yet.

    Don’t let them set the narrative. You don’t have to justify childhood death rates. The local bands started with the tribal legend that there were tons of bodies in the ground, and then declared every grey squiggle on the GPR screen a dead child. It’s a lie. Call them on it.

    1. Call them on it.

      Do that and you’ll be accused of using “white man’s” science to evade responsibility.

      Well, if white man’s science is so bad, would they be willing to give up their big screen TVs, their pick-up trucks, and their cellphones and computers? Not blinkin’ likely.

      1. THEY’RE using the white man’s technology … in a pantomime of sciency outrage. This is all so preplanned for maximum shock and Awwww. And guess what … more school sites are coming … lots of em. Until all the girls who swoon at the sight of your PM cry in unison – “ENOUGH!!!” … give it all back to the FN … give em $T’s in reparations!!

        Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh Mo’mmmmmmmaaaaaaaaa

    2. “Don’t let them set the narrative. You don’t have to justify childhood death rates.”
      I suppose you are right, but this constant rewriting of history is so irritating. Everyone here knows that before antibiotics, vaccines, and clean water, no one escaped tragedy and loss from diseases like scarlet fever, diphtheria, typhoid fever, yellow fever, rheumatic fever, influenza, diarrhea, smallpox, cholera, tb……. Genealogists confront this all the time. Even if there are lot of unmarked children’s graves it’s still ridiculous to carry on as though borders, culture, class, sex, ethnicity, race matter to a remorseless disease.

    1. yup. My elderly mother-in-law when asked about her experience said she liked getting new clothing, being removed from an abusive home, and learning english for the first time, but hated that they gave cod liver oil every morning. As for abuse and sexual assault, said that was peer on peer in her case.

    3. Thompson Highway is really interesting. I heard him speak once ( at a conference) and he was mesmerising. He also has a deep appreciation for both native and European culture. There are many positive stories about the residential schools but people are definitely trounced on for bringing them up. just ask Lynn Bayek. We can acknowledge wrong doing in some of the residential schools, but it is a mistake to paint thrm all with the same brush. Of course it is being done for political reasons.

  17. The facts really are irrelevant. The story comes out in accusing, screaming, bleeding headlines and the truth – the truth skulks in from the alley long after the leftist media have burned the perceived villains to ashes. The truth, if it ever does show up, is promptly told to f*ck off. It’s reviled as something deeply offensive to the victims of an event that didn’t happen.

    1. So totally true, now with the added feature that anyone expressing skepticism of the story must be censored and have their life and livelihood destroyed.

  18. A better question is why now? Is this an attempt to bludgeon whitey to tamp down Canada Day celebrations so the media and Liberals can declare Canada a true post nation state like the good little UN toadies they are? F that. Even Conservative Mp Michelle Rempel weighed in with her white guilt declaring that Canadians should scale back their celebrations . (Just fng quit already Rempel, god damned Charlatan)
    And who are we kidding here? The “Indian Residential School Agreement” was signed off in 2006 and with it a 1.6 Billion payment to survivors and then some, not to mention how “unmarked graves” wasn’t exactly a secret during the “Truth and Reconciliation” hearings in 2008.
    If it’s about the money…name your price… Trudeau will cut you a check.
    Sheesh!

    1. Burton, because andy O’Stool made a comment about residential schools, and the left will beat the idiot over the head with this, come election time. I agreed with what O’Stool said, but residential schools are a political 3rd rail, you never touch!

    1. Of course they didn’t. Which brings us back to the Canadian Human Rights Museum in Manitoba. When backhoes & dozers were excavating for the footings they came across aboriginal remains and not just a few. Solution? Bags of half lit sweet grass dropped in a few predetermined holes…a few waves of a feather and an “ok…we’re done here, let’s go!!”
      Such effing bullshit.

          1. The culture of 60 foot seiners with GPS, Radar, running on diesel, catching their salmon with seine nets set by the fossil fueled skiff, storing it in bins with ice from man made ice machines, bringing it to shore, processing in fish plants, then freezing it and transporting in Semi-Trailer Diesel tandems across the country.
            That Culture. Just like their generations of forefathers did……..

