I’ve posted a lot about Irish industrial “schools” but not much about the Canadian version. That was negligent. From CTV News last January:
For the past year and a half, lawyer Fay Brunning has been fighting to get the federal government to hand over documents about the St. Anne’s residential school.
It’s a school that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and a judge described as having the worst cases of abuse out of any residential school in Canada. Brunning, who represents survivors, says they were taken away from their parents at age five or six for 10 months a year. They were forced to eat vomit, subjected to sexual and physical abuse and put in an electric chair.
What??
The little ones first,” recalls Edmund Metatawabin to the Wawatay News in July. “And I was, I think, about number seven or eight, meaning I was one of the smaller ones.”
The children sat on a wooden seat with their arms strapped to a metal chair. A Brother held a wooden box with a crank ready to send the electric charge.
“Your feet is flying around in front of you, and that was funny for the missionaries,” Metatawabin says. “So all you hear is that jolt of electricity and your reaction, and laughter (of the Catholic school administrators) at the same time. We all took turns sitting on it.”
Catholic school administrators. These are the people who think they have the right to reject secular laws, and demand exemptions from laws that apply to everyone else, in order to harm women who need contraception. These are the people who think they are morally better than everyone else.
St. Anne’s is in Fort Albany in northern Ontario. It was open from 1904 to 1976 and had hundreds of aboriginal children from remote James Bay communities walk through its doors. A police probe from the 1990s turned up evidence of horrific abuse, including an electric chair. A government had said Ottawa received the documents from police on an undertaking they would not be passed on to anyone. Ontario Superior Court Judge Paul Perell says the government misinterpreted its obligations and should turn over the more than 7,000 records to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The reports must also be turned over to the Independent Assessment Process, an out-of-court process for the resolution of claims of abuses suffered at residential schools.
Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt told Kevin Newman Live in an email the government is “pleased that the court clarified we can now disclose St. Anne’s residential school documents, and, now that we have the court’s permission, we will do so.” His office declined to answer any follow-up questions.
In Ireland it was children of single mothers and poor families. In Canada it was aboriginal aka First Nations children. It’s always someone. There always has to be someone to be the receptacle for sadistic impulses. How interesting that it keeps being the Catholic church that is in charge of the sadism.
As a matter of full disclosure, the Anglicans ran a lot of these, too. But also as a matter of full disclosure, I’m not as current as I probably should be on how the levels of sadism actually compared.
I’m sure Pope Frank is going to call for full disclosure of any and all records of these crimes that are now under his jurisdiction or influence … any. Minute. Now.
opposablethumbs:
Oh, no. The pope is much too busy to speak out about this. He’s far too busy fooling people into thinking he’s accomplishing anything with his PR campaign.
In the US, it was Indian Boarding Schools, which were almost exclusively run by Christians. Remember the old “Kill the Indian to save the man” rhetoric? Children kidnapped from their families, shipped long distances away so they couldn’t find their way home if they escaped, and used as slave labor and sex slaves by these gooood Christians, who made a profit farming them out for day labor and to pedophile rings.
Note that these children were deprived of being parented, so upon their release, they returned home, unable to speak their relatives’ language, and without any skills to use when they themselves became parents. A brutally effective way to wipe out entire cultures, and don’t think for a moment that wasn’t the goal.
In Canada, the counterparts were the Indian Residential Schools. The last one still operating closed in 1996. You read that right – less than 20 years ago, this holocaust was still going on. In some of these schools, the mortality rates were around 60% – these kids weren’t even given anything close to adequate medical care or even nutrition. In the US, these boarding schools reached their peak enrollment in 1973, some 60,000 children. By 2007, 9,500 indigenous children were still attending these boarding schools. In Australia, aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their families and shipped off to similar boarding schools, to teach the children to be Christians, to absorb European cultural norms, and to speak English, to be trained to be white people’s servants and laborers. This was still going on into the 1990s. The movie “Rabbit Proof Fence” (2002) is the story of three young related girls who are thus kidnapped, who escape and navigate their way 1,500 miles home along the rabbit-proof fence, pursued by trackers who are intent on returning them to the boarding schools (prisons). They are part of what is sometimes referred to as “The Stolen Generations”. One of the girls died – she was captured during the escape and never returned home. One of the girls escaped TWICE. She went on to have two daughters – one was taken from her at 3 years old and she never saw her again.
It’s all the product of European Christian imperialism. Yet more evidence of religions’ poisonous effects on humanity.
The residential school in my hometown didn’t completely shut down until 1973 (when I was in middle school.) They didn’t actually teach there by then, but native kids from the north were shipped off to live there and bussed to local schools. I remember those kids, and their isolation (which I undoubtedly contributed to at the time.) I thought they didn’t want to have anything to do with white kids like me and believed the stories I heard about them being violent and dangerous; looking back (with shame) I now know they were just frightened, lonely little kids hundreds of miles from home surrounded by strangers.
The residential school system is a blot on Canada’s history as dark as any Apartheid or Southern segregationist policy.
Just as poor black populations have been used as human guinea pigs for drug and pathogen testing (see the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment), native children have likewise been used for everything from vaccine trials to radiation studies, all without their consent. Read a bit about it here: http://www.whale.to/c/ca.html
After WWII, the US conducted massive nuclear testing, including the most powerful bomb ever exploded (Castle Bravo), around the Marshall Islands, without evacuating the natives. Now, they have severe health and reproductive difficulties, to the point that several populations have decided to go extinct – to no longer attempt to reproduce.
Interesting factoid re: apartheid:
I heard an excerpt of a speech given by Malcolm X where he said exactly this – how could we morally and ethically say anything to South Africa’s apartheid regime when our own segregated situation here in the US was just as bad? So of course he had to die. He was joining with workers’ rights groups and challenging the worldwide capitalist regime, and that could not be tolerated.
A Hermit: The Canadian Indian Act was a key model for South African Apartheid.
http://www.rcinet.ca/english/archives/column/the-link-africa/TruthandReconciliationCanadaSouthAfricaResidentialSchoolsAbuses/
Blanche @4 – One of the girls died in the Rabbit Proof Fence movie? Are you serious? Did you know that didn’t happen in the book? I’m really getting a little bit tired of movies making stuff up when they’re based on what everyone knows to be memoirs. Alternatively, maybe we should begin being much more suspicious about treating them as history.
PS – did you know that the author of the original memoir was the daughter of the woman who escaped twice? She was the one who never saw her mother again after the second escape. Doris Pilkington pieced together the story with the help of her ‘aunties’, that is both the other two girls from the original escape.
Blanche @#6:
While I’m definitely not saying it didn’t happen (I can, unfortunately, easily see some of that happening as we have too many similar examples already), do you have a cite that isn’t whale.to? That place makes most conspiracy theorists look positively connected to reality.
There is a ‘law’ on the net called Scopie’s Law: In any discussion involving science or medicine, citing Whale.to as a credible source loses you the argument immediately… and gets you laughed out of the room.
Some religious types also liked to abuse white kids in Canada. The story of Mount Cashel Orphanage is probably the best known case. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Cashel_Orphanage Then there was the case of the Ideal Maternity Home, immortalised in the book Butterbox Babies. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterbox_Babies As with First Nations victims the abusers took advantage of those society had marginalised, whose complains wouldn’t have been taken seriously, or who would have been blamed for their victimisation.