I’ve done a video about Residential Schools and Residential School denialism, because it's becoming a bigger issue. Angus Reid, who's a pollster, ended up leaving Twitter, talking about churches being burned and about claims around Residential schools. And it's really important because the sad - the really tragic part about this is that we're not actually fighting about history. The history is actually not in question. In, 1907 Dr. Peter Bryce, Canada’s First Chief Medical Officer issued a report detailed the fact that First Nations students at Residential schools were dying in appalling numbers of Tuberculosis, when the deaths could be prevented. He wrote: “I believe the conditions are being deliberately created in our residential schools to spread infectious diseases […] The mortality rate in the schools often exceeds fifty percent. This is a national crime.” There's still more to be discovered, but when you actually look at the records, at people's letters, the stuff that was compiled in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, there's no question, that Residential schools were not well-intended, that they were horribly run, that thousands of children died. And it was because of neglect. Uou have people who you might call the usual suspects on the right have been playing down and minimizing the harms of Residential schools. And these articles are being pushed out by Right-wing think-tanks. The Fraser Institute has published them, media outlets like True North. And they're not backed up by facts. It's really, really distressing because the reality is we are nowhere close to accepting the history of how First Nations and Indigenous people were treated in the past, or how they continue to be treated right now in Canada. Indigenous children being taken by child and family services in Canada is every bit the catastrophe that Residential schools were. It's being completely ignored, as if it never happened. And as if it is not happening when thousands and thousands of First Nations and Indigenous children have been seized over decades, taken from their families, and it's still happening now. And it is almost impossible to express the damage that's happened. Just this year, there was a family and children in CFS who died, who were murdered. There have been hundreds of deaths in the last 20 years in Manitoba. Missing and murdered women and girls and two-spirit are overwhelmingly people who were in CFS systems. Manitoba has twice the national incarceration rate, and many of them were in CFS. The vast majority of our prison population in Manitoba is Indigenous. And there is a basically a pipeline CFS to prison because of the way the entire system has been structured and never properly reformed since the 1950s. The Manitoba government doubled the number of children they were taking from First Nations families, from 5500, in about 2005 to 11,000 just a few years later. And then they also took the federal funding that was intended for those children. The apology for that just happened this week. And no one, no person has ever been named as being responsible for any of it, for any of it. And this is ongoing. So part of the problem with Residential school denialism is that people are denying what really happened in the past and fighting over that, while also completely ignoring everything that's happening right now. Images: Thompson Ferrier * 30 Thanks for reading Dougald Lamont’s Substack! This post is public so feel free to share it. Dougald Lamont’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Dougald Lamont’s Substack at dougaldlamont.substack.com/subscribe
