Social media textbooks?

[Ben]

I've been having this little kid telling me that in the most recent social media textbooks that they blame christianity for the death of the Native Americans. I don't know if he made this up to win an argument we've been having recently, or he has actually seen this. Is this factual?

[Arrogantstage838]

Factual? Yes.....on many different facets. In total, no. Many other groups are also responsible, from average settler, army private, right on up to Presidents.

The US and Canada BOTH implemented a system to get rid of their "Indian problem". The Residential Schools/Indian Boarding Schools. Government funded, contracted out to various Churches to run. Anglican, Catholic, Unitarian, Presbyterian/Protestant.........Children were taken these schools, at the age of four. Four. Their hair was cut. They were given a biblical name. They were educated in trades...not the sort of education other children across the country were receiving. They were beaten if they spoke their own language. Supplies given to the schools were often sold off....which meant the staff lived comfortably and ate well...but the children were routinely starved, neglected, housed in cramped dormitories...in the same room as sick kids. Many were medically tested on. Given sicknesses on purpose so doctors could study them. Or dentally tested on. Root canal procedures were perfected by practicing them on CHILDREN. Shock treatment levels were perfected by practicing on children. There was rampant molestation. Children would just go "missing". Not runaways, I might add. Children would die of mysterious circumstance, like falling out windows. Buried in mass graves, with no markers.
Who were the staff of these schools? Church officials. Priests, nuns, others affiliated with the Church. Sometimes people hired by the government. In Thousands and thousands of these children never made it out of these schools alive.

Is this ancient history? Nope. The last school here in Canada closed its doors in 1996. In the US....not too more than a couple years before that. The sad part is how few people know about them. The US and Canadian governments have done their best to see to that.