COUNCIL OF CANADIANS--
Help defend the Browns Creek watershed: the Okanagan Indian Band
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010
The Okanagan Indian Band has set up a road blockade near Bouleau Lake to stop Tolko Industries from logging in the Browns Creek watershed area near Vernon, British Columbia.
The Okanagan Indian Band is concerned that the logging will threaten their water supply and archeological sites. They insist that the logging should not take place while land claims remain unresolved.
Chief Fabian Alexis says, “The federal government has done nothing to protect the 1,800 people who live on the Okanagan Indian Band reserve. The provincial government has made it clear that the financial interests of Tolko are of greater concern to them than the health and safety of the people who derive their drinking and irrigation water from the Browns Creek watershed. When it comes to protecting watersheds that supply Vernon with its water, government agencies would not hesitate to act, but suddenly when it involves our community, our concerns are discounted. This systemic racism will not stand.”
National Chief Shawn Atleo of the Assembly of First Nations says, “I would like to offer my support to Chief Fabian Alexis and the members of the Okanagan Indian Band in their efforts to protect their community’s water supply.”
Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs Grand Chief Stewart Phillip says, “The UBCIC fully supports the Okanagan Indian Band’s decision to protect their community’s water supply… I received a letter from Minister Pat Bell that makes it clear that the safety of the drinking water that supplies most of the 1800 people who live on the Okanagan Indian Band reserve is not as important to him as facilitating short term profits for Tolko.”
The BC Supreme Court gave permission for the logging to proceed provided the archeological sites were protected in a February 1 ruling. Tolko is now going to court to seek an enforcement order on the logging permits that have been issued to them.
Chief Alexis is asking that members of the general public help by calling their MLAs and MPs to express their support. Supporters have also been invited to attend the blockade.
To find the contact information for your federal representative (and for those in BC your provincial representative), go to the Council of Canadians website at http://www.canadians.org/action/contact_reps.html.
Friday, February 26, 2010
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Natives died in droves as Ottawa ignored warnings
Tuberculosis took the lives of students at residential schools for at least 40 years
------------------------------------------------------------------
GRANNYNOTE: AS CANADA'S COURT-ORDERED, UN-SUPERVISED 'TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION COMMISSION' TRIES AGAIN IN 2010 TO BEGIN ITS VVORK, A REVIEVV OF THE HEINOUS FACTS ... THE TRUTH OF CANADA'S ACTIONS ... IS NECESSARY.
PLEASE DISTRIBUTE THIS INFORMATION TO ALL CANADIANS
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Globe and Mail investigation
BILL CURRY AND KAREN HOWLETT
From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
April 24, 2007 at 1:30 AM EST
OTTAWA — As many as half of the aboriginal children who attended the early years of residential schools died of tuberculosis, despite repeated warnings to the federal government that overcrowding, poor sanitation and a lack of medical care were creating a toxic breeding ground for the rapid spread of the disease, documents show.
A Globe and Mail examination of documents in the National Archives reveals that children continued to die from tuberculosis at alarming rates for at least four decades after a senior official at the Department of Indian Affairs initially warned in 1907 that schools were making no effort to separate healthy children from those sick with the highly contagious disease.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
GRANNYNOTE: IN 1901, IT BECAME CANADIAN POLICY TO SEGREGATE PEOPLE VVITH TUBERCULOSIS FROM OTHER PEOPLE TO AVOID THE SPREAD OF THE DEADLY DISEASE. NO SUCH EFFORTS VVERE MADE TO PROTECT THE CHILDREN IN CANADA'S 'INDIAN' RESIDENTIAL SCHOOLS. THEY DIED IN NUMBERS SO HIGH THAT IT COULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED BY NORMAL TRANSMISSION. IT VVAS DELIBERATE MASS MURDER PERPETRATED BY THE GOVERNMENTS OF CANADA AND THE CATHOLIC, ANGLICAN AND UNITED CHURCHES OF CANADA.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Bryce, the department's chief medical officer, visited 15 Western Canadian residential schools and found at least 24 per cent of students had died from tuberculosis over a 14-year period. The report suggested the numbers could be higher, noting that in one school alone, the death toll reached 69 per cent.
