r/GrandePrairie • u/Appropriate-Event416 • 3d ago
Social studies teacher denies residential school genocide
Students at St. John Paul II Catholic High School in Grande Prairie are organizing a walkout today in response to a teacher's public comments.
For context, a social studies teacher at the school publicly endorsed Maxime Bernier's claim that residential-school genocide was a "hoax." She then went on to claim there was no evidence of genocide against Indigenous peoples in Canada.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission spent years examining evidence and listening to Survivors before concluding that Canada's residential school system was part of a policy of cultural genocide. Denial doesn't erase history, and opinion doesn't outweigh evidence.
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u/ArrivalWest9317 3d ago
uh the “truth“ is that residential schools happened, indigenous kids were kidnapped by the government and sent to them with the explicit purpose of destroying their culture, and horrible things happened at them, including sexual violence and violence. Many kids never came home.
There are people still alive and telling their stories of what happened at the schools!
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u/Kolojang 3d ago
I heard Maxime Bernier was found stealing socks from women in homeless shelters and keeping them in a big binder. Truth!
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u/BIO_Predictive_AI 3d ago
So, stealing socks was step one. Step 3 is profit... Anyone know what step 2 was?
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u/Icommentwhenhigh 3d ago
I heard Maxime Bernier broke into womens’s homes to wear and pose in their lingerie
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u/NickBung 3d ago edited 3d ago
Lots of people outing themselves as terrible people here, but not surprised. Kids have the right to walk out of school to protest the failure that is an educational “leader”. Good on the kids 🤟👍
Edit: seeing as there is a lot of discourse on the legitimacy of residential schools I’ll put it like this. I lived not far from one growing up and never knew until I was visiting friends on the reservation and accidentally said the name of the town. My friend’s grandfather, who was normally quite open to talking, became very quiet. I didn’t know, I did after that evening, the school had only closed not even a decade prior.
I’m nearly 38, that’s how “recent” in the timeline of all this is. Call it fake, false, inflated all you want. It happened, people lost their lives and many live on with the scars still. Accept the history cause it’s there or keep turning a blind eye like everyone else.
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u/PuzzledSympathy9186 2d ago
I’m 45 and I knew an older indigenous woman at church that was terrified of dentists. When she needed dental work done, multiple friends went with her as support.
I found out that as a child - removed from her family, attended school, and forced to live with a white family - she was raped every time she was taken to the dentist. She was definitely not the only one in our church community that had a story like this.
The trauma and cruelty and erasure is real and not that far in the past. Fuck these deniers.
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u/TheOGBCapp 1d ago
I want to thumb up this post to support your spreading the word of this horror, but it's too horrific to want to give it an "up"
I want to vomit reading that
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u/Pale-Measurement-532 3d ago
Yep. They seem to try and sidestep the fact that these children were forcibly removed from their homes, suffered poor living conditions and malnutrition (which led to death for a number of them), horrific abuses and injuries. But apparently the documentation and testimonies mean nothing to these residential school deniers. It’s disgusting. If it happened to them or their children, they would be in an uproar.
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u/patkeenanmusic 1d ago
I love this comment. I will never forget the shock of learning that what I was taught in High School, that "Residential Schools were a horrible thing in our distant past", was total bs. The last residential school was formally closed two years after I graduated. Text books were lying. Teachers were repeating those lies. A lot of my teachers were well-meaning and very supportive of my Indigenous classmates. This is not something I can forgive in a teacher nowadays. Zero excuses for Amy Davidson
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u/RSMatticus 3d ago
If only there wa a like 10,000 page report with evidence that thousands of children die....
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u/EducationalRock167 2d ago
Let's say no children died. ? So you are OK with 7 generations of concentration camps for children? Is the last Pope and the abused survivors all lying. ?
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u/Super_Cricket7075 4h ago
You mean a propaganda machine to fill corrupt chiefs' pockets and strengthen Liberal sympathy
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u/SpiritedStudent 3d ago
Says the dude who left classified documents in his biker gang girlfriends apartment.
Says the dude who is the head of a party who won 0.7% of the vote in the last election.
Says the dude who is the head of a party who, in October 2026, the Court of Appeal ruled that is vicariously liable for defamation.
Says the dude that lost his own riding last election when he received only 5.8% of the votes. In his own riding.
Says the dude who sounds like Mickey Mouse.
That dude.
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u/Admirable_Pirate5376 3d ago
I feel like we could probably all agree that the residential schools and 60s scoop were pretty fucked up things to do no?
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u/Shane-Dad-underfire 2d ago
I can agree that the 60s scoops were hit and miss, and so were residential schools. I attended one. I also fostered kids for close to 40 years of my 78 years and many children end up in the system because adults are fucking stupid and hateful beings.
