An excellent article which sums up the state of the union perfectly. The demise of journalistic integrity was shamefully celebrated by the Fifth Estates coverage of the alleged fictious horrors of the Kamloops IRS which painfully placed investigative journalism in the same genre as a Stephen King horror novel. The main stream press and those mercenaries who prostitute virtue, integrity and honestly for a fleeting moment of personal glory, are the fifth columnists bent on the destruction of a fair and noble country.
One need not look to far to find accomplices in this disgraceful coup. Chief Casimire and AFN Chief Archibald immediately come to mind. Apart from the normal motivation of smearing and scapegoating Canada for their own obvious failures, financial reward is a central motivator. Then there are the shameful, groveling, sycophantic politicians who see opportunity in the denigration of their own country lead by an egotistic PM who unabashedly said Canada is guilty of genocide.
For an indigenous group who vocally place to much value and importance on truth before reconciliation it would really be timely to hear some.
The whole exercise or discrediting Canada Inc forms part of a much larger woke attack on the integrity of the Western Narrative as a whole, including its reproductive familial infrastructure as well.
It is a calculated propaganda campaign in the tradition of public relations and marketing machinery that was fathered by men like Edward Bernays in the early twentieth century, then enthusiastically embraced by both fascist and communist regimes. and finally apotheosed into the equally totalitarian, but the privately funded machinery of Jewl Wasp style consciousness control and mind colonization that has emerged out of the 1960s roll out of Indulgence Capitalism, whereby a culture of disciplined hierarchies of needs and wants was subsumed by reality deregulated and privatized subjective fantasies of desire, and giving into them as quickly as possible, at any cost, regardless of long-term consequences for social/existential or ecological infrastructure.
The postmodernist inspired Woke campaign against modern times has all the endearing race, identitarian qualities of a Joseph Goebbels attack on Jews. It is just as irrational, obtuse and malign in its intent and rolled out with the same totalitarian intentions to take complete control of the means of social reproduction and administration, and run everyone else 'out of town'.
What has happened in the universities is a re run of the German experience in the late 1920s and early '30s, even before the Nazi takeover of state power.
The attack on the churches through the 'graves' propaganda campaign is just the same as the German tactic of spreading the bullet ridden Polish uniformed bodies of concentration camp inmates in front of a German/Polish frontier post, in order to accuse the Poles of unconscionable aggression, as an excuse to invade Poland.
It is as crude as that.
It is not that it is somehow an irrational 'mistake' by more than ordinarily obtuse individuals and media opportunists in search of sensationalism, any more than the unwillingness to correct the obviously made-up stories is just dishonest denialism and evasion in the ordinary sense.
This is an attack that is the beginning of a Cultural Revolution style coup run by institutional Woke Red Guards bent on wiping out the past, creating an Orwellian seizure of memory not content with merely amnesia, but a reconstruction in its own image.
'Truthings' and 'Knowings' are just the beginning of making an end of the Enlightenment and everything it once stood for, by people who are no longer fellow citizens, but instruments of regime change where the only option is to conform or be rubbed out.
They are not mucking around. This is not a drill. This is it.
This is the insect model I use as an analogue for the way late Indulgence Capitalism in general and its Woke controllers of the means of social reproduction and administration in particular, prey on those whose consciousness they invade, colonize and extract value from.
Excellent article. My experience of working for 3 years on a West coast Indian reserve was traumatic for the element of truth. If an elder says a newly laid pipe outside is flooding a kitchen by the water ascending up 3 steps and over a sill, you cannot question them. I would have lost my job if I had pursued this tack. This is called the tyranny of the elders. This culture is applicable in a pre contact society where cohesion was essential for the greater good but has no place in our modern society.
Follow the money. Bre-X management issues a press release stating the results of their scientific field survey have discovered buried in the ground a motherlode of gold, enough to fill Fort Knox. If this turns out to be a lie, should we absolve Bre-X management, and rather blame the media for not having flown to Indonesia and physically inspecting the soil themselves prior to disseminating the initial press release? That doesn't seem right to me.
