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Hey remember when they found over 200 bodies of native children buried behind a residential school and the world cared for… what, a week?
They’ve counted about 6,000-7,000 now, for those of you who do still care
It should NOT fall on Indigenous people’s shoulders to keep this known still. We’ve been doing that for generations at this point and NO ONE wants to listen to us.
We’re tired, mourning and constantly reopening our trauma and pain to keep people caring about us. It’s terrible.
I should start by noting that I am white, and not Canadian, and that if op wants me to remove this comment for any reason, please let me know.
This is a map of all the residential schools in Canada:
[link to the article it’s attached to, it’s interactable there, so you can get a better look around]
Each dot on this map represents a residential school. Blue dots mean the school is considered completely searched. Yellow dots mean they are either in the process of being searched or there are plans to be searched. Red dots indicate that no search has happened and that no search is currently planned
There were more than 130 residential schools in Canada. This map suggests that only six have been fully searched, and a little more than a dozen partially searched (I counted 15 yellow dots). That leaves at least 109 schools completely untouched.
Let that sink in; if 6,000-7,000 unmarked, indigenous children’s graves were found by searching less than a fifth of all the schools, how many are still undiscovered.
Wikipedia estimates that the body count could be over 50,000, and honestly, that could be a low estimate
[ID: A map of Canada with dozens of dots on it, 6 of which are blue and 7 of which are yellow; the rest are red. Later there is a screenshot from wikipedia reading, “Estimates range from 3,200 to over 50,000 children that were killed. Most of the recorded student deaths at residential schools took place before the 1950s. /end ID]
The residential school system was a calculated, open, and forthrightly declared attempt at the total genocide of all indigenous peoples in this country. It was literally meant to wipe them out entirely, through a combination of attrition and assimilation.
Never forget that this is what Canada is really built upon.
These are the residential schools in the U.S. I’ve mapped out the ones in California and there are articles about burials on these sites, some marked and some not.
I hope Secretary Haaland’s Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative investigates every single one; their report is Due on April 1, 2022,
reminder that genocide doesn’t just include ending people’s lives, it includes eradicating their culture. forced assimilation of an entire people is an attempt at genocide.
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from twitter user deejaygeejaygee
it just gets better
and better
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*chanting quietly* tree law tree law tree law tree law
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i keep seeing that picture of the Chinese railway employee (Han Junjia I believe, if the People’s Dailt article I found is the same as the post I’m thinking of) posed in front of a steam locomotive in the 80s when he first started work on the railway side by side side a more modern picture of him in front of a high speed train. i don’t think the post is that complicated- it like illustrates the development of china and the rapid transformation of the network and the country. from the 1980s to the current day -but the “before” picture - in the 1980s - is like. not the place where the Chinese state railways started and is worth discussing because it is an impressive development which I’d imagine a lot of the people who see it take for granted.
the locomotive is a JF class. the class of locomotive which would become the JF was originally designed and built in America and sent to Manchuria to work on the Japanese colonial railways and designated “Mika” or ‘Mikako". After World War I, Japan assumed operation of the Sifang locomotive shops built by the Germans during their occupation of China, which was then used by Japan to produce Mikas of the same design as those orders from the United States. After China was liberated by the PLA the railways were recategorized and standardized and the Mika was renamed JF standing for - Jie Fang (Liberation). Spare parts leftover at the Sifang Locomotive Works from the Japanese Occupation at the Sifang Locomotive works were used to produce the first locomotive produced in the People’s Republic and the first truly indigenous locomotive - JF no 2101 - which would enter service on railroads run for the benefit of the country and its people rather than colonial powers. The JF would be the backbone of the Chinese railway in the early years of the People’s Republic as the railway network grew and the country rapidly industrialized. it was a reliable design examples of which lasted in service for at least 86 years. by 1980 the entire railway network had undergone a drasric transformation compared to just 40 years previously- from one with locomotives built by colonial powers to work on colonial railways to domestically produced locomotives to work on railways which were for the benefit of the country itself and not a colonial power.
even at the time the “before” picture in the aforementioned post had been taken, there had been people who had witnessed a massive and almost unimaginable transformation within the Chinese railway network. who started as employees in Japanese colonial railways or German colonial locomotive works who ended their careers building locomotives in not only a newly liberated country but a worker’s state. and i think that’s as impressive if not more impressive than the high speed rail construction.