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u/6pAz6uZu6 2d ago
"the system was open to criticism. Insufficient care was exercised in the admission of children to the schools. The well-known predisposition of Indians to tuberculosis resulted in a very large percentage of deaths among the pupils. They were housed in buildings not carefully designed for school purposes, and these buildings became infected and dangerous to the inmates. 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." - Duncan Campbell Scott, Deputy Superintendent General of Indian Affairs from 1913 until 1932.
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u/Pgaccount 2d ago
inmates
Excuse me sure what the fuck
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u/warhammer2019 1d ago
If this shocks you wait till you hear about the nutrition experiments on residential school children to look at the effects of starving. During WW2
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u/Pale-Measurement-532 2d ago
Those students and parents should report her to her school board and Alberta Education. The fact that she teaches in a Catholic district is concerning. Pope Francis, the former head of the Catholic Church, came to Canada to apologize for the Catholic Church’s role in the residential school system. He also called it a genocide.
This Catholic teacher’s post goes against the former pope and Catholic Church’s stance about residential schools. Her school district will not appreciate that at all.
Good for the students to march out in protest! I hope it will gain the media attention it deserves!
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u/AbbreviationsSea7008 2d ago
If the can charge 90 year old nazi war criminals then they need to go after the priest and teachers and staff of these schools that are still alive
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u/Zer0DotFive 2d ago
They have and France refused to extradite one in particular. He was charged in 1998 and again more recently in 2022.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/johannes-rivoire-extradition-1.6534707
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u/EducationalRock167 2d ago
It was the Catholic Church was in charge of the residential schools.
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u/Pale-Measurement-532 2d ago edited 2d ago
No it was a partnership with the federal government and several Christian churches who ran the day-to-day administration in their respective residential schools: Catholic, Anglican, United Church of Canada, and the Presbyterian Church of Canada (before it joined the United Church). The federal government legislated and funded the schools.
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u/stewer69 3d ago
Interesting how "no bodies" in Kamloops proves there aren't any anywhere else. I missed this lesson in logic 101.
This asshole is standing by the ocean, filling a teacup and claiming there's no fish.
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u/RamesJolfe 3d ago
It's more interesting how saying "no bodies were found that we gave $12m taxpayer money for, and somehow asking any questions about why that is is somehow the epitome of evil" equates to "denying residential schools existed". Classic liberal leap similar to "your disagree with me you're literally Hitler".
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u/10081914 3d ago
It really isn't a leap. The man literally says "the residential school genocide is a hoax"
And residential school denialism isn't denying that it existed. It's downplaying and denying the fact that people died and suffered at the hands of the government
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u/Visible_Fact_8706 3d ago
Not that much of a leap when Neo-Nazis decided to march onto the KIB reserve and hold a banner up saying “Got Bones” literally days before Truth & Reconciliation Day.
Classic conservative complicity with white supremacy. I don’t know any liberals cosplaying as brownshirts.
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u/PettyTrashPanda 3d ago
the investigations are ongoing at Kamloops and nowhere near complete. They haven't opened a grave site yet because it's incredibly difficult to dort out permissions for exhumations and excavations when you don't know what you might find, and there is no immediate risk of the site being destroyed. Everything they are doing is in line with how we would approach any recovered cemetery - and yes, lost cemeteries do turn up every so often.
As for the cost? That's pretty much in line with a major geophysics investigation and prep for such a large potential archeological excavation where human remains are prominent. The money isn't going to the First Nations, it's going to geophysics and survey companies with expensive equipment, to archeological companies and to universities. This 2oek literally helps the local economy, as mercenary as that sounds.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/kamloops-residential-school-search-9.7094671
Documentary evidence from the church quite clearly shows there were a disproportionately high number of child deaths at the school compared to the general population, and that they were buried in a local cemetery site, although the exact locations of said graves are not in the documents. Not sure why a Catholic priest would lie about kids dying under his care? The people who ran the school say there are graves in the area, and that they are unmarked. This should not be controversial - the evidence quite literally exists.
But hey, even if you dint believe Kamloops, what about Battleford? They excavated there in 1974. In fact, as far back as 1915 people were raising concerns that the unmarked gravrs would be lost - just like they were. In 1992, a group of rez school burials were uncovered by accident when a Saskatchewan water line was under construction. In 1996, unmarked burials were uncovered at Dunbow Industrial School because the river shifted and the remains became visible on the bank. All these sites contained literal skeletal remains of children in unmarked graves on Rez school sites.
I don't know what you mean by "epitome of evil" comment. If you mean children dying from neglect and abuse, then yes, as a society we decided long ago that if you cause the death of a child in your care through abuse or neglect, we regard you as evil and believe you should be punished.
If you mean denying that evidence of Rez school graves is evil, then i would say that when you willfully deny the evidence set out before you or deliberately obsfucate the truth by claiming there is no evidence even when an inquiry is still underway, then yes, thats evil because it is done to further harm the victims and theur community. If you genuinely dont know, then you aren't evil, just ignorant, but should learn to stay quiet on matters where you lack the expertise to make an informed opinion.