Another interesting issue raised by Terry is the relative incidence of sexual assualt. I have no doubt that it happened, but it was a feature of almost all other institutions involving children: from public schools, to boarding schools to churches. Pedophiles go where the children are. So the question is not whether sexual assualt occurred but whether the rate was significantly different from comparable institutions. Do you know if that question has been addressed?
I don't believe there is any evidence to suggest that abuse of children happened at higher rates in IRS. It is also important to note that the schools had quite a bit of non-clergy staff, some who were indigenous. Only 10% of all abuse claims were against priests or nuns, 90% were against non clergy staff and older students.
Excellent article James Pew! I'd always wondered how how mortality rates, on and off reserve, compared. Apparently, the media never thought it important to ask.
Found this article more enlightening than any I've previously read on the subject.
I would like to add to your excellent article several pieces of information regarding mortality rates at the residential schools.
Whereas the mortality rate in the residential schools was higher than among the general Canadian child population during most of the first half of the 20th century, by 1950 the gap had been largely erased (Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Graph 4). The death rate in the residential schools declined steadily beginning in the first decade of the 1900s and reached near zero by mid-century (TRC History, Part 1, Origins to 1939, Graph 16.1.)
Tuberculosis was by far the largest cause of death in the residential schools during the first several decades of the residential school period. It accounted for over half the deaths during the period 1883 to 1939 (TRC History, Part 1, Graph 16.2). But by 1950, death from TB was virtually eliminated (TRC History, Part 2 1939 to 2000, Graph 36.3)
The toll from TB was consistently greater in the overall First Nations population. Chief medical officer Peter Bryce calculated that in 1906, the TB death rate in the general “native” population was 34.7 per 1,000 (3,470 per 100,000). Graph 5 in the TRC Summary of the Final Report shows that the rate in the residential schools in that year was around 5 per 1,000 (500 per 100,000). Thus the overall First Nations rate was approximately seven times higher than the rate in the residential schools.
In the 1930s, the TB death rate in the residential schools averaged around 1.5 per 1,000, or 150 per 100,000 (TRC Summary of the Final Report, Graph 5). TRC History, Part 1, page 421, notes: “Throughout the 1930s, the First Nations death rate from TB never fell below 600 deaths per 100,000, while the death rate from tuberculosis for the overall Canadian population fell from 79.8 per 100,000 in 1930 to 53.6 per 100,000 in 1939.”
Thus, while the death rate from TB in the residential schools in the 1930s was about twice as large as that in the general Canadian population, the rate in the First Nations population was at least ten times higher.
As indicated above, the scourge of TB was essentially eliminated in the residential schools by mid-20th century. TB mortality in the First Nations population, meanwhile, continued at very high levels well into the 1950s (TRC History, Part 2,Table 36.1 and Table 36.3).
Death rates from all causes in the residential schools were consistently lower than death rates in the First Nations from TB alone. In 1906, the all-cause residential school death rate was about 15 per 1,000, or 1,500 per 100,000 (TRC History, Part 1, Graph 16.1), while the death rate from TB alone in the First Nations, as noted above, was 3,470 per 100,000. In the five years after WWII, the all-cause death rate in the residential schools averaged around 300 per 100,000; during the same period, the death rate from TB alone in the First Nations population averaged in the high 400s per 100,000 (TRC History, Part 2, Table 36.1).
The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-19 took a heavy toll throughout Canada. Over 600 out of every 100,000 Canadians died from the disease. The toll in the general First Nations population was many times higher. Estimates range from 3,770 per 100,000 (TRC History, Part 1, page 436), to as high as 4,600 per 100,000. By way of comparison, in the residential schools mortality not only from the Spanish flu, but from all causes, was about 5 per 1,000 (500 per 100,000) in 1918, and roughly 8 per 1,000 (800 per 100,000) in 1919 (TRC History, Part 1, Graph 16.1).
The dramatic declines in mortality from TB and other deadly diseases in the residential schools did not come about without active intervention.
In his report to the TRC, “Where are the Children buried?”, Dr. Scott Hamilton wrote that the residential schools administered comprehensive TB drug treatment and inoculation programs as effective medicines became available around mid-century (page 11).
