Let’s kick this up a level
Hi. I wanted to thank and update everyone who’s supported the campaign so far.
First, some numbers: Two days in, we have 3,296 views, 99 shares, and 404 signatures. Not bad, I'd say!
Second, more about our motivation - especially why we're singling out the Oblates for attention.
Of all Indian Residential Schools in Canada, the Catholic Church operated nearly half (65 of 143, or 45%), more than twice as many as the second largest operator. Of all Catholic Indian Residential Schools, the religious order known as the Oblates of Mary Immaculate operated nearly three-quarters (48 of 65, or 74%) of them.
The Oblates’ singular responsibility for acts of genocide against First Nations alone warrants a demand that they come clean about their Indian Residential Schools. Second, it’s especially unconscionable that the Oblates have failed for thirty years to keep their solemn promise to disclose all records of their Indian Residential Schools. And finally, recent reports of the discovery of many hundreds of unmarked graves on the grounds of three Oblates’ Indian Residential Schools reveal the Oblates’ consciousness of guilt and their ongoing scheme to hide their culpability.
In a news conference (June 24, 2021) to announce the discovery of 751 unmarked graves on the site of the Oblates’ Marieval Indian Residential School, Chief Bobby Cameron, of the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations, demanded “a full, public independent inquiry into the genocide. We need to verify causes of death and identify these children. Our people deserve more than apologies and sympathies, which we are grateful for. Our people deserve justice. Canada can start by handing over all of those records. The Churches can start by handing over all of those records. To all of our allies, we need support as we grieve.”
In the same news conference, Chief Cadmus Delorme, of Cowessess First Nation, revealed for the first time that “In 1970, give or take a year or two, our records were removed from Cowessess. One of our Knowledge-Keepers said that they were moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba. She tried to keep one of those books, when she was a young worker under the Oblates. She mentioned that they were threatening to charge her for keeping those records. She was able to keep one of those books, and we have that information of the others. We have full faith that the Roman Catholic Church will release our records. They have not told us ‘No’. We just don’t have them yet.”
Besides the removal of records, Chief Delorme also revealed that headstones, once marking the graves of children buried at Marieval, had been removed in 1960. “We didn’t remove these headstones,” he said. “Removing headstones is a crime in this country. We are treating this like a crime scene at the moment.”
In an CBC interview that same day, Niigaan Sinclair urged Canadians to come to grips with “the fact that the Catholic Church consciously removed the headstones from those sites, which shows you that this was not just neglect, this is a cover-up. This is a situation in which the Church not only withheld documents in the past, or claimed that they’ve been destroyed, only to have them sent off to, what Chief Delorme said, was Winnipeg, but there is a conscious effort to cover this up, so that Canadians don’t find out the truth of what happened at those schools. That is a key thing here which demonstrates a culpability, and an action involving criminal intent, that is underway by the Churches, funded by the federal government.”
Dr. Sinclair appealed especially to everyday Christians to seize this critical moment and demand that Churches be accountable finally for their complicity in Indian Residential Schools. “Political will can produce anything. You can produce subpoenas for Churches to hand over documents. You could go in there yourself and require those documents to be produced. Unfortunately, you’d probably find that Churches have porous records, they had records that they claimed to be private, things like missionary records or journals, for example, that talk about people’s names, and there may be some need to work with those privacy concerns in some way. But the fact is, do we really want to produce that kind of relationship with the Churches that’s acrimonious and divisive, or do we want the Churches to stand up for themselves, to be the places that Christians purport them to be, which is places of kindness, goodness, the right thing to do. It seems that the Churches are contravening their own belief system by continuing to be silent on the issue of producing documents or being resistant in any way. It shouldn’t be the Churches, it should be Christians who attend these Churches, who demand accountability in their own institutions.”
On this powerful and positive note, I'm aksing you to share this petition with everyone, and with your Christian family and friends especially. Here’s the link: https://www.change.org/p/oblates-of-mary-immaculate-oblates-must-come-clean-now-about-their-indian-residential-schools