As anyone who has done basic research into their family tree might know, the presence of unmarked graves in rural 19th century cemeteries is extremely common. Given the high rate of infant mortality at that time, it’s also not surprising that many were children. But careful consideration of the actual evidence doesn’t make for shocking headlines, so some feel it’s best to make sinister inferences and jump to outrageous conclusions instead.
Earlier this month, the Acimowin Opaspiw Society (AOS) — announced they have confirmed that at least 212 children were buried in unmarked graves during the school’s operations.
“It can be safely stated that in our community of 12,000 people, each family has had four to five children who went missing from this institution,” he continued.
The remnants of the Saddle Lake site are so extensive that grave diggers kept uncovering child-sized remains when digging graves for recently deceased band members.
The math doesn’t add up. Unless each family consists of 200 people.
That is colonialist settler math, sir. As part of the indigenization and decolonization of our educational institutions, the numbers will be what we say they are.
An Aunt, my mothers sister once did an extensive search on their side of the family. It ended in a Church yard in NFLD. It did represent about 200 years of family.
I tried something similar but the same thing all the records used to be kept in Churches, the Churches fell down burnt down, about 200 years of Scottish ancestry available. With the Clan system one can find how long a family existed if you know the Clan you are from, but not necessarily individuals.
My first wife’s family ran a family tree and between Canada and the US they got back to 1652.
Boiler plate narrative reinforcement of the residential schools as Indian child extermination centers. Oh, and Typhoid fever killed a bunch too. The Indian Industry runs on white guilt which must be continually stoked.
I thought transparency would be part and parcel of ANY possible Truth or Reconciliation?
Due to issues of privacy, the Society has said that they would like to keep their source undisclosed as the investigation is on-going and extremely delicate.
Yeah … right …
Let me guess. They want money.
Not this time… your first born will suffice…or sacrifice?
Illegal to cut a tree considering they’re still endangered somewhere else of the planet like a desert.
Can’t harness sugars or other products from trees as well… beavering is destroying our forest lakes.
Beg pardon Sir; i hope you’re not a beaverphobe. OMG!!
My mom had a sister pass away at 6,my dad had a sister pass away when she was a teenager, how much do get?
My Great grandfather had his farm taken away by the Russian commies, where do send our claim?
We are Mennonites, the Catholics used to persecute us, do I send an invoice to the Pope?
Its fun and profitable playing victim all day.
Just out of curiosity, how many MARKED graves for Indian children have been found from BEFORE contact with Europeans?
Did they even bury their dead? I remember ol Farley Mowat writing about mothers in a certain northern tribe leaving the babes in the snow for the scavengers to take care of when food was scarce ( say if the caribou weren’t running). Time to cancel ol Farley and burn his books.
Leave us not forget the cultural potlatch among the West Coast tribes.
Farley was so full of shit he basically canceled himself.
I worked in the arctic where he is known as “hardly know it”
“Did they even bury their dead? I remember ol Farley Mowat writing about mothers in a certain northern tribe leaving the babes in the snow for the scavengers to take care of when food was scarce ”
I remember raised platforms in the woods where they would lay the bodies. They may have different customs depending on which tribe you are talking about.
A Basque hombre we met in Portugal fills the RV water tank at village cemetarios. Gotta have water for the flowers, and seldom people there see anything.
Need to knock off the Parrots as they might squeal and repeat what you’d been discussing too?
I’ll make a bet that child mortality at the schools was a LOT less than it was on the reserves.
Chrétien was born on January 11, 1934, in Shawinigan Falls, Quebec, as the 18th of 19 children (10 of whom did not survive infancy)
Jamie… that’s the elephant in the room.
I knew a woman that grew up in remote Grassy Plains BC, one of 15 kids. Every one lived and reached adulthood.
Native women that lived around them marvelled that her parents were able to keep so many children alive and asked her mother how she was able to do it.
Have mixed feelings about the Chretien’s success rate. Could have just been bad luck.
In my own family tree childhood deaths of 25 to 50% were quite common.
