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Wednesday, October 9, 2024
Letter: Atrocities inflicted by men and women of God

Dear editor:

Most of the right things about the inhuman atrocity that were the residential schools are being said in the media.

But often writers and commentators, very carefully it seems, “skate” around the issue of just “who” the teachers were in the many Catholic church-run “schools” that are at the heart of the horrors and are quite rightly castigated by everybody who has taken the time and trouble to look into the matter.

The reality was that these “teachers” were mostly not teachers, but in the case of the Kamloops school and over 40 others, Catholic nuns and priests who may or may not have had any teaching skills at all.

Such skills were, in the concept of the “residential schools,” quite secondary to the objective of “kill the Indian,” which required “sterner” measures.

Those sterner measures included, as ample evidence has shown, an “electric chair,” corporal punishment, deprivation of life sustenance, forced labour, lack of medical care, sexual attacks by priests and nuns, torture by many additional physical and psychological means.

Sterner measures included clandestine burials of little children who died of the atrocities these “men and women of God” inflicted on them.

It is in fact quite painful just to write about this and think of little children being subjected to brutality rivalling Nazi death camps.

And, of course, all this was carried out by Catholic “religious” nuns and priests dedicated to saving humanity by the “love of God.”

Nobody should pussy-foot around this issue: the very people, Catholic priests and nuns, who one would expect to express the love of God to little children did the exact opposite: they practised what amounted to expressions of hate.

We have a long way to go in Canada, given that still today racism is rampant in our society and our Indigenous Peoples continue to be shoved, ever so imperceptibly, to the sidelines.

Kaspar Pold

NOTL

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