Body Dumping in Kamloops and Beyond: News and Insights about the Ongoing Crime

[MercurysBall2]

Body Dumping in Kamloops and Beyond: News and Insights about the Ongoing Crime

phpBB [video]

..As for those children in the ground and what put them there, their appearance and what put them them there, their appearance is really a mirror into which we can see ourselves and the nature of who we are and our culture..

[doginventer]

Sorry MB2, didn’t see this thread before posting this:

Remains of 215 children found at former Kamloops residential school - The SearchVoat Forum
viewtopic.php?t=2952

Indigenous group in Canada announces discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves | Reuters
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cana ... SKCN2DZ2S6

TORONTO (Reuters) - A Canadian indigenous group announced on Wednesday the “horrific and shocking discovery” of hundreds of unmarked graves at the site of a former residential school, just weeks after the discovery of other children’s remains shook the country.

The Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations said in a statement that the number of newly found unmarked graves was “the most significantly substantial to date in Canada.” The statement did not specify numbers.

The group said it would announce at a news conference on Thursday morning “the horrific and shocking discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves at the site of the former Marieval Indian Residential School” in Saskatchewan.

The discovery weeks ago of the remains of 215 indigenous children at the site of another residential school for indigenous children in Kamloops, British Columbia, forced Canadians to confront the legacy of an abusive and assimilationist system.

Between 1831 and 1996, Canada’s residential school system forcibly separated about 150,000 indigenous children from their families. They were malnourished and physically and sexually abused in what the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission called “cultural genocide” in 2015.

Survivors who spoke with Reuters recalled perpetual hunger and haunting loneliness, and schools run under the threat and frequent use of force.

Canada’s federal government apologized for the system in 2008. The Roman Catholic Church, which ran most of the schools, has not apologized. Earlier this month, Pope Francis said he was pained, a statement dismissed by survivors.

Reporting by Anna Mehler Paperny; Editing by Peter Cooney

[doginventer]

'Is he here amongst all these graves?': Survivors recall abuse after hundreds of remains found near Sask. residential school | CTV News
https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/is-he-her ... -1.5483838

With hundreds more unmarked graves discovered on the grounds of a former residential school in Saskatchewan, survivors of the system are once again speaking out about their experiences.

Cowessess First Nation, located 164 kilometres east of Regina, announced at a press conference on Thursday that it had found an estimated 751 unmarked burial sites on the grounds of the former Marieval Indian Residential School.

Related Stories

Indigenous crisis support: Where to find help
Cowessess First Nation says 751 unmarked graves found near former Sask. residential school
'Canada's responsibility to bear': PM on unmarked graves found near former Sask. residential school
Sask. First Nation finds hundreds of burial sites near former residential school
This is what it will take to identify hundreds of remains in unmarked graves at residential schools
As more unmarked graves are found, Indigenous communities face renewed trauma
O'Toole tells Conservative caucus he's against cancelling Canada Day
'There's a memory there': Rampant addictions on Sask. First Nation a result of generational trauma from residential school
'Living in fear': Survivor says he suffered sexual abuse for years at Sask. residential school
The news comes less than a month after the discovery of the remains of 215 Indigenous children buried in unmarked graves at Kamloops Residential School in Kamloops, B.C.

Indigenous crisis support: Where to find help
Click here for first-hand accounts from residential school survivors
According to the University of Regina, the Marieval residential school operated from 1899 to 1997 in the Qu'Appelle Valley. Marieval was run by the Roman Catholic Church until it handed over administration to the federal government in 1968.

Cowessess First Nation took over its operations in 1981. The residential school was later demolished in 1999 and replaced with a day school.

For survivors of Canada’s residential school system, the discovery in Cowessess, while not unexpected, renewed feelings of grief and trauma.

"Just feeling like the wind was knocked out of me again," Lou-Ann Neel, a residential school survivor, told CTV's Your Morning on Thursday.

Elder Florence Sparvier, a survivor of Marieval, said at the press conference that she had no choice but to go there. She explained that one of her parents would have been jailed if they didn't send a child to the school.

"In order to keep the family together, we went to boarding school. They brought us there, we stayed there. And we learned, they pounded it into us, and really they were very mean. When I say pounding, I mean pounding," Sparvier said.

