Shout it from the rooftops

Kate at SmallDeadAnimals reminds us that the Red Indians who knew the Residential School System the best loved it and didn't want it to go away.

A resolution asking that the Marieval Residental School be kept open as long as the Indian people want it, was passed by the chiefs and counsellors of eight Indian bands at a regional meeting held Thursday.

The meeting was held in the Royal Canadian Legion Hall, with Joe Whitehawk of Yorkton, district

supervisor, as chairman.

Various spokesmen said the pupils are generally children from broken homes, orphans or are from inadequate homes. There is a great need for the school and the need is increasing, rather than diminishing. Many of the children have no other place to stay, as many have only grandparents, who through lack of space, health or age are unable to look after them.

The alternative is foster homes, which will cost just as much money. Children in the residential school get a measure of correction, discipline and religious training and this should be taken into consideration, when plans are under study for the phasing out of the school, the spokesman said.

Seriously, repost this. This deserves to be bigger. A .docx file of the full newspaper report can be found here.

Bonus exposing the lies about "215 or 751 or however many dead injun kids they think they've found now: TNC news has really been excelling at this (this is where their strength compared to Rebel Media lies, for those wondering):

It’s been six weeks since the Chief of the Tk’emlups band in Kamloops, B.C. announced that 215 unmarked graves were found using ground-penetrating radar on the grounds of a former residential school. On May 27, the band said that a preliminary report would be released in mid-June. 

It’s now mid-July, and no report has been released. Multiple emails from the Sun asking for the report have been ignored.

On June 24, another discovery was announced — this time in Saskatchewan, where Cowessess Chief Cadmus Delorme announced an even bigger finding: 751 unmarked graves. 

Media reports were quick to characterize the graves as belonging to children who attended the nearby Marieval Indian Residential School. But according to a band councillor, that’s not necessarily the case. 

It appears that not all of the graves contain children’s bodies,” Jon Z. Lerat told the Globe and Mail, noting that this was also the burial site used by the rural municipality.

“We did have a family of non-Indigenous people show up today and notified us that some of those unmarked graves had their families in them — their loved ones,” Lerat said. Delorme added that oral stories said the graves belong to “both children and adults” as well as “people who attended the church or were from nearby towns.”

Unlike the Tk’emlups band — who claims the unmarked graves were discovered on the grounds of the former residential school — the unmarked graves at Cowesses are in an existing cemetery. Delorme noted that the graves were once marked, but that the markings were removed at some point.