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In the past month, 3 burial sites on Indian Residential School lands have been revealed in western Canada. A total of 1070 graves have been found and only 78 have actually been documented. IRSs had no apparent policy for burying deceased children, according to one historian.
Much research has yet to be done as we don't know what period of time the burials covered. For instance, 215 deaths in Kamloops, if it turns out covers a period of 100 years, including the Spanish Flu Pandemic, could not be considered excessive - just over 2 per year. But the fact that the graves are unmarked, not even identified as a graveyard, and the deaths are not documented anywhere, apparently, is unforgivable regardless of who is responsible.
Why so many sexual predators at Indian Residential Schools
escaped punishment
An estimated 5,000 people committed a sex crime at a residential school during
the system's 100 year existence, but fewer than 50 have been convicted
Author of the article: Tristin Hopper
The National Post
Publishing date: Jun 10, 2021
Tony Charlie, a Kuper Island residential school survivor, becomes emotional as he recounts his abuse, at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings in Duncan, B.C. in 2012. His abuser, Glenn Doughty, spent only three years in jail for a a string of Kuper Island sex assaults lasting nearly 20 years.
PHOTO BY LYLE STAFFORD
One of the most horrific aspects of Indian Residential Schools — and the one that took the longest to be publicly revealed — is that virtually from their inception they were institutions awash with child predators.
Schools didn’t bother performing even the most rudimentary background checks on potential new employees and they paid such piddling wages they would take almost any willing recruit. Students were kept constantly hungry and were relentlessly cowed into meek obedience through corporal punishment, both of which would be ruthlessly exploited by abusers.
And as church-run institutions for much of their existence, abusers within Indian Residential Schools were protected by the same culture of secrecy that is now known to have protected sexual predators at church-run facilities around the world.
“The matters of sexual acts involving students were almost never brought to the police and even less often prosecuted,” reads a 2017 study of Indian Residential School abuses. “Typically, teachers or staff were invited to seek employment elsewhere — rarely did their record of malfeasance follow them.”
70% Sexually abused at some schools
Virtually from the outset, a shockingly large proportion of the 150,000 Indigenous children sent to residential schools were subjected to rape and molestation from principals, teachers, dormitory supervisors and even maintenance workers and janitors. At some schools, upwards of 70 per cent of students faced some form of sexual abuse. - Like a candy store for perverts!
Nevertheless, as Canada once again grapples with the legacy of Indian Residential Schools, it’s remarkable how few of the system’s abusers have faced even the most tokenistic punishments for scarring a generation of Indigenous youth.
Unfortunately, Tristan, as you allude to below, it was not one generation of youth scarred. Residential schools ran for about 100 years across Canada making for several generations of youth, what? 5? And then much of that abuse made its way back into First Nations communities where inter-generational abuse still scars them today. I am convinced that many of the child suicides happening today in Indigenous communities are a consequence, at least in part, of child sexual abuse that has its roots in Indian Residential Schools.
When former Indian Residential School dorm supervisor Arthur Plint was sentenced in 1995 for more than two decades of sexual abuses against children, Justice Douglas Hogarth described him as a “sexual terrorist” who had exploited a system that was “nothing more than institutionalized pedophilia.”
Arthur Plint threatens a photographer with his cane after arriving at the Port Alberni Courthouse.
PHOTO BY NICK DIDLICK/VANCOUVER SUN
Between 1947 and 1968, Plint exercised total dominion over students at Alberni Indian Residential School: Bribing children for oral sex with candy, brutally beating anyone who tried to escape his predations and enlisting teams of young boys who would bring him new victims. “At twelve years old I began drinking alcohol to forget,” one of his victims later told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
By the time Plint was brought up on charges in the mid-1990s, most of his victims had taken their own lives or died of alcohol abuse, according to coverage of the trial by Windspeaker.
It was this case, more than any other, that would push Canada towards a public reckoning with the traumatic legacy of Indian Residential Schools. As for Plint himself, he got 11 years in jail but still died a free man after he was released after eight years of incarceration at age 85. A parole board approved Plint’s release on the grounds that his advancing age had given him a “lack of motivation” to participate in prison programs.
Oh, gosh, that poor guy. A lack of motivation must be worse than hundreds of sexually abused children. The Canadian Justice System - good grief!
In this 1995 photo from Port Alberni, B.C., artist Arthur Thompson, right, gives the thumbs-up while getting a hug from his wife Charlene after testifying about the child abuse he received from Arthur Plint at Alberni Indian Residential School. PHOTO BY NICK DIDLICK/VANCOUVER SUN
In 2016, private investigators contracted by the federal government identified 5,315 people — both students and staff — who are believed to have committed sexual abuse at a Canadian Indian Residential School. They weren’t up on criminal charges; they had been tracked down to see if they would be willing to testify at hearings determining compensation for residential school survivors.