She said the students were forced to learn about the Catholic god, while nuns and priests condemned First Nations people for not following the Catholic religion.

"They told us our people, our parents and grandparents had no, they didn't have a way to be spiritual, because we were all heathens," Sparvier said.

"They were putting us down as a people," she added. "So we learn how to not like who we were. And that has gone on and on, and it's still going on."

Barry Kennedy, a survivor of the Marieval residential school, told CTV News Channel on Thursday that he "can’t find the words" to describe how he feels knowing more than 750 graves surround his former school.

"I am outraged, I am saddened and I'm depressed," Kennedy said in an interview from the gravesite at Marieval. "The feeling here is so heavy."

Kennedy said it is likely that some of the graves could be former students he once knew.

"I got a friend that's missing. His name was Brian, and one night he was taken like everybody else was and he just didn't return. So is he here? Is he here amongst all these graves?" Kennedy said.

Kennedy arrived at Marieval when he was five years old, and says he witnessed burials throughout his time at the school while helping the church as an altar boy.

"We were called to the church one early morning… we were brought outside and they were burying someone. Who it was, whether it was a boy or a girl, I don't know. But what I do know is that this individual was wrapped in a sheet and there was a hole dug," he said.

Kennedy said he experienced brutality at the school from the moment he arrived. He said "everything was done with a physical" hand at the school, and children were frequently slapped, punched and kicked, among other abuses.

Kennedy said they were also given food that was so rancid that the children threw up from eating it, only to be made by the priests and nuns to eat their own vomit.

"That's what you're faced with -- that along with the confusion of wondering where's your family, that along with the confusion of being lonely," Kennedy said.

Kennedy noted that some of these details may be difficult for people to hear. However, he said these atrocities need to be acknowledged not only in Canada, but across North America.

"This has to be a worldwide cry of what systemic racism created," he said.

While the road to reconciliation continues to be a long one, Kennedy said it is a necessary journey to "heal as a country."

"We have to try and fix it in a respectful way so that we can move forward, not only as Indigenous nations of Canada, but as a country. We have to make this right," Kennedy said.

Although she attended the Marievel residential school 56 years ago, Debbie Delorme says the pain and trauma she endured there still haunts her today.

"I remember looking out the window and to my grandfather's place, way out by the lake and crying, wanting to go home," Delorme told CTV National News.

Delorme was taken when she was five years old and says all of her immediate family were forced to attend Marievel. She said they all suffered multiple forms of abuse.

"When I was in Grade 1, I almost froze and I was also sexually, physically, and mentally abused," Delorme said. "Any abuse that anybody talks about was all true."

She added that her grandfather lost his hearing while at the school after being hit in the back of the head with a two-by-four.

Another survivor, Eagleclaw Bunnie, says all of his immediate family was also forced to attend Marievel. He told CTV National News that his family was broken apart by the residential school "completely and utterly in every single way."

Bunnie said he didn’t get to see his younger sister, Amber Peltier, until she was 17 when she was still in the residential school.

"They would call her by her number, they wouldn’t even call her by her name," he said. "They called her by her name when they wanted to be sweet."

SURVIVORS ACROSS CANADA DEALING WITH RENEWED TRAUMA

As a survivor of St. Anne’s Residential School in northern Ontario, Elizabeth Sackaney said she knows the discoveries in Kamloops and now Cowessess are just the beginning.

"A lot of things to think about. It's hard knowing that we're finding more bodies all over. And it's not going to be finished," Sackaney told CTV's Your Morning on Thursday.

Sackaney reflected on her time at the former residential school. She remembered the electric chair, and there being a nearby hospital that nuns and priests took students to.

"When I was living in residential school there was an electric chair. There was a tunnel to take you to the hospital, not to take you out on top of the ground," Sackaney said.

Looking back, she said she thought the abuses she faced as a child were games or jokes.

"They would stand up on a balcony, take all of us in there and throw candies at us and we would be fighting, and people fighting each other and they would be standing there laughing at us, and we used to think it's funny, but now when I really think about these things, these things weren't funny. It was very serious," she said.

While at St. Anne’s, a lot of children went missing, and Sackaney thinks a survey of the ground could reveal where some ended up.

