They were just graveyards. Nothing "mass" about them. A mass grave is where a backhoe is used to open a giant pit and dump bodies in en masse.
These are just individuals dying and graves made for them as needed. Given most of these were run starting in the 1890s and the first-half of the twentieth century, mortality rates were quite high. Reminder: penicillin was only generally available after 1945.
Before that, it didn't matter if you were the US President's son, life could be extremely fragile:
> The general story is well-known: while playing lawn tennis with his brother on the White House grounds, sixteen-year-old Calvin [Coolidge], Jr. developed a blister atop the third toe of his right foot. Before long, the boy began to feel ill and ran a fever. Signs of a blood infection appeared, but despite doctors’ best efforts, young Calvin, Jr. was dead within a week.
A little while ago there was a news article from BC about a former school having 210 graves. People seem to have been shocked that this number was 'high', but it seems that most people didn't do the math: the school ran for over 70 years, and with that many graves, all you need is 3 deaths a year over the decades to get to that number.
Given historical child mortality rates, 3 isn't a crazy-high number IMHO:
Yeah, and then they took little Calvin Jr and buried him in an unmarked grave or dumped him in the Potomac, right? The conditions were considerably worse than those afforded to the President's son, and arguably worse than those the children were taken from (although that's a judgement call). But in any case, we have a different feeling about kids dying in an otherwise abusive/coercive environment than we do about them dying with their families, for some strange reason.
I was correcting a factual error in the GP's statement.
The graves were marked, it's just that it was with wood which has since disintegrated over time. Even stone ones will dissolve eventually. I went to three funerals in 2020 and was at the cemetery for the lowering of the body/ashes in each case: plenty of almost-disappeared graves in cemeteries that are less than a century old (of which many did (used to) have stone markers once).
If I have erred in my statements, provide the correct information.
The shock isn't so much at the number as it is that so few records have been released to indicate who these kids actually were. It seems to be the case that many parents were never notified of the deaths of their own children - they just never saw them again.
I was responding to the assertion of the GP that people who are shocked "didn't do the math", not the appropriateness of the term "mass graves".
There seems to be a bit of an elitist bent to several comments here, implying that anyone who is responding to these findings emotionally must either be thoroughly ignorant or incapable of considering historical child mortality rates.
Surely it's reasonable for people to be "shocked" to find that children in these schools died at a far higher rate than their non-indigenous peers, and were buried on-site, presumably far from their homes, in graves that up until recently their relatives weren't even sure where they were? What is wrong with allowing people to have that emotion?
I'm not expecting lots of records to exist from schools that operated decades ago in very rural parts of Canada. Remember that while some of these schools ran until only a few decades ago, these deaths date back to the 1800's.
Clearly there are very few records. This was detailed in Hamilton's "Where Are The Children Buried", currently linked from the front page of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission reports page[0].
The report also notes that the death rate of children attending Indian residential schools was much higher than the Canadian average at the time, and that most children were not returned to their families for burial.
I think it's fair for people - especially people who haven't read the TRC report - to be upset by these numbers.
"We're shocked at finding graves for kids that we already knew had died, and already knew about where the graves should be, but are really surprised that they actually were there when we looked."
I think you will find that the people who are surprised are not the same people as the people who already knew the kids had died and where the graves should be. The first group is shocked. The second group is grieving.
If the first group realized that the second group weren't actually shocked, the first group would feel intentionally misled.
Especially if they found out the shocking discovery just confirmed what the second group already knew (and was what they'd been told by officials all along).
This is a bizarre complaint. What do you think is happening here? That there is some group of people who are pretending to be shocked, specifically in order to mislead another group of people into actually being shocked, for some nefarious purpose?
In neither the press release from Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc back in May[0] nor today's announcement from Cowessess First Nation[1] is there any claim that this is a "shocking discovery". Most of the Canadian media appears to be reporting on this as the start of a process to help the affected communities grieve and find closure, not as some kind of big, dramatic surprise.
I assume most of the people shocked by these findings are either not Canadian, or just didn't know much about the history of indigenous people in Canada. For those people, I think being upset is an authentic emotion.
The government did a purge of records in the 1930s and 1940s. While storage of information is cheap nowadays, it wasn't always so and sometimes it was decided things needed to go.
It is one thing for a white kid to die from playing golf or tennis, and another to pass laws, giving a free reign to those who are more than willing to torture colored kids to death.
I don't necessarily disagree with the point that mortality numbers may have been inflated due to lack of modern-day medicine, but I doubt access to it would have changed much, given the epidemic of systemic racism and the kind of violent behaviour it has entailed in the past.
They were just graveyards. Nothing "mass" about them. A mass grave is where a backhoe is used to open a giant pit and dump bodies in en masse.
These are just individuals dying and graves made for them as needed. Given most of these were run starting in the 1890s and the first-half of the twentieth century, mortality rates were quite high. Reminder: penicillin was only generally available after 1945.
Before that, it didn't matter if you were the US President's son, life could be extremely fragile:
> The general story is well-known: while playing lawn tennis with his brother on the White House grounds, sixteen-year-old Calvin [Coolidge], Jr. developed a blister atop the third toe of his right foot. Before long, the boy began to feel ill and ran a fever. Signs of a blood infection appeared, but despite doctors’ best efforts, young Calvin, Jr. was dead within a week.
* https://coolidgefoundation.org/blog/the-medical-context-of-c...
A little while ago there was a news article from BC about a former school having 210 graves. People seem to have been shocked that this number was 'high', but it seems that most people didn't do the math: the school ran for over 70 years, and with that many graves, all you need is 3 deaths a year over the decades to get to that number.
Given historical child mortality rates, 3 isn't a crazy-high number IMHO:
* https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041751/canada-all-time-...