      2. In Edmonton near the baseball field and the old power plant, they have discovered possibly hundreds of unmarked graves over the years. It is a long forgotten cemetery.

        1. They were discovered because the city wanted to re-route a part of the street in the area. As a result, the original layout of the roads had to be extensively modified.

      3. I’m sure there was some kind of “tobacco” ceremony as well. You are right about bullshit.

        1. But, but, but … Catholics believe in virgin birth … and a sky daddy …
          (Leftist sarc.)

    2. rich, didn’t Indians often burn the bodies of the dead, especially when the ground was frozen solid?

  20. “Compared To What?”

    Good question, but I got better questions.
    How about: “Who cares?” and “So what?”

    The idea that savages who never contributed anything receive recognition from civilized is repugnant.

  22. I worked on an Irish cemetery restoration as volunteer in downtown Halifax for 5-6 years every Saturday in the summer and fall. There were several hundred headstones in an area about the size of a football field—maybe a bit smaller. In addition to the marked gravers, there are 17,000 people buried there.

  23. The call goes out to cancel Canada Day, but ironically that gets a sympathetic reaction from many conservatives who see it as a sort of Liberal one-party-state celebration of cultural Marxism. I have to admit that I have never celebrated much on Canada Day for those reasons. The red and white flag is so similar to the party’s logo and colour scheme that they tend to blur together for many of us.

    Now their clients are equally unmoved by the experience. Wait until the clients figure out who was in charge of Canada for most of the residential school era (and who moved the Japanese Canadians into the interior so their businesses could be sold off to the right people). Too soon?

    1. How dare you introduce facts and logic into this debate?!

      Canadians (who cannot tell you what Canada or a Canadian is without insulting the Americans) will celebrate Canada Day not because political multiculturalism works (it doesn’t) or to celebrate Canada’s achievements and freedoms and not because they see the current news cycle as ridden with sensationalism and half-truths but because it is the done thing every July 1st.

  24. 02/18/2013
    https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/education/at-least-3000-native-children-died-in-residential-schools-research/article8786118/
    Seems like this is one of those things we’ve known about all along. I’m just wondering what people think the options are when a native child in residence dies from TB or the flu. I’m wondering if there’s an awareness that, in hard times, these natives would abandon their infants and elderly to die in the cold. There may have been abuses at these schools, which are inexcusable, but don’t think, for even a second, that these children were plucked from heaven.
    Now, from high minded bearers of the white man’s burden, they have received another plague, resistance culture, and it’s mutant wokeness. Moving forward the only question remaining is should their dead be buried, burned, or just thrown into the sea.

  25. It’s no surprise these were “discovered” so close to Canada Day.

    I like the idea of Compared to What? They didn’t die because of murder. They died due to disease and other health factors.

    1. It’s in keeping with the “post-national” agenda being pushed by Trudeau. Same with taking down statues of Sir John A. I don’t even think it is about aboriginals, whose story is well known. It is about destroying our nationhood.

  26. Yep, they’ll set up a several BILLION dollar fund to excavate each grave and forensically analyze every cranium perforated via a 45 calibre muzzle loader since 1886. Okay so now we’re supposed to believe that every “racist catholic” was advocating genocide; since well before the advent of concentration camps and pit graves with lime.

    Oh and what happened to the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT RECORDs? Oh well they were DESTROYED!

    The clown car show that is responsible for the Indian Act, the most racist document on the federal books, can’t for the life of them provide supposed reserves with fresh water; in the land mass of Canada that accounts for 1/3 of the entire planets FRESH WATER. Want to help an Indian TODAY try turning on the water in a heat wave!

    The federal bleating on this file is hypocritical beyond the extreme.

    Let’s see now my sister in law (64) is dead due to a failed heart valve, and my father is dead due to stroke (92); all in the last year. Yep, no funeral due to the dread Covid-19; so they rest quietly on their spouses fireplace mantlepiece; until the variant delta, episilon, zeta, eta, theta…and finally OMEGA arrives.

    When the OMEGA comes, oh then we will be set free!!!

