[Thanos]

I wouldn't even know what to offer as suggestions. The damage is so massive that it can never be repaired. This wasn't born out of some sort of malignant redneckism that came to it's inevitable malicious conclusion. This was something the greatest minds among the founding generation of the country dreamt up. And with every step of this atrocity they were completely convinced they were doing the right thing, and that their way was best.

The only positive I can see coming out of this, and from the inevitable discovery of even more graves as the rest of the schools get archeologically investigated, is that it should permanently deflate the massive self-righteous ego of this country. We are not inherently good just because we live here. And far too often our grand words are empty wind, great for those who think speeches reflect reality when almost all the time on so many issues nothing in Canada ever changes. We are just another country and we are no different, either in terms of good or evil, from any other country on this planet. We have the exact same pride in ourselves that anyone else does. And more often than not all it takes is that pride, and the delusional self-love that follows it, to unleash the monsters that are lurking inside. The built-in Canadian tendency to sneer at the sins of others absolutely has to be removed from the national character. This pedestal of wildly arrogant self-righteousness that underpins the mentality of this country needs to be obliterated completely, and smashed into so many pieces that it can never be put together ever again.

At a minimum there should be no more discussion that any of what surrounds the residential schools was done out of good intentions. For a hyper-religious people the founders of these abattoirs seemed stunningly ignorant of their own words about good intentions being the paving stones of the road to hell. Just because it wasn't them that had to walk that road doesn't erase the fact that the hell it led to was unforgivably real for the children who were condemned to it.

[herbie]

Well the good intentions then fall short when seen through the lens of our times.
FFS a woman I know just said over coffee yesterday "Now they have something else to complain about!"
The times haven't changed all that much....

[Scape]

My clan in warships is mostly from the US and they were talking about it as well. Pierced the consciousness it seems. They were asking what it was about and I just said Residential schools. "it was a long time ago" someone said. I just left it.

If anything this will force Ontario to stop their lawsuits.

[xerxes]

Here’s hoping. It’s known that residential school were a terrible thing but to hear of a mass grave with the bodies of 200 children in it will absolutely change things. Ffs, the last residential school in Canada closed in 1996. There were forced sterilizations of First Nations women still happening in the 2000’s. This didn’t happen long ago. This happened in my lifetime and our parents’ lifetime.

Thanos is absolutely right that this should shatter our collective smugness of how good of a people we are. We watch the news from the US and see how African Americans are essentially a permanent underclass and cluck our tongues in disapproval (and rightly so), without realizing that is how we treat the First Nations in our country. We took their land, tried to destroy their culture, and shunted them onto dilapidated reservations and then wonder why they can’t succeed in our way of life; after we’ve put as many obstacles in their path as possible.

This has always been Canada’s shame and now it has been truly laid bare for all the world to see. I haven’t the foggiest clue how to fix it or resolve it. But the first step will be to acknowledge the true horror of what was done. And this is the start.

[CDN_PATRIOT]

JaredMilne JaredMilne:

This ties right into what I've been writing about for years now-how do we remember people like these whose actions made it possible for us to live here? Are all our heritage, everything that makes us who we are?

We don't give in to cancel culture, first and foremost. Nothing can be learned from history if we start erasing it and pretending it didn't happen. When I was a kind, my parents/grandparents AND the school system taught me to learn from history while maintaining it in the process.

Nowadays, it seems (primarily) the younger generations think that removing all traces of something they don't agree with or label as 'insensitive' is the way to go. It also doesn't help that the person in charge of running our country is one of the champions of hurt feelings, apologies, and cancel culture himself, PM Snowflake.

JaredMilne JaredMilne:

It's why I support restoring Indigenous lands, clearly spelling out their rights and jurisdictions in the Constitution

Spelling out their rights in the Constitution, perhaps. That might just be a decent idea. But restoring 'their' lands? What's done is done, and we need to go in a different direction. It's time to abolish the reservations, let them integrate into Canadian society (while maintaining their culture and heritage), and welcoming them into the family properly.

