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BS: Bad things Canada has done.
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: Charmion Date: 16 Dec 21 - 12:14 PM Ouch. Way too close to true. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: gnu Date: 16 Dec 21 - 09:34 AM Justin Trudeau decides it is time to visit a remote northern reserve. With news crews following him around as they tour the place, the Prime Minister asks the chief if there was anything the residents need. "Well," says the chief, "We have three very important needs. First, we have a medical clinic, but no doctor." Trudeau whips out his cell phone, dials a number, talks to somebody for two minutes and then hangs up. "I've pulled some strings. Your doctor will arrive in a few days. Now what was the second problem?" "We have no way to get clean water. The local mining operation has poisoned the water our people have been drinking for thousands of years. We've been flying bottled water in, and it's terribly expensive." Once again, Trudeau dials a number, yells into the phone for a few minutes, and then hangs up. "The mine will be shut down, and the owner will be responsible for setting up a purification plant for your people. Now what was that third problem?" "We have no cellphone reception up here," the chief says. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: Joe Offer Date: 12 Aug 21 - 06:07 PM A very interesting article about the deaths in schools for indigenous people in Canada. It's a bit more opinionated than what I'd expect from Scientific American, but it's nonetheless a very good article and makes a very good point:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/canadas-residential-schools-were-a-horror/ |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: Big Al Whittle Date: 12 Jul 21 - 04:31 PM When you put brucemurdoch.com into your browser - Chinese writing comes up and it says its an unsafe site. Why would Canada do a bad thing like that?
-Joe Offer- |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: keberoxu Date: 10 Jul 21 - 08:02 PM Sadly, there is a flip side to this ugly coin. I know some American Indians, by whatever name you call them, who speak with great bitterness of how burial sites respectfully maintained, by their people and for their people, were shamefully desecrated and the land re-purposed to suit the white European colonizers. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: Joe Offer Date: 10 Jul 21 - 04:00 AM I can't say I'm all that thrilled about being a Catholic these days, either - especially an American Catholic in what is seemingly becoming the Church of Trump. I've been a lay leader in my congregations all my life, ever since I left the seminary in 1970. I keep working to right what's wrong, and wondering when I ought to give up. And I certainly don't deny that terrible wrongs were done at these schools. It's a question of how long do I keep trying to fix the boat before I jump ship. I'm outspoken, and I'm often on the "wrong" side of authority. But I have many Catholic friends who depend on me to keep on keepin' on. A nun told me this week that I "have a talent for stirring up the pot" - and she cheered me on. -Joe- |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: Stilly River Sage Date: 10 Jul 21 - 01:45 AM Amid shameful residential-school revelations, I cannot remain a Catholic In my six decades, I have been many kinds of Catholic: a cradle Catholic, a confirmed Catholic, a convenient Catholic, a lapsed Catholic, a renewed Catholic and a conflicted one. Now I am nothing but ashamed. The rest of this is at the link. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: meself Date: 08 Jul 21 - 10:01 AM Charmion - Your explanation is far better than anything I've heard from the news media - which so far has been full of dark insinuation with very little in the way of detail or explanation. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: Charmion Date: 05 Jul 21 - 10:38 AM Joe, a great deal of the righteous indignation sweeping Canada right now extends beyond the seizure of children from their families for the purpose of extinguishing their culture and the neglect and abuse of them when they were alive. It's the failure to inform families of children's deaths, demand for payment for returning remains to their families, failure to create and retain adequate documentation of children's deaths and places of interment, and the eventual abandonment of so many burial sites. A friend asked me if I thought it relevant that many indigenous cultures do not mark graves. I said marking and documenting graves is a thing *we* consider important, and we most signally declined to do so for these children and their families. So I guess imposing our culture on them was important until it would cause us the very slightest inconvenience and expense. The Anglican Church of Canada and the United Church of Canada were both participants in the residential schools scheme along with the Roman Catholic Church. The Anglicans and the United Church accepted legal responsibility and made formal apologies years ago, and began paying restitution. I don't know about the Uniteds, but the Anglicans collect earmarked funds across the country and have sold extensive property to meet their obligations. Of the main-line churches, only the Roman Catholics are evading liability. It's not a good look. