Raising the red flag

 

If you don't live in Canada, you may not be aware that, a month before our national holiday, Canada Day, 215 bodies were found buried in the grounds of the former "Kamloops Indian Residential School". 

All kids, some as young as preschoolers. 

 The crummy thing is, I wasn't surprised. 

150,000 Indigenous children were forced to attend residential schools between the 1870s and the 1990s. 

Estimates very on how many children died while at the schools, the number is probably between 4,000 and 6,000 - possibly higher. 

How did they die? Tuberculosis, a lot of them. The schools were government-funded and run by churches, so they weren't well-funded, and the children weren't well-fed. They were powerless, and miles from home, and in such situations, predators close in. Many were abused, beyond the draconian school rules. Some committed suicide; some died trying to escape. 

And it was deemed too expensive to send their bodies home, so they were buried in the school grounds. 

"I'll bet your school didn't have a graveyard," said a survivor years later. 

So, in the aftermath of this "discovery" - there were more to come, and they'll keep coming - it was decided to forego the Canada Day stuff. Not that much would be going on anyway, given the pandemic. 

I had my second Pfizer vaccination that day, which seemed an appropriate thing, y'know, protecting my fellow Canadians. The clinic was awash with orange shirts. I had to explain why to an English cousin, when I mentioned this on Facebook. 

The same day, also on Facebook, a friend mentioned that she was flying the Canadian Native Flag (designed by Curtis Wilson of the Kwakwaka’wakw People of northern Vancouver Island). Only she didn't call it the Canadian Native Flag, she just posted the picture, like the one above, and a "Facebook Friend" commented, from her home in Arizona: "Yes, the Inuit flag." 

Oh, crud. Well, you'd think I'd know better than to put my oar in --- and you're right; I didn't put my oar in. Someone else did, but she and my friend explained very kindly, that the word was "indigenous". 

Arizona Lady informed the friends that she'd lived in Five Countries, and why would they think she didn't know what "indigenous" meant? 

And my friend, being Canadian, tried to placate her, and Arizona Lady said: "Well, you all are just so smart..." and logged off. 

It would have been such a better idea to blame predictive text...