But continuing to throw money at the problem and treat them as an entirely different people is why we're still in this mess. Until the government steps up and treats them like equals instead of segregating them the way which is done now, everything will be stuck in neutral.

-J.

[DrCaleb]

Scape Scape:

If anything this will force Ontario to stop their lawsuits.

Why? What's wrong with fighting, in the name of Canadians, against compensation for children who were shocked in an electric chair?

/s


I can't believe I even had to write that sentence.

[bootlegga]

JaredMilne JaredMilne:

Thanos Thanos:

What our nation both allowed and encouraged, from top to bottom, from both dominant language groups, and across all political parties:



For some things there is no forgiveness that could ever be earned by later generations, not when an attitude like this was built into the bedrock of the new country. Some guilt can be nothing but eternal.

I live in St. Albert, where Vital Grandin has a school, street and neighbourhood named after him. This prompted a petition to have his school renamed.

This ties right into what I've been writing about for years now-how do we remember people like these whose actions made it possible for us to live here? Are all our heritage, everything that makes us who we are, all the positive and negative experiences we've had morally tainted by association?

Vital Grandin not only participated in the residential school system, but also in the development of Franco-Albertan culture, the birth and growth of many central Alberta communities, and prominent regional cultures such as that of Ukrainian Canadians on the Prairies. How do we remember that? Can we morally take any pride in it?

It's why I support restoring Indigenous lands, clearly spelling out their rights and jurisdictions in the Constitution, not to mention updating the damn funding formulas, stopping fighting judgements to properly fund Native child welfare programs, rejecting the Doctrine of Discovery and in short acting on a lot of the recommendations of the Penner Report, RCAP, the TRC and all the other inquiries, reports and writings that have discussed the problems and how we could fix them.

I am Canadian. It's all I can be. This place is the only one I can call home. But that means I have a responsibility to know these things and try to set things right. I can't fix everything on my own, but I hope I've at least done something to help.

I'd rep if I could.

Learning about this was shocking and vile, and makes me wonder how many other mass graves are scattered across Canada full of First Nations children, and as painful as it will be for everyone, we need to find them all and deal with the issue honestly and openly.

I'm not often ashamed of who I am or where I come from, but let me tell you, I was after this.

The disturbing thing is that this when they taught this genocide in schools, but it was sugar coated as 'educating the noble savage' or some shit like that. I clearly remember my Social Studies teacher talking about MacDonald's plan to assimilate and eradicate the First Nations, but it was always framed in such a way that it sounded like we were trying to help them, not wipe them out. And it certainly wasn't the fault of my Social Studies teacher, she did the best she could with the shitty curriculum that we had back then.

But as we now see, it was all about wiping out their culture and assimilating a people white Canadians didn't understand or know much about.

I don't live in St Albert, but I too learned this weekend about Grandin's role in developing the residential school system and completely agree his name should be stripped from as much as possible, and the only thing that should remain is a placard/statue denoting his terrible legacy.

[DrCaleb]

bootlegga bootlegga:

I'd rep if I could.

I can! And did.

bootlegga bootlegga:

I don't live in St Albert, but I too learned this weekend about Grandin's role in developing the residential school system and completely agree his name should be stripped from as much as possible, and the only thing that should remain is a placard/statue denoting his terrible legacy.

The LRT station in the basement of the building I work in, is 'Grandin Station'. There is a mural in it of him stealing babies from Natives.



When first nations were consulted about what to do with this, instead of removing it and hiding it, they chose to put up their own murals opposite to it.




They chose not to hide it, but to instead tell their own story.

Myself, I found the Hudsons' Bay colours being there slightly odd, but I am told it is important to them as much as us. Just for different reasons.

[Thanos]

bootlegga bootlegga:

I don't live in St Albert, but I too learned this weekend about Grandin's role in developing the residential school system and completely agree his name should be stripped from as much as possible, and the only thing that should remain is a placard/statue denoting his terrible legacy.

