50 comments and still going strong! I don’t normally get that many comments on anything I post here, so I’m happy to see a lively debate. (That’s not sarcasm. It’s pretty cool that the discussion remained relatively civil, too.)
Anyway, new PunkAssReaders, I hope you’re still reading, because now that I have your attention, I’d like to draw it to something that I care far, far more about than who gets to carry guns in the U.S. That something is the grotesque case of denial that my country has about the violence on which it was founded, the history that makes one poverty-stricken Third World nation for the people who were here first, and another, relatively safe and secure and prosperous country for mostly everyone else. Sure, our government recently said its sorries to the indigenous people, but they stopped short of naming the crime: genocide.
I don’t think they’ve ever done a survey of how many people in Canada know that there are mass graves of children here, but I’m guessing if you randomly suggested it to strangers, all but a few would splutter and deny it. According to Hidden From History, there are possibly thousands of dead indigenous children buried at 28 different sites. While most, if not all, of the murderers and kidnappers of these children are dead, the institutions—church and state alike—responsible for this crime against humanity are still at large.
I guess I mention this now because we all have issues that drive us into a frothing frenzy and issues that we might recognize as important and might even have an opinion on but we don’t really care all that much. I can’t stand it when people ask why I don’t put the energy into pro-Tibet activism that I put into pro-Palestinian activism (there is a reason, but it probably belongs in a different post). But I really do wish more people would get into a frothing frenzy about residential schools. It’s a crime that’s gone unpunished because the only ones speaking about it are its victims.
That page I linked to has the locations of the graves, as well as the sources of information. Much of it seems quite credible. I’m not sure what to do with this information, other than keep talking about it until I’m blue in the face, because as long as we continue to deny the fact that genocide took place here, we are still perpetrating it.
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