"I wonder how many they're going to find in Fort Albany, St. Anne's School, a lot of kids went missing, a lot of kids something happened to them," she said.

Neel said that the only way forward is to find the truth and share them without sugar-coating, and that the Catholic Church needs to do their part and release the documents that have been requested.

"If we're going to achieve any form of reconciliation as a country, these truths have to be known, we have to be willing to help each other and the church really needs to be able to respond to what its own members and nearby First Nations communities are asking for," she said.

What she finds disturbing is just how many people in Canada say they are unaware of residential schools, and that for years people who spoke about the horrors weren’t believed.

"It's really troubling that this many people would report these things, and nobody would believe them," she said. "I think that's a real symptom that we need to do something about the way we respond to these kinds of things."

Canada's reputation as a friendly, humanitarian country has been part of the reason that these atrocities have been swept under the rug for so long, she added.

"Maybe we've done just too good of a job of promoting Canada as this place where these things couldn't happen," she said. "And here we are finding out the exact opposite."

Sackaney just wants the truth to come out, and says too many people have known for too long with no consequences.

"They're hiding things," she said.

Chief Robert Joseph, the ambassador for Reconciliation Canada and a member of the National Assembly of First Nations Elders Council, told CTV News Channel on Thursday that the discovery of these unmarked burial sites presents “unrelenting grief” for residential school survivors.

When he heard about the findings in Cowessess, Joseph, a survivor of St. Michael's Residential School in Alert Bay, B.C., said he was filled with sorrow.

"Even though we had the experience in Kamloops, these new revelations were just traumatizing. And I know that others, Canadians were also in shock and dismay," Joseph said.

He says Canada has come to a "real moment of reckoning" in regards to its legacy on residential schools.

"We have the opportunity to reflect deeply on our shared history and the turn of events that are revealing some really difficult traits about us, about Canadian society, and how they treated little children in residential school days," Joseph said.

While Canada formally apologized for its residential school system in 2008, the federal government has implemented only eight of 94 Calls to Action issued in 2015's final report from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC).

Joseph said he is disappointed that the country hasn’t made more progress towards reconciliation.

"There ought to have been a lot of work by now, and there should have been some shift, some transformation of our attitudes toward each other and our willingness to engage in creating new kinds of relationships," he explained.

With the discovery of these latest unmarked graves, Joseph said it is important for Canadians to have a "deepened dialogue" with Indigenous people about how these findings are impacting them.

"It's important for Canadians to know that from our cultural perspective, it's the height of indignity to treat the decease in any way that's less than respectful, so our attention needs to be on addressing the way we see each other," Joseph said.

With files from CTV National News' Creeson Agecoutay

--

If you are a former residential school student in distress, or have been affected by the residential school system and need help, you can contact the 24-hour Indian Residential Schools Crisis Line at 1-866-925-4419, or the Indian Residential School Survivors Society toll free line at 1-800-721-0066.

Additional mental-health support and resources for Indigenous people are available here.

[doginventer]

A fire in Kamloops BC from lightning tonight - View on Imgur:
https://imgur.com/gallery/APTf1x9

[shewhomustbeobeyed]

A fire in Kamloops BC from lightning tonight - View on Imgur:
https://imgur.com/gallery/APTf1x9

I wonder if any churches burned? Seems to be happening a lot.
'Temperature rising': First Nations leaders condemn rash of church fires across Canada - https://archive.is/QYGLj - https://archive.is/QYGLj/13e4521f8fbb85 ... 1f3982.png

Five churches, some over 100 years old, were burned to the ground, starting with four in B.C.’s Okanagan Valley. The latest and the largest was in Morinville, Alta., on Wednesday, preceded by at least three smaller arsons, the two on Siksika land and a fire at the door of a vacant, century-old Anglican church in northern B.C..

Dramatic red-paint handprints, mimicking the bloody hands of children, were also daubed on the doors of a cathedral in Saskatoon, on a statue of Pope John Paul II at a church in Edmonton and on a statue of nuns in Regina.

On May 27, the discovery of 215 unmarked graves at the old Kelowna school was announced, followed a few weeks later by 751 unmarked graves at the former Marieval Indian Residential School in southeastern Saskatchewan. The Lower Kootenay Band in B.C. reported Wednesday that 182 unmarked graves were found close to the former St. Eugene’s Mission School . There are expected similar findings at other sites from more than 120 years of the government-sponsored, church-run system of forcibly sending First Nations, Metis and Inuit children to boarding schools, where many suffered serious physical and sexual abuse.

