CBC News has examined 33 Canadian churches that burned to the ground since May 2021. Just two were ruled accidental.

Investigators have determined that 24 were deliberately set while others are still under investigation. Some researchers and community leaders suggest Canada’s colonial history and recent discoveries of potential burial sites at former residential schools may have lit the fuse.

Archive

  • Drivebyhaiku@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    15
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    11 months ago

    Yeeeeaaaahhh no. The reason the churches are burning is because Canada is in the midst of coming to terms with a massive genocide that didn’t end until the 1990’s that was spearheaded by a joint effort of the Catholic Church and the Canadian government to rip Indigenous children from their families, remove them from their cultures and languages, forcefully indoctrinate them with the idea they were dirty barbaric and sinful while abusing them and then covering up the deaths of thousands of children many of whom were buried in unmarked graves and downplaying the intergenerational trauma caused to individuals and families.

    For more than a few years there have been a lot of memorials with very small shoes and a lot of people who are depressed when another grave site near a church run residential school is discovered with another couple hundred little bodies. It’s kind of a reap what you sow situation for Canadian churches at present. Some are completely unapologetic for the role they played and when there’s this much resentment and anger about how we were all made complict via our ignorance some are likely to feel that matches are more effective than arguements.

    • rbesfe@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      arrow-down
      11
      ·
      11 months ago

      The cultural genocide aspect of residential schools ended well before the 1990s, every uneducated virtue signaller like yourself should do some deeper reading into what the last school was actually like in its final years

      • Drivebyhaiku@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        11 months ago

        It isn’t about the last, it’s about the whole cultural impact since the beginning. The last gasp is just the final shameful icing on the cake. The effect of the schools is still very real and present in our modern day society and the rolling damages did not end with the closures.

        But then I don’t expect callous intolerance signallers who read history only to find ways to excuse themselves from personal responsibility in making anything better to care. You are too busy drowning in doxastic anxiety and attempting to self-soothe by lying to yourself that nobody is actually deeply perturbed by this, they just are pretending to care for appearance sake.

        • rbesfe@lemmy.ca
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          arrow-down
          3
          ·
          edit-2
          11 months ago

          Being precise about the dates when cultural genocide ended vs when the last residential school shut down does not imply that I think it was a non issue or that I think I shouldn’t care about what happened.

          You should calm down and reflect on why you decided to automatically ascribe such extreme and awful viewpoints to a stranger in the internet who never mentioned them.

          • Drivebyhaiku@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            11 months ago

            Gee, think maybe it was the immediate jumping to call me uneducated and claiming that I only care because I am somehow performing for attention that got my back up?

            I have family members currently working on the GIS investigatory teams and I know how emotionally difficult the work has been for them given what they find. Your "It wasn’t actually that bad " rhetoric isn’t welcome.