It seems it is raining everywhere today. Here in Charlottetown it is pouring rain and cool at 17C. For the trooping of the colours in London today, it was raining hard at times with a high wind. The horses were not behaving and it must have been miserable in parade uniform getting wet on the grounds. The king on his return to Buckingham Palace took the salute from the regiments for 25 minutes in the rain. His son Prince William and Princess Anne on horse back next to him. Queen Camilla was in the carriage but it is not comfortable. Huge crowds everywhere, in a very good mood, cheering the Royals. Princess Catherine appearing for the first time and still on chemotherapy look very good and her 3 children were very well behaved.
We went to Founders Hall yesterday for lunch, the building is the old repair shop of the railway cars turned into a food hall. Watching people is interesting, each outlet has different food offerings, one is Italian style sandwiches, another is stuffed potatoes, Mexican, pizzas, french pastries, vegetarian dishes, Caribbean food, Japanese and a bar with artisan beer. Just watch people, they stare at the menu for 5 or 6 minutes, discussing what the dishes are, never heard of this or that, is it any good and if they might like them. It’s to funny, they are just not sure. It looks exotic and what about the spices. Salt and pepper here is the range of known spices anything else raises eyebrows. Hot sauce is good for hamburgers or a BBQ chicken. Bloody Mary’s cannot be too spicy, the tomato juice is the spice. In the end they may decide to not buy anything, just to foreign. But life is changing nonetheless and more quickly than one thinks.
With the opening of the tourist season, I noticed the fashions, mismatched pants, shorts, tops, bold colours but nothing goes together, this is obviously an internationals fashion trend that has taken off and was brought to us from Ex-pats in Spain.
Currently I am reading a book entitled Grave Error: How The Media Misled Us (and the Truth about Residential Schools) on the history of the reporting in various media outlet on the moral panic in Canada 3 years ago over the so called unmarked graves near residential schools run by the clergy and government. It was the New York Times who first spoke of mass unmarked children’s graves, though no one had spoken of mass graves. This is all it took for hysteria to set in. Other indigenous community started to say they also had discovered unmarked graves using ground penetrating equipment to indicate soil disturbance. The Catholic Church was still grappling with pedophilia scandal and our Prime Minister Justin T. decided to jump on the bandwagon and say that Canadians had committed genocide, our national history was shameful, he ordered that all Canadian flags be flown at half mast for 5 months. This had never happened in the history of the country, Canadians were surprised to say the least about this new version of our national history. Some social activists attacked the very existence of Canada and all non-indigenous Canadians, some 40 million people were thrown in the same bag as white supremacist bent on cruelty. The Prime Minister’s own doctrine was that Canada was a post-national country, we had a diverse culture but no culture in particular, it is all the same according to him and in the Capital Ottawa, you started to hear references publicly that the Algonquin were the host nation and we non-indigenous people basically guests in a non-existing place formally called Canada. The term Turtle Island started to be used to speak of North America, all public venue, be it theatre, symphonic concert, political rallies/ events and gatherings started with a formal declaration acknowledging that all land belonged to the indians ( can’t use that word anymore) and we Canadians had stolen all that we owned. Some Ministers in the Trudeau government started to say that we had to give the land back, which in turn led to a lot of confusion as to property rights. People did ask, do I have to give back the house I bought, my farm, my business? Statue of Canadian politicians, historical figures, Royalty etc, were destroyed by activists and vandals, the police merely standing by. This came during the Covid Pandemic and the occupation of the Capital Ottawa by groups of malcontents. The Prime Minister clearly sided with the indigenous population and gave away billions of dollars in reparation in the hope of reconciling with them. There is still demands for billions in reparation and power sharing with all indigenous groups.
On this third anniversary of this panic, no mass graves and no graves have been discovered. No bodies or human remains have been found anywhere. Chiefs who had spoken at first of murdered and missing children from the closed residential schools, had to admit that nothing was found and also that many stories told to the media turned out to be nothing more than inventions often from elderly people who admitted that as kids they would invent such stories to scare each other as in the case of the Apple Orchard. The Prime Minister got the Pope to come to Canada to apologize to the indigenous groups, they also wanted millions in compensations. It was a sorry spectacle, the media loved it, great headlines. Now three years later, the Chiefs speak of unconfirmed reports and unproven allegations, no one speaks of graves. Many children died prior to 1950 due to tuberculosis which had a very high incidence amongst native people, if a child was ill at school he or she were treated in hospital, the government also had a program of vaccinations against all childhood disease and the rate of mortality fell. As for the so called disappearances, again it would appear they did not happen. Children’s bodies were returned to their families and if not buried in the church yard with simple wooden crosses. Non-indigenous families have come forward and pointed to the graves of their own relatives in sanctioned cemeteries and churchyards, communities used the same plot of land to bury their dead and simple wooden crosses adorned them, with time they would wither away but that did not make them unmarked. There was both in the political commission to investigate the matter this prejudice that white people deliberately mistreated indigenous people. The CBC used its programming to spread this notion that we owed reparation to the indigenous population. Everything else took a back seat in the affairs of the nation. All this reminded me of the 1939 song about Peter Minuit and the island of Manhattan, Give it back to the Indians from the Broadway musical, Too many girls with Lucille Ball.