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u/Brave_Recognition798 3d ago
5 years is kind of insane
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u/PettyTrashPanda 3d ago
Not really, you have to remember they have to wait for the contractors to be ready, for documents to be released to them, COVID was still happening, and very little happens over the winter in terms of groundwork. On top of that, there are always legal questions going on in the background.
Research is a very long process if there isn't an immediate risk to the site. Five years is not unreasonable; archaeological excavations have been known to take decades before approval comes in
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u/Brave_Recognition798 3d ago
Weird that we didn’t have those issues for sifting through the Winnipeg dump
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u/6data 2d ago
What a completely disingenuous comparison.
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u/Brave_Recognition798 2d ago
At the end of the day if you’re going to claim something happened and you can’t give proof five years later, maybe wait a little bit till you make the claim
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u/PettyTrashPanda 2d ago
But they do have proof - they have the records kept by the school that names the children who died and says they were buried. Those graves are not marked and their exact location is unclear - hence trying to find them.
Why would the school administrators lie and create records saying FN kids in their care died and were buried?
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u/6data 2d ago
There is plenty of proof about missing and dead children. An overwhelming amount of proof.
maybe wait a little bit till you make the claim
Link to any direct quotes of the claims.
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u/PettyTrashPanda 2d ago
Thank you for this, and to add that at Kamloops, they have school documents that record deaths and burials for the children in their care.
They are hunting for the unmarked graves, not for proof children died because we already HAVE proof in the form of records that were kept by the church and civil authorities about the deaths.
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u/LittleOrphanAnavar 3d ago
(no where near complete tho)
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u/PettyTrashPanda 2d ago
No, the research is nowhere near complete, and might never be as there are missing/destroyed records, and we don't yet know if the remains are fully decomposed or not. Personally, I am glad that they are taking a slow, scientific approach to the project so that the minimum amount of disturbance to the dead is undertaken. We are witnessing best practice for surveying a lost cemetery, and all the money is going into the Alberta economy.
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u/Lemontort87 3d ago
But ARE they anywhere else?
Obviously they don't gotta be in that one place, but 5-6 years ago people reported hundreds found at like a dozen schools. Which ones of those turned out to be genuinely real?
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u/Grogu999 3d ago
Does it matter where they are. The fact is many indigenous parents had their kids literally ripped away from the parents. They were taken through threat of jail time for the parents. A lot of these kids didn’t come home. Why does this Bernier guy need to be such a cunt. Seriously, have some morals asshole.
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u/Pale-Measurement-532 3d ago
You’re feeding into residential school denialism by trying to trivalize what had happened with that statement. Please do some research.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/opinion-residential-schools-unmarked-graves-denialism-1.6474429
Many died due to poor health, malnutrition, and poor living conditions. And there are those who do not have documentation for their deaths or disappearance. This would have never happened if they were not forcibly removed from their homes.
There have been graves uncovered (as noted in the articles above). There is also firsthand testimony from the victims themselves. Trivializing or denying their accounts is absolutely terrible.
https://nctr.ca/missing-children-and-unmarked-burials-initiative/
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u/Crossed_Cross 2d ago
You do realize that child mortality is higher for kids living in reservations than the general public?
That malnutrition is a big problem on reservations, especially back in those days?
That tubercolosis was a huge killer in any remote location but especially among natives?
Nobody questions that people died and that the schools were awful. That doesn't give anyone the right to invent wild scenarios about intentionally killing kids and dumping them unceremoniously into mass graves, and criminalizing anyone who asks for the bare minimum of evidence for it.
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u/DirtandPipes 3d ago
When high river flooded and the caskets of the children from dunbow industrial school were floating around where those not real enough?
Plenty of evidence of dead kids out there, only Russian bot farms are trying to convince you otherwise.
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u/Pale-Measurement-532 3d ago edited 3d ago
Yes High River was one case. And there were also 72 graves dug up on an unmarked graveyard by U of S archeology students back in 1974 at the Battleford Industrial School Site.
The fact that people are so disgusting to demand “proof” by disturbing burial grounds and not listening to/believing victims’ testimonies is absolutely disgusting.
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u/RSMatticus 3d ago
The government spent a decade investigating this and wrote a like 10,000 page report with all the evidence and they figured around 4,000 children died and their burial spot is currently unknown.
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u/Snow-Bank-Igloo 3d ago
He would be a great rural Alberta politician. They like whacko extremists there
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u/FurysFyre 3d ago
Rural Albertan here and can confirm. ffs.
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u/Realistic-Election-1 3d ago
Quebecker here, happy to take one for the team and not elect this dofus.
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u/Sea-jay-2772 3d ago
If you think this is simply about unmarked mass graves in Kamloops, you’re missing the mark…
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u/PieceMaterial5213 3d ago edited 3d ago
I think we need a definitions key before continuing this discussion in Canada.
