Residential Schools

[agstar77]

If they want to find the burial sites , they should serve the church with warrants for their records. They have not accepted responsibility for their crimes.

[RD414]

Sounds like that is the problem, their lives and deaths were not written down. The crime is they were taken in the first place and lots abused while in someone else’s care. The native people were muscled under and held down and left to rot on the reserves and we wonder why they are so pissy now. They have finally found their voice.

[sumdumguy]

Gotta remember, those were very different times. There weren’t phones, never mind cell phones. Antibiotics may not even have been available. It was not always possible to locate parents of the kids. A lot of the grave markers were home-made wooden crosses that would rot away in twenty or thirty years.

Residential schools can be traced back to the 1830’s(that’s before confederation) up until 1996. In early days a lot of French kids in our area were sent away at 6 years old to College Matthieu in Gravelbourg. Our friends were dragged away kicking and screaming too and aren’t entirely enamoured with the memories of their childhoods. Some teenage girls, were sent to Forget to live at the nunery. There was a convent in many larger small communities and parents paid with milk and butter for their kids room and board. There were no poor weather roads and winter meant isolation at the farm for the rest of the family. Even at Christmas it was not always possible to get your younguns home. And thats in the 1960’s. Think about 1830 and 1860 and the plagues of 1918, every country graveyard still has the evidence of the Spanish Flu. Enuf rambling, just see it in perspective, is all I say.