With less than four months to go before Ottawa officially settles out of court with most former students, a group calling itself the Friends and Relatives of the Disappeared Residential School Children is urging the government to acknowledge this period in the tragic residential-schools saga – and not just the better-known cases of physical and sexual abuse.
Last week, Liberal MP Gary Merasty wrote to Indian Affairs Minister Jim Prentice asking the government to look into the concerns. Mr. Prentice's spokesman, Bill Rogers, told The Globe that departmental officials have been asked to meet with native groups.
Some of their stories, including tales of children buried in unmarked graves beside the schools, are told in a new documentary by Kevin Annett, a former United Church minister, titled Unrepentant: Kevin Annett and Canada's Genocide.
Mr. Annett, as well as some academics, argue that the government's handling, combined with Canada's official policy of removing children from their homes for 10 months each year to attend distant schools, does indeed fit the United Nations definition of genocide.
The UN definition, adopted after the Second World War, lists five possible acts that qualify as genocide, of which killing is only one. The fifth act is described as “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
But transcripts of debates in 1952 of the House of Commons external affairs committee, reviewed by The Globe, show public servants advised politicians not to enshrine a definition of genocide into law, despite Canada's promise internationally to do so.
In 2000, four years after the last residential school closed, the government finally adopted a limited definition of genocide, excluding the line about forcible transfer of children. But courts have rejected native claims of genocide against Ottawa and the churches because Canada had no law banning genocide while the schools were operating.
“It's another crime,” said Roland Chrisjohn, a professor of native studies at St. Thomas University who has written extensively on the subject. “Canada can't define genocide to suit its own purposes.”
(See http://www.dominionpaper.ca/original_peoples/2006/10/12/like_weeds.html )
Few argue that the policy was genocidal in the Nazi sense of deliberately killing people. Rather, the focus was on killing native culture in the name of assimilation, said John Milloy, a Trent University professor.
“The purpose of the [federal government's] policy is to eradicate Indians as a cultural group,” said Prof. Milloy, who has had more access to government files on the subject than any other researcher. “If genocide has to do with destroying a people's culture, this is genocidal, no doubt about it. But to call it genocidal is to misunderstand how the system works.”
Whatever the definition, there is no disputing the deadly swath tuberculosis cut through native schools.
Dr. Bryce followed up his 1907 report with a second one two years later, this time on the toll TB was taking in Alberta residential schools. He recommended that Ottawa take over responsibility of the schools from church control.
The Globe has uncovered letters in the archives showing that many others issued similar warnings. Just a few months after Dr. Bryce's 1909 report, the department's Indian agent for Duck Lake, Sask., wrote to his Ottawa colleagues: “The department should realize that under present circumstances about one-half of the children who are sent to the Duck Lake boarding school die before the age of 18, or very shortly afterward.”
Another document published in 1914 shows Dr. Bryce's findings were accepted by Duncan Campbell Scott, the most influential senior Indian Affairs official of the period. “It is quite within the mark to say that fifty per cent of the children who passed through these schools did not live to benefit from the education which they had received therein,” Mr. Scott wrote in an essay.
But one of the documents obtained by The Globe reveals Mr. Scott's department rejected the doctor's recommendations because the government did not want to upset the churches that ran the schools.
The residential schools were an extension of religious missionary work. They started receiving federal support in 1874 as part of Canada's campaign to assimilate aboriginals into Christian society by obliterating their language, religion and culture. Well over 100,000 native children passed through the schools, most of which were closed in the mid-1970s.
The tuberculosis problem was symptomatic of the deplorable living conditions for the thousands of children uprooted from their communities and placed in the care of strangers. Tuberculosis is one of the deadliest infectious diseases, entering the body through breathing and infecting the lungs. It can then spread to the central nervous system, bones and joints, according to the Canadian Lung Association.
In May, 1930, at the Shubenacadie Residential School in Nova Scotia, officials were coping with an outbreak of tuberculosis seven months after the facility opened. But it was the arrival several years later of James Paul, a new student with an advanced case of tuberculosis, that raised the ire of the school's visiting physician.
“Evidently somebody has mistaken our residential school for a TB sanatorium,” D. F. MacInnis says in a letter to Indian Affairs.