Serious preventive and ameliorative measures against TB actually began much earlier in the residential schools. The 1911 Indian Affairs Annual Report states: “...the greater attention now paid to…sanitation…will before long have its beneficial effect on the general health…The [schools] have the best modern sanitary appliances and outdoor sleeping apartments where children of tubercular tendencies may have the advantage of the fresh air cure.”
In the 1930s, the schools began a program of regular screening of the student body to detect cases of active tuberculosis and bcg vaccinations to protect non-infected students (TRC History, Part 2, page 197).
Many residential schools served as medical centres. The 1932 Indian Affairs Annual Report states, “The affected pupils [in the residential schools] are under treatment [for trachoma], carried out by the nurse or other person in immediate charge, under the direction of the local doctor, and supervised by the Departmental specialist at his periodical visits. The school is utilized as a centre for examination of the surrounding Indian population, and encouraging reports have been received of the interest of the Indians at home having been awakened by letters from their children at school.”
Well into the second half of the 20th century, the residential schools continued their essential role as medical service providers. In a 2017 study, University of Victoria researchers found that students were “selected to attend residential school based partly on their need for medical care that was otherwise unavailable.”` The same study found that at least after mid-century, children who attended residential schools were taller and less likely to be obese as adults, than had they schooled in other environments.
The residential school employees and students were all in close daily contact. For this reason, as well as out of their benevolent concern for the students’ well-being, the staff did their best to ensure that the children under their care remained healthy. They often worked in times of difficult economic conditions and when medical knowledge was primitive by today’s standards, but it is unfair and inaccurate to suggest that they wantonly neglected the well-being of the students.
Thank you for this helpful summary of the TB facts and figures, Pim. What is the citation for the 2017 University of Victoria study you mention in your second-to-last paragraph? (or just a few more details so that I can search it out myself).
An excellent article which sums up the state of the union perfectly. The demise of journalistic integrity was shamefully celebrated by the Fifth Estates coverage of the alleged fictious horrors of the Kamloops IRS which painfully placed investigative journalism in the same genre as a Stephen King horror novel. The main stream press and those mercenaries who prostitute virtue, integrity and honestly for a fleeting moment of personal glory, are the fifth columnists bent on the destruction of a fair and noble country.
One need not look to far to find accomplices in this disgraceful coup. Chief Casimire and AFN Chief Archibald immediately come to mind. Apart from the normal motivation of smearing and scapegoating Canada for their own obvious failures, financial reward is a central motivator. Then there are the shameful, groveling, sycophantic politicians who see opportunity in the denigration of their own country lead by an egotistic PM who unabashedly said Canada is guilty of genocide.
For an indigenous group who vocally place to much value and importance on truth before reconciliation it would really be timely to hear some.
The whole exercise or discrediting Canada Inc forms part of a much larger woke attack on the integrity of the Western Narrative as a whole, including its reproductive familial infrastructure as well.
It is a calculated propaganda campaign in the tradition of public relations and marketing machinery that was fathered by men like Edward Bernays in the early twentieth century, then enthusiastically embraced by both fascist and communist regimes. and finally apotheosed into the equally totalitarian, but the privately funded machinery of Jewl Wasp style consciousness control and mind colonization that has emerged out of the 1960s roll out of Indulgence Capitalism, whereby a culture of disciplined hierarchies of needs and wants was subsumed by reality deregulated and privatized subjective fantasies of desire, and giving into them as quickly as possible, at any cost, regardless of long-term consequences for social/existential or ecological infrastructure.
The postmodernist inspired Woke campaign against modern times has all the endearing race, identitarian qualities of a Joseph Goebbels attack on Jews. It is just as irrational, obtuse and malign in its intent and rolled out with the same totalitarian intentions to take complete control of the means of social reproduction and administration, and run everyone else 'out of town'.
What has happened in the universities is a re run of the German experience in the late 1920s and early '30s, even before the Nazi takeover of state power.
