Jonathan Kay on Twitter - "The Canadian Museum for Human Rights falsely claimed that the remains of 215 people had been found. Twitter has now provided "added context" in regard to this misinformation."
The truth about Canada’s Indian graves - "The young anthropologist who conducted the GPR search later added a note of caution: only a forensic investigation could confirm that these were indeed burials. But a moral panic had already been unleashed... Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau set the tone of the public response on 30 May by ordering Canadian flags to be flown at half-mast on all federal building to honour the “215 children whose lives were taken at the Kamloops residential school”, thus elevating the possible burials to the status of murder victims and making Canada sound like a charnel house of murdered children. Unprecedented in Canadian history, flags remained at half-mast until Remembrance Day, 11 November, and were returned to normal height only after the Assembly of First Nations gave its OK... Sixty-eight Christian churches, mostly Roman Catholic, were vandalised or even burned to the ground. Many of these were historical church buildings still used and revered by native people. The pretext for arson and vandalism was that the Kamloops Indian Residential School had been run by a Catholic religious order, as had 43% of all residential schools. Imagine the outrage if 68 synagogues or mosques had been vandalised and burned. Yet the attacks on 68 Catholic churches passed with only mild criticism... At her original press conference, the Chief of the Kamloops Indian Band called these findings unmarked graves, and the media, politicians, and even Pope Francis ran with the story without waiting for proof. Similar claims from the chiefs of other Indian reserves ran into grave difficulty (no pun intended) because the GPR research was conducted in whole or in part on community cemeteries located near the sites of residential schools. It would hardly be surprising to find burial sites in a cemetery! But again, since no excavations have been conducted, it is not known whether these unmarked graves contain the bodies of children. North American Indians did not conduct burials; they usually exposed the bodies of the dead to be worn away by predators and the elements. Christian missionaries introduced the practice of burial. But Indian graves were usually marked by simple wooden crosses that could not long withstand the rigours of Canadian weather. Thus Indian reserves today contain probably tens of thousands of forgotten unmarked graves of both adults and children. To “discover” these with ground-penetrating radar proves nothing without excavation. Second, there are no “missing children”. This concept was invented by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), whose members spoke at various times of 2,800 or 4,200 Indian children who were sent to residential schools but never returned to their parents. Indeed, some children died at residential schools of diseases such as tuberculosis, just as they did in their home communities. But the legend of missing students arose from a failure of TRC researchers to cross-reference the vast number of historical documents about residential schools and the children who attended them. In the fake news stories, the “unmarked graves” are presumed to be populated by the “missing children”, who died at residential school. Lurid tales of torture and murder, of babies thrown into the furnace and hanging from meat hooks, make the stories more colourful. However, the notion of missing children cannot stand up to critical scrutiny. Indian parents, like other parents, loved their children and certainly would have noticed if they went away to school and never came back. But no inquiries about missing Indian children were ever filed with the police. Moreover, children were carefully tracked in the residential school system. Similar to boarding schools all over the world, each child received a number upon admission for keeping track of clothing and other possessions. The federal Department of Indian Affairs also recorded students because it paid a per capita subsidy to the schools. It reviewed admission records meticulously because it didn’t want to pay for the white and Métis students who sometimes got into the residential schools, even though they were supposed to be only for Indians. On the other side, the residential schools were equally motivated to keep track of students because their income depended on the per capita subsidies. If students disappeared, their subsidy would have decreased. Third, stories about Indian residential schools are almost always accompanied by the frightening claim that 150,000 students were “forced to attend” these schools, but the claim is misleading at best. Scholars generally agree that more students attended day schools on Indian reserves than went away to residential schools. Moreover, a large number didn’t go to any school at all. It wasn’t until 1920 that school attendance was made compulsory for Indian children, and enforcement was often lax. It was estimated in 1944 that upwards of 40% of Indian children were not in any kind of school. For students