Later, Dr. MacInnis wrote to the school principal: “We are apparently getting all the advanced TB cases and syphilities in the three provinces shipped into our school and apparently there is no way left for us to keep them out. It is very unfair to the children who are clean and well.”
Although most students from this period are no longer alive, some who attended later recall sharing sleeping quarters with dying children.
“I've known some students that died there and I don't know how they died. All we know is we had their funeral service,” said Harry Lucas, 66, who attended Christie Indian Residential on Vancouver Island from 1948 to 1958.
“There were quite a few grave sites there that I always questioned. We were able to sleep next to a person that was dying. They didn't put them away in separate rooms. That was always kind of spooky for me.”
Ted Quewezance, the executive director of the National Residential School Survivors Society, attended Gordon Residential School and St. Philip Residential School in Saskatchewan from 1960 to 1969. He said he has spoken to thousands of former students across Canada.
“We'd see [funerals] monthly,” he said. “We were never able to ask what they were. It's no different right across the country. There's even some graves unmarked. Kids were buried at the school, but now we're talking about how do we bring our survivors home?”
The Friends and Relatives of the Disappeared Residential School Children claims thousands of children are buried in unmarked graves near the schools. Many of their stories are contained in the documentary by Mr. Annett ( Link: Unrepentent ) who says he was ousted from the United Church in 1995 after raising concerns about the church's residential-school history.
(The United Church rejects Mr. Annett's version of events, pointing to a three-week termination hearing in which several witnesses said he was a confrontational figure who was a poor manager of his Port Alberni church.)
James Scott of the United Church said there is relatively little solid information on deaths at the schools because archivists have been so focused on researching claims of living former students.
“My sense is that the more we find out about [the schools], the deeper our understanding of the catastrophic impact of the residential schools on aboriginal people, on their families and their culture,” he said.
Bede Hubbard of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops said the Roman Catholic Church, which ran most of the schools, noted that previous research has shown the churches made many pleas to Ottawa for more money to improve standards.
“I didn't realize that the rates of tuberculosis were that high. In the 1930s, tuberculosis was rampant in Canada itself, so it shouldn't be surprising then that it was also a problem in the residential schools.”
Prof. Milloy of Trent University is the only outsider to have accessed the locked vault of Indian Affairs records through his role as a senior researcher for the 1996 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples.
In 1999, he published his research in a book titled A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System. Prof. Milloy expressed discomfort with the campaign of Mr. Annett and others to introduce language such as genocide and “aboriginal holocaust.”
What government and church records do show, he said, is that the deaths were primarily due to the policy of paying churches on a per-capita basis to run the schools. Numerous letters indicate that because of the funding policy, churches would admit sick children and refuse to send ailing ones home. Pleas to the department for more funding fell on deaf ears.
“That's why there's so many kids sleeping in so few beds in so many dormitories across the country,” Prof. Milloy said. “It has absolutely nothing to do with the idea of ‘Let's get them sick with tuberculosis and wipe them out as a species on the earth.' It's the fact that the feds won't spend any money on this, and that's what it leads to.”
As for Dr. Bryce, the man who first sounded the alarm, he was shuffled to another department. The position of chief medical officer was terminated and the government appears to have made no further effort to gather statistics on deaths at the schools. Ottawa did not take over control of all schools until 1969.
In 1922, after he retired, Dr. Bryce penned a diatribe against Ottawa's lack of response to his reports.
The title: The Story of a National Crime.
A HISTORY OF SHAME
EARLY YEARS
Started before Confederation as part of religious missionary work, residential schools originally focused on replacing aboriginal beliefs with Christianity. More than 70 per cent of the schools were run by the Roman Catholic Church; the rest by the Anglican and United Churches.
FEDERAL INVOLVEMENT
The federal government started funding residential schools in 1874, using American Industrial Schools as the model for introducing manual labour and agricultural skills to natives. To encourage children to use English and French, they were physically punished for speaking their own languages.
OTTAWA TAKES OVER
There were 72 residential schools in 1948 and 9,368 students. Ottawa took full control of the schools in 1969 and most were closed during the 1970s. The last school shut its doors in 1996.
THE LEGACY
Stories of physical and sexual abuse began to emerge in the 1980s, and became major news when Manitoba Chief Phil Fontaine, now the National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, went public with his story of sexual abuse as a student.
