The following is Conrad Black's take on the native file. Obviously, I am not alone, but no journalist will pick up on this -- and neither will any native or politician. Canada has disgracefully lost the plot on this file And you can take that to the bank.
___________________________________________
Once
again, we are indebted to the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and retired
judge Brian Giesbrecht for their diligent research that has unearthed the
proportions of some of the embellished claims about Canada’s past treatment of
its Indigenous population and particularly some of the claims made by the Truth
and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the National Centre for Truth and
Reconciliation (NCTR) about “missing children.” There is no doubt that there
are very serious legitimate grievances that Aboriginal people rightfully hold
about the wrongs committed against them in Canada, including very serious
abuses that were perpetrated against children in the residential school system.
But all Canadians of European extraction are the subject of blood libels by the
TRC and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and former Supreme Court chief justice
Beverley McLachlin and others of comprehensive racism and genocidal intent
against this country’s Indigenous people. Trudeau has disgraced Canada by pleading
guilty on behalf of all of us to the charge of past efforts to exterminate the
culture of First Nations and in the deliberate or negligent deaths of
Indigenous children, and he humiliated Canada by lowering all federal flags,
including on embassies and other offices abroad, to half-mast for over five
months over these false charges. Many other accusers stand in the dock for
falsely proclaiming or accepting this collective guilt. There has never been
any general or official desire to eliminate Canada’s First Nations.
The
research of the Frontier Centre and Giesbrecht has unmasked the dearth of
conclusive evidence of the claims of atrocities committed against the infamous
215 Indigenous children who were allegedly killed and secretly buried in
Kamloops, B.C. This charge began with the revelation by First Nation of
Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc Chief Rosanne Casimir that she “knew” of this secret
burial because “knowledge keepers” told her about “oral histories” of
six-year-old children being taken from their beds at the Kamloops Indian
Residential School in the dead of night to bury fellow students in the apple
orchard. Stories such as these have been circulating for decades, and were
amplified by less precise allegations about mysterious unmarked graves near the
locations of other residential schools. (My note: Now they are asking for more money to dig up maybe-graves, see below:)
The
underlying problem is that even sophisticated audiences that do not accept that
thousands of Indigenous children were murdered and secretly buried, as has been
alleged, have been receptive to the claim that death rates at residential
schools were greatly higher than on nearby reserves. This is a misconception,
according to Giesbrecht. Tuberculosis was long one of the leading causes of
death for the whole population, more than a century ago, when life expectancy was
generally significantly lower than it is now. Indigenous people were at much
greater risk of death from tuberculosis and a range of other illnesses that
they had not encountered before the Europeans came to Canada, and which
European-Canadians had had centuries to develop immunity to.
This
vulnerability of the Indigenous population to European-originated diseases was
aggravated by the fact that by the late 19th century, Plains Indians had lost
their principal source of protein — the buffalo — and lived on government
rations that were not nutritionally adequate and led to weakened immune
systems. When the federal government took over the residential schools in 1883,
the Canadian Pacific Railway had not quite reached the prairies and supplies
for the Natives were imported from Montana by wagon train. Though this was
certainly unintended by the authorities, the diet imposed upon the Plains
Indians was insufficiently healthy. Canada’s First Nations were revealed by
Peter Bryce of the Indian Affairs department in the early 1900s to have a
mortality rate more than double that of the whole population, though the
Aboriginal population was slowly rising despite these problems. He established
that the greatest threat was a lack of familiarity with the requirements of
sanitation in their residences, which were frequently overcrowded. This
resulted in mortality rates that were higher than those in residential schools
in many cases.
Bryce
also reported in 1906 that the 189 Indian reserve medical officers toiled
constantly to deal with these problems, and that a number of
government-subsidized hospitals had been built in or around reserves to serve
the Indigenous population. There has never been any explanation for why the
media and Indigenous activists have never mentioned, nor even implied, that
they were aware that death rates on reserves often exceeded those in the
residential schools. Nor has there been adequate attention to the fact that
attendance in residential schools was entirely voluntary to the parents until 1920,
when attendance was made compulsory in order to try to ensure that all First
Nations youth enjoyed the benefits of literacy. Sending the children to the
residential schools was in fact a prudent measure, despite the many and
sometimes terrible problems in the schools, including documented cases of
abuse. Giesbrecht has established that these unheralded facts have been known
and have gone practically unmentioned for over a century.
We
have heard endlessly that parents “had their children ripped out of their arms,
taken to a distant and unknown place, never to be seen again. Buried in an
unmarked grave, long ago forgotten and overgrown,” as TRC commissioner Marie
Wilson put it. The blood-red banner famously unrolled by the NCTR in 2019 is
claimed to carry the names of 2,800 children who died in residential schools,
but Giesbrecht’s research shows that many of those names are of children who
died from many different causes, in some cases away from the schools
themselves.
There
have been other well-publicized issues with the list, as well. Indigenous
leaders were “disgusted” and “mortified” when they discovered that the NCTR’s
list of deceased children in the residential school in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont.,
contained four adults, including an Anglican archdeacon and the wife of an
Anglican bishop. The TRC has exaggerated this issue: its commissioners have
suggested that up to 25,000 children “never returned home,” implying that they
died in the schools and their corpses vanished. TRC Commissioner Murray
Sinclair and his colleagues have promoted the likely embellished claim that
more than 6,000 children were exterminated in the schools and secretly disposed
of by the Catholic clergy. And the Kamloops claim that caused such an uproar
last year was based on 200 “soil disturbances,” which even the researcher who
performed the ground-penetrating radar search was forced to list as “probable
burials,” because the sites need to be excavated in order to be confirmed.
The
Truth and Reconciliation Commission should be required to restate its
conclusions on a basis consistent with its own research and all research
conclusions should be rigorously verified and cross-indexed. The TRC’s bloated
budget makes the sloppiness of its sourcing inexcusable. There should not be
another cent of reparations paid out over these claims of heinous crimes until
we have more clarity. Native jurisdictions should be held to the same standards
of fiscal honesty as other jurisdictions in Canada and a plan of action should
be produced by the collaboration of all bona fide parties and implemented to
address the genuine grievances of First Nations people. Sinclair and the other
commissioners must answer these very serious findings and Trudeau and McLachlin
and the other defamers of this country should be rebuked and must recant their
false allegations. Justice must be done, at last, for First Nations, and for
Canada.
National
Post
No comments:
Post a Comment