4 Canadian Catholic churches destroyed in 'suspicious' fires on indigenous lands - https://archive.is/ldR5q

[doginventer]

Six things the media got wrong about the graves found near Residential Schools | True North.
https://tnc.news/2021/07/07/six-things- ... l-schools/
When it comes to the coverage of graves identified near residential schools in three First Nations communities, the legacy media in Canada has done a tremendous disservice to all Canadians – especially First Nations.
They have created a moral panic, and continue to fan the flames of racial division.
This panic came to a breaking point over the weekend, when prominent statues were knocked over and at least 25 churches in Western Canada were either vandalized or completely burnt down.
To make matters worse, several prominent commentators, including politicians, journalists, professors, lawyers and activists, excused the behaviour of the mob, explained away and justified these riots, and in some cases, even cheered them on. “Burn it all down,” said the head of the BC Civil Liberties Association, once the country’s strongest voice for protecting the rule of law and civil liberties.
Likewise, the Chair of the Newfoundland Canadian Bar Association Branch said “Burn it all down”
Or how about this, from a radio host in St. John New Brunswick: “Burn the churches down. Arrest any former staff that were actually there and any current staff that won’t provide documentation. Sell everything they own in Canada and give it to survivors. Dismantle it completely.”
Not to be outdone, NDP MP Niki Ashton cheered on the mob who toppled statues at the Manitoba legislature but calling it “decolonization” and saying there is “no pride in genocide.”
Finally, Justin Trudeau’s top advisor and best friend Gerald Butts said that burning churches isn’t cool, but it “may be understandable.”
How did we get here as a country?
Here are the six ways the legacy media in Canada got this story wrong.
1. Unverified Reports
It is standard practice in journalism to clarify whether or not an allegation has been proven, in court or otherwise. But when the Tk’emlups band issued a press release stating that they had used ground penetrating radar to locate 215 unmarked graves, the media accepted the story without question or any verification.
The band said a report was forthcoming in mid-June – but no report has been released to date. No evidence of any sort has been put forth for public consideration. We don’t know who carried out the research, whether it was a company or a university, or how the technology was used. At this point, we have a few claims, and nothing else.
This may be a minor point, but it’s an important distinction nonetheless.
2. What exactly was “discovered”?
There has been incredible confusion over what exactly was discovered, and media outlets have used tremendous liberty in describing what the bands have claimed.
JJ McCullough has made this point on Twitter, showing all the various ways the media have described what was discovered.
The first nation band leaders say they used ground penetrating radar.
To be clear: nothing was “uncovered.” No “bodies” were found.
There was no excavation, nothing was unearthed, nothing was removed, no identities were confirmed. So anything you may have read saying these graves belong to children, including some specific claims about the ages of these children, is speculation at this point.
Let me refer back to a National Post story that explains what ground penetrating radar actually does. They interviewed a professor of Anthropology who is also the director of the Institute of Prairie and Indigenous Archaeology. She said this of ground penetrating radar: “It doesn’t actually see the bodies. It’s not like an X-ray.”
“What it actually does is it looks for the shaft. When a grave is dug, there is a grave shaft dug and the body is placed in the grave, sometimes in a coffin, as in the Christian burial context. What the ground-penetrating radar can see is where that pit itself was dug, because the soil actually changes when you dig a grave. And occasionally, if it is a coffin, the radar can pick up the coffin sometimes as well.” We’re talking about pretty rudimentary technology here, and a relatively imprecise process. The numbers are more or less a rough estimate.
So why have media reports been so bold in asserting these numbers as facts?
3. We don’t know whose graves were discovered
The Tk’emlups band claimed the graves belonged to children at the school. So when the second two bands (Cowessess and Lower Kootaney) came forth with their own claims, many in the media jumped to the conclusion that these too were the graves of children from residential schools. But that wasn’t the claim made by the bands. In fact, in both Cowessess and Lower Kootaney, the graves are believed to be in community cemeteries, belonging to both First Nations and the broader Canadian community. Tucked away at the very end of a report in the Globe and Mail on the findings at the Cowessess reserve in Saskatchewan, it said this:
“It appears that not all of the graves contain children’s bodies, Lerat (who is one of the band leaders) said. He said the area was also used as a burial site by the rural municipality. “We did have a family of non-Indigenous people show up today and notified us that some of those unmarked graves had their families in them – their loved ones,” Lerat said.”