In April of 2006, Ottawa reached a $1.9-billion agreement with former students to settle their class-action lawsuits out of court and compensate for the loss of language and culture. Further money has been set aside to settle claims of physical and sexual abuse. Students have until Aug. 20 to accept the package. Bill Curry
RAISING CONCERN
January, 1919
Duncan Campbell Scott, a senior Indian Affairs official, talks about the inadequacy of the school buildings in a memorandum to Arthur Meighen, then Superintendent General of Indian Affairs. “They were unsanitary and they were undoubtedly chargeable with a very high death rate among the pupils.”
December, 1920
A report to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs says 33 students at the Sarcee school near Calgary are afflicted with tuberculosis.
February, 1925
W.M. Graham, Indian Commissioner for Saskatchewan, says in a letter to Mr. Scott: “We will have to do something to stop this indiscriminate admission of children without first passing a medical exam. ... I quite often hear from the Indians that they do not want to send their children to school as it is a place where they are sent to die.”
February, 1925
Russell T. Ferrier, Superintendent of Indian Education, writes to Indian commissioners and agents, saying each child should be pronounced fit by a medical officer before being admitted to a school. “When a pupil's health becomes a matter of concern soon after admission, the consequent parental alarm and distrust militates against successful recruiting.”
March, 1932
The Department of Indian Affairs announces that as a result of spending cutbacks, it cannot authorize admitting children with tuberculosis to a sanatorium or hospital unless the patient requires “care for relief of actual suffering.” Karen Howlett
Original source. www.theglobeandmail.com
Natives died in droves as Ottawa ignored warnings
-----------------------------------------------------------
GRANNYNOTE: THE GOVERNMENT OF CANADA IS ATTEMPTING TO CONTROL THE TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION COMMISSION BY CONTROLLIN ITS FUNDS AND BY STACKING THE COMMISSION VVITH GOVERNMENT/CHURCH-FRIENDLY APPOINTEES.
VVILL CANADIANS ACCEPT THE VVHITEASH?
DO VVE VVANT TO KNOVV THE REAL TRUTH?
Tuberculosis took the lives of students at residential schools for at least 40 years
------------------------------------------------------------------
GRANNYNOTE: AS CANADA'S COURT-ORDERED, UN-SUPERVISED 'TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION COMMISSION' TRIES AGAIN IN 2010 TO BEGIN ITS VVORK, A REVIEVV OF THE HEINOUS FACTS ... THE TRUTH OF CANADA'S ACTIONS ... IS NECESSARY.
PLEASE DISTRIBUTE THIS INFORMATION TO ALL CANADIANS
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Globe and Mail investigation
BILL CURRY AND KAREN HOWLETT
From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
April 24, 2007 at 1:30 AM EST
OTTAWA — As many as half of the aboriginal children who attended the early years of residential schools died of tuberculosis, despite repeated warnings to the federal government that overcrowding, poor sanitation and a lack of medical care were creating a toxic breeding ground for the rapid spread of the disease, documents show.
A Globe and Mail examination of documents in the National Archives reveals that children continued to die from tuberculosis at alarming rates for at least four decades after a senior official at the Department of Indian Affairs initially warned in 1907 that schools were making no effort to separate healthy children from those sick with the highly contagious disease.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
GRANNYNOTE: IN 1901, IT BECAME CANADIAN POLICY TO SEGREGATE PEOPLE VVITH TUBERCULOSIS FROM OTHER PEOPLE TO AVOID THE SPREAD OF THE DEADLY DISEASE. NO SUCH EFFORTS VVERE MADE TO PROTECT THE CHILDREN IN CANADA'S 'INDIAN' RESIDENTIAL SCHOOLS. THEY DIED IN NUMBERS SO HIGH THAT IT COULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED BY NORMAL TRANSMISSION. IT VVAS DELIBERATE MASS MURDER PERPETRATED BY THE GOVERNMENTS OF CANADA AND THE CATHOLIC, ANGLICAN AND UNITED CHURCHES OF CANADA.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Bryce, the department's chief medical officer, visited 15 Western Canadian residential schools and found at least 24 per cent of students had died from tuberculosis over a 14-year period. The report suggested the numbers could be higher, noting that in one school alone, the death toll reached 69 per cent.