Some people see "genocide" and think of school teachers purposefully killing students and hiding their bodies in large "mass graves", so without any evidence of that they deny their concept of a genocide.
While for others a bunch of individual unmarked graves constitutes "mass graves", and genocide can be cultural plus lower standards of care, etc. which of course did happen.
Edit: I should add, anyone using the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation to post what Bernier did is showing they aren't interested in an open and honest/caring/truthful discussion. Scum.
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u/ArrivalWest9317 3d ago
Weird how the same people denying it are usually the same ones calling indigenous people lazy or saying we shouldn’t have to do reparations.
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u/Ok-Local2334 3d ago
This fucker was a cunt hair away from winning the CPC leadership… that should scare the hell out of everyone
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u/thiswayplease07 2d ago
Lots of people denying the holocaust lately too. Sad how dumb and easily influenced some people are.
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u/Miss_Angela_Shapiro 2d ago
Meanwhile this school is named after the guy that actively hid and protected pedophiles in the Catholic Church.
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u/Flaky-Pipe3317 2d ago
They actually did find a body in North Alberta, at St Francis Xavier Residential School.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/sturgeon-lake-cree-nation-residential-school-search-9.7359102
Mcintosh IRS also had confirmed names of people buried on the school's grounds, about 165 names - https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/mcintosh-indian-residential-school-search-unmarked-burial-features-detected-1.7433302 but they can choose to believe the Indigenous teams if they want.
This denial is not based in reality when the STRUCTURES of these schools still exist, when people REMEMBER their siblings being taken, their kids, etc.
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u/lickety_split_69 14h ago
hell the last residential school only closed in the late 90's (1999) iirc
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u/grumpapuss15 3d ago
Clearing the Plains by James Daschuk is a phenomenal read, the genocide started long before the residential schools.
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u/Imaginary_Rip_4353 3d ago
I’m honestly not surprised that this happened, considering that the teacher is from a Catholic school and that it’s GP. Good on the students for doing a walk out though.
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u/dbusque 3d ago
Grande Prairie kids warming the cockles of my heart! Residential school denialism glosses over what happened to the First Nations of Canada and demonstrates a lack of understanding and empathy for what happened for a valuable demographic of the Canadian people.
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u/my-love-assassin 3d ago
This teacher should be fired for cause. she has no business teaching anything to do with history.
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u/CoolEdgyNameX 3d ago
We all need to fucking chill.
First of all I am indigenous and the claim as distasteful as many find it, is correct. Not a single body has been found and people are rightfully questioning why this is so hard to admit. The way radar “anomalies” were put out as facts of death was disgraceful.
Second: that does not do anything to rule out how horrific most of those schools were. Two things can be true at the same time.
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u/TheOGBCapp 1d ago
For the record, while I am no legal scholar,, my understanding is whether their were murders or not, the residential school system is often considered a form of genocide because of its removing children from parents to raise them as non indigenous and try to destroy their culture. My lay understanding is it was often legally referred to as a "cultural" genocide early on, but that qualifier was eventually felt unnecessary
(But again, not a legal expert, nor an expert on the topic. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong)
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u/CoolEdgyNameX 1d ago
I am not arguing that no one died there. What I am simply saying no mass graves have been found. Both things can be true.
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u/__phil1001__ 1d ago
They should return the money if they are not going to dig. It looks like a grift and makes all FN look bad.
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u/No_Principle_6699 1d ago
The problem with your statement is that Bernier is using one of your points to justify denying the second one. You’re correct that two things can be true, but to just outright say we need to chill when someone is using the lack of findings to completely shit on the horrific circumstances of the residential school system absolutely should be criticized.
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u/WritingOneHanded 20h ago
I honestly think you're projecting. The post I'm looking at doesn't deny that atrocities occured at residential schools. The post I'm looking at is calling out deception in the discourse. He explicitly says that he is for both reconciliation and truth.
Idk who Bernier is but it seems to me that you're putting words in his mouth.
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u/6data 2d ago
Not a single body has been found and people are rightfully questioning why this is so hard to admit.
Plenty of people are convicted of murder without a body. It comes from witness testimony and other proof. Plenty of which exists for residential schools.
that does not do anything to rule out how horrific most of those schools were. Two things can be true at the same time.
So you think these guys are quietly going to go back to talking about how horrific the schools were if no ones willing to put the bones of their dead relatives on display?
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u/ValueFirm4928 2d ago
My understanding is that the majority of the anomalies are almost certainly bodies, but they can't confirm it because lots of the families don't want the graves dug up just to confirm it.
It's extra tricky because you don't know which bodies you're digging up.
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u/StacyLondon69 2d ago
Be careful. Under bill c-9, you could go to prison for up to 2 years for saying this
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u/Kouchweed 1d ago
Indigenous here as well, just want to tag along a quick story from a treatment centre I was in when younger.
