Over 1000 bodies of young Indian boys have been found on or near Canadian catholic church run schools. The claim is that the catholics genocided the Indians. The number of deaths certainly exceed those reported in Florida School for boys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_School_for_Boys , which was more about teachers supposedly abusing delinquent children rather than genocide. The peoples response in Canada has been to burn down catholic churches-a lot of catholic churches.
The graves are at multiple locations.
182 human remains found in Cranbrook, Brittish Columbia.
School operated between 1912-1970.
https://www.npr.org/2021/07/01/1012100926/graves-found-at-new-site-canadian-indigenous-group-says
600-715 unmarked graves were found near the former Marieval Indian Residential School
https://www.npr.org/2021/07/01/1012100926/graves-found-at-new-site-canadian-indigenous-group-says
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57592243
the school operated from 1899-1997.
215 bodies found near Kamloops, British Columbia
https://www.npr.org/2021/07/01/1012100926/graves-found-at-new-site-canadian-indigenous-group-says
The Catholics and the American Indians have a very special relationship, as recorded in "the black legend" by one of Spain's own missionaries de la casa. A previous papal bull allowed Catholics to capture pagans who were told about Jesus christ, but still rejected him. Often the Spanish would read the Indians warning in their own ?spanish? language-the Indians couldn't understand it-as an excuse to enslave and even massacre up to 50 million Americans in Latin and south America-Or so the claim goes. The Spanish Catholics are also known for their inquisition, and their 80 years war with the Dutch. Had a 12 year truce not ended in 1621, the pilgrims might not have come to America.
So fast forward some 300 years from the black legend, and the french Catholics are taking Indian children from their home, destroying their culture, and forcing them to speak French.
These schools started as early as 1863. Initially, I was not sure what kind of records the french kept on vital statistics, but at this point Canada was well controlled by England. Records of baptisms, births, deaths, were traditionally recorded, with little detail by the English church-which separated from the Catholics during the reign of Henry VIII-but not without controversies (bloody Mary, Guy Fawks, the 7 bishops trial, etc). Anyways, upon research, it turns out the Catholics in Canada did take such records; and said records can be searched freely on family search-at least for Saskatchewan.
https://www.familysearch.org/search/collection/2001071
I don't know if names of the unmarked graves are in this book. Absent DNA testing, that would be difficult to prove. However in doing a more generic search for or Birth Year (Range): 1900 - 1970 Death place: Marieval, Saskatchewan, Canada I see a lot of people who died young. granted some records are duplicates-but there are a lot of young dead people appearing without even filtering by age.
Given the number of people who died at age 0, something else may have been going on besides normal infant mortality.
unmarked graves really aren't uncommon.In trying to doing geneology work on my own family, I've seen [read about] grave sites from the 1850s where all the names except one has eroded which had the same surname-all technically still grave markers. One my relatives [and his wife], whom everyone thought died in the 1840s, moved away and died in the late 1860s, no grave site exists that I know of. His parents and siblings seem to have disappeared off the face of the earth, as well as ?4? of his children-?3? of whom were counted & not named-in a census.
On a search for Robert Allary, I don't find any gravestone for him in find a grave. I decided to try to find Robert Allary's parents in the census. It wasn't on the family search website, but was on a canadian genealogical site. https://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/census/1906/Pages/1906.aspx
https://central.bac-lac.gc.ca/.item/?app=Census1906&op=&img&id=e001207482
if I am reading this, with the aid of https://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/census/1906/Pages/saskatchewan.aspx , correctly, he lived in the Assiniboia West district, sub district 38 which is the "Piapot's Indian Reserve and that part of Muskowpetung Reserve in range 17". I am unable to answer if they were Indians, or just whitey's living on/near a reservation. Nonetheless, Robert's siblings are clearly listed as living with their parents-Robert was of course dead by the 1906 census.
Another thing to keep in mind about the french, particularly Parisians, is a lack of respect for the dead. Kind of out of necessity where Paris ran out of places to bury the dead, and spent 12 years throwing bones and corpses into tunnels. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/paris-catacombs-180950160/
And what happened in England might explain what happened to my aforementioned ancestor's parents and siblings. In England, a gravedigger would dig a pit some 20-60 feet deep. The poor would deposit dead bodies in a single deep grave-with or without a coffin. That doesn't sound like what happened on the reservation, but Canada is an English owned commonwealth of francophones.
https://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/history/social-economic-history/what-were-victorian-paupers-graves
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jan/22/death-city-grisly-secrets-victorian-london-dead
The Romans apparently had similar ideas, large pits away from the city to toss corpses of the indigent into. A pit could hold 24k bodies.
https://www.thegreatcoursesdaily.com/burial-practices-in-ancient-rome/
The 19th century didn't offer much for the rite of sepulcher. I would suspect that in rural Canada in the earlier 20th century, this hasn't changed either. Neither John nor
Adelaide Allary have a gravestone listed anywhere in the world on findagrave.