As for the original apple orchard where the ground penetrating devices was used indicating soil disturbance, it is now known that the area saw infrastructure work and laying of drainage pipes, trees and roots removed, etc. which would lead to soil disturbances. It the case of the pipes, a trench four feet deep was dug and at the time no graves were found. Unfortunately many churches were set ablaze by vandals for no particular reason. This stopped when denounced by native communities. This is one factor which led to the unpopularity with many Canadians, of our narcissistic Prime Minister who enjoyed the limelight of social justice activist. Our countries reputation was damaged by innuendoes, unproven allegations and political agendas. A new book by Paul Wells is out now entitled Justin Trudeau on the Ropes: Governing in Troubled Times. It is 100 pages, Wells is a very well informed journalist and a solid writer who knows his topic. It seems now, unless something drastic happens that in 18 months at the most Justin Trudeau will be replaced by Conservative Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre, a populist who uses the language of ordinary folks and has a strong following leading in the polls by 20 points. That is not necessarily a good thing, Poilievre is the opposite of Trudeau and after 9 years people appear tired of the constant lack of judgement and virtue signalling of Justin.
Larry Muffin At Home 
Notre beau Trudo est bel et bien au bout de son rouleau quand à sa popularité et ses chances à être réélu. Les CONadiens voteront CONnement CON et se surprendront quand Skippy se révelera incapable de faire baisser le prix moyen d’une maison par
200 000 $ ou de faire apparaitre des milliers de logements comme par magie.
LikeLike
Les scandales des enfants morts et des pensionnats pour autochtones: on les entretient avec grand soin car pour une élite des Premières nations, ça paye!
LikeLiked by 1 person
I am mad-jealous about the rain. It is only June and I am already weary of sunshine and cloudless days. The roofers come this week so I should hold off my wish for rain awhile.
LikeLike
I agree totally that the whole issue of ‘unmarked graves’ was driven by a high degree of media inaccuracy. When the news stations first picked up the story, it was so vague and lacking in basic fact checking that it caused a number of people to first assume that these children had been murdered.
On the other hand, during the period of residential schools, it was well known by the federal government that students in these schools were ‘dying like flies’. There were official reports that outlined why the government was mostly responsible for this state of affairs – reports that were ignored and brushed aside. It’s true that most of the deaths were due to diseases but the mortality rate at a residential schools was staggering compared to that of ‘white’ public schools. One needs to examine why there was such a difference.
It started with the dismaying ideology of ‘killing the Indian in the child’ in order to promote assimilation as ‘a final solution to the Indian question’ (yes, the federal head of residential schools actually used those words). This colonial ideal allowed children to be forcibly removed from their families, communities, culture and language, into school where the resources that the government was willing to pay for the ‘care’ for these children was completely inadequate. There are credible accounts from both students and people who worked within these schools that hunger was a constant issue because the government’s per pupil allotment for food was not much better than the level the Nazi gave to inmates in their concentration camps.
Health care was dismal, with little done to protect children from communicable diseases. A recent university study about dental care in residential schools can provide an exemplar of the kind of ‘care’ provided to these students. Because there was a belief that native children had a ‘higher tolerance to pain’ than white people, the government refused to pay for freezing or pain killers. They also wouldn’t pay for fillings so extractions without pain killers was the norm.
With or without ‘unmarked graves’ the treatment of native people in our Country was appalling – of course it wasn’t any better in any other country where European colonization occurred – but that doesn’t really excuse our colonial past in today’s world or negate the need to find ways to address the injustices that still have significant impacts on our society today.
The other truly thorny question you touch on is with regards to ‘land claims’. Unless you believe in the 1493 ‘Doctrine of Discovery’ – a Papal decision that gave European conquerors the ‘right’ to ignore ownership of land by indigenous peoples, there’s still a need to come to terms with land claims. The Crown, prior to the founding of Canada, engaged in negotiating treaties with any number of aboriginal peoples. Many of these treaties were subsequently ignored by both the Crown and our government – especially if it was found later that anything of value was in the land that had been ‘given’ to the natives ‘in perpetuity’. There are also a lot of places where our the Crown, or government, took (stole) land from indigenous peoples without engaging in negotiations or treaties. If someone steals something from you and later apologizes for doing it, will the apology alone mean they get to keep everything they stole? Sounds too much like Vladimir Putin’s ideal to me.
I don’t believe that addressing land claims is going to result in everyone losing their homes – like the news about ‘unmarked graves’ this is also a hysterical claim that prevents dialogue and progress. A good example of where it might actually lead is B.C.’s recent settlement of a lands claim with one of their indigenous peoples that, I think, respects both sides of a complex issue.
When you finish your current book, I’d like to recommend a follow-up (if you haven’t already read it) – a book by Bob Joseph called ’21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act’. It’s a book that caused me to look further into, and wrestle with, indigenous issues.
Not that our current political leader is capable of getting where we need to be as a country (and if the polls are accurate, his replacement will undoubtedly be worse) but let’s face it – it’s not easy trying to balance the injustices of our country’s past with its many successes that most of us enjoy today.
LikeLike
thank you for your comment. I am going to look into your book recommendation. A complicated issue indeed.
LikeLike