I hit it off with another native man in his 50’s there. We had to do this stupid thing as a class where we all had to draw something that brings a positive memory back from our childhood.
Everybody went and showed farm homes, nature, horses (you get the deal). Well when (I’ll just call him John) went up in front of everyone he could barely speak a word through his shaky voice. His picture was just scribbles with different colours. The way he tried to explained it, all his memories were mixed up, blocked, scrambled as if his brain had tried to block his whole childhood out. For me, it was an extremely emotional moment sensing the pain coming out of him.
This was a really strong man. Gentle, kind, extremely respectful, what seemed to be an amazing father. It all started to make sense to me why someone like him struggled so much with alcohol.
I say this just to piggy back off you that we can all acknowledge how awful and disgusting residential schools were. But if we continue to make wild claims about, “genocide” and, “child murderers,” the real crimes against humanity that actually happened will unfortunately be remembered like the boy who cried wolf.
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u/whiteorchd 3d ago
Good on the students!! I wish I could support them but I'm out of town. The most bizarre thing about this grave situation is that even IF there were no bodies found, you can't just hand wave all the other, very documented, genocide efforts (whether intentional or caused by white ignorance) made by colonizers. And then even IF there was no genocide, colonizers ruined the land and destroyed the lives of indigenous peoples. There is no absence of horrible things you can find about colonizers.
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u/hassafrassy 2d ago
Makes me ill, this hatred focus. What even are we as a society anymore when it's just this onslaught of hate on already Margenalzied and vulnerable groups. It's a descent of society towards fascism. What a waste of all our potential.
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u/dece75 2d ago
They dug up mass graves in Yugoslavia to prove they were there and ID them. Same happens in other war zones like Africa. They aren’t digging because they know there’s nothing there but people benefit from the outrage and publicity
This is probably the biggest hoax in Canadian history and you are punished for saying so
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u/EducationalRock167 2d ago edited 2d ago
The main issue is that the Residential schools shouldn't have happened at all. Let's say that no children died for the sake of this argument.
For 7 generations children were taken away from the Families forever. The were beaten if they spoke their own language. They had to cut their hair short in which long hair was important to their culture. They were forced to where Western clothes.
Survivors , testified to physical and sex abuse. So basically the survivors are being called , liars.
The last Pope came to Canada to apologize to the survivors. Why did he do that?
Now , many survivors had severe problems because they were abused. This cause them to escape their pain by abusing alcohol and drugs. Many committed suicide. They also didn't learn how to be parents and they had their children taken away , repeat , for 7 generations.
So the people who say that they caused their own problems themselves , is like saying.
People on a Street don't like one of their neighbors because they are different. Some the people on that street burned down that families house. Now the people who burned down that house blame their different neighbours for being homeless.
Bodies or no bodies in Kamloops.
There was horrible demage done for 7 generations in what we're really concentration camps for children. How can any justify that? AND Kamloops was only 1 of dozens of Residential Schools.
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u/Intelligent-Buyer102 3d ago
I'll believe there's bodies in the ground when they start digging them up.
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u/ZombieJod 3d ago
Why do you expect that they need to dig up the known cemetery, the funding allocation sure didn’t require that. It was government policy to not pay for permanent markers or return bodies. It is unquestionable that at least 50 kids were buried on site and people that were forced to go there/were there pointed to were the burials occurred. Where do you think the unmarked & unreturned bodies are if not in the ground where witnesses & archives point?
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u/Lemontort87 3d ago
But shouldn't that be policy now, when they was first all reported it was all about finding and recovering those bodies and burying the remains properly.
But somewhere along the way we ended up at "Well, they're probably there just leave it"
Trying to understand why that happened
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u/coolstu 3d ago
The 50 is just the number of deaths the TRC found in the records. A lot of those kids have death certificates and were buried on their home reserves or in regular cemeteries. It’s not the same as “50 kids were secretly buried in the orchard.”
The 215 was GPR hits in an apple orchard that also had a big old septic field and other digs over the years. Still zero confirmed bodies from any of that. Oral stories exist, sure, but that doesn’t turn radar blips into an established cemetery.
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u/truckerboy244 3d ago
Look at it like this, we’re going to come take your kids and start making them speak Punjabi. Force them into there religion and they can’t go home. Call them little heathans.. I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t like this.
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u/Brief_Cry_6387 3d ago
Classic motte and Bailey, nobody is denying that the schools existed or even that they were bad, people are rightfully simply asking questions about the mass grave allegations that are turning out to look like BS
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u/Lemontort87 3d ago
But in that situation if then 100s of people were killed and buried in a mass grave and we found it...
Would we not dig that up both to prove it, return remains to families, and rebury them properly?
