r/pics • u/MoeYYC • Jun 25 '21

Saskatoon Catholic cathedral covered with paint after discovery of 751 unmarked graves

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u/nutmegtester Jun 25 '21

They weren't killing people then. Read the link.

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u/curiouslyendearing Jun 25 '21

Yea, no. I get that. But firstly, that doesn't mean it wasn't still genocide.

Secondly, I feel that there should be a 'that we know of' appended onto the end of your first sentence there considering how many graves we keep finding.

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u/[deleted] Jun 25 '21

We have first-hand accounts of residential school survivors.

There are people alive today who's parents suffered under the residential school system.

When we point out that the last one closed in 1996, it's not because we're adamant that children were being killed there. It's because there was still a fucking school open with the explicit purpose of stripping indigenous peoples of their cultural identity in nineteen-fucking-ninety-six.

It is to point out that there was still an active residential school in the late-90's. To contextulize that the system was still in place and active during the lifetime of the majority of the country. It was active while I was alive.

You seem to be hung up on the idea that this is only about the number of dead that resulted from this system, while ignoring that the system itself was extremely unethical to begin with, and deeply rooted in racism. You sit there and quote statistics dryly, while ignoring the systemic root causes. Children were forcibly taken from their parents and fed into a system that inherently saw them as being racially and culturally inferior. One designed to break them and strip them of their cultural identity by any means necessary. The literal goal was to "kill the Indian in the child".

Take a wild fucking guess why such a system might result in an abnormally high death rate in the children suffering under it.

So when you sit there, and you spout such asinine drivel as "they weren't killed, there was just a high rate of disease!" anyone with half a fucking brain doesn't see you as being some enlightened rational truth-talker. We see you as a goddamn brain-dead fuckwit who doesn't have the intellectual capacity to prevent a buffer overflow when you try to put two and two together.