With less than four months to go before Ottawa officially settles out of court with most former students, a group calling itself the Friends and Relatives of the Disappeared Residential School Children is urging the government to acknowledge this period in the tragic residential-schools saga – and not just the better-known cases of physical and sexual abuse.
Last week, Liberal MP Gary Merasty wrote to Indian Affairs Minister Jim Prentice asking the government to look into the concerns. Mr. Prentice's spokesman, Bill Rogers, told The Globe that departmental officials have been asked to meet with native groups.
Some of their stories, including tales of children buried in unmarked graves beside the schools, are told in a new documentary by Kevin Annett, a former United Church minister, titled Unrepentant: Kevin Annett and Canada's Genocide.
Mr. Annett, as well as some academics, argue that the government's handling, combined with Canada's official policy of removing children from their homes for 10 months each year to attend distant schools, does indeed fit the United Nations definition of genocide.
The UN definition, adopted after the Second World War, lists five possible acts that qualify as genocide, of which killing is only one. The fifth act is described as “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
But transcripts of debates in 1952 of the House of Commons external affairs committee, reviewed by The Globe, show public servants advised politicians not to enshrine a definition of genocide into law, despite Canada's promise internationally to do so.
In 2000, four years after the last residential school closed, the government finally adopted a limited definition of genocide, excluding the line about forcible transfer of children. But courts have rejected native claims of genocide against Ottawa and the churches because Canada had no law banning genocide while the schools were operating.
“It's another crime,” said Roland Chrisjohn, a professor of native studies at St. Thomas University who has written extensively on the subject. “Canada can't define genocide to suit its own purposes.”
(See http://www.dominionpaper.ca/original_peoples/2006/10/12/like_weeds.html )
Few argue that the policy was genocidal in the Nazi sense of deliberately killing people. Rather, the focus was on killing native culture in the name of assimilation, said John Milloy, a Trent University professor.
“The purpose of the [federal government's] policy is to eradicate Indians as a cultural group,” said Prof. Milloy, who has had more access to government files on the subject than any other researcher. “If genocide has to do with destroying a people's culture, this is genocidal, no doubt about it. But to call it genocidal is to misunderstand how the system works.”
Whatever the definition, there is no disputing the deadly swath tuberculosis cut through native schools.
Dr. Bryce followed up his 1907 report with a second one two years later, this time on the toll TB was taking in Alberta residential schools. He recommended that Ottawa take over responsibility of the schools from church control.
The Globe has uncovered letters in the archives showing that many others issued similar warnings. Just a few months after Dr. Bryce's 1909 report, the department's Indian agent for Duck Lake, Sask., wrote to his Ottawa colleagues: “The department should realize that under present circumstances about one-half of the children who are sent to the Duck Lake boarding school die before the age of 18, or very shortly afterward.”
Another document published in 1914 shows Dr. Bryce's findings were accepted by Duncan Campbell Scott, the most influential senior Indian Affairs official of the period. “It is quite within the mark to say that fifty per cent of the children who passed through these schools did not live to benefit from the education which they had received therein,” Mr. Scott wrote in an essay.
But one of the documents obtained by The Globe reveals Mr. Scott's department rejected the doctor's recommendations because the government did not want to upset the churches that ran the schools.
The residential schools were an extension of religious missionary work. They started receiving federal support in 1874 as part of Canada's campaign to assimilate aboriginals into Christian society by obliterating their language, religion and culture. Well over 100,000 native children passed through the schools, most of which were closed in the mid-1970s.
The tuberculosis problem was symptomatic of the deplorable living conditions for the thousands of children uprooted from their communities and placed in the care of strangers. Tuberculosis is one of the deadliest infectious diseases, entering the body through breathing and infecting the lungs. It can then spread to the central nervous system, bones and joints, according to the Canadian Lung Association.
In May, 1930, at the Shubenacadie Residential School in Nova Scotia, officials were coping with an outbreak of tuberculosis seven months after the facility opened. But it was the arrival several years later of James Paul, a new student with an advanced case of tuberculosis, that raised the ire of the school's visiting physician.
“Evidently somebody has mistaken our residential school for a TB sanatorium,” D. F. MacInnis says in a letter to Indian Affairs.