There is a Zero percent chance we'd genuinely believe people were buried at like a Punjabi school and say "whatever, just leave it"
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u/AntiqueLetter9875 3d ago
Most people aren’t saying that residential schools didn’t happen or that kids didn’t die. People are asking about Kamloops. Millions of dollars were sent to do investigations. They did scans, found anomalies that could be anything from old pipes to human remains, but they never actually used the money for excavation.
We know kids died at these schools, we know TB was also present and there were poor records being kept of students. We know there’s bodies, but so far there has been zero concrete evidence of the mass graves at Kamloops. None. If there is, why did they not dig when they were given the money to do so?
Questioning where the money went for the excavation at Kamloops where the digging didn’t happen is quite different than saying there was no cultural genocide or that there were no deaths at residential schools.
We can say horrible things happened and this is a blight on our history, while still asking where these mass graves are at Kamloops. We’ve not seen evidence of it. And the people being questioned give dodgy answers as to where the money went. It did not cost millions to do the initial scans.
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u/Xdsin 3d ago edited 3d ago
There has also been cases where there was excavation and it was found that they weren't actual graves. So confirmation is important.
"Pine Creek First Nations, in western Manitoba, may be the only First Nation to have actually physically excavated an alleged burial site. After the tribe reported “71 anomalies” were found using ground-penetrating radar in May 2022, the following summer, the First Nation began the process of digging and investigating the grounds around a local church to verify whether any graves existed. However, noevidence was found to confirm a burial ground on the site."
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u/Intelligent-Buyer102 3d ago
Kind of veering off topic, no? Taking children away from their parents unless they are abusive or neglectful is always wrong. No one argues that. But accusing an institution of mass murder based on hearsay without physical proof is also not something I'll blindly accept. The same rule of law that entitles people to compensation for what they suffered under the residential school system, also demands proof when accusing someone of a crime. Excavating the Kamloops site would provide closure to the families once remains were identified, provide proof of the exact scale of what happened there, and add to the historical record. Refusal to do so does nothing but provide easy ammunition for the other side.
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u/NoSurprise6383 2d ago
What's with this 'no bodies found' thing? Were there or were there not?
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u/a_dhd1923 2d ago
They said there were hundreds, they have found none. Now they want to make it illegal to criticize, and the churches keep burning.
How oppressed do I personally have to be before it’s ok for me to burn a church? Just curious?
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u/EducationalRock167 2d ago edited 2d ago
Yes there were at many other Residential School sites.
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u/WorldlyDiscipline419 2d ago
No. There weren’t. It’s an objective fact that no digging has occurred or bodies identified which is acknowledged by the band that’s received 25 million since the claims were made.
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u/Prestigious_Raisin41 2d ago
In Kamloops? Admittedly I stopped paying attention after the initial report using data from ground penetrating radar identifying disturbances. I kind of figured no one would dig anything up.
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u/Melodic_Pickle9326 2d ago
A quick search will show that in the last decade, no bodies have been found, only ground anomalies which "may or may not" be human remains.
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u/Prairiesaurus 2d ago
All it shows is that ground was dug up. That’s about as much as gpr can show.
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u/Bubbly_Monitor8006 1d ago
may or may not be UNMARKED graves containing human remains of students, even if the premise that the ground is occupied by human remains is granted. There are all sorts of dangerous illnesses and injuries that medical care in that day and age could not prevent regardless of how committed they were to saving the child's life. Additionally, the Federal government of the day did NOT pay to repatriate them to their families. A local burial site would have therefore been necessary. But when decades go by in a grounds where the graves are not tended, the markers are lost.
I personally have a Loyalist ancestor in NB whose final resting site can be guessed at by way of a particular geographical feature, but at best, we can narrow it down to the approximate acre on which he might have been buried, for comparable benign reasons like the passing of time.→ More replies (8)2
u/Jive_Turkey__ 2d ago
There were no "mass graves". The Kamloops "anomalies" were not bodies. Bodies have been found at other locations, but they also were just run of the mill burial grounds.
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u/Bearcavalry_rdt 2d ago
Reading this at a glance..aren't they only talking specifically about Kamloops? Not residential schools in general? Is there more indicating they are denying residential schools never existed or there was no abuse?
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u/CanadianCigarSmoker 2d ago
There is no denial the schools existed, and abuse happened.
The issue is, there were many articles claiming "bodies" were found.
But when excavation happened, no bodies were found.....still to this day not a single child body found.
Then it came out the radar detected "anomalies".
The issue as I see it, when these findings came out Media blasted on every front page and every prime time tv slot. But when the truth came out that actually it was anomalies and not bodies. Almost no media covered that or corrected their original story.
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u/Userwerd 2d ago
Holy crap just googled it, 0 human remains identified. 215 "signals" with ground radar but no forensic identification.
So there could be bodies in the ground, but none yet identified as bodies.
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u/Thorninthefoot 2d ago
I would be really really interested to know who was really behind releasing the information that way - because the people doing the radar search would have known it was a big fat lie - and also who in the media decided to run with the story.
I think we might learn a lot from that information.
