When the government talks of healing get ready for the wounding.
Oregon might soon have to take its turn in the barrel of the Indian Boarding School grift and local Indigenous activists and professional hand-wringers can hardly wait.
The deliberate moral panic launched on specious evidence for long-made charges of “mass graves” (conjuring up genocidal images of piled bodies) at Canada’s Indian boarding schools that sought to Christianize and assimilate Indian children, “tearing” them from their families (for something other than surgical sexual transitioning, as in our more enlightened era) migrated south of the border, it appears.
Since the George Floyd hoax, the model and mother of all Current Things, any moral con that gains purchase radiates outward over the gaslit globe in a wave, and zombified normies in, say, Portland aren’t even capable of asking why a case of police brutality in Minneapolis necessitates the repeal of law and order here.
The manufactured panic in Canada produced a sinister sounding Truth and Reconciliation Commission, modeled on South Africa’s, to perpetuate the ongoing displacement and impoverishment of native (not “indigenous”) Canadians (Portland’s most powerful progressive, Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, has long sought one for the city).
Modeled, like all Current Thing hoaxes, on the George Floyd hoax, and demonstrating the formerly mainstream left’s new tolerance for violence, the probable hoax of the Kamloops mass grave elicited a wave of arson and vandalism against Catholic churches by outraged malcontents, ignored or encouraged by the media and politicians who were busy fueling the hoax and taking advantage.
And then came the arson. In June, dozens of churches across Canada, most of them Catholic and some of them more than a century old, were burned to the ground. No church was safe. As my colleague Chris Bedford reported at the time, “In Calgary, 10 churches of various denominations were vandalized in a singlen ars night. A few days later, a Vietnamese church was set on fire — just hours after it held its first full service in more than a year.”
Overall more than two dozen churches in Canada have been targeted over the past few weeks — and people are cheering it on. Not just anonymous people, either: On June 30, Harsha Walia, the executive director of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, responded to a story of another church arson, saying ‘Burn it all down.’
Others rallied to her defense. Naomi Sayers, a lawyer and blue Twitter checkmark, said ‘I would help her burn it all down … and also, I would help anyone charged with arson if they actually did burn things.
Naturally this new opportunity appeals to those dismantling the traditional US in, where else, the Department of the Interior, eager to get in on the moral grift:
PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) – As the first step in coming to terms with the nation’s controversial history, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland launched the first investigation into federally run Indian boarding schools last summer –an investigation with strong ties to Oregon.
“For more than a century, tens of thousands of indigenous children were taken from their communities and forced into boarding schools run by the US government,” Haaland stated after the Department of the Interior published the first volume of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative in May.
The nearly 100-page report found 408 Federal Indian Boarding Schools – nine of which were located in Oregon.
“To address the intergenerational impact of Indian boarding schools and to promote spiritual and emotional healing in our communities,” Haaland stated. “We must shed light on the unspoken traumas of the past.”
The familiar fallacy deployed in apologetics for Black! dysfunction is applied here: to understand the present we must account for the past. Ergo, Black! criminality is due to Jim Crow and redlining. When in fact it’s self-evident by now that Jim Crow and redlining were due to Black! criminality.
There’s a lot of unfortunate misery in the Indian population that their conspicuous defenders will now attribute to the boarding schools in the same fashion. The fact seems the boarding schools were an earnest effort to assimilate the Indians–there are Indians who went to the schools who praise them still–and they failed to do that for the same reason Canadian society is “failing” to assimilate the Indian tribes now; they are generally less well-suited for modern Western society. Any sympathy for them or similarly afflicted minorities that doesn’t operate on this racist assumption is false.
The moral panic proceeds despite not a single body having been found–and nobody’s asking why. The Federalist:
In the seven months since this shocking news broke, not one body has been found, and not a single shovel-full of dirt has been excavated from the site in question. Contrary to the worldwide media coverage last summer, nothing, in fact, has been “discovered” on the grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School.
In a healthy society, this would be a scandal. A story that grabbed headlines for a week and inspired arson attacks that destroyed dozens of churches in Canada turns out to be based on flimsy, unexamined evidence at best, and an outright, pernicious lie at worst.
You might remember the overblown coverage. CNN breathlessly reported on what it called the “gruesome discovery.” The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation appended a warning label to its coverage, saying “this story contains details some readers may find distressing.” The Washington Post declared that news of the mass grave had “dragged the horror of Canada’s mistreatment of Indigenous people back into the spotlight.” Every corporate outlet took it for granted that a mass grave containing hundreds of corpses had indeed been discovered—corpses of children, no less. They reported it as fact.
Politicians quickly fell in line. Canadian Prime Minster Justin Trudeau tweeted that the discovery “is a painful reminder of that dark and shameful chapter of our country’s history.” British Columbia Premier John Horgan said he was “horrified and heartbroken.” The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights called it “a large scale human rights violation,” and called on Canada and the Vatican to investigate.
No one in authority addressed the church burnings, and the putative Pope came all the way from Rome to personally abase himself. It’s not clear he’s acknowledged the church attacks at all.
No attempt to exhume the Kamloops site has been taken or is planned–and with the story accepted as gospel interested parties now have no interest in an investigation that might prove them wrong.
From new research revealed at a July 15 press conference last year, the anthropologist scaled back the potential discovery from 215 to 200 “probable burials.” Having “barely scratched the surface,” she found many “disturbances in the ground such as tree roots, metal and stones.” The “disruptions picked up in the radar,” she says, led her to conclude that the sites “have multiple signatures that present like burials.” But she cannot confirm that until the site is excavated – if it is ever done. A community spokesperson says the full report “cannot” be released to the media. For Chief Casimir, “it is not yet clear whether the continuing work on the Kamloops site will involve excavation.”
Here the Biden Administration jumped in with Secretary Deb Haaland’s (Laguna Pueblo and Progressive tribes) Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, which is to tour the country drumming up guilt. “[T]ens of thousands” of Indian kids were taken from home to attend the schools for “over a century” we’re told. That doesn’t sound very widespread. Here in Oregon some of the local tribes are using the occasion to complain about losing federal recognition in the 1950’s.
I have no opinion on that. I do restate here my prediction that after a breakup of the US the reservations are uniquely suited to survive. I’m certain at least some of them are working on their plans to establish their sovereignty post-America. If not, I offer my services if they let me join the tribe.
A well-ordered res might be a good place to be soon.
Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland, proud Ojibwe, has been actively involved in the schools initiative. Here he is in traditional garb:
I think I’ll look good in native garb.
untethered 