Residential school starvation made Indigenous children disease-prone survivors of a true conspiracy

Evidence

Here in so-called British Columbia (a province whose very name is a humiliating colonial mash-up of the British Crown and Christopher Columbus), it seemed as if the buried worlds upon which our settler state was built were rushing to the surface. The deaths of these children and the subsequent cover-ups were true conspiracies, and now they could no longer be denied. Grand Chief George Manuel, who helped found the modern Indigenous rights movement, attended the Kamloops school. “Hunger is both the first and last thing I can remember about that school,” he wrote in his memoir. “Not just me. Every Indian student smelled of hunger.” Weakened bodies made Indigenous youth more vulnerable to disease; Manuel himself contracted tuberculosis at age twelve and lived with disability for the rest of his life. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 848