I was opposed to it before but there is no choice remaining any more. ALL the statues of any politician or clergyman have to be removed. ALL the buildings, streets, and schools have to be renamed. At this stage the only statue still standing in this country should be the one of Wayne Gretzky and of the soldiers who died in the wars because every other statue seems to be of someone who has the darkest shadows on their legacy and blood on their hands.

A single crime does not render any person irredeemably evil but neither does an endless list of following good deeds wipe out the original sin, especially not when that sin resulted in the mass deaths and torment of children. And this is our original sin, done in the name of every generation of Canadians that followed the founders. It can't be washed away or covered up but wretched worship of ancestors. It has to be worn forever by everyone, not just as a reminder of what was done but as a lesson to never let anything like it happen again. The crime has to remain on the record and the responsibility, the obligation, going forward is simple to be good enough that no one else ever has to experience that kind of indifference and contempt.

God should not so quickly forgive this nation of it's sins and hypocrisies. Not when Canada half-asses it's way through most of the things it continually says it's going to do. This land's complacency and self-serving contentment and resting on the laurels of glories far in the past has to come to an end. And it's simply disgusting that it took the finding of a mass grave full of children's bones to wake this country up from it's undeserved smugness.

[CDN_PATRIOT]

Thanos Thanos:

ALL the statues of any politician or clergyman have to be removed. ALL the buildings, streets, and schools have to be renamed.

No. That's called cancel culture, plain and simple. Re-writing history because it's offensive to some is no way to learn anything, nor will it help us learn from any of the mistakes made in the past and help to not repeat them.

Sorry, but you're dead wrong on that one.

-J.

[Thanos]

No, it's long overdue ending to the secular worship of icons. The subjects of the statues were merely men with the same feet of clay as anyone else who's ever lived. They were not angels beyond all reproach. Put the statues in museums as things to be studied, not in public places as objects of undeserved admiration.

[xerxes]

CDN_PATRIOT CDN_PATRIOT:

Thanos Thanos:

ALL the statues of any politician or clergyman have to be removed. ALL the buildings, streets, and schools have to be renamed.

No. That's called cancel culture, plain and simple. Re-writing history because it's offensive to some is no way to learn anything, nor will it help us learn from any of the mistakes made in the past and help to not repeat them.

Sorry, but you're dead wrong on that one.

-J.

Removing a statue isn’t re-writing history. It’s not altering the historical record nor is it making a topic taboo.

In my opinion, a statue of a person is put up because they did something notable in their life worth commemorating. But if that person was involved in this atrocity then pull it down. I’ll admit it should be on a case by case basis though. I know there’s been calls to remove statues of Sir John A McDonald because of his role in the repression of First Nations people and I’ll admit I’m torn on that one.

[CDN_PATRIOT]

xerxes xerxes:

I know there’s been calls to remove statues of Sir John A McDonald because of his role in the repression of First Nations people and I’ll admit I’m torn on that one.

Sir John A. MacDonald was a drunk and a bit of a handful, but he had the courage to found Canada and should never have anything with his name taken down. It's bad enough PM Potato removed him from the 10-dollar bill.

-J.

[Thanos]

I'd rather have an accurate history that's been re-written in the light of newly revealed truths than have one that's obviously nothing but a self-serving & two-faced myth. And one that's only there for feel-goodism instead of for encouraging the living generations and the future ones to build a society that's actually earned the right to call itself good.

[DrCaleb]

CDN_PATRIOT CDN_PATRIOT:

Thanos Thanos:

ALL the statues of any politician or clergyman have to be removed. ALL the buildings, streets, and schools have to be renamed.

No. That's called cancel culture, plain and simple. Re-writing history because it's offensive to some is no way to learn anything, nor will it help us learn from any of the mistakes made in the past and help to not repeat them.

Sorry, but you're dead wrong on that one.

-J.

Yes, let's bring back the toothbrush moustache and boys named Adolph.

It's not cancel anything to recognize the harm someone has done, and take them down from the position of being a role model. You don't re-write history, you change who the heroes of the story are.

Or perhaps Subway should just continue with Jared whathisname as their spokesman.