Lindy Kato (Writer)

Health warning: If you are already depressed then reading this can do you no good at all.

I have been mulling more than is good for me. Mostly about dead people. There are dead people in psychiatric hospitals all over the world, mostly in unmarked graves. There are deaths without burial records and missing bodies on every continent. One of the most heartbreaking though is the artwork of copper cannisters containing the cremated remains of unclaimed bodies from the Oregon State Insane Asylum from between 1883 and the 1970s.

The cannisters have corroded https://davidmaisel.com/works/library-of-dust/

Then there are around 800 mothers, babies and children who were buried – reportedly in a septic tank between 1925 and 1961 in Tuam, County Galway in western Ireland. I had heard about this many years ago but it came back to mind because the go ahead has been given to dig them up. Work is due to start on the 16^th of July. The site is in the grounds of a mother and baby home run by the nuns of Bon Secours.

I saw the movie, The Magdalene Sisters it came out in 2002. In fact I left before the end because it upset me too much but I know it ended badly for the girls of the real Magdelene laundries. The Magdalene Laundries were operated by four religious orders (The Sisters of Mercy, The Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, the Sisters of Charity, and the Good Shepherd Sisters) (Justice for Magdalenes – established 2003). Ten thousand young women, pregnant out of wedlock and forced to work in the laundries are documented – but this is likely to be a serious underestimation. The laundries were supposedly closed by 1996 but who really knows. Even if they did, by them many of the girls (possibly by then old ladies) would have been institutionalised.

Southern Ireland has to be the worst because this went on for so long and involved neglect and abuse, and made worse by being framed as Christian charity, which I will come back to. Many years ago though, and back in the UK, my Nan was upset after visiting an old friend she hadn’t seen for fifty years. She said her friend had got herself into trouble. We all know it takes two for this kind of trouble. When Nan was a girl, and children (they were children) became pregnant they disappeared. Marriageable age for girls up until 1929 was twelve, but if the male in question had scarpered, the chances were the girl would end up in the workhouse. By the middle of the twentieth century these girls would likely to have been moved to the County Lunatic Asylum as the workhouses were closed. Deliberately out of area, a geographic cure for an embarrassing problem. Nan could never have stayed in touch.

With the push to close the asylums following Enoch Powell’s 1961 speech, women who were pregnant on entry but not insane (though they probably were by then) were some of the first to be shifted out. Actually it was decades before the asylums really began to empty in earnest, but these ladies had already paid the price. Nan was upset because her friend, now discharged from the asylum, was a wreck. She had been moved into a flat with three other elderly ladies. They couldn’t cook, shop, manage money or catch a bus. This was in the name of progress.

Just to be gloomier still there are the Canadians. Like most countries discovered by Europeans, Canada had a resident population before they came bringing disease and muskets. Canadian children were taken under the auspices of assimilating them into Euro-Canadian society, much like the stolen generation of Australian aboriginal children. Some four thousand (this is a guess) are missing. The Canadian residential school system was funded by the Canadian government but run by religious orders, Roman Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian and United religious groups (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_school_system# ).

Just to be clear, New Zealand’s history isn’t any better, I found this little gem from a 1966 government paper by a Dr. Isaac Featherstone.
“The Māoris are dying out, and nothing can save them. Our plain duty, as good compassionate colonists, is to smooth down their dying pillow. Then history will have nothing to reproach us with.”

New Zealand dealt with the assimilation issue by land grab and pepper potting, i.e. isolating families within settler enclaves with the idea of assimilating them into European culture.

Not everyone even wants to be a European. I don’t think that occurred to anyone back then.

On the good news front, I have a new grandchild so there are reasons to be cheerful.