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Interior Secretary Deb Haaland Announces Native American Boarding School Investigation [esquire.com]:

Sooner or later, somebody finds where the bodies are buried.

For an institution based on the concept of resurrection, Holy Mother Church certainly hasn’t grasped the concept that the dead do not always stay buried. Its complicity in colonialism—cultural and otherwise—mixed with its own millennia-old perversity toward human sexuality has led it into horrors that, in their own way, rival the crimes committed against children, and covered up, that have come to light over the past 20 years.

The scandal in Ireland surrounding the network of “mother and baby homes,” in which thousands of babies died [thejournal.ie] and were buried in unmarked mass graves, has roiled the already tenuous relationship between HMC and the country the government of which deferred to the institutional Church for far too long. And, in recent weeks, Canada has found itself confronting the ghastly history of the “residential schools” established for its Indigenous children in large part to teach them how not to be Indigenous anymore. (This, of course, is also something with which the Irish of several generations ago had experience, thanks to the kind ministrations of Her Majesty’s Government.) Over the last couple of weeks, hundreds of unmarked graves have been found at the sites of several residential schools containing the bodies of children who died while being held there. From the CBC [www.cbc.ca]:

Many … are members of the Catholic Church, he said, and are still grappling with the news from last month that a preliminary scan uncovered the remains of as many as 215 children [urldefense.com] buried at a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C., about 200 kilometres north of Hedley. Earlier this week, the Cowessess First Nation said a preliminary scan discovered hundreds of unmarked graves [urldefense.com] at the site of the former Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan. Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, president of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, previously told CBC News there are "mixed emotions" about the Catholic Church among Penticton Indian Band members. Phillip said some members of the community have "an intense [urldefense.com] hatred for the Catholic Church in regard to the residential school experience.”

And now, in the forests of British Columbia, the churches are beginning to burn.

Two more Catholic churches on reserves in British Columbia's southern Interior burned down Saturday morning. Lower Similkameen Indian Band Chief Keith Crow says he received a call at about 4 a.m. PT that the Chopaka church was on fire. By the time he arrived about 30 minutes later, it had burned to the ground. "I'm angry," Crow said. "I don't see any positive coming from this and it's going to be tough.”

"It's devastating. You know, we do have a devout Catholic following here in our community," he said Monday to Chris Walker, the host of CBC's Daybreak South. "I really don't want to see any separations in a community.” Crow said he later received a call from the Upper Similkameen Indian Band, near Hedley, telling him a church on that reserve had burned down as well. The Upper Similkameen Indian Band confirmed that St. Ann's Church was destroyed overnight. A representative for the band said officials are currently working with RCMP at the site of the fire.

In my experience, Canada has taken its obligations, treaty or otherwise, to its First Nations people a little more seriously than we have. All of which is to point out that this particular crow is coming to sit on our capitol very soon. From theNew York Times [nytimes.com]:

The initiative is likely to resemble a recent effort in Canada, where the discovery of the remains of 215 children at the site of a defunct boarding school rekindled discussion of the traumatic history [urldefense.com] and treatment of Native populations.

The United States will search federal boarding schools for possible burial sites of Native American children, hundreds of thousands of whom were forcibly taken from their communities to be culturally assimilated in the schools for more than a century, the interior secretary announced on Tuesday. Addressing a virtual conference of the National Congress of American Indians, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland said the program would “shed light on the unspoken traumas of the past, no matter how hard it will be.”

“I know that this process will be long and difficult,” she said. “I know that this process will be painful. It won’t undo the heartbreak and loss that so many of us feel. But only by acknowledging the past can we work toward a future that we’re all proud to embrace.”

If you want an example of why elections count, and why a diverse Cabinet counts even more, Secretary Haaland launching this initiative is all the proof you need. The process is not only going to be painful, but ugly, and the inevitable backlash even more so. Given how well folks have taken to the "1619 Project," and its undeniable truth that, in great measure, slavery built this nation, it will be interesting, not to mention disgusting, to see what excuses angry white people will concoct once the bodies start coming out of the ground on this side of the border, the lies and the crimes coming up with them like the roots of old poisonous trees.

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