The other unanswered question is how many Indian children died with their PARENTS and among their tribe during the same time.
Do they have marked graves?
I know the approximate location of three distinct unmarked graves of the children of pioneer ancestors of mine within two miles of my home. It’s safe to say the landscape of abandoned homesteads that we can and cannot see is littered with countless more graves.
As a kid I used to farm over a few unmarked pioneer graves. I didn’t know they were there and I’m guessing my father didn’t. I found out in old age after getting all the death certificates of neighbouring pioneers for a history project. Copies are under a buck in Alberta. They are free online in BC. Lots of neighbour’s kids died 100 years ago but not in my family. My father’s family lost 1 of 11 before 1926. My mother’s family lost none of 5 before 1928.
// Jamie MacMaster February 3, 2024 at 11:47 am
I’ll make a bet that child mortality at the schools was a LOT less than it was on the reserves. //
/// When Dr. Peter Bryce was sent out in 1907 to assess the health of students in the residential schools of Manitoba and the Northwest Territories, he reported back to Scott that conditions were so appalling the death rate in several schools was in the 40-60-per-cent range.
[TB was endemic on reserves, but the crowding & lack of treatment meant that the death rate was twice as high as on the reserves – which was bad enough]
Scott shelved the report and made the good doctor’s life very difficult, but six years later he would admit: “It is quite within the mark to say that fifty per cent of the children who passed through these schools did not live to benefit from the education, which they had received therein.”
Why they did not live is left unmentioned, as if to imply it was a result of their own failings and alleged higher susceptibility to disease. However, their “education” was killing them.
His cynical comment delivers exactly the average death-ratio provided earlier by Bryce, who had also warned him the government could well be charged with manslaughter for creating such deplorable conditions. Not in the habit of listening to reason when it came to his pet project, Scott wrote:
“It is readily acknowledged that Indian children lose their natural resistance to illness by habitating so closely in these schools, and that they die at a much higher rate than in their villages. But this alone does not justify a change in the policy of this Department, which is geared towards the final solution of our Indian Problem.”. /// Edmonton Journal
Finally, disgusted with the lack of action, Bryce wrote a book:
The Story of A National Crime By P. H. Bryce M.A, M.D.
being an
Appeal for Justice to the Indians of Canada;
The Wards of the Nation:
Our Allies in the Revolutionary War:
Our Brothers-In-Arms in the Great War:
1922 Price 35 Cents.
“Finally, disgusted with the lack of action, Bryce wrote a book:
The Story of A National Crime By P. H. Bryce M.A, M.D.”
The big search engines quickly bring up dozens (if not hundreds) of references to this “outrage” and “genocide”, but keep digging and you will find the other side of the story:
https://www.dorchesterreview.ca/blogs/news/what-did-dr-bryce-really-say
Yeah…doesn’t really support the original sensationalist headlines, does it?
Thanks for saving me the bother of digging that up (pun intended), Fred from BC. 🙂
“Thanks for saving me the bother of digging that up (pun intended), Fred from BC. ”
NP, Jamie….I just had to know. There is almost always another side to any political issue, and this “Canadians deliberately tried to WIPE OUT the indigenous population!” story has never made sense.
I have the book. I know what he said.
I am also familiar with the Dorchester Review.
So, your misrepresentation was deliberate. Worth noting.
My maternal grandparents, three of their children, and a great uncle were all buried in unmarked graves. *gasp* While my mother and her two surviving brothers were sent into foster care. *gasp, gasp*
Were they murdered or suffered some other nefarious fate? No, they died during the Great Depression, when childhood diseases could be fatal and medical care was harder to get. Have a couple of accidents, and things can get really bad very quickly.
It’s a reality that very few people in Canada (especially the urban elites) can understand, let alone even to have experienced something even remotely similar.
+++McP
” No, they died during the Great Depression, when childhood diseases could be fatal and medical care was harder to get. Have a couple of accidents, and things can get really bad very quickly.”