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: mg Date: 05 Jul 21 - 12:54 AM not sure what you mean about black irish. my father said that we were..or at least he was. there are many definitions of black irish, with more added daily. going back a ways i think it refers to those irish with black hair. probably some spanish genes, or maybe old turkish or african somewhere...who knows. it is an old term and newer definitions should be explained and identified as newer interpretations of an older classification. irish for a while were not white. neither were greeks, italians, mediterranean people. i think scandinavians probably mostly were. some were considered strong but dumb..no offense...one way they rose probably more quickly than the irish is that they had more skills probably. they were not as held down by a nutty church..no offense fellow catholics. they could freely marry to upper class or income people whereas irish catholics were not supposed to marry outside the faith, and upper income people at first did not tend to be irish. danish girls especially tended to marry up. some groups did not have the problems with alcohol that irish did...many complex interacting factors. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: Stilly River Sage Date: 05 Jul 21 - 12:22 AM The problem with privilege is assuming that the position we inhabit today is free of the malfeasance of those who came before. My Irish and Scandinavian great grandparents arrived after the Civil War, they have no part in slavery, right? But even though "no Irish need apply" in the 1850s - 1890s, they were white and they more quickly benefited from that status than other minorities in the nation. And after a while, they blended in, weren't part of the "black Irish" that the English created. Just White Americans. But now with privilege. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: Joe Offer Date: 04 Jul 21 - 11:40 PM Well, you got your wish, Jack. They're burning down Catholic churches in Canada. What good does that do, to make people of the current age suffer for the sins of their ancestors? And do we even know how the Native school children died? Was there malfeasance? I'm guessing that the kids lived in dormitories, as I did in a Catholic seminary in the 1960s. Epidemics spread like wildfire in dormitories. People didn't know how to deal with epidemics a century ago, and COVID-19 makes it clear that we STILL have a lot to learn about dealing with epidemics. I'm sure there was some malfeasance, but how widespread was it? I'm also sure that there was a lot of harm done by well-intentioned people of European ancestry, who thought they were doing the right thing by imposing European culture on indigenous peoples. We need to probe all this deeply and have excruciatingly honest discussion, so we can come up with honest answers. So, what's the answer? Certainly, not burning churches and punishing the great-grandchildren who were responsible for the wrongdoing. -Joe- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/04/canada-burned-churches-indigenous-catholicism |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: Jack Campin Date: 02 Jul 21 - 08:14 PM Please obey your local wildfire prevention code when burning down a Catholic church. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: Stilly River Sage Date: 02 Jul 21 - 02:00 PM The same kind of discovery/repatriation is happening in the US (I don't think there's a separate thread about this? We strayed into it elsewhere, but I don't want to turn a declutter thread into a dead children thread.) Rosebud Sioux to receive the remains of their children who died at the former Carlisle Indian School |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: Charmion Date: 08 Jun 21 - 09:58 AM Yeah. I've seen it, Vincent. For too long, we Canadians have celebrated our Georgian and Victorian ancestors as essentially "good" people who did mostly "good" things so we could live our lovely lives in the here and now. Lord Cornwallis founded Halifax on the best harbour on the Atlantic coast; too bad for the Mi'qmaq people, but they weren't using it to its fullest advantage. Sir John A.'s tippling habit was funny and his fear and loathing of Indigenous people was normal for his time. Egerton Ryerson brought education to the masses; who cares that he built a school system with baked-in racism and class biases? Rather less smugness would be nice in all quarters. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: Vincent Jones Date: 08 Jun 21 - 07:58 AM There is statue in Vancouver of a nineteenth century Yorkshire sailor and bar owner whom they celebrate, John 'Gassy Jack' Deighton. He married a Squamish woman and when she died married her 12-year-old neice. That there has been a statue of him for over 50 years has offended many First Nation women who regard him as an exploitative paedophile. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: meself Date: 07 Jun 21 - 08:17 PM You know things are bad when you switch to the American news because the Canadian news is too damn depressing. