Only those who have actively avoided the issue. I was taught it in school, then again during university. The issue has been discussed on radio/TV for decades. At work (government) we all attend aboriginal awareness training, where residential schools are a big subject. It is an acknowledged part of Canadian history. Those who are shocked now are only so because they chose to remain ignorant year after year.
* Many people are shocked and surprised by these findings
* They are sympathetic to aboriginal causes and not sticking their fingers in their ears. They were not trying to avoid it
You are in the educated set (university), work for the government, and are commenting on a text based forum so you probably easily consume and retain text based information. You also had a school that taught death stats specifically (mine didn’t) and are young enough that these stats were known at the time the curriculum was formed.
If most people were like you, these findings would not be headline news. The fact that the finding are surprising sympathetic people should indicate that you’re not the majority.
And it is not fair to people to say they “choose” to remain ignorant because they didn’t pay close attention and integrate statistics at the time the truth and reconciliation report was released.
Do you have no gaps in your knowledge? In particular outside of bookish, text based knowledge, which you are surely top 1% in.
It is impossible to be Canadian without having been thoroughly exposed to the realities of the residential school system. There have been multiple government inquiries. There were reparations paid. There was a truth and reconciliation commission. This is not at all new news.
But it's being presented as new news making people think this is some new discovery, as if unknown murder pits have been exposed. As if it's in addition to what everyone already knew about the residential school system. But it isn't.
Aside from some exaggerated, unverified numbers, there is literally nothing new in these claims. And it has become essentially a PR vehicle, so it's going to percolate for months to come.
I think most people were aware on some level of what residential schools were and had an opinion that bad stuff happened there. I do not think most people knew there was high levels of death. Even though that was quite clear from the report.
The other key thing is social media was not big in the era of the truth and reconciliation report. You could easily tune out the details or take it in passively. But finding the graves now, in 2021, allows for virality.
My argument was that most knew about the schools but not about death counts.
Presented accurately in school? No. Never heard about all the dead children or the abuse. Just this week there was an online course being presented to students in Ontario that was found to require students to list the “positives” of the residential school system. It’s propaganda.
In reality there was a single class in a single school in BC that had such an assignment. Trying to broadly wash that is propaganda. Tiny, isolated case on the other side of the country. Neat.
But clearly a lot of people didn’t know that so these findings are a shock. Probably an instance of “one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic”. Some countable number of graves has a more visceral effect than “disease was rampant in residential schools are up to 40% of children in attendance died”.