05.30.2021 01:29 PM

Remember this

More than 200 babies and children, tossed into unmarked graves. Unloved, unprotected, unknown.

Some days, we are just as bad as the worst of the worst.

 

8 Comments

  1. dave says:

    “Grim reports that nearly 800 dead babies were discovered in the septic tank of a home run by nuns has set off a round of soul-searching in Ireland and sparked calls for accountability from government and Catholic Church officials.”

    https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/ireland-investigates-alleged-discovery-800-babies-sewer-tank-n123236 Dead for being native, dead for the crime of being born out of wedlock.

  2. Phil in London says:

    Dave, I have no reason to question. Your motive but discussions about the sins of Irish nuns and the strife of the home children are not the point nor appropriate here.

    This is an atrocity on our soil against our neighbours. It is our holocaust. The numbers may seem small but we need to have a sober open discussion and honour these children not detract from the news.

    By all means be outraged at the Catholic Church who let things like this happen around the world, but let’s dig into CANADA’s problem with our native population.

    We get (or did get) a lot of international credit for being the good guys. This story is wrong on so many levels. Fact is this went on for almost a century and no one has ever been held to much account.

    I don’t think we who are alive today need to take on a lot of guilt for what a church organization and government did to these people. BUT, we sure as hell owe the survivors a promise to never let this repeat again.

    I don’t pretend to have a single answer to how we make right our past, I don’t believe that is possible. I don’t think a “what about the home children?” Or “did you hear about the Irish nuns is appropriate here.” I am no woke crowd enthusiast but for heaven’s sake let’s talk about the problem of this story and get it out in the open.

    I believe we owe Native Canadians a place at the table to discuss how we all can live in this great nation together, in this time. WE need to ask how we can make them feel as Canadian as they feel native. We need to do better – a hell of a lot better. Sorry is so lame a word for how I feel.

    I just believe we need to be better and NOT take away from their story today by bringing up other wrongs. It makes what they went through sound like it is less important.

  3. Mark D says:

    It’s worse, Warren.

    200 is our latest discovery.
    200 is one residential school.

    I have been scanning reputable British media. The Guardian estimates around 3200 children died in residential schools throughout Canada. Reuters estimates 4100.

    And this assumes no more suprise discoveries.

    My heart goes out to our First Nations brothers and sisters. As painful as it is for me as a mostly white Canadian, I cannot begin to imagine the pain they must be feeling right now.

    • irreversible road map to freedom says:

      Exactly what I’ve been thinking. This was mentioned on CP24 yesterday. Tip of an iceberg.

    • Mark D says:

      It wasn’t just religious leaders. The government and scientific community are just as complicit. Just discovered these children were reportedly subject to highly unethical scientific experiments:

      https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3941673/

      • True Liberal says:

        National Post
        Saturday, June 19, 2004

        Byline: William Marsden
        A group of orphans are fighting for the bodies of children to be exhumed from an abandoned Montreal cemetery in a bid to discover whether they were the subject of medical experiments. The group has hired a lawyer to ask a court for permission to dig up the bodies of the children, who were also orphans, and perform forensic examinations.
        Rod Vienneau, a spokesman for the orphans, said, “We want to show that these people were the victims of medical experiments such as lobotomies.” There were about 20,000 orphans during the 1940s, ’50s and early ’60s — generally called the Duplessis era, after Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis — who were handed over to various religious institutions.
        Thousands were labelled mentally deficient and sent to asylums and other church-run institutions because the nuns running the establishments received larger subsidies for the mentally ill.
        The orphans’ group claims children buried in an abandoned cemetery in east-end Montreal may have been victims of medical experiments performed at the old Cite de St. Jean de Dieu insane asylum, now Louis-Hyppolite Lafontaine Hospital.
        The group’s lawyer, Daniel Lighter, said, “If there is evidence of this kind of activity, then it would certainly be important evidence in a suit against the government, church and doctors.”

        Mr. Lighter said it will take several months to analyze whether there is enough proof to persuade a judge to order the exhumations. Many orphans were sexually abused and forced to work in slave-labour conditions. Some claim as well that many were subjected to medical experiments inside the asylums.

        Albert Sylvio, 62, was a Duplessis orphan who lived at St. Jean de Dieu in the 1950s. He said that during that time, he transported about 60 bodies of fellow orphans from the operating rooms to the basement morgue. “I undressed them and washed them and prepared them for burial,” he said. “We put them in cardboard boxes. Some of them were children.” He said the bodies were then taken to the cemetery and buried in unmarked graves.

        “There was never any ceremony. Some of these people died on the operating table. Some had been sick and some had committed suicide.” The medical experiments are alleged to have been performed on living orphans.

        Paul St. Aubain, another Duplessis orphan, said he was lobotomized at age 18 at a mental hospital in Joliette called St. Michel Archange. “I wasn’t ill,” he said. “They did it without my consent, without my permission. They were experimenting with me. I was a prisoner.” Mr. St. Aubain, 52, said he spent 25 years in various mental institutions run by nuns in Quebec and during that time saw “other orphans who were lobotomized.”

        He said doctors also gave him electroshock therapy and numerous psychiatric drugs. Mr. St. Aubain now lives on welfare in Joliette. He cannot work. A Quebec law passed in 1942 allowed the nuns to sell unclaimed bodies to medical schools for $10. Many dead orphans, whose names and identities had been changed or erased, were dissected. What was left of their bodies was buried in cemeteries such as St. Jean de Dieu.

        One government registry indicates there were about 2,000 bodies buried at the St. Jean de Dieu cemetery, which locals called the “pigsty” because it was next to a hog farm owned by the nuns. At least 42 were children.

        How many orphans ended up as cadavers for anatomy students is not known because hospital registries have disappeared from government archives or were never properly filled out.

Leave a Reply to Mark D Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published.