Later, Dr. MacInnis wrote to the school principal: “We are apparently getting all the advanced TB cases and syphilities in the three provinces shipped into our school and apparently there is no way left for us to keep them out. It is very unfair to the children who are clean and well.”
Although most students from this period are no longer alive, some who attended later recall sharing sleeping quarters with dying children.
“I've known some students that died there and I don't know how they died. All we know is we had their funeral service,” said Harry Lucas, 66, who attended Christie Indian Residential on Vancouver Island from 1948 to 1958.
“There were quite a few grave sites there that I always questioned. We were able to sleep next to a person that was dying. They didn't put them away in separate rooms. That was always kind of spooky for me.”
Ted Quewezance, the executive director of the National Residential School Survivors Society, attended Gordon Residential School and St. Philip Residential School in Saskatchewan from 1960 to 1969. He said he has spoken to thousands of former students across Canada.
“We'd see [funerals] monthly,” he said. “We were never able to ask what they were. It's no different right across the country. There's even some graves unmarked. Kids were buried at the school, but now we're talking about how do we bring our survivors home?”
The Friends and Relatives of the Disappeared Residential School Children claims thousands of children are buried in unmarked graves near the schools. Many of their stories are contained in the documentary by Mr. Annett ( Link: Unrepentent ) who says he was ousted from the United Church in 1995 after raising concerns about the church's residential-school history.
(The United Church rejects Mr. Annett's version of events, pointing to a three-week termination hearing in which several witnesses said he was a confrontational figure who was a poor manager of his Port Alberni church.)
James Scott of the United Church said there is relatively little solid information on deaths at the schools because archivists have been so focused on researching claims of living former students.
“My sense is that the more we find out about [the schools], the deeper our understanding of the catastrophic impact of the residential schools on aboriginal people, on their families and their culture,” he said.
Bede Hubbard of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops said the Roman Catholic Church, which ran most of the schools, noted that previous research has shown the churches made many pleas to Ottawa for more money to improve standards.
“I didn't realize that the rates of tuberculosis were that high. In the 1930s, tuberculosis was rampant in Canada itself, so it shouldn't be surprising then that it was also a problem in the residential schools.”
Prof. Milloy of Trent University is the only outsider to have accessed the locked vault of Indian Affairs records through his role as a senior researcher for the 1996 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples.
In 1999, he published his research in a book titled A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System. Prof. Milloy expressed discomfort with the campaign of Mr. Annett and others to introduce language such as genocide and “aboriginal holocaust.”
What government and church records do show, he said, is that the deaths were primarily due to the policy of paying churches on a per-capita basis to run the schools. Numerous letters indicate that because of the funding policy, churches would admit sick children and refuse to send ailing ones home. Pleas to the department for more funding fell on deaf ears.
“That's why there's so many kids sleeping in so few beds in so many dormitories across the country,” Prof. Milloy said. “It has absolutely nothing to do with the idea of ‘Let's get them sick with tuberculosis and wipe them out as a species on the earth.' It's the fact that the feds won't spend any money on this, and that's what it leads to.”
As for Dr. Bryce, the man who first sounded the alarm, he was shuffled to another department. The position of chief medical officer was terminated and the government appears to have made no further effort to gather statistics on deaths at the schools. Ottawa did not take over control of all schools until 1969.
In 1922, after he retired, Dr. Bryce penned a diatribe against Ottawa's lack of response to his reports.
The title: The Story of a National Crime.
A HISTORY OF SHAME
EARLY YEARS
Started before Confederation as part of religious missionary work, residential schools originally focused on replacing aboriginal beliefs with Christianity. More than 70 per cent of the schools were run by the Roman Catholic Church; the rest by the Anglican and United Churches.
FEDERAL INVOLVEMENT
The federal government started funding residential schools in 1874, using American Industrial Schools as the model for introducing manual labour and agricultural skills to natives. To encourage children to use English and French, they were physically punished for speaking their own languages.
OTTAWA TAKES OVER
There were 72 residential schools in 1948 and 9,368 students. Ottawa took full control of the schools in 1969 and most were closed during the 1970s. The last school shut its doors in 1996.
THE LEGACY
Stories of physical and sexual abuse began to emerge in the 1980s, and became major news when Manitoba Chief Phil Fontaine, now the National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, went public with his story of sexual abuse as a student.