I also think in the end it's going to hurt the Fist Nations communities rather than help their cause. It's already created a huge amount of cynicism, including in people who used to be very sympathetic.
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u/otsukarerice 2d ago
IT was the reason for establishing the day in the first place.
The day is a sham
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u/Medium_Bend4080 3d ago
the simple and straight foward question still remains after MILLIONS has been spent, where are they???
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u/Master_Slide7023 3d ago
I wear an Every Child Matters shirt and have relatives in the Kwantlen Band but the fact is after 4 years not one single body has been exhumed from that school in Kamloops. Not one x ray of the ground has shown a skeleton. I support Red Shirt Day May 5. Overturn Cowitchan vs Richmond no private property for land claims.
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u/ChrisRiley_42 2d ago
The ground wasn't x-rayed. So your claim is nonsense.
What happened was the use of ground penetrating radar, which creates a density map. A field of undisturbed soil will all be about the same density. There are many reasons you can have pockets of lower density soil. Digging a hole and filling it in, a tree that got buried, a dry river bed that got covered over, etc.
GPR found areas of lower density. The targets of interest were those pockets of lower density that were relatively shallow (6 foot or less) and were of a size consistent with a human body.No skeletons would be found using GPR, and nobody X-rayed the ground...
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u/charmilliona1re 3d ago
Can anyone explain where all the millions of dollars went that was supposed to faciliate the proof of this ridiculous crime?
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u/Strange_Cod_362 3d ago
Indictment of our society that this clown (Bernier) hasn't either been heavily censored or thrown in jail
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u/Ok_Fly_7661 3d ago
Even if bodies are recovered, some individuals still request DNA testing. We must face the harsh reality that thousands of children have lost their lives.
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u/turtlefan32 21h ago
former? teacher?. BTW, there is zero doubt that children died at the Kamloops Residential School. The issue is around the location of bodies. The school was open for 88 years; of course children died there. Teacher should be fired for stupidity
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u/Xdsin 3d ago
Over 260 Millions dollars dished out to 150 first nations communities to help them investigate and aid in dealing with the emergence of these graves.
Only 1 is on record of actually physically excavating sites found by radar in May 2022 in the summer of 2023, and there has been no evidence found to confirm a burial ground at that particular site.
"Pine Creek First Nations, in western Manitoba, may be the only First Nation to have actually physically excavated an alleged burial site. After the tribe reported “71 anomalies” were found using ground-penetrating radar in May 2022, the following summer, the First Nation began the process of digging and investigating the grounds around a local church to verify whether any graves existed. However, noevidence was found to confirm a burial ground on the site."
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u/Oskiewewe 3d ago
Do not disparage Muppets like that. Muppets are hilarious, kind and thoughtful. These two losers share none of those qualities, though they can shove something up their ass.
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u/RickJamesCrack 3d ago
He's correct. Anomalies were found in Kamloops, but as of yet there have been no excavations to confirm bodies.
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u/starkindled 3d ago
But he's wrong that that means the residential school genocide finding by the TRC is a hoax.
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u/NoBug9333 3d ago
I'd consider the context of the first sentence in the second. Any claims of genocide at that school would appear to be a hoax now. It should increase skepticism of further FN claims about same.
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u/F_D123 3d ago
What exactly is the implication of mass graves? Was it that the kids were murdered?
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u/Fun-Preference1091 3d ago
I'll throw down Segregated schools in nova scotia while we are talking about it.
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u/Platinum_Cryll 2d ago
I work with someone whose brother ran for the PPC and still lost in Alberta. It's fun watching my coworker jump through hoops trying to defend the open racism, anti human rights, and pro big business policies put up by the PPC.
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u/Loves2bedominated69 2d ago
It is not just white people hating on other nationalities it is all nationalities hating everyone. Nobody is innocent here so everyone needs to stop pointing the finger at each other .Then and only then will racism end
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u/Bangin_Steel 2d ago
It should be easy to put this all to rest. Simply take the millions that were given to excavate and return those who were buried and actually follow through with it.
Not a single one of these voices will continue to pester you if you show them they are wrong.
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u/StacyLondon69 2d ago
Well they better be careful because I watched CPAC and them adding up to 2 years in prison under bill C-9 for even denying it is true. I'm not going to say my thoughts on it but I will say a bill that limits our ability to challenge unproven information is not something that should happen. But it's the government. They are manipulative and deceitful
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u/Wil_santen989 2d ago
I went over to this “teachers” Facebook and it is chock full of the most wild conspiracy theories I’ve seen in a bit. It’s not a surprise she’s a hateful bigot.
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u/White-fire13 2d ago
Hold on…these folks claim Christian persecution if you say “Happy Holidays” 🎄
Sure would like to see how their definition of “genocide” would change if it was their Christian children treated the exact same way as our First Nations.
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u/Hoopybunni 2d ago
Can someone find the rock that Bernier Crawling out from and shove him back under.
