It's even technically incorrect to claim "215 bodies of children have been found in Kamloops".
The ground-penetrating radar survey (which hasn't actually been released btw, nor will the band even release the identity of the company that performed the survey) predicts graves based on difference in densities the radar detects.
No human remains have actually been identified or exhumed. The 215 number is simply being assumed by the number of irregularities in density the radar detected and their identities as children are simply being presumed since the site was a former industrial school.
I don't doubt children's remains will ultimately be found. But it's important to understand that all of this caterwauling so far (including the prime minister already passing legislation to establish a national holiday and day of remembrance in September) is all based on incomplete, secretive data where no actual exhumation has even yet been attempted.
I also thought the number was just enormous and thus unlikely. I thought it was possible it was a Spanish Flu outbreak but apparently they had only some 50 students at the time.
It is generally agreed that the majority of residential-school deaths were caused by tuberculosis or other disease (Many of the children arrived at the schools already infected with tuberculosis. And rates of tuberculosis, virtually eradicated in the general population, remain high amongst certain Indigenous populations, rising to 300 times more for the Inuit).
Yeah, that should explain it.
Many of these deaths may have been avoidable under better living conditions or more scrupulous care in segregating the sick from the well (a lesson the shamefully high COVID death rates in our nursing homes proves has still not been learned). It may be disheartening to know these poor children's bones lie in perpetual anonymity, but it should not be shocking to us that the graves were unmarked. As Champion notes, unmarked graves "were the norm for the poor for centuries: in the Irish potato famine and during the Spanish influenza."
Spanish Flu ravaged Poland in general (the country utterly pillaged and scorched-earth destroyed in WWI by the both sides going back and forth, and semi-starving, and still at wars) but especially killed off the Bolshevik POWs in their camps. The guy mentions Katyn, so I'll also do to tell how about several years ago the (often supposedly anti-communist) Russian nationalists started a public theater of crocodile tears about this to equate these deaths with their 1940 shootings.
It's even technically incorrect to claim "215 bodies of children have been found in Kamloops".
The ground-penetrating radar survey (which hasn't actually been released btw, nor will the band even release the identity of the company that performed the survey) predicts graves based on difference in densities the radar detects.
No human remains have actually been identified or exhumed. The 215 number is simply being assumed by the number of irregularities in density the radar detected and their identities as children are simply being presumed since the site was a former industrial school.
I don't doubt children's remains will ultimately be found. But it's important to understand that all of this caterwauling so far (including the prime minister already passing legislation to establish a national holiday and day of remembrance in September) is all based on incomplete, secretive data where no actual exhumation has even yet been attempted.
I also thought the number was just enormous and thus unlikely. I thought it was possible it was a Spanish Flu outbreak but apparently they had only some 50 students at the time.
Yeah, that should explain it.
Spanish Flu ravaged Poland in general (the country utterly pillaged and scorched-earth destroyed in WWI by the both sides going back and forth, and semi-starving, and still at wars) but especially killed off the Bolshevik POWs in their camps. The guy mentions Katyn, so I'll also do to tell how about several years ago the (often supposedly anti-communist) Russian nationalists started a public theater of crocodile tears about this to equate these deaths with their 1940 shootings.