I think the lack of grave markers about the dead bodies recently found is probably on par for the time [up to the 1930s] in Canada, which strikes many of us today as strange.
As to the number of bodies. In today's time, in America only 7 in 1000 children die before the age of 5. In 1900, this number was closer to 240. Basically a 24% mortality rate even without claims of genocide-in a geography presumably warmer than canada.
source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041693/united-states-all-time-child-mortality-rate/
For a quick summary of why survival has increased so much over 100 years, see https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4829a1.htm
Granted school age kids are typically older than 5 years old, but some of these bodies found are as young as 3 years old. So I found a social security life table [usa of course] for the year 1900 to focus on kids older than 5. https://www.ssa.gov/oact/NOTES/pdf_studies/study120.pdf
So let us suppose that at age 5 there are 78591 boys, and 81409 girls. Lets say they stop at a 8th grade education (age 14), which isn't out of the ordinary at the time. see https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/culture-magazines/1900s-education-overview for America. ((78591-75916)/78591)=3.4% chance of death for boys, and
((81409-78621)/81409)=3.42% chance of death for girls (if they were schooled).
Now there were some 715 unmarked graves from this one school, so if canadian mortality rate followed the united states we would multiple that by the reciprical of 3.4%. so 715/.034=21029. that 21029 figure would be the minimum number of students required to attend this school in all the years to be relatively normal to us mortality death rates in the 1900s. They would have to enroll a lot more to really be normal adjusted for time, how many years education they likely recieved as a function of time, and population growth, but if the total enrollment was less than the 21029 then it should be obvious something was wrong without further analysis-or so I had originally thought. Peak enrollment happened in the 1960s, with about 240 students up from 14 their first year. The school operated for about 100 years. Certainly deserves greater scrutiny, and greater scrutiny reveals:
There was a graveyard next to the school before it started operations.
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/hundreds-of-bodies-found-in-unmarked-graves-at-former-saskatchewan-residential-school
The grave markers were removed for unknown reasons in the 1960s.
https://globalnews.ca/news/7977208/marieval-residential-school-unmarked-graves-2/
Adults were buried there as well.
https://globalnews.ca/news/7977208/marieval-residential-school-unmarked-graves-2/
Granted this is just one of the three locations. As far as people dying from abuse or neglect here, I don't think that is seen in the data given how corrupted the numbers are.
In the case of Cranbrook, there were reportedly some 5000 total students. 182/.034=5352. Because 5000 is less than 5352, there is more overt merit to claims of abuse here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kootenay_Indian_Residential_School
But again, we see that it was the site of a previous graveyard-one that served a hospital. And those in it are mostly from the old hospital. So again the numbers are corrupted, and there is little need at this point to try to find the enrollment per year and the actuarial tables for those years (or other method) to find a more accurate number than 5352.
How about Kamloops? This one has the most severe claims, with claims of up to 4100 died at the school but only 51 names provided-and 215 bodies found. I am not sure what documentation there is of the 4100 deaths at the school, or if it is just some calculated estimate [by an activist]. The school was reportedly under funded, under-heated, and part of it burned down mid winter one year. Students were reportedly whipped if they spoke in a native tongue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamloops_Indian_Residential_School .
While there are not overt claims of a cemetery, it still can't be ruled out. Kamloops started to become popular in the 1880s due to railroad work. The graves were not marked (labeled) until the 1920s. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Hidden_History/OhaaDgAAQBAJ
The actual school is located on or near the historic indian village. google maps + https://www.google.com/books/edition/Harper_s_Weekly/uBeKDjrLhFUC , although google maps is often error ridden and I suspect it is giving errors here. While there is evidence of an older tribe living somewhere in kamloops long ago, the Indians in about 1900 had special burials for their dead and were reportedly into ancestor worship. It is not to say that the bodies found by ground penetrating radar weren't in piles of rocks or shells that could signify an existing Indian burial ground-just some things will would require physical research. Another possibility is the catholic school was selling cemetery plots to the poor for much needed funding, but that would just be speculation. Maybe they were using child labor to try to raise funds, again speculative. Just too many unknowns at this point, but it does deserve greater scrutiny.