who did attend residential school, there had to be an application form signed by a parent or other guardian. Many of these forms still exist and can be seen in online government archives. The simple truth is that, despite allegations of physical and sexual abuse, many Indian parents saw the residential schools as the best option available for their children. Cree artist Kent Monkman’s famous painting The Scream, showing missionaries and mounted policemen snatching infants from the arms of their Indian mothers, is a fever dream of the imagination. It is not even close to an accurate depiction of historical reality, not even if taken metaphorically. How could the fake news story of unmarked graves, with its attendant legends of missing children ripped from the arms of their mothers, have gained such wide currency among political and media elites? The short answer is that it fits perfectly into the progressive narrative of white supremacy, of the white majority in Canada oppressing racial minorities. But there is also a specific etiology of the unmarked grave story. Prior to 1990, residential schools enjoyed largely favourable coverage in the media, with many positive testimonials from students who had attended them. Indeed, alumni of the residential schools made up most of the emerging First Nations elite. Then Manitoba regional chief Phil Fontaine spoke on a popular Canadian Broadcasting Company radio show about how he had suffered sexual abuse at a residential school... Ultimately about $5 billion in compensation was paid to about 80,000 claimants, and Prime Minister Harper gave a public apology for the existence of residential schools in 2008. Harper might have thought that the compensation payments and his apology would be the end of the story, but it was only the beginning... Harper’s government offered some resistance in court, but the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau, elected in 2015, preferred to settle out of court. Billions of dollars more are being paid out as a result. Against this background, the claims of unmarked graves are a new money-maker... Fake news does not arise and thrive in a political vacuum. While progressive ideology makes academia and the Liberal government a receptive audience, the indigenous industry has an obvious financial stake in driving the story. As long as the dollars flow, expect more stories about unmarked graves, yet no excavations to test the truth of the stories."
Once you pay the Danegeld, you'll never get rid of the Dane
Kamloops mass grave debunked: 'Biggest fake news in Canada' - "The band called the discovery, “Le Estcwicwéy̓” — or “the missing.” What’s still missing, however, according to a number of Canadian academics, is proof of the remains in the ground. Since last year’s announcement, there have been no excavations at Kamloops nor any dates set for any such work to commence. Nothing has been taken out of the ground so far, according to a Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc spokesman... The Canadian government and provincial authorities pledged about $320 million to fund more research and in December pledged another $40 billion involving First Nations child-welfare claim settlements that partially compensate some residential school attendees. Pope Francis issued a formal apology on behalf of the Catholic church, which ran many of the residential school facilities and asked for God's forgiveness. He said he planned to visit Canada later this year to further assist in healing and reconciliation. But a group of about a dozen academics in Canada don’t believe the whole story. “Not one body has been found,” Jacques Rouillard, who is a professor emeritus in the Department of History at the Université de Montréal, told The Post. “After …months of recrimination and denunciation, where are the remains of the children buried at the Kamloops Indian Residential School?” Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc spokesman Larry Read confirmed to The Post this week that no bodies have yet been exhumed from the Kamloops school and no dates have been set to start excavations. He added that the report showing the results of the ground-penetrating radar (GPR) has not been released by the band but may be at some point in the future. Rouillard, who first made his case for what he said was a total lack of evidence for the mass graves in a January essay, doesn’t deny that serious abuses may have occurred at residential schools. But he and others question the highly-charged narrative about Kamloops school that includes children being murdered and buried in what some past school attendees say was an apple orchard. “They use a lot of words like ‘cultural genocide,’” Rouillard told The Post. “If that’s true, there should be excavations. Everything is kept vague. You can’t criticize them. Canadians feel guilty so they keep quiet.”