The attack on the churches through the 'graves' propaganda campaign is just the same as the German tactic of spreading the bullet ridden Polish uniformed bodies of concentration camp inmates in front of a German/Polish frontier post, in order to accuse the Poles of unconscionable aggression, as an excuse to invade Poland.
It is as crude as that.
It is not that it is somehow an irrational 'mistake' by more than ordinarily obtuse individuals and media opportunists in search of sensationalism, any more than the unwillingness to correct the obviously made-up stories is just dishonest denialism and evasion in the ordinary sense.
This is an attack that is the beginning of a Cultural Revolution style coup run by institutional Woke Red Guards bent on wiping out the past, creating an Orwellian seizure of memory not content with merely amnesia, but a reconstruction in its own image.
'Truthings' and 'Knowings' are just the beginning of making an end of the Enlightenment and everything it once stood for, by people who are no longer fellow citizens, but instruments of regime change where the only option is to conform or be rubbed out.
They are not mucking around. This is not a drill. This is it.
Chris, what is "Jewl Wasp style consciousness control" ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerald_cockroach_wasp
This is the insect model I use as an analogue for the way late Indulgence Capitalism in general and its Woke controllers of the means of social reproduction and administration in particular, prey on those whose consciousness they invade, colonize and extract value from.
Excellent article. My experience of working for 3 years on a West coast Indian reserve was traumatic for the element of truth. If an elder says a newly laid pipe outside is flooding a kitchen by the water ascending up 3 steps and over a sill, you cannot question them. I would have lost my job if I had pursued this tack. This is called the tyranny of the elders. This culture is applicable in a pre contact society where cohesion was essential for the greater good but has no place in our modern society.
Follow the money. Bre-X management issues a press release stating the results of their scientific field survey have discovered buried in the ground a motherlode of gold, enough to fill Fort Knox. If this turns out to be a lie, should we absolve Bre-X management, and rather blame the media for not having flown to Indonesia and physically inspecting the soil themselves prior to disseminating the initial press release? That doesn't seem right to me.
Another interesting issue raised by Terry is the relative incidence of sexual assualt. I have no doubt that it happened, but it was a feature of almost all other institutions involving children: from public schools, to boarding schools to churches. Pedophiles go where the children are. So the question is not whether sexual assualt occurred but whether the rate was significantly different from comparable institutions. Do you know if that question has been addressed?
I don't believe there is any evidence to suggest that abuse of children happened at higher rates in IRS. It is also important to note that the schools had quite a bit of non-clergy staff, some who were indigenous. Only 10% of all abuse claims were against priests or nuns, 90% were against non clergy staff and older students.
Excellent article James Pew! I'd always wondered how how mortality rates, on and off reserve, compared. Apparently, the media never thought it important to ask.
Found this article more enlightening than any I've previously read on the subject.
I would like to add to your excellent article several pieces of information regarding mortality rates at the residential schools.
Whereas the mortality rate in the residential schools was higher than among the general Canadian child population during most of the first half of the 20th century, by 1950 the gap had been largely erased (Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Graph 4). The death rate in the residential schools declined steadily beginning in the first decade of the 1900s and reached near zero by mid-century (TRC History, Part 1, Origins to 1939, Graph 16.1.)
Tuberculosis was by far the largest cause of death in the residential schools during the first several decades of the residential school period. It accounted for over half the deaths during the period 1883 to 1939 (TRC History, Part 1, Graph 16.2). But by 1950, death from TB was virtually eliminated (TRC History, Part 2 1939 to 2000, Graph 36.3)
The toll from TB was consistently greater in the overall First Nations population. Chief medical officer Peter Bryce calculated that in 1906, the TB death rate in the general “native” population was 34.7 per 1,000 (3,470 per 100,000). Graph 5 in the TRC Summary of the Final Report shows that the rate in the residential schools in that year was around 5 per 1,000 (500 per 100,000). Thus the overall First Nations rate was approximately seven times higher than the rate in the residential schools.
In the 1930s, the TB death rate in the residential schools averaged around 1.5 per 1,000, or 150 per 100,000 (TRC Summary of the Final Report, Graph 5). TRC History, Part 1, page 421, notes: “Throughout the 1930s, the First Nations death rate from TB never fell below 600 deaths per 100,000, while the death rate from tuberculosis for the overall Canadian population fell from 79.8 per 100,000 in 1930 to 53.6 per 100,000 in 1939.”