In two of the 3 locations, I don't think the evidence pointing to physical abuse is present. It's not to say it didn't happen, catholics have a certain reputation for children, And there were other mass graves of children found in Ireland, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/03/mass-grave-of-babies-and-children-found-at-tuam-orphanage-in-ireland a few years ago from a maternity home that ran mostly in the 1920s-1950s. At the irish home there was a 34% mortality rate in 1943, and malnutrition was a culprit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bon_Secours_Mother_and_Baby_Home . Meanwhile another [protestant] church lead mother's home also operating in the 1920s-1950s in Ireland 220 dead in unmarked graves in a cemetary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bethany_Home . The survivors say the high mortality rate was due to child abuse. There are other locations in Ireland where the schools were used for child labor.
Allegations of physical abuse at the third [Canadian] location in kamloops is more believable, but given how corrupted in information was at the other two locations that isn't saying much. Ultimately forensics I think has the best chance of determining what happened: whether by quantity of broken bones, by any residual bacterial/viral dna, or evidence of malnutrition or hard labor, even what race the children were, and how long ago they were buried.
Much of the world is condemning these as human rights violation and demanding apologies. There might have been some rogue actors who committed hideous human rights violation, but it is premature to say it was systemic. I added the term hideous, because certainly if Indian children were kidnapped from their families that would be a human rights violation but doesn't rise to the level of being beaten nor starved to death even if it is a human rights violation. In the USA, our states were kidnapping Indian Children and adopting them out to white families-until we passed the Indian Child Welfare act in the 1970s, which was ruled unconstitutional in the last few years, before being restored by the appellate courts and is still being heard in the court system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Child_Welfare_Act So there is merit to the claim that Canada was kidnapping children. Additionally, the Muslims for centuries were previously taxing Christians of their children, and training/schooling them for the Janissary-so kidnapping children wasn't unique to just Catholics. I would speculate that this practice is much older, probably dating back to the romans and their peace treaties with germanic tribes (or others) but without formal education. Additionally human rights violations include violating the right of sepulcher-which is the right of the next of kin to bury the dead. Although British Columbia is warmer than the rest of Canada, maybe delivering the dead to the next of kin was impractical during the times when automobiles were scarce, or the blackberries & hawthorn in the fall would tear a traveler to shreds [exaggeration]. When flu is rampant, it is winter and the ground may be solid. Additionally, neither the french nor the English apparently cared too much about the graves of indigents. As far as the Roman church removing grave stone markers in the 1960s, we can only speculate why they would do that or why their relatives would allow them to do that. However, we also know of the practice of "damnatio memoriae" where the powers that be destroy all records of a person.
The utilization of damnatio memoriae here probably was used to undermine ancestry worship where there were previous marked (and named) graves prior to the school or adults otherwise buried; the Chinese communist resorted to destroying ancestral temple and requiring cremations to end ancestor worship over in China. Ancestor worship is very ancient, the Romans going so far as to create wax death masks of the patriarchs and keeping them (and using them) for generations. A lot of ordinary people my feel there is nothing special about them, until they see who their ancestors were; And as to the adults buried there (obviously kids shouldn't be having kids, but it isn't unheard of), this has been removed from their posterity. Even when the Chinese are kidnapping, torturing, enslaving, killing the Uighur's, and despite their own history of cultural genocide, they still ironically found time to condemn Canada. The criticism that the Roman Catholics engaged in cultural genocide may be correct even if perchance no one died of abuse/neglect, but these unmarked graves [some of which were previously marked] are fueling all sorts of fear and claims as to what actually happened at these schools. Not all of these claims of abuse will be false (dealing with Catholics afterall), but the scale of claims of abuse is greatly exaggerated due to confirmation bias on a grand scale. Lastly, not all of the older graves may have been marked (or labeled) in the first place, in which to then erase their memory so the damnation memoriae argument is limited at best.
In context, I think the outrage by leftist groups is unfounded at this point. It's not to say that they won't be proven right to justify the state of being outraged, but likely on a much lesser scale. I think it is more that they are just looking for an excuse to show their existing anger and hostility to the catholic church to engage in more cultural genocide in the name of communism.