In April of 2006, Ottawa reached a $1.9-billion agreement with former students to settle their class-action lawsuits out of court and compensate for the loss of language and culture. Further money has been set aside to settle claims of physical and sexual abuse. Students have until Aug. 20 to accept the package. Bill Curry
RAISING CONCERN
January, 1919
Duncan Campbell Scott, a senior Indian Affairs official, talks about the inadequacy of the school buildings in a memorandum to Arthur Meighen, then Superintendent General of Indian Affairs. “They were unsanitary and they were undoubtedly chargeable with a very high death rate among the pupils.”
December, 1920
A report to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs says 33 students at the Sarcee school near Calgary are afflicted with tuberculosis.
February, 1925
W.M. Graham, Indian Commissioner for Saskatchewan, says in a letter to Mr. Scott: “We will have to do something to stop this indiscriminate admission of children without first passing a medical exam. ... I quite often hear from the Indians that they do not want to send their children to school as it is a place where they are sent to die.”
February, 1925
Russell T. Ferrier, Superintendent of Indian Education, writes to Indian commissioners and agents, saying each child should be pronounced fit by a medical officer before being admitted to a school. “When a pupil's health becomes a matter of concern soon after admission, the consequent parental alarm and distrust militates against successful recruiting.”
March, 1932
The Department of Indian Affairs announces that as a result of spending cutbacks, it cannot authorize admitting children with tuberculosis to a sanatorium or hospital unless the patient requires “care for relief of actual suffering.” Karen Howlett
Original source. www.theglobeandmail.com
Natives died in droves as Ottawa ignored warnings
-----------------------------------------------------------
GRANNYNOTE: THE GOVERNMENT OF CANADA IS ATTEMPTING TO CONTROL THE TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION COMMISSION BY CONTROLLIN ITS FUNDS AND BY STACKING THE COMMISSION VVITH GOVERNMENT/CHURCH-FRIENDLY APPOINTEES.
VVILL CANADIANS ACCEPT THE VVHITEASH?
DO VVE VVANT TO KNOVV THE REAL TRUTH?
Friday, February 05, 2010
Six Nations comes 'ready to negotiate'
January 28, 2010
Chief William K. Montour
The Hamilton Spectator
(Jan 28, 2010)
First off, I would like to congratulate the Mississaugas of New Credit chief and council and their negotiating team for reaching an agreement with Canada for their City of Toronto and Brant lease claims. It is now up to the New Credit membership to ratify the agreement.
My deep concern and utter disbelief is based on reports about the narrow attitude of the Minister of Indian Affairs and the local politicians in intimating that if New Credit can come to an agreement, why can't Six Nations?
The name, Mississaugas of New Credit, tells the story. This particular group of Mississaugas was displaced from the Credit Valley by the Province of Upper Canada. They moved to the Six Nations Grand River lands after the Mississauga Chiefs and the Six Nations Confederacy Chiefs negotiated a lease arrangement for 6,000 acres of Six Nations of the Grand River lands. Hence the name NEW Credit.
What the minister and the local politicians don't seem to realize is that if it were not for the Six Nations there could well be no Canada, as we know it today. From the late 17th century to the American Revolution, the Six Nations and the British had a military alliance against the French, and later the American patriots, in the fight for dominance in North America.
After the American Revolution and the Haldimand Proclamation of King George III, the Six Nations settled along the Grand River. This settlement was not arbitrary but specific.
The Six Nations were to act as a buffer between the British settlements in Upper Canada and the new United States of America. This was tested in the War of 1812.
The Haldimand Proclamation was a specific designation of lands within our beaver hunting grounds that were to be recognized as a deed to Six Nations of these lands. This proclamation of six miles on either side of the river from mouth to source and comprising of 950,000 acres of land was to become the new home of the Six Nations to compensate for lands lost to the new United States of America. These lands were to be enjoyed by the Six Nations and their posterity forever.
After the need for Six Nations to fight as allies of Great Britain, the land dealings by Crown trustees started. These nefarious sharp dealings by these Crown trustees and later the new Canada and the Province of Ontario, have reduced the land base of Six Nations, in the legal terms of the dominant society, to 46,000 acres. The Six Nations still maintain land rights to the entire original Haldimand Tract.
