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.