So what we have here is an abandoned community cemetery, where people of different backgrounds were buried.
That’s quite a leap from the original storyline that these graves belong to children who had died at a residential school.
4. NOT mass graves
These are not mass graves.
Several media outlets, both in Canada and international outlets like the BBC, Al Jazeera, the New York Times and the Washington Post have recklessly and erroneously labeled these findings as mass graves.
This is incredibly irresponsible.
All three chiefs themselves have explicitly stated these are not mass graves.
Why is this important?
Mass graves are a hallmark of genocide. They conjure images of pure evil, the kind of evil that characterized collectivist governments in the 20th century. Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot.
These were truly evil leaders who used mass graves to cover their atrocities and crimes against humanity. These leaders carried out mass murder, and the mass graves went hand in hand.
The use of the term mass graves is wrong, and it is reckless. It conflates Canada’s policy of forced assimilation through mandatory universal education, with Nazi death camps. Let me be clear. Canada’s policy was wrong. It was misguided and in too many cases, those who were responsible for caring for children in this country let them down, and let all of us down.
But that does not put Canada’s residential schools on any level of equivalence with Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps.
It’s good to see that the Washington Post made a correction on their story. Others should follow.
5. Cause of death
Many children who died at these schools died of natural causes.
According to the Truth and Reconciliation Committee report in 2015, the number one cause of death was Tuberculosis.
You can argue that these children didn’t receive proper health care, or that some of their immune systems could’t handle living in close proximity to other children.
But negligence resulting in accidental death is quite different from murder, which is what many in politics and the media have suggested.
Since this news came out, there has been a near universal assumption in the media that these graves are evidence of Canada’s Holocaust, as if the children had been deliberately killed.
Genocide requires intent. It requires a concerted and systematic effort to conduct mass murder and eliminate an entire race of people.
Canada’s residential schools, however misguided, had the intent of educating children, assimilating them into the broader Canadian population, and ultimately lifting them out of poverty.
The policy was wrong, clearly. It was flawed and much harm resulted.
But there are a few orders of magnitude that separate the misguided intent of Catholic priests, nuns and Canadian government officials versus those of Nazi firing squads and gas chambers.
6. It’s possible these weren’t even unmarked graves.
Wooden graves, which were and are still the norm in First Nations communities in Western Canada, erode and disintegrate over time. It’s possible these were once marked graves.
This is the claim being made by the former chief in the Lower Kootenay region (the third band to have announced the finding of graves.)
This is from a Global News story (my emphasis added):
The detection of human remains in unmarked graves at the site of a former residential school in B.C. was not an unexpected discovery, according to the area’s former chief. On Wednesday, it was confirmed that ground-penetrating radar found 182 unmarked graves in a cemetery at the site of the former Kootenay Residential School at St. Eugene Mission just outside Cranbrook, B.C.
The remains were found when remedial work was being performed in the area to replace the fence at the cemetery last year.
Sophie Pierre, former chief of the St Mary’s Indian Band and a survivor of the school itself, told Global News that while the news of the unmarked graves had a painful impact on her and surrounding communities, they had always known the graves were there. “There’s no discovery, we knew it was there, it’s a graveyard,” Pierre said. “The fact there are graves inside a graveyard shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.”
According to Pierre, wooden crosses that originally marked the gravesites had been burned or deteriorated over the years.
Using a wooden marker at a gravesite remains a practice that continues to this day in many Indigenous communities across Canada.
So when we’re talking about so-called unmarked graves, at least in the context of the Lower Kootenay Band, what we are more likely talking about is abandoned graves at an existing cemetery.
Abandoned graves where people of different backgrounds — not just children from residential schools — were buried.
What an amazing leap to go from an uncared for community cemetery to mass graves, mass murder and genocide.
Mark Twain once said to never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Well for journalists, they might say never let the facts get in the way of a good narrative.