• Provinces to start giving out official Residential School death tolls.
    5 replies, posted
[quote=CTV News] Friday, March 28, 2014 The death records of tens of thousands of First Nations children who died during the time residential schools were operating in Canada have been handed over to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. British Columbia opened the floodgates with the release of 4,900 death records for children aged 4 to 19 -- the first batch a few months ago and the latest on Friday.The province's registrar general, who is in charge of vital statistics, appealed to colleagues across the country to open their archives, as well, and Alberta, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick followed suit. "We hear from the survivors about having lost loved ones in the schools and not knowing what their fate was, what happened to them, whether they died and, if they died, where they're buried," said Kimberley Murray, executive director of the commission. "It's an important truth they need to have before they can move forward to reconciliation." [B]About 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Metis children went to the church-run schools, the last of which closed in 1996.[/B] Many children never returned to their homes, according to the commission. Some ran away, some died. "Often, their parents and families never were informed of their disappearance or death," the commission said in an interim report.[/quote] The full article: [URL]http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/provinces-hand-over-aboriginal-death-records-from-residential-school-period-1.1751450[/URL] This is unbelievable how long this has taken for these atrocities to be formally accounted for. Common estimates put the death toll at around 50 000. This was for all intents and purposes an attempt at genocide by the church and government of Canada, and is arguably the darkest part of our history as a country. As someone with a fair amount of Metis heritage it makes me think about what could have and may actually have happened to distant and possibly fairly recent relatives.
I've never heard of this before what exactly happened?
[QUOTE=Ganix565;44495828]I've never heard of this before what exactly happened?[/QUOTE] In a nutshell, early Canadians tried to assimilate first nations into Canadian society by sticking them in horrible schools ('residential schools'). Most of them were beaten and treated extremely poorly, some kids separated from their parents. [editline]e[/editline] I never thought my high school education about this stuff would ever be relevant. But yeah, it happened and it was horrific.
Wow I had heard about this a little bit, I can't believe it was never accounted for.
Inuit culture is absolutely fascinating, stuff like this is just scandalous.
We sort of have the same scandal just with christian orphanages. in Germany, horrible stuff.
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