Despite this, fewer than 50 people have ever been convicted for a sex crime committed at an Indian Residential School, according to analysis by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Among those handful, almost all are sex offenders who spent mere months in prison for actions that damaged the civic life of whole Indigenous communities.
Another former employee of Alberni Indian Residential School, Douglas Haddock, got 23 months for abusing children over a six-year period starting in the late 1940s. Richard Donald Olan, a teacher at Alberni Indian Residential School, was convicted of five counts of “gross indecency” against children – including a practice of “signing out” children from the school to abuse them at his home over weekends. By serving his sentences concurrently, however, Olan was out of prison within two years.
William Peniston Starr was convicted of abusing 10 boys over 20 years at Saskatchewan’s Gordon Indian Residential School – but he would later admit to abusing hundreds of others. “We’re talking getting buggered and oral sex. The whole f—ing deal,” one of the boys targeted by Starr, Ben Pratt, said in 2000.
Gordon Indian Residential School during the time of Starr’s employment there.
PHOTO BY UNIVERSITY OF REGINA
Sentenced to 4.5 years in jail in 1993, Starr was out by 1996. When more than 100 of his victims then filed a civil suit, Starr said he was “surprised and disappointed.”
The now-free Starr told Windspeaker in 1997: “I pleaded guilty, I was incarcerated and I’m still in treatment — what more can I say?”
Gerald Mathieu Moran abused children throughout the early 1960s at two residential schools, including Kamloops Indian Residential School. Twelve of those instances netted him convictions in 2004, each carrying a three-year sentence. However, because they were served concurrently Moran was up for parole within a year.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Catholic priest Harold McIntee would sneak into the dormitories at St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School outside Williams Lake, B.C., slip into bed with pre-pubescent boys and fondle them under their pyjamas. Or, he would lure boys for oral sex with the promise of candy. Later in life, he would repeatedly orally rape a 13-year-old Indigenous boy who had come to his parish office for help after facing a prior incident of sexual abuse. McIntee got two years in jail and when he died, his obituary made no mention of his decades of sexual abuse.
In just these individual cases, the abusers left a trail of cultural destruction still felt in First Nations communities. “You tore communities apart with your acts,” one victim of Plint would tell him in court. Multiple Plint victims would speak of their confusion and shame turning them into domestic abusers and — in two instances — of victimizing children themselves.
One of the boys “checked out” by Olan for a weekend of rape would later sob so hard during his Truth and Reconciliation testimony that he would vomit.
Indian Residential school survivor Sheri Lynne Neapetung tells her story of abuse during testimonies at
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission into residential schools, in Montreal, Thursday April 25, 2013.
PHOTO BY PHIL CARPENTER/THE GAZETTE
For girls, the abuses of residential school would result in a wildly disproportionate number of Indigenous women entering the sex trade. At a Truth and Reconciliation hearing, Elaine Durocher said that she didn’t get any formal education at Saskatchewan’s Fort Pelly Indian Residential School, but learned many of the dark lessons that would directly lead to years in the sex trade. “Once I knew that I could touch a man’s penis for candy, that set the pace for when I was a teenager, and I could pull tricks as a prostitute,” she said.
To this day, research out of UBC has found that women who had a parent who attended a residential school are 2.35 times more likely to be sexually assaulted.
As for why so few abusers have faced punishment for their actions, the sexual predators who ran through the Indian Residential School system benefited from the fact that so many of their victims ended up dead, homeless, incarcerated or addicted to drugs. For those willing to step forward with charges and relive the traumas of the abuse, the almost universal result was years of court action resulting in a sentence amounting to only a few weeks of jail time per victim.
“The Canadian legal system failed to provide justice to Survivors who were abused,” read the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. “When, in the late 1980s, that system eventually did begin to respond to the abuse, it did so inadequately and in a way that often re-victimized the Survivors.”
The Commission heard about hundreds of instances of sexual abuse — many spoken publicly for the first time — but did so at the expense of systematically tracking down the individuals responsible. In order to maximize the number of people willing to testify, the Commission’s mandate specifically barred it from identifying abusers unless they had “already been established through legal proceedings.”
“In keeping with this instruction, this report does not identify or name alleged perpetrators of sexual or physical abuse,” wrote the commission’s final report.
Good grief! However, we can comfort ourselves with the knowledge that justice will be meted out, if not in this lifetime, then in Eternity.
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