    Psalm 34:2 My soul makes its boast in the LORD; let the afflicted hear and be glad..

    Cheers

    Hans Rupprecht, Commander in Chief

    1st Saint Nicolaas Army
    Army Group “True North”

  27. My father went to a school in the 30s and early 40s. A thirteen year old girl stayed after school for violin lessons from the teacher that somehow it got her pregnant. If they put their heads on their desks to sleep, a fist to the back of the neck is what they got. This was just a regular 2 room school house in rural Manitoba. So yeah, maybe the Natives had it hard, but compared to what?

    1. My lily white father said his teacher, in the 1930s, had students go and cut their own willow switch so he could beat them. I am not sure that corporal punishment was racist.

  29. Something tells me they’ll “discover” 5000+ at the Mohawk Institute in Brantford and their will be blockades set up on all local roads except the ones directing you to the smoke shacks and pot shop. The only possible resolution on the reservation will be to return all the land along the Grand River stolen* by the evil white man

    * Sold by their slave owning Mohawk leader Joseph Brant

    2. That would be the Six Nations Reserve who were all American. The land they are living on was taken from other Indians.

  31. I keep asking the question, what was the death rate for general population in those days, were the graves marked or marked with a wooden cross and then it just rotted away?
    Actually there are a lot as in many questions that needs to be answered. There are a lot of artificial barriers on that path, the first barrier is that nobody is allowed to ask the questions, lest he be racists or some kind of nazi.
    Heard and read, this would be by the media cartel, that many grave markers were removed for some reason.
    The “journalists” will not ask questions they just manage the propaganda.

    It is obvious to any normal person that the government, it being run mostly by totalitarian minds, should keep away from peoples lives. White, yellow, red, black, brown and what ever else some of the woke call themselves.
    As soon as they start messing with people’s lives, a downhill slide occurs and it never, ever stops, as you can currently observe.
    It ends with totalitarian dicktatorship (sic) because those that run things know and you don’t and people die because they will make you do what they want you to do if they have to kill you.
    So far, in this country, they just take you to court and the corrupt justice industry makes sure that you understand who is in charge.

    You may have noticed that they prefer cash than putting people in prison, it does not look that bad, after all, you have not done anything criminal.

    One could go on and on and on.

  32. I’m into ancestry. I’ve gone through all kinds of parish records from the 1700s and 1800s, Britain, Canada and the US.

    Those records are filled with child deaths, the majority are children. Measles, mumps, small pox, you name it. Often the records only say “infant”, and often the parents, generally only the father, are not named. Recall one record of a distant family member – about 20, stepped on a nail, died from tetanus. You could tell when a disease of some sort had swept through a town or village…80% of entries would be children.

    My parents lost their first child back in the late ’30s. A great many of their generation lost one or two children. My great grandparents lost four children. My third great grandparents circa 1800 in Lincolnshire lost 8 out of 12 children before they made three years of age…my 2nd great grandfather was one of the four who survived.

    I’ve asked this question posed by this article since the first moment this issue came up.

    1. And I should add…

      When I hear these ignorant asses prattle on about vaccinations as some sort of evil, I boil! They have not one GD clue about how it used to be.

      When I was a kid, everyone knew someone close who had been stricken by polio. Thanks to vaccines, that’s all but wiped out!

    2. I helped with Family Search indexing (project of The Church of Latter Day Saints for their own purposes but they share the results free and world wide). I too noticed that number of young children who died in the late 1800s and early 20th century – lots of infants, but kids under 10 were also common

  33. There are many facts around this issue, commenters on this thread have explored many of them. We know that the progressive left ignores facts in the quest for their ‘truth’, but maybe there are too many facts to ignore.

