Too little way too late.

>Finland and Sweden haven't always played nice with each other

Uh... what history books are you reading? That's how I'd describe the relationship between Britain and France. Sweden and Finland though? Two peas in a pod by comparison.

Those with no real values and dollar signs in their eyes.

I went to a kinda fundamentalist Protestant private school (which was chiefly attended and operated by United Church members), and as one of the few people from a Catholic background, I can remember two occasions where I was explicitly mocked and derided for my family’s faith from staff members there. I will never forget that. It was so humiliating and insulting. Overzealous, insecure adults going on power trips about how their only somewhat different brand of the same religion is superior to 10 and 12 year olds. Super pathetic.

Other students there never cared for anything like that, because most of the kids there couldn’t even tell you what denomination their family was. But lemme tell you as a Catholic at a Protestant school, it was no distinct pleasure being there and in the crosshairs when those over-religious nutjobs showed their true beliefs.

I’m an atheist now though, and have firmly been for about 15 years. I was always hesitant and sceptical — I even remember in Grade 1 we were read a cartoon, kid-friendly version of the Adam and Eve story in the school library, and I distinctly recall thinking it was nonsensical and far-fetched. Obviously one can’t adequately express that at all at such an age, but I never firmly believed. Of course I had to keep that shit a tight secret. Regardless, what will irk me until the end of my days is the lengthy rap sheet of crimes the Catholic church committed over centuries. It is truly and deeply disgusting. I am so glad to no longer be affiliated with that horrible institution, which is all lovey-dovey now, but only is because it can no longer arrest, torture, or execute us for not believing in its dogma.

Dude! I did my aforementioned project on the Plains Cree people(s) and of the central Canadian prairies! High five!

>kids in school today might have a better understanding given access to knowledge, information sharing, social media etc.

Yes, absolutely. The world is really at our fingertips with the internet. It’s never been a better time to be a curious learner.

>I think the first time I used Wikipedia was also in 2006

Ah yeah, those were the days. Probably the exact same year of first use for me too. Back when every teacher disavowed Wikipedia as being this grossly unreliable source. Funny how it has now become a globally revered one. Even just a few years ago when I was doing my master’s, I occasionally had professors either openly using Wikipedia themselves or referring someone to use it. It is a fantastic and incredible utility — imperfect from time to time, but it is devoutly moderated and a place where one can almost always find substation from reliable source material, especially for larger and more popular topics.

I’m from the GTA, which is pretty much determinable as the most left-leaning socio-political reach in the whole country, so I can imagine that maybe influenced why the topic was discussed for me back then. Hbu?

I should mention that this was not covered at great length. I would say probably only a few classes were spent mentioning it. We spent more time talking about Rosa Parks and MLK Jr during black history month (February) the year before in Gr 5.

So I really, really don’t want to be that guy, but it’s important to discuss that the numbers are still pretty uncertain. See this comment from a few months ago, for example, which highlights some of the issues.

Furthermore, the unmarked graves are not so much unmarked graves as they are graveyards which used to have markings but which now no longer do. These sites were well known to their respective local communities before the enormous news and headline eruptions of the last year. Part of the reason many of these are unmarked today is because out in the prairies especially, headstones were historically very expensive and difficult to acquire. Wooden crosses were erected for the dead — a practice that was still common out that way until around the 1960s, I believe, for virtually everyone. So basically all of the graves were actually marked in the past, and the crosses removed after they deteriorated. Nothing out of the norm for old graveyards. Cadmus Delorme, Chief of the Cowessess First Nation, has even publicly asked people to stop calling these “mass graves” because they simply aren’t what those words imply, but rather just regular graveyards, albeit unmarked.

Speaking of virtually everyone — one of the major problems I personally have had with all this news is that many of the news sites/stations even misreported these as mass graves. Mass grave implies mass murder, and bodies being callously dumped into a hole in the ground. This is not the case for a single one of these sites, and furthermore, many of them are/were normal community graveyards used by peoples of both white settler and indigenous extraction, adults and children alike. Furthermore, to date insofar as I am aware, not a single body has been confirmed as a specifically indigenous child, partly because exhumations have not been made, and because the ground penetrating radar can often even misread tree roots in a similar way to human bodies. And those numbers are the graveyard totals, many of which may very well be of deceased white people who were local to those community graveyards.

Was residential schooling wrong? Absolutely, yes. Were its intentions wrong and did they pursue a policy of intentional cultural genocide? Once again, absolutely yes. But do we know everything clearly enough to determine how many children died? Actually unfortunately no, we do not know that. Hopefully that can be conclusively determined in the future, but for now, there is actually and sadly a shocking amount of misinformation out there revolving around this issue. And there are still other things out there surrounding the issue which need to be further investigated too.

Would you consider 2006 a few years ago, in this context? Because I was in Grade 6 then and we learned about it at that time. I even did a short project presentation in my social studies class which was partly on residential schooling. Maybe my school just happened to be ahead of the curb here though, but I kinda doubt that. And even then, I’m quite confident that my parents (both boomers) knew all about this well over 20 years ago too.