Western Standard - October 03, 2024


MORGAN： 'Myths are dominating truth with residential schools'

HANNAFORD： Hard to believe but the Trudeau Liberals are actually at war with free speech Twenty years later, the Alberta Report is Back!

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

200.47

Word count

1,032

Sentence count

55

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I talk about the dark history of residential day schools, and how the government covered up the truth about what happened in them, and the cover-ups that kept the truth hidden from the public for decades.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Ken observed its fourth one, and the truth was often actually nowhere to be found.
00:00:04.700 In fact, myths and fabrications were just more deeply entrenched
00:00:08.260 as Indigenous people were invited and encouraged to share tales of historical abuse
00:00:12.460 while never being challenged on the veracity of their claims.
00:00:15.960 Now, the granddaddy of all those myths is, of course, the false claim of 215 children
00:00:20.260 having died of abuse being buried at the Kamloops Residential School.
00:00:23.240 Now, that hoax endures despite years of passing and not a single body's been found,
00:00:28.740 nor are there any records of children actually disappearing at the institution.
00:00:32.760 The local Indigenous band, though, was given $8 million to investigate the issue,
00:00:36.780 but they didn't really tell anybody what they did with the funds
00:00:38.820 or release any of the conclusions of their alleged investigation,
00:00:42.200 and, yeah, they found the bodies.
00:00:44.080 The claims of abuse, though, they're escalating,
00:00:46.200 as it appears to be like a race between people to recount a historic horror that outdoes prior ones.
00:00:51.500 I mean, one of the enduring and ludicrous claims is that children in Kamloops' school
00:00:55.420 were awakened in the night to go out and bury bodies of murdered children as recently as in the 1960s.
00:01:00.780 Now, if this was true, the RCMP should be exhuming these grave sites
00:01:04.320 and trying to find the perpetrators of these crimes.
00:01:06.480 There's no investigation, of course, because it never happened.
00:01:09.020 That didn't stop the CBC, though.
00:01:10.520 The state broadcaster aired the claim of surreptuously interred children
00:01:15.260 just the other day without questioning it.
00:01:16.940 The mythology isn't just spread through news broadcasts.
00:01:20.960 A Canadian-produced detective series I was watching had a scene depicting
00:01:23.920 an electric chair sitting in the basement of an abandoned residential school.
00:01:27.780 It was explained that the chair was used routinely by priests and nuns to torture students.
00:01:32.340 The electric chair myth is an unfounded story among many
00:01:35.340 that include other alleged atrocities like hanging babies from hooks
00:01:39.420 and forcing children to work in crematoriums in the basements of residential schools.
00:01:43.280 The stories sound outlandish because they are.
00:01:45.680 These things never happened, yet we have Canadian productions reinforcing the belief they did.
00:01:51.180 Then we have the term genocide.
00:01:52.900 It's been improperly applied in Canada for years.
00:01:55.380 With no actual genocide to be found, activists have broadened the definition of genocide instead,
00:02:00.480 claiming cultural genocide had been committed.
00:02:02.660 It's an abuse of the term, and it's an insult to the races and cultures that experienced real genocide.
00:02:07.440 Canada is an imperfect nation, but it's not a genocidal one,
00:02:10.180 and to state that truth is to invite an onslaught of abuse on social media
00:02:14.320 and bring about the labels, of course, of denier and racist.
00:02:17.260 The NDP is even trying to criminalize disputing allegations of Canadian genocide,
00:02:21.540 and their bill to do it might just pass in the Canadian House of Commons.
00:02:24.520 The cycle of victimhood continues to expand as people self-identify as intergenerational victims of residential schools.
00:02:30.900 And one young social media influencer, he was applauded on X for his bravery
00:02:35.160 as he announced his grandparents, uncles, and aunts all went to residential schools.
00:02:39.180 Now, while it's not impossible, it's pretty unlikely that his family members were residential school attendees.
00:02:43.780 Only 150,000 children attended those schools over the course of a century.
00:02:47.800 In the last generation, there were very few who actually attended.
00:02:50.260 But if you listen to the claims of some,
00:02:51.940 it appears as if every Indigenous person in Canada over the age of 50 attended a residential school,
00:02:56.140 and nobody ever questions those claims for fear of being labeled intolerant or insensitive.
00:03:01.540 When I questioned the gentleman's assertion, he responded with a tirade of obscenities and blocked me.
00:03:06.400 Typical response to questions rather than presenting evidence.
00:03:09.000 He also identified himself, though, as a residential day school survivor.
00:03:13.260 What was a residential day school?
00:03:14.680 Well, residential day schools were structures built on reserves
00:03:17.600 where children would leave home in the morning, attend classes, then return home.
00:03:21.480 In other words, they were schools.
00:03:22.740 The only difference is the ones on reserves were under federal management.
00:03:26.140 Most of us did indeed survive school,
00:03:28.040 but we don't have to put the label survivor in front of everything we say.
00:03:31.760 Now, with true residential school attendees becoming actually a rare commodity,
00:03:35.920 race hustlers in the legal world turned their attention to regular schools, and it paid off. 0.56
00:03:40.000 Children who attended these day schools took part in a massive class action suit,
00:03:44.680 which the government settled rather than fought.
00:03:46.960 150,000 survivors of these day schools qualify for payouts between $10,000 and $200,000 each.
00:03:53.480 Now, the widespread in compensation is based on the alleged suffering due to attending the schools.
00:03:58.640 That's quite an incentive for claimants to make up horrific stories about their time in the school, isn't it?
00:04:02.900 And since nobody dares to question the assertions, the stories get wild and unbelievable.
00:04:07.080 Ironically, there probably would have been a class action suit launched if there weren't day schools either,
00:04:12.040 as children would have lost the opportunity to get an education.
00:04:14.700 The provision of education is entrenched in most treaties, actually, because bans signing on to the treaties demanded it.
00:04:19.720 Yes, indigenous people actually asked for the schools.
00:04:24.120 The residential school system was not a success.
00:04:26.440 I mean, there's no doubt there was some abuse, and that the manner of imposing the system caused terrible social damage.
00:04:31.020 That doesn't mean the system was genocidal, though, and we don't have to accept every spacious claim of abuse at face value.
00:04:38.960 Canada's indigenous people are in dire socioeconomic straits, and something must change.
00:04:44.440 But, I mean, things are only going to get worse for them, no matter how much money is tossed their way.
00:04:48.560 To start with, we're entrenching a culture of victimhood based on falsehoods, and it's not helping matters.
00:04:53.480 It's causing social division, and it's led to hundreds of churches being burned or vandalized, and it's costing a fortune.
00:04:58.400 We do need reconciliation, and we need to put the old divisions to rest.
00:05:02.340 But we need the truth first, though, and as long as we continue to let mythology dominate the day,
00:05:06.520 healing and reconciliation are never going to come.