... Tom Flanagan, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Calgary, isn’t buying any of it. “This is the biggest fake news story in Canadian history,” Flanagan told The Post. “All this about unmarked graves and missing children triggered a moral panic. They have come to believe things for which there is no evidence and it’s taken on a life of its own.” Strangely, Rouillard, Flanagan and their associates have an ally of sorts in Eldon Yellowhorn, a professor and founding chair of the Indigenous Studies department at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. Yellowhorn, who grew up on a farm on the Peigan Indian reservation with many family members who attended residential schools, is both an archaeologist and anthropologist. He is part of the Blackfoot nation. He’s been searching for and identifying the grave sites of indigenous children at residential schools in Canada since 2009 after being hired by Canada’s powerful Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Many of the graves he’s identified at residential schools in other parts of the country, though, come from actual cemeteries and it’s not always clear how they died. Some of those found had succumbed to disease, Yellowhorn said, citing one cemetery where it became apparent many children perished from the Spanish flu a little over a century ago... As Yellowhorn sees it, the actual evidence for the mass grave at the Kamloops site is thin. “All the radar shows you is that there are anomalies or reflections,” he said. “The only way to be certain is to peel back the earth and ascertain what lies beneath. We have not gotten to the point where we can do that. It’s a huge job.”... Canadian professor Frances Widdowson said that no one dares question indigenous leaders in Canada these days, which makes it difficult to check their claims about buried remains of children. “Knowledge Keepers, after all, cannot be questioned, because to do so would be perceived as ‘disrespectful,’” wrote Widdowson in “The American Conservative” in February. Widdowson is a former tenured professor at Mt. Royal University in Calgary. Widdowson wrote that “lurid” talk of buried indigenous children has circulated for more than 25 years and is “now firmly ensconced within the Canadian consciousness.” But she said there’s still no hard evidence. The Canadian professors also take issue with reports that at least 150,000 Indigenous children were forced to attend residential schools, which is now accepted as gospel in Canada. Flanagan and others say the number is misleading at best — because a large percentage of Indian parents willingly opted for residential schools as they were the only way for their children to get an education... The nearest school to where his family roamed as nomads was 300 miles south... “The idea that we could walk a few blocks to school or take the bus to high school was an unimaginable luxury, we couldn’t conceive of it,” he said. So in order to receive an education, Highway said he entered the Guy Hill Indian Residential School in Manitoba on September 1, 1958. Highway, who wrote about his sub-Arctic childhood in last year’s “Permanent Astonishment,” told The Post that he credits his years spent at Guy Hill for his success in life... Highway said the Guy Hill school wasn’t perfect and that he witnessed and experienced some abuse. But “I didn’t see any strange deaths,” he said. “A lot of the white people there were kind. The education I got there…set me up for life.”"
From 2022
The year of the graves: How the world’s media got it wrong on residential school graves - "there was something utterly surreal about last year’s eruptions. It’s difficult to see how either truth or reconciliation had anything to do with it. One of the most totemic images from the turbulent summer of 2021 depicted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau holding a teddy bear, kneeling at a little flag marking the site of a grave near the former Marieval residential school on the Cowessess reserve in Saskatchewan’s Qu’Appelle Valley. Except it wasn’t a just-discovered residential school burial ground. The graveyard where Trudeau knelt was a Catholic cemetery, a community cemetery. Children and adults, Indigenous and settler, were buried there, going back generations. The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, the successor to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, lists nine students who died at Marieval in the century between the school’s opening and its closing in 1997... The Cowessess people noted from the outset that they didn’t discover any graves; the crosses and headstones had gone missing under disputed circumstances decades earlier, and ground-penetrating radar had been brought in to enumerate and pinpoint the location of each burial. Cowesses Chief Cadmus Delorme told CBC News: “This is a Roman Catholic grave site. It’s not a residential school grave site.” Cowessess elder and former Marieval student Lloyd Lerat said the depiction of the cemetery as a burial ground for residential school children took on a life of its own. Lerat told Jorge Barrera of the CBC’s Indigenous unit in Ottawa: “We’ve always known these were there.