    One cry from the progressive left was that the government of the day should have looked at alternatives. Actually they did – read the Davin report that looked at industrial schools in the US and recommended that as a model AND he explicitly stated that certain groups (such as religious and bureaucrats should not be involved). Like all government reports, it was ignored at the time but is used as a cudgel to beat up churches today – often by people who haven’t read the report. Davin School was renamed by the progressive parents in a rich part of town (The Crescents) because apparently he was solely responsible for the horrors of the residential schools system. I wrote to the board members citing the important points of the Davin report along with an historical context – several responded and noted that they had not actually read the Davin report but agreed with me, however they would go along with the parents for the sake of harmony. I suggested that this might be an actual good teaching moment to show children (and their parents) how history actually works. They declined and caved to the mob of very well paid parents who mostly worked for the government.

    I know from my mother’s experience that there were few alternatives, My mother grew up and went to school in Southern Saskatchewan in the late 1920s and 1930s. The school in the nearest town only went to Grade 9. To take Grade 10 and 11 she had to go to the school the town over – so she did but had to board and room with a family. One of her brothers would take her on Monday morning and bring her back on Friday evening. To pay for her board and room, she did light housekeeping from the family (she was 15, 16 at the time) – up at 5 a.m. to make breakfast, home at 4 p.m, to clean the house/laundry, make supper and then maybe at 9 p.m. have some time to study. Needless to say her marks were not great, but she passed. To finish Grade 12 she had to go into Regina, pay tuition and the same arrangement for room and board. She borrowed the money from her older brothers (her parents were tenant farmers but her brothers had gone out to work). Again she passed, but with not great marks. However she used that diploma after working in the munitions factories in Toronto after the war to go to Winnipeg and take a secretarial course.

    THAT was the alternative in a province with a huge land mass and small population She was one of the few people in the surrounding towns that finished high school. Most quit at grade 9. Today, the same is happening in rural SK as there are fewer and fewer farms – children, but the option for on-line learning exists.

    It is really sad that there are loud voices with no understanding of the history of western Canada that push a narrative that is not based on reality. Tomorrow my sister and I go to a small cemetery near my mum’s hometown to clean up the grave sites of family members. I also contribute to FindAGrave and will take photos of markers for the site The cemetery is still used (about 1 burial a year) and is maintained by the RM (essentially they mow it one or twice during the summer). But wandering around there is are a number of graves with just wood markers (rotting in many cases) and a number of young children (4, 7, 8, 10 etc.). Even a small granite marker runs about $2,500 today, probably not that much different in 1930s money. Remember that the 1930s were the ‘dry years’ (depression elsewhere in Canada) – spending any money on non essentials was just not even considered.

  34. My baby sister died in 1956 …. she is in an unmarked grave in a cemetery …. my parents had a large family , small budget , big hospital bills at the time , and nothing left for a gravestone. We have never felt like “victims” because of that.

    Speaking of cemeteries …. look at the huge numbers of children who died in the 1800’s and 1900’s before modern medicines and vaccinations .

    1. So sad to hear your story. My cousin died at eight months in 1966 from a birth defect (today she would have lived). The grave marker was not put on until about 30 years later when the family had just a little more money. And it is very very simple. Reality bites hard some times

  35. July 1 is a day of self flagellation for Canadians.
    Forever embarrassed by our insensitive forefathers and their actions we must now humiliate ourselves in perpetual apology.

  36. I’m not bothered by un-marked graves of children. Old cemeteries are full of them. What I am bothered by is the forced removal of children from their homes who are then sent to be re-educated in government schools. This is no different than the forced removal of children from Christian parents by the communists in the Soviet Union, who placed these children in residential schools to be re-educated. Most were never heard from again. The media and Liberal government all seem to think that we white Canadians need to make amends for our racism against the natives. But I feel no guilt. When I was growing up, we never saw Indians, ever. They stayed on the reserves where the government supposedly looked after them. We heard that there were native Residential Schools around the country run by the Catholic Church, but again had no experience or exposure to them. I’ve thought about who is responsible for this atrocity, and came to the conclusion that it is the same group that is responsible for all the atrocities that have been perpetrated on the canadian population, they are the Laurentian Elites. Before confederation they were called the “Family Compact”. They formed and sent the NWMP to impose their will on the west, who are still here to this day imposing their directives. These are the well-heeled, monied, power brokers who control all aspects of canadian lives for their own power and financial gain. These are the people who are responsible.

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