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: Charmion Date: 07 Jun 21 - 06:05 PM Mass grave, Jack, or unmarked and unrecorded cemetery? The implications are very, very different. Mass graves in Canada are usually associated with waves of epidemic disease -- smallpox, cholera, typhus, diphtheria, typhoid. As well as lots and lots of death, major epidemics used to produce administrative collapse as overwhelmed survivors shovelled the dead underground as fast as possible before even worse things could happen. In Kingston, Ontario, where I went to uni, the remains of about 1,400 refugees from the Irish famine of the 1840s had to be moved from the shore of Lake Ontario before a new wing could be added to the Kingston General Hospital. The people buried there made it past Grosse Isle only to succumb a few weeks later and a few hundred miles upstream. Typical of such sites, the Kingston mass grave was not forgotten, but marked with a lovely great marble angel in 1894. Angel and interred remains were carefully lifted and moved together to a suburban cemetery. But an unmarked and unrecorded cemetery, especially one as recent as the site at Kamloops, is quite another matter. It means that those who laid the bodies to rest could have done it properly and did not -- and it's hard not to think that neglect was deliberate. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: Jack Campin Date: 07 Jun 21 - 11:46 AM A CBC story today which I can't read on my phone appears to report they've found another mass grave of Native American children, this time in Manitoba. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: Charmion Date: 07 Jun 21 - 11:08 AM Thanks for posting that link, mg. An important point clarified in more recent coverage is that the Kamloops burial site is not a mass grave, as the first reports stated, but a crude graveyard. This video, made for tonight's "The National" news broadcast, does a good job of explaining both the large number of graves and the anonymity of the deceased. The video is nearly ten minutes long, and the playback may balk -- it did on my computer, which doesn't normally choke on such files. Keep going to the end, however. No, it's not fun viewing. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: Mrrzy Date: 07 Jun 21 - 10:12 AM Aussie Aborigines, too. Good point. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: mg Date: 06 Jun 21 - 04:40 PM here is a very good video about the residential schools situation. i think we have just seen the tip of the iceberg.https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sinclair-kamloops-residential-remains-1.6049525 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sinclair-kamloops-residential-remains-1.6049525 |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: Charmion Date: 06 Jun 21 - 09:54 AM The Maori people have retained in memory the epic poem that recounts their migration from the Tahiti-Bora Bora area to the island group we Anglophones call New Zealand. Confirmed by astronomers (from the poem’s description of the stars they used to navigate), the date of their arrival has been set sometime in the mid- to late 14th century. Biologists have determined that the only flora on the islands at that time were ferns of a wide variety of types up to tree size, and fauna were likewise limited to insects, a few birds and reptiles, and a very small range of mammals. The species that were not capable of long trans-oceanic migrations were not found anywhere else, indicating that the islands had been isolated for thousands and thousands of years. Until Captain Cook showed up, the Maori had the place to themselves. The European settlers and their descendants did their best to subjugate the Maori, but the culture and power-sharing arrangements of modern New Zealand indicate that they failed to stamp out Maori language, culture, spiritual practices, family structures or politics. So I nominate the Maori as the group of humans that most closely meets Mrrzy’s criteria. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: Mrrzy Date: 06 Jun 21 - 08:56 AM The Navajo [Dinee] origin myth has them coming up out of the earth exactly where they are, note. But I don't see how anywhere's people could be the original inhabitants, any more. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: keberoxu Date: 05 Jun 21 - 01:58 PM Meself, apropos languages and nations: Here in the southwestern quadrant of the United States, Navajo is actually one of those names which an enemy/rival nation addressed to the group in question. They call themselves "Diné", as well as their language. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: meself Date: 04 Jun 21 - 12:56 PM "what Jews have done" - Not entirely wrong, I suppose - but could we narrow it down at least to 'Israelis'? It's hardly fair to blame Jews world-wide for what's happening in Israel/Palestine. ********** The language of the Dene people, in the northwest of Canada, is said to be very similar to that of the Navaho. *************** AFAIK, the term 'Scotch-Irish' is peculiar to the south-eastern states of the US - I've certainly never heard it used in Canada to indicate those with Ulster roots, anyway. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: Stilly River Sage Date: 04 Jun 21 - 12:26 PM Navajo are thought (via linguistic evidence) to have moved south from the BC Pacific region down through the Western US to the area around the Hopi. The Choctaw have origin stories that have them moving (and carrying along huge heaps of bones of their ancestors) across the entire swath of the continent from somewhere Northwestern to the Mississippi delta area where they built mounds for those bones and assembled the bone picker stands to continue collecting bones. When you look at those stories you have a healthy mix of possible history mixed with some pretty interesting traditions. Charmion, as we listen to the news from the Middle East these days, your poem (That those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return) describes precisely what Jews have done to Palestinians. Created ghettos and don't seem to see the parallel. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: Allan Conn Date: 04 Jun 21 - 11:08 AM "industrialisation of the Borders region" Not really much industrialisation here in the Borders. There were the mill towns right enough but they are very small and rather than causing an outflow of refugees etc they would have helped keep a population here. Where there is work there is folk. Berwickshire had one of the biggest drops in population of all the Scottish counties and there is hardly any industrialisation there. I think a lot of people left here really pre-industrialisation. Most folks who went to Ulster from Scotland left from south-west Scotland but many left from the Borders too - and also the English side. From Ulster many of the folks we call Ulster Scots later crossed the Atlantic where they are called the Scotch-Irish. The plantation of Ulster started in the early 1600s but according to Tom Devine far more left in the 1690s. So pre-union and pre significant industrialisation in the Borders. The 1690s in Scotland are called "the ill years" because of a series of bad harvests and famine conditions. So folk looking for a better life earlier on in th 1600s, along with a minority who were forcibly removed because of their continuing reiving behaviour, but later on in the 1600s folk leaving often because of pretty dire conditions at home. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: Jeri Date: 03 Jun 21 - 09:42 PM Thanks Keb. I looked on Wikipedia, and it does seem like they didn't displace any other tribes. There are probably others, or they won the land from other tribes, but white people's history likely won't know. Maybe it doesn't matter. People of all nations can do bad things. Governments are way worse than individuals. People in groups... |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: keberoxu Date: 03 Jun 21 - 04:29 PM Not in Canada, Jeri, which I don't know well anyhow. But there are the Hopi in northeastern Arizona. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: Jeri Date: 03 Jun 21 - 11:51 AM No, Gnu, it wasn't you. Silly question: does anyone know of a place where the people who live there are the first ones to have lived there? I suppose maybe before people started crossing the land bridge. Personal observation/opinion: we suck as a species. Hopefully, we will learn that love and empathy are really important. We kill people and, take their land, destroy their culture, gain status and wealth, and then what? |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: Charmion Date: 03 Jun 21 - 09:59 AM Jack, when you read Canadian history you soon come to realize that the first major waves of European settlers were largely made up of refugees and displaced people. French from the Wars of Religion, the 30 Years' War and the dynastic struggles that followed. Scots from the British version of the Wars of Religion, the Jacobite rebellions, the Highland Clearances, and the industrialization of the border region. Irish from generations of famine, poverty and imperial exploitation. "Loyalists" from the American Revolution. And the minute they got here, they scrambled to the top of whatever hierarchy was available to them and promptly started doing unto others what had been done to them. "I and the public know / What all schoolchildren learn: / That those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return." I think that's Auden, who had his faults but was good with a bon mot. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: Jack Campin Date: 03 Jun 21 - 09:53 AM Lawsuit over cultural genocide Good luck to them. Not that the Canadian court has any legitimacy whatever. Like the American one it's nothing but an honour tribunal of a criminal gang. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: Jack Campin Date: 02 Jun 21 - 08:04 PM Compulsory Irish dancing as a tool of cultural genocide?... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamloops_Indian_Residential_School I looked that up because on trying to find the school on Google Maps I noticed that most of the streets in Kamloops were named after Highland Scots. And it turned out that most of the uberkommandants were Irish priests. It was an all-Celtic atrocity for its entire existence. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: Mrrzy Date: 01 Jun 21 - 10:02 AM This is totally in the US media, that is how I found out about it. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: gnu Date: 31 May 21 - 07:48 PM SRS, THANKS!... WHEW! I am a cranky and forgetful old man so I wasn't sure. Glad I asked Jeri. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: Stilly River Sage Date: 31 May 21 - 07:26 PM It wasn't directed at you, gnu. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: gnu Date: 31 May 21 - 10:57 AM Jeri, re "Regarding the complaining about what people chose to post, stop, please.", please refresh my memory - with what do you take offense? |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: Jeri Date: 31 May 21 - 09:33 AM Gnu, no, but you can post a link to it. Regarding the complaining about what people chose to post, stop, please. Anybody can post here, and we can have an assortment of links. For what it's worth, this doesn't seem to have even made the news here in the US - at least not yet, and not where I am. Posting comments and people's experiences is fine - IF we know what they're talking about. I think it's covered, now. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: gnu Date: 31 May 21 - 08:44 AM Is there a way I can post an image from my 'Picture' files? |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: gnu Date: 31 May 21 - 08:43 AM Didn't read the thread... maybe later, time permitting. I have a list as long as your arm, but, the worst, for me, was when Pierre Trudeau led the charge to change the Bank Of Canada Act of 1934 to rewrite it as the Bank Of Canada Act of 1974. Canada has gone downhill ever since. When he famously brought in "a bunch of men with guns" in La Belle Province, he was my hero... that guy didn't fuck around... he didn't take no shit! But, he used a gun on Canada's financial policy... killed it... dead as a knit. Hero > vile villain. Then, our PMs got worse. Now, his son, Just-In, is worthless, and worse. Aggggggggghhhhhhh! |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: gnu Date: 31 May 21 - 08:15 AM Be a rough job splittin' that, even after frost, eh? https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/tree-cedar-truck-viral-social-media-1.6042822 |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: Rapparee Date: 30 May 21 - 09:28 PM All of which is why I'm not a twit on twitter or a red on reddit or a tik on tiktok. I am on Facebook and LinkedIn and joined when I was a poor working stiff who felt they might be useful -- and I take anything in both with a massive amount of salt. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: Charmion Date: 30 May 21 - 04:06 PM Jack, memoirs are not journalism either. Journalists produce opinion essays and accounts of events that are carefully constructed in compliance with the conventions of their profession and the requirements of their publishers. The “first-hand” account — if it is, indeed, what you say it is (I would not believe that from a Reddit posting) — should be considered a memoir. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: Stilly River Sage Date: 30 May 21 - 02:47 PM Nope. But there is a lot of crap to have to wade through to find a few worthwhile reads in those reddit threads. Tu quoque is a standard response in this kind of topic. Ollaimh has been kicked out or he'd be in here smearing obscenities around. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: Jack Campin Date: 30 May 21 - 02:23 PM Whataboutery is invariably a moronic response. And it's just obscene for this. That Reddit thread includes a first-hand account by a 93-year-old man who had never felt able to tell his story before. You don't fucking DARE say he has to shut up because he's not a real journalist. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: Rapparee Date: 30 May 21 - 01:41 PM Don't feel superior because you're British. ALL nations have something to be ashamed -- or should be. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: Charmion Date: 30 May 21 - 12:02 PM Jack, with all due respect for your sympathy, even justified angry ranting is not journalism. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: keberoxu Date: 29 May 21 - 11:12 PM There is now an official press release from this First Nation community whose name has been anglicized to "Kamloops" in British Columbia. real name: Tk'emlúps te Secwépeme The spokesperson in this press release references a grant, titled Pathways to Healing, which financed the use of ground penetrating radar. The land and grounds still have areas that have yet to be examined. Kamloops Indian Band, Office of the Chief |
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Subject: RE: BS: Bad things Canada has done. From: Jack Campin Date: 29 May 21 - 04:18 PM I linked to the Reddit thread deliberately - I could have just linked to a news article, but with 5.6K comments in the thread, many from people with first hand experience, the torrent of anger and tears goes far beyond what any paper would publish. It's citizen journalism at its very greatest. |
