Re: Cartoon, page 27, June 29 Albertan
“I don’t lie, I just make the truth more interesting”. I first encountered this saying when my mother came to live with us after being hospitalized with pancreatic cancer, and I am always amazed at the different ways this can be done.
One of the easiest ways to make things more interesting is to leave out important facts, and I find the news media doing this in their coverage of the residential schools.
The fact that children died needlessly separated from family is bad enough, but portrayals like those of your June 29 cartoon go beyond the pale.
As I understand ground penetrating radar, it would not give us a body count in a mass grave, do to get a body count in a mass grave we would have to do an excavation.
In Saskatchewan the local Chief said there were no mass graves, just graves that the headstones had been removed from.
According to him, back in the 60’s a priest who couldn’t get his way in a dispute with the tribe showed his love for God and mankind by having the headstones bulldozed.
This is bad enough, and both he and the cat skinner (tractor operator) should face charges of desecrating the graves, but it is a far cry from mass graves or unmarked graves.
It also causes me to wonder about the other sites. Are these mass as your cartoon portrays, were they unmarked, or are they unmarked due to neglect or the actions if some self-righteous idiot.
I was visiting with a friend the other day and he expressed the anguish he feels for his aunt. She left her family in the east and came west to work in a residential school.
She loved those kids and I think it’s time we quit accusing everyone involved with either sexually abusing them or physically abusing them or clubbing them on the head and throwing them in a hole out the back door.
Marvin Engel,
Didsbury
