Goodbyes and nostalgia

Law school is over for most of my friends. I just have a few last assignments...boo

This weekend, we had quite a bash. It was like we were new and we were old friends. Talking to everyone and sharing hugs, laughter, secrets.

What a day.

P.S. Still obsessed with CSR.

sLEEP & torture

Sleep the stuff of dreams and resilience
Thing I lack
Weather for stormy mood or twisted dream
I stare on and on waiting
I can't get that sleep groove back

And on a different note Canada is now actually by word of the Prime Minister and Minister of Defence defending its practice and complicity in torture. Professor Attaran, of Ottawa U was way ahead of the curve on Canada's policy on prison of war transfers in Afghanistan.

Tuberculosis, Indigenous Canadians and Genocide

I almost threw up this morning reading this article in the Globe and Mail. But I guess I don't even deserve to talk about my feelings because my pain must be so trivial compared to the suffering of Canada's Aboriginal Peoples. Canada, Ontario, Ottawa, the World are already awake. We know this terrible shit happened to other human beings. Let it never happen again. Reinstate the Kelowna Accord. Change the Indian Act to something like the Aboriginal Canadian Act. Get your shit together Canadian Government or else the protesters blocking the roads and railroaders will be reinforced by all of the uptight "wasps", yuppies, and starbuck's socialists.

Natives died in droves as Ottawa ignored warnings

Tuberculosis took the lives of students at residential schools for at least 40 years

BILL CURRY AND KAREN HOWLETT

From Tuesday's Globe and Mail

April 24, 2007 at 1:30 AM EST

OTTAWA — As many as half of the aboriginal children who attended the early years of residential schools died of tuberculosis, despite repeated warnings to the federal government that overcrowding, poor sanitation and a lack of medical care were creating a toxic breeding ground for the rapid spread of the disease, documents show.

A Globe and Mail examination of documents in the National Archives reveals that children continued to die from tuberculosis at alarming rates for at least four decades after a senior official at the Department of Indian Affairs initially warned in 1907 that schools were making no effort to separate healthy children from those sick with the highly contagious disease.

Peter Bryce, the department's chief medical officer, visited 15 Western Canadian residential schools and found at least 24 per cent of students had died from tuberculosis over a 14-year period. The report suggested the numbers could be higher, noting that in one school alone, the death toll reached 69 per cent.

With less than four months to go before Ottawa officially settles out of court with most former students, a group calling itself the Friends and Relatives of the Disappeared Residential School Children is urging the government to acknowledge this period in the tragic residential-schools saga – and not just the better-known cases of physical and sexual abuse.

Last week, Liberal MP Gary Merasty wrote to Indian Affairs Minister Jim Prentice asking the government to look into the concerns. Mr. Prentice's spokesman, Bill Rogers, told The Globe that departmental officials have been asked to meet with native groups.

Some of their stories, including tales of children buried in unmarked graves beside the schools, are told in a new documentary by Kevin Annett, a former United Church minister, titled Unrepentant: Kevin Annett and Canada's Genocide.

Mr. Annett, as well as some academics, argue that the government's handling, combined with Canada's official policy of removing children from their homes for 10 months each year to attend distant schools, does indeed fit the United Nations definition of genocide.

The UN definition, adopted after the Second World War, lists five possible acts that qualify as genocide, of which killing is only one. The fifth act is described as “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

...

RAISING CONCERN

January, 1919

Duncan Campbell Scott, a senior Indian Affairs official, talks about the inadequacy of the school buildings in a memorandum to Arthur Meighen, then Superintendent General of Indian Affairs. “They were unsanitary and they were undoubtedly chargeable with a very high death rate among the pupils.”

December, 1920

A report to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs says 33 students at the Sarcee school near Calgary are afflicted with tuberculosis.

February, 1925

W.M. Graham, Indian Commissioner for Saskatchewan, says in a letter to Mr. Scott: “We will have to do something to stop this indiscriminate admission of children without first passing a medical exam. ... I quite often hear from the Indians that they do not want to send their children to school as it is a place where they are sent to die.”

February, 1925

Russell T. Ferrier, Superintendent of Indian Education, writes to Indian commissioners and agents, saying each child should be pronounced fit by a medical officer before being admitted to a school. “When a pupil's health becomes a matter of concern soon after admission, the consequent parental alarm and distrust militates against successful recruiting.”

March, 1932

The Department of Indian Affairs announces that as a result of spending cutbacks, it cannot authorize admitting children with tuberculosis to a sanatorium or hospital unless the patient requires “care for relief of actual suffering.” Karen Howlett

Web sites of Tim

So I have since forgotten about blogging for a while and then become addicted to website design. This will be my last post at this site.

Please visit an excellent CSR consulting site that I am working on.

If you are interested in the recent Canadian CSR Roundtable Report and Recommendations, see a report prepared, by your's truly Tim Brown. Comments and feedback are appreciated.

By the time you read this a more activist site on Corporate Obligation will be in action