People died from broken limbs, abscessed teeth and infected wounds, too. Modern generations just don’t understand history,
When I was a kid my father asked me to help him fix the back fence. Some of the posts had rotted including the corner post. My job was to go in the hole and pull out the rocks. They used rocks to sturdy the posts in those days and not cement. One stone was too big and my father had to climb in and help me fish it out. Turned out to be a marble grave marker with the name Donaldson. The girl was only a few years old when she died. My great grandfather had built the house in 1911 and my grandfather, who later lived there, had said they plowed up and moved an old cemetery nearby. While there was a cemetery at the end of our street, my grandfather used to joke about the house having ghosts so I never believed much of what he said. The marker was from the 1800s.
Years later I bought some farmland with a house on it. I live there now. The original farmhouse was long gone. I was told by a local that I had bought the old Donaldson farm and that the lane I drove up and down every day was going to be named Donaldson Lane. And now it is. The farm was established in the 1850s.
This spring I have to take a fence down. Maybe my son will help.
Where are all the crosses and headstones for graves of natives who died before 1492?
Aren’t graves a settler/colonist/immigrant thing and natives appropriated that culture of ours?
But, but, but … what better way to “tell a story” about how the white man dehumanized the native population by not giving them the same dignity of a headstone they gave to their own people. Ohhhhhhhhh mommaaaaaaa … history and truth be damned
They used to hang them in trees and the ravens took care of things.
Maybe that’s what happened to all those missing these days?
Is there another industry other than smuggling and tobacco that we could let them monopolize?
I think they’ll move in on “waste management” and just go back to dumping their shit in the river and burning it.
” The fire began at around 1 a.m. and was later found to have been started by five Ohsweken-area youths. The boys stole a plastic container of gas, lit it and one of them tossed it into a pile. They were arrested in April 1990 and charged with mischief.”
Hagersville Tirefire
l used to commute thru hagersville of all places.
the tire fire was seriously massive in size and consequences.
Three ‘Solitudes’
Headstones? Very few of my middle class relatives buried in the 20th century had any, let alone the 17th to 19th. My pioneer Alberta grandparents still have none. Mostly, western folks in Northern America, east of the Canadian shield used wooden crosses.
There are likely lots of teachers and members of the churches buried in residential school grave sites, not just indian kids. So dig some up and check DNA. Diseases that now have REAL vaccines killed everyone.
Anyone from a tiny town or tribal community had to move to get higher education. This is true, even today, in some isolated communities. Daily bussing was not possible on gravel roads until the 1960’s. I remember the buses coming into high school from Alberta reserves.
Residential schools were strict, but ALL schools were strict in the 1900s, and some public schools had uniforms. Even in the 1960’s, we girls got our knuckles whacked and outgoing boys got the strap. It is still a common practice in language immersion schools to forbid the use of native languages in school and on playgrounds.
It is still Canadian policy to educate every child.
People forget that northern reserves that now have 1000 people had 100 back in the day. Roads were trails through the bush and were impossible bogs for some of the year. Also in pre-welfare days Indians left the reserve to work, either in the bush or in civilization and they packed up the whole family. Residential schools were the only possibility for education before the government put them all on welfare.
This entire issue has been marked by people making ominous references without saying anything specific. This puts those rebutting their charges in an awkward position — what exactly are we rebutting? If the charge is that some children died in the past, okay but so what? This was an era when child mortality was far higher than it is now.
We live in a world … so pampered and free of need that we demand the “global temperature” be some imagined ideal setting. An era where children rarely die from still-common childhood diseases. An era where we impose contemporary beliefs on the past … like selfish, snobby, FOOLS.
They refuse to show their work (in this case, claiming some nebulous “privacy” concern; in the original, they refused to release the GPR scans). Instant disqualification.
“The remnants of the Saddle Lake site are so extensive that grave diggers kept uncovering child-sized remains when digging graves for recently deceased band members.”
I suspect that Indian cemetery never had marker pins and tape measures when they started burying on the reserve. They would have done it pretty randomly like every other Indian cemetery, thinking that with a wood cross, everyone would remember where the graves were.
The rumor I heard is those are graves of jornolithps, buried by students.