Apology

She's waited 97 years for this:

"Marguerite Wabano, 104, is known as Granny Wabano to everyone in Moosonee, Ont. On Wednesday, she and five other residential school survivors will be seated on the floor of the House of Commons to hear Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologize on behalf of all Canadians.

It will be a historic and personal moment for Ms. Wabano and tens of thousands other indigenous people who were taken from their families and sent to church-run boarding schools where they were forbidden to speak their own languages. Many were sexually and physically abused.

Indian Affairs Minister Chuck Strahl said that if the opposition parties agree, the House of Commons will set aside all other business on Wednesday for the formal apology for Canada's Indian residential schools policy, which will start at 3 p.m. Church and native leaders are urging Canadians across the country to stop in their tracks on Wednesday afternoon and turn on the nearest TV."

I will definitely be turning on my TV to watch this historic moment.

In spite of what some may errantly insist, this is not an issue that has nothing to do with the current government -- it has everything to do with all Canadians, past and present. We are all complicit -- the residential school atrocities that were committed were committed in our name, as Canadians, by the governments we elected and the religious institutions we supported. Admitting it is the first step toward making things right.

UPDATE: The point of culpability, articulated more profoundly than I ever could, by Dave at TGB.

UPPERDATE: More reaction, this time from balbulican at stageleft.

Residential school gravesites: Why the MSM silence?

A couple of weeks ago the horrific news that 3 children were murdered in Merritt BC was the object of frenzied media attention. While the suspect ran, the MSM clung onto the story with pitbullish tenacity, exhausting every detail from the background of the family, to the manhunt, to the private citizen who finally brought the suspect in. The story captured widespread attention and why not? It was unthinkable, that innocents would be viciously cut down in childhood. And yet...

Just a short hop up the road from Merritt, Kamloops is the site of another story of innocent children murdered, not in the heat of some psychotic passion, but systematically and in far greater numbers. Children that just disappeared from residential schools into the anonymous earth. From the list of residential school mass graves published by stageleft last week:

And Kamloops is just one of many such gravesites announced last week by First Nations representatives determined to investigate the list of mass graves of murdered aboriginal children that spans several towns and cities across the country.

Where is the media frenzy? Why is this story not on the front page of every newspaper in Canada, with our Fourth Estate doing their job and demanding answers?

Consider the repercussions of this story had the "disappeared" been WASPy little kids from Branksome Hall. Even if there was only the faintest shadow of suspicion that their gravesites might have been discovered, it would be headline news with the media howling for investigations. But for the graves of residential school victims? Silence.

Is there a conspiracy of media silence about the victims of residential schools? Why?

Residential school gravesites news conference vid

Commenter "FRD" (of hiddenfromhistory.org) left a link to this video of the news conference where the investigation and locations of schoolchildrens' mass graves were announced:



They are desperately trying to give this issue some traction. Let's help.

A serious note

Something everyone needs to see, if you haven't already, is the list of locations of mass graves of residential schoolchildren that was made public earlier this week -- stageleft published it.

To be honest, I was so shocked and so disturbed by the magnitude of this list that it took me a few read-overs to fully absorb it. The number of victims, the fact that they were kids, little kids, the causes of some of their deaths, the complete disrespect in their final resting places left hidden and uncared for to conceal the crimes that killed them... all so unbelievably horrific.

When confronted with such horrors, it's human nature to automatically try and turn away as a kind of defense mechanism. But that's how things like residential school atrocities went on -- because it was so much easier not to confront the ugliness and one's own part in it, however distant. The list of mass graves makes it impossible not to do so, which is why it's so important to read it, read it slowly and carefully and let it sink in, read it 3 or 4 times if you have to. Read it and weep, literally. Then let the grief become resolve to work towards better understanding.