May 29, 2021 Genocide…

215 bodies were discovered buried at the Kamloops residential school grounds. 215 lost souls. The poor students, some as young as three, have been forgotten and ignored for decades.

It is a sad day in the history of our ‘great’ nation.

Canada has been on a path of reconciliation. We have been faced with our nations abhorrent treatment of the indigenous population that lived on this land for generations prior to the arrival of European settlers. If we don’t face our past and understand it we will never be reconciled with our history.

The guilty parties in the genocidal treatment of the natives that lived on this land before the white-man must be brought to account. The damage will never be repaired and the victims will never be receive justice. All that can be done is to admit what happened was real, was wrong, and will never happen again.

The worst criminals in this organized oppressive effort at assimilation was the Roman Catholic Church. The children of a once proud and noble race were forced from their homes and taken far away to be ‘educated’ by these supposed godly people. People that thought nothing of raping the youth they were put in charge of. Nuns and Priests would routinely abuse and starve the children in their care and if they got sick or died they were put in unmarked graves and disappeared like animals brought to slaughter.

There is no excuses for the horrors perpetrated across our beautiful nation. A beauty that disappeared when the children were taken from their families in an effort to wipe their culture off the face of the earth. Yet the Canadian government for the last century has ignored the atrocities that happened under their power. Even as late as the 1970’s the residential schools operated with impunity. Worse still is during World War II , when Canada was fighting a great evil across the Atlantic, children were dying in Canada under such similar circumstances.

Shame.

We must face the shame of our past and do what we can to find justice for it. The poor souls that died needlessly in Kamloops and disappeared without any trace deserve some form of justice. They can never be brought back but they must be remembered.

Sadly, when I read the comments in the Calgary Herald on the articles about this tragedy, far too many people want to find ways to justify what happened. There is no justification for what happened to those lost souls. One such person wanted to blame the “liberal” media for blowing it out of proportion… there is no proportion that can be held up to the loss for so many families. These were the sisters, brothers and children of real people. The conditions they were forced to live under were intolerable and unacceptable tor a twentieth-century world. This action by the Canadian government and the Roman Catholic Church was wrong on all levels and must be identified as such.

There are no excuses.

I am saddened by the news of the tragic discovery. I am saddened more by anyone that could find an excuse for the treatment these people suffered. The effects of the residential school system will last for generations. The natives of our great land lived for over a thousand years in harmony with nature. They had a happy existence that was symbiotic with the natural world.

Then came the Europeans.

Now our natural world suffers at the hands of those that would conquer all. We spiral out of control, the climate is changing faster than it can be sustained. A new disease has swept across the globe and the world has lost it’s balance. Who is to say the native culture should have been assimilated? We should have taken the best of the culture that was here and learned from it.

We need to find a balance and look after our natural world. We must learn from our history, even the most awful parts of it. We need to change our ways.

Before it’s too late.