Thus, while the death rate from TB in the residential schools in the 1930s was about twice as large as that in the general Canadian population, the rate in the First Nations population was at least ten times higher.
As indicated above, the scourge of TB was essentially eliminated in the residential schools by mid-20th century. TB mortality in the First Nations population, meanwhile, continued at very high levels well into the 1950s (TRC History, Part 2,Table 36.1 and Table 36.3).
Death rates from all causes in the residential schools were consistently lower than death rates in the First Nations from TB alone. In 1906, the all-cause residential school death rate was about 15 per 1,000, or 1,500 per 100,000 (TRC History, Part 1, Graph 16.1), while the death rate from TB alone in the First Nations, as noted above, was 3,470 per 100,000. In the five years after WWII, the all-cause death rate in the residential schools averaged around 300 per 100,000; during the same period, the death rate from TB alone in the First Nations population averaged in the high 400s per 100,000 (TRC History, Part 2, Table 36.1).
The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-19 took a heavy toll throughout Canada. Over 600 out of every 100,000 Canadians died from the disease. The toll in the general First Nations population was many times higher. Estimates range from 3,770 per 100,000 (TRC History, Part 1, page 436), to as high as 4,600 per 100,000. By way of comparison, in the residential schools mortality not only from the Spanish flu, but from all causes, was about 5 per 1,000 (500 per 100,000) in 1918, and roughly 8 per 1,000 (800 per 100,000) in 1919 (TRC History, Part 1, Graph 16.1).
The dramatic declines in mortality from TB and other deadly diseases in the residential schools did not come about without active intervention.
In his report to the TRC, “Where are the Children buried?”, Dr. Scott Hamilton wrote that the residential schools administered comprehensive TB drug treatment and inoculation programs as effective medicines became available around mid-century (page 11).
Serious preventive and ameliorative measures against TB actually began much earlier in the residential schools. The 1911 Indian Affairs Annual Report states: “...the greater attention now paid to…sanitation…will before long have its beneficial effect on the general health…The [schools] have the best modern sanitary appliances and outdoor sleeping apartments where children of tubercular tendencies may have the advantage of the fresh air cure.”
In the 1930s, the schools began a program of regular screening of the student body to detect cases of active tuberculosis and bcg vaccinations to protect non-infected students (TRC History, Part 2, page 197).
Many residential schools served as medical centres. The 1932 Indian Affairs Annual Report states, “The affected pupils [in the residential schools] are under treatment [for trachoma], carried out by the nurse or other person in immediate charge, under the direction of the local doctor, and supervised by the Departmental specialist at his periodical visits. The school is utilized as a centre for examination of the surrounding Indian population, and encouraging reports have been received of the interest of the Indians at home having been awakened by letters from their children at school.”
Well into the second half of the 20th century, the residential schools continued their essential role as medical service providers. In a 2017 study, University of Victoria researchers found that students were “selected to attend residential school based partly on their need for medical care that was otherwise unavailable.”` The same study found that at least after mid-century, children who attended residential schools were taller and less likely to be obese as adults, than had they schooled in other environments.
The residential school employees and students were all in close daily contact. For this reason, as well as out of their benevolent concern for the students’ well-being, the staff did their best to ensure that the children under their care remained healthy. They often worked in times of difficult economic conditions and when medical knowledge was primitive by today’s standards, but it is unfair and inaccurate to suggest that they wantonly neglected the well-being of the students.
Regards, Pim Wiebel
Thank you for this helpful summary of the TB facts and figures, Pim. What is the citation for the 2017 University of Victoria study you mention in your second-to-last paragraph? (or just a few more details so that I can search it out myself).
The UVic study is found here: https://www.uvic.ca/socialsciences/economics/assets/docs/discussion/DDP1703.pdf (see abstract and p. 3)
Bryce's calculation of the "native" TB death rate is found on p. 206 here:
https://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/cbmh.13.2.199