The only land settlement that the Six Nations Elected Council will support is a global settlement that, by modern treaty, secures our perpetual care and maintenance for basic services such as education, health, social and public infrastructure.
Further, any lands that become available must revert to Six Nations title, as well as the return of monies taken from our trust accounts by these same sharp dealers that used Six Nations money to build various buildings and other facilities that Ontario and Canada still enjoy today.
In addition the Six Nations Elected Council will not settle any land right for money and then sign a paper that absolves Canada of any future obligation to negotiate further grievances. We will not be forced to extinguish our children's right to their homelands for money. Six Nations comes to the table ready to negotiate while Canada only comes to the negotiating table with a predetermined solution with pretense that negotiations have taken place. The province comes to the table as a spectator.
I hope I have articulated to the reader that every land claim settlement cannot be completed in a cookie-cutter approach.
William K. Montour is Chief, Six Nations Elected Council.
January 28, 2010
Chief William K. Montour
The Hamilton Spectator
(Jan 28, 2010)
First off, I would like to congratulate the Mississaugas of New Credit chief and council and their negotiating team for reaching an agreement with Canada for their City of Toronto and Brant lease claims. It is now up to the New Credit membership to ratify the agreement.
My deep concern and utter disbelief is based on reports about the narrow attitude of the Minister of Indian Affairs and the local politicians in intimating that if New Credit can come to an agreement, why can't Six Nations?
The name, Mississaugas of New Credit, tells the story. This particular group of Mississaugas was displaced from the Credit Valley by the Province of Upper Canada. They moved to the Six Nations Grand River lands after the Mississauga Chiefs and the Six Nations Confederacy Chiefs negotiated a lease arrangement for 6,000 acres of Six Nations of the Grand River lands. Hence the name NEW Credit.
What the minister and the local politicians don't seem to realize is that if it were not for the Six Nations there could well be no Canada, as we know it today. From the late 17th century to the American Revolution, the Six Nations and the British had a military alliance against the French, and later the American patriots, in the fight for dominance in North America.
After the American Revolution and the Haldimand Proclamation of King George III, the Six Nations settled along the Grand River. This settlement was not arbitrary but specific.
The Six Nations were to act as a buffer between the British settlements in Upper Canada and the new United States of America. This was tested in the War of 1812.
The Haldimand Proclamation was a specific designation of lands within our beaver hunting grounds that were to be recognized as a deed to Six Nations of these lands. This proclamation of six miles on either side of the river from mouth to source and comprising of 950,000 acres of land was to become the new home of the Six Nations to compensate for lands lost to the new United States of America. These lands were to be enjoyed by the Six Nations and their posterity forever.
After the need for Six Nations to fight as allies of Great Britain, the land dealings by Crown trustees started. These nefarious sharp dealings by these Crown trustees and later the new Canada and the Province of Ontario, have reduced the land base of Six Nations, in the legal terms of the dominant society, to 46,000 acres. The Six Nations still maintain land rights to the entire original Haldimand Tract.
The only land settlement that the Six Nations Elected Council will support is a global settlement that, by modern treaty, secures our perpetual care and maintenance for basic services such as education, health, social and public infrastructure.
Further, any lands that become available must revert to Six Nations title, as well as the return of monies taken from our trust accounts by these same sharp dealers that used Six Nations money to build various buildings and other facilities that Ontario and Canada still enjoy today.
In addition the Six Nations Elected Council will not settle any land right for money and then sign a paper that absolves Canada of any future obligation to negotiate further grievances. We will not be forced to extinguish our children's right to their homelands for money. Six Nations comes to the table ready to negotiate while Canada only comes to the negotiating table with a predetermined solution with pretense that negotiations have taken place. The province comes to the table as a spectator.
I hope I have articulated to the reader that every land claim settlement cannot be completed in a cookie-cutter approach.
William K. Montour is Chief, Six Nations Elected Council.
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Two Row Wampum Treaty
"It is said that, each nation shall stay in their own vessels, and travel the river side by side. Further, it is said, that neither nation will try to steer the vessel of the other." This is a treaty among Indigenous Nations, and with Canada. This is the true nature of our relationships with Indigenous Nations of 'Kanata'.
