Before the priests and the nuns... when every child did NOT matter

Caution: Grisly historical details.

With the focus on colonial oppression as an evil in contemporary society, people who are not aware of history tend to imagine that life was like the Garden of Eden in North America, before those nasty white Europeans arrived.

No. As Hobbes wrote: “Life in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

And it was cruel — especially if you were an Indigenous orphan or disabled.

The Grey Nuns set out from Montreal to go north to help the priests who had established relations with many native tribes. These incredibly courageous women had no idea of what kind of horrors they would face.

But long before it was ever a T-shirt slogan, it turned out that they made sure every child mattered. Let us read from the “The Diaries of the Grey Nuns in the Far North 1876-1917.”

The Missionary Sisters of Mackenzie — of the Sacred Heart Hospital — saw at a glance what a great field of labour awaited their courage and self-denial. They saw that their self-sacrifice had to be the price which would rescue and uplift a race still sunk in barbarism.

One of them wrote in 1867:

"I must give you a few instances to show you what is the depth of the moral misery which we are called on to relieve. What I tell you will shock you to hear, as it sickens me to tell. It was a rather general custom of the savages in these countries to kill, and sometimes to eat, the orphan children, especially the little girls. Religion has made a great change in this respect, but infanticide is still by no means rare. A mother, looking with contempt on her newly-born daughter, will say, "Her father has deserted me; I am not going to feed her." So she will wrap up the little one in the skin of an animal, smother her, and throw her into the rubbish heap…. Now you will quite understand that all these wretched people would rather have given their children to us than have killed them, or let them die."

“The barbarous deeds of fifty years ago are occasionally repeated even now, if the Convent Orphanages are far away. But the poor children are usually saved, to be brought to the Convent by some charitable neighbour, as in the case of Gabriel and Rosalie.”

“Gabriel was about eight years of age when he saw his mother kill his father, and throw his little brother into the fire. He himself was saved from the same fate by his grandmother, who took him to a Sekanais named Barby, who had no children of his own. A few days later Barby's wife sickened and died.”

The Sekanais thought Gabriel had brought bad spirits and so a terrible thing happened. Barby left the child alone on the opposite bank of the river with no food or fire, almost naked.

The Grey Nuns recount that:

“He [Barby] took deliberate aim at him [the child, later named Gabriel] with his gun, whenever he saw the boy wandering around the grave, or coming to the water to drink, or pulling up roots to satisfy his hunger.”

A passing Hudson Bay Company trader, Boniface Laferty, heard of the case from the little boy's grandmother. He saved the child, “then little more than a skeleton, on which vermin and mosquitoes had been trying to feast.”

Documented historical records show that at the time of contact, there was no Garden of Eden and there were none of Rousseau's 'Noble Savages.' Life was, for most, a hunter-gatherer subsistence existence, with callous disregard for ‘the weepers’ — those orphaned in that time. Those children were simply abandoned to trail along behind the tribe, living off scraps of food, shreds of clothing, left to find their own shelter.

The Grey Nuns saved hundreds of these orphans from that tribal abandonment, destitution, demoralization, and worse. And yet, Canada lowered the flag for about six months on false claims of a residential school genocide.

Read history, people. Read it all.

Read about when every child did not matter, except to the “colonizing oppressors” — the priests and nuns who took all the orphans in, with love and grace and gave them the best life that they could, even life itself.

The First Nations tribal alternative was, for most orphans, a life of abysmal destitution and ultimately a painful death.

Sadly, today a high proportion of newborns in dysfunctional indigenous families are brought into the contemporary child welfare system, as a recent report out of Manitoba shows. Maybe it was not the residential school system that created dysfunctional families. Maybe there is a historical antecedent.

It is odd to me, to claim that ‘every child matters’ and focus so much time and energy on the dead, when the living children are in distress

https://www.westernstandard.news/opinion/stirling-before-the-priests-and-the-nuns-when-every-child-did-not-matter/55564