In a previous podcast, I spoke with historian Sarah Nickel about the discovery of the remains of as many as 215 children at Kamloops Residential Schools in British Columbia. Nickel provided an excellent primer on the history of residential schools, the culpability of the churches that ran them, and how they fit into a multi-generational government program of forced assimilation.
As more graves continue to be discovered, the horrors of residential schools are gaining international attention. The American Conservative recently ran a piece by Declan Leary arguing that the Catholic Church bearse no responsibility for the deaths in the schools and that any harm done to multiple generations of Indigenous children was “worth it” in order to bring them to Christ.
Leary’s article is very bad, but worth analyzing. I sat down with the historian Robin Ganev (who also happens to be my partner) to talk about it.
The claims Leary makes are ludicrous and false. But they also speak to a larger push to recast the residential schools issue into a cultural war framework. Robin and I get into this important development in the podcast. In the meantime, here are some excerpts from the piece so you can see for yourself.
The Meaning Of The Native Graves
They're good, actually.
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It is very important to note that the entire story is made up. First, we have always known that many children died in the residential schools, which were active through the 19th and 20th centuries. Child mortality was relatively high during that period to begin with; Indian mortality overall was astronomically high; and the Church-run schools for native children were systemically underfunded by the government, resulting in subpar facilities and inadequate medical care. Second, the sites almost certainly include the graves of Christian adults from the neighboring communities, as Chief Cadmus Delorme of the Cowessess First Nation admitted with respect to the Marieval Indian Residential School, where an estimated 751 burials were detected by radar last month. The “mass graves” of public hysteria are, in fact, the ordered and intentional burial sites of people we always knew were dead, and who died of more or less natural causes. In more literate times, we might have called that a cemetery.
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This is not to discount the deaths of children altogether. Of course, it would have been better if each and every one of the First Nations tykes Christianized by the union of Church and state had lived a long and happy life. But it is absolutely to discount the blame fixed on the Church by vicious opportunists. If anyone is at fault here—and the residential school system, for all the good of its evangelizing purpose, was hardly without flaws—it is, without a doubt, the secular authority.
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Whatever sacrifices were exacted in pursuit of that grace—the suffocation of a noble pagan culture; an increase in disease and bodily death due to government negligence; even the sundering of natural families—is worth it.
(This post edited by Emily M. Keeler)
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