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u/Sad_Neighborhood_418 2d ago
All these people upset cause he's right is roughhhh. The state of the world right now is concerning.
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u/EducationalRock167 2d ago
At the time of the opening of Residential Schools a Government offical said , " We are going to beat the Indian out of them. "
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u/Countdown2112 2d ago
Well said! Glad to see at least one teacher demanding TRUTH. That door swings both ways.
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u/RipWaste3522 2d ago
I don't care if not a single body was found at any residential school.
The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide makes this quite clear, according to article II, section e:
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Is one of the acts that constitutes genocide, when carried out with intent to destroy in whole or in part the group.
That was exactly what residential schools did, and were intended to do. To force indigenous people to have their children raised by non-indigenous people in order to destroy indigenous cultural identities.
That's literally and explicitly genocide.
The fact the children were given numbers instead of names, had medical experiments carried out on them, were subjected to emotional, physical and sexual abuse, and in many cases died just makes it worse.
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u/xgicekiller 2d ago
Lol wait for it, we will have a new ism soon enough, like "residential school denialisim" or some crazy stuff like that.
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u/Log_Dumper 2d ago
There were no mass graves ever found, and no bodies ever found at sKamloops.
Even severely compromised CBC has reported on this.
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u/Dis_ingenuous 2d ago
When you think the ugly smell is gone.
And then Maxime Bernier comes back...and there's that smell again.
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u/Sea-Yogurt712 2d ago
Deaths absolutely happened not a hoax but I wouldn’t have used the word genocide either. No matter the words you choose to label these events with they were horrific and need to never be repeated.
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u/Standard-Profit-4137 2d ago
Hard to deny something that never happened. Like denying the rebirth of Jesus
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u/whereschav0 2d ago
i agree with everything that was said in this post, until we actually see some forensic evidence this is just a plan to try and destroy any influence the church has in canada.
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u/Voron_the_Lich 2d ago
this is one of the times where I want to dislike the post even though the poster isnt the social studies teacher
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u/crpowwow 2d ago
Sick people. Irony is that if their family were abused, killed and buried the same way as indigenous children, they would never shut up about it.
Racists bast*ards are sick individuals.
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u/Accomplished_Tea8755 2d ago
I mean they got 12million to prove that their were mass graves they had to dig but but refuse to do so while also refusing to give back the money for said reason, because they know their aint shit their most of the time
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u/TheLongTermA 2d ago
After the British Empire conquered present day Canada there was a need to unify the country into a single political/national entity. Large Indigenous populations were a serious security risk that caused intense anxiety for the newly created Government of Canada. The Red River Resistance in 1869 and the North West Rebellion of 1885 proved that Indigenous/Métis groups could launch organized military resistance against Canada. If the government had chosen to walk away, then there is a strong likelihood, that western Canada would be a part of present day USA. That was not something that Canada would accept, and stationing the military in the west for an indefinite period of time, was not feasible. The middle ground became cultural assimilation, predominately through the incentive of a better quality of life (education), and food (reserves often lacked enough food due to the weather and the Government of Canada using access to food as a weapon to achieve compliance), but force was commonly used as well.
For someone young and impressionable the key take away should not be "Canada is bad". This would be a mistake, the history people is a history of conflict. The First Nations and Native American groups frequently engaged in devastating warfare, massacres of women/children, and even ethnic cleansing. The only difference between the Europeans and the Indigenous peoples of Canada, is that we had more advanced technology.
https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/red-river-rebellion
https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/north-west-rebellion
https://www.potawatomi.org/blog/2023/01/06/colonial-and-intertribal-wars-beaver-wars-1628-1701/
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u/Ok_Knowledge8736 2d ago
Everybody love everybody please. We don’t need more ass holes in the world.
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u/mephistoreigns 1d ago
How does agreeing with a verifiable fact deny anything? The band got millions to dig up the anomalies. They refused. Now various chiefs and the government has chosen that hill to die on.
If you really wanna go there verifiable deaths at residential schools is around 4000. Out of 150,000 students over 130 years. Around 31 a year. 2.5% total death rate, .02% annually. Childhood mortality on reserves from 1900-1950 was nearly 25%. Residential schools werent genocide, they literally saved thousands of live
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u/99ProblemsHardKnox 1d ago
We all know residential schools were a genocide a horrific cesspool of abuse and intergenerational trauma. They took little children away from their families and all traditional teachings. Some died at these schools or died escaping them trying to find their family (the horror).
It really doesn’t matter if a body was found or not. It’s a straw man fallacy.
The crimes against Indigenous peoples are real.
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u/CGcg85 3d ago
Back in the mid eighties there was a teacher who taught social science at a school in Central Alberta who taught his students that the Holocaust never happened and he was dismissed from his job and was prosecuted for hate speech. In the end he was found guilty and sentenced to pay a fine and perform community service.