… It’s just the fact that the media picked up on unmarked graves, and the story actually created itself from there because that’s how it happens.” The Marieval uproar was similar to other gravesite-discovery shocks that played out sequentially in the national and international news media last summer: it wasn’t the Indigenous people directly involved who made the disturbing claims that ended up in the headlines. From the beginning, the local Indigenous leaders tended to argue for careful, thoughtful and precise language. It was Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc Chief Rosanne Casimir who pointed out, after the first shocking headlines: “This is not a mass grave, but rather unmarked burial sites that are, to our knowledge, also undocumented.” What made last summer’s upheavals different from previous “overdue reckoning” episodes wasn’t just the innovation of ground-penetrating radar in the search for the remains of the children who died after being enrolled at residential schools. It was also that the initial “mass grave” references appeared to lend credence to a QAnon-like conspiracy theory popularized by a defrocked white United Church minister in the 1990s. Among his many baseless claims was that there was a country-wide archipelago of secret mass graves containing the remains of thousands of children murdered by priests, and behind the scandal was a vast cover-up orchestrated by Indigenous leaders, prime ministers and the Vatican. Another key difference from earlier “reckonings” was that the residential schools’ legacy was widely interpreted in the lexicon of culture-war hyperbole, with Indigenous people largely portrayed as victims or truth-tellers about the nature of Canada as a white-supremacist, colonial settler state. Fractious divisions among and between traditional historians and a new breed of critical-studies academics, centred on theory-encumbered disputes about whether Canada should be understood only as “genocidal” in its relationships with First Nations, also had a lot to do with it. The local Indigenous leaders most directly involved in last summer’s “discoveries” tended to be the most cautious of all the various participants in the rancorous public debates. In some cases, those local leaders had never even intended to draw any public attention to the “ground truth” work they were overseeing at the residential school sites that ended up the subject of all those shocking headlines. The archaeologists and ground-penetration radar (GPR) specialists engaged by those First Nation communities were similarly circumspect about the success of their efforts to locate gravesites, let alone verify persistent, macabre stories about secret graveyards and ritualized night-time burials of murdered residential school students. Even so, in the days following the story out of Kamloops, veteran Liberal politician Carolyn Bennett, serving as Crown-Indigenous relations minister at the time, expressed the hope that the news would be a catalyst, like the murder of George Floyd — the unarmed Black man murdered by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in May 2020... This is directly related to something else that has been going on throughout North America. Traditional journalism is undergoing a rapid and debilitating decline along with public trust in the “mainstream” media. The United States has lost 1,800 newsrooms over the past 20 years. In just the year leading up to the Kamloops story, 50 community newspapers were closed in Canada and 2,000 journalism jobs were lost. In these impoverished conditions, it’s much easier for journalists to construe events in such a way as to uphold an ideologically rigid “narrative” than to go about the hard work of building true stories from the construction material of hard facts. The empty space left behind by once-thriving newsrooms has been increasingly taken up by a constellation of advocacy-journalism startups and hybrid digital platforms intent upon throwing conventional democratic values off balance. Moscow’s RT news network (only recently jettisoned from cable offerings in North America, following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine) and Beijing’s network of propaganda platforms devoted a great deal of effort last summer to hype the “Canadian genocide” story line. The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab found that right through the summer, the Chinese government’s propaganda channels were bursting with accounts of Canada’s residential school uproars. Within two months of the initial “mass grave” headlines out of Kamloops, the Chinese Communist Party’s various multilingual propaganda sites had carried more than 90 stories about the graves. The manic opinion-making function associated with the rise of social media networks also had a lot to do with last year’s residential-school agitations. In a 2017 article titled “Moral Outrage in the Digital Age,” in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, Yale University neuroscientist Molly J. Crockett noted that the prevalence of potent, outrage-inducing online content requires close attention to the way new globe-encircling technologies “might transform ancient social emotions from a force for collective good into a tool for collective self-destruction.”... The burial was in an old cemetery originally set aside for white settlers, in 1865, nearly half a century before the residential school was built. There had also been a hospital at the site from 1874 to 1899, and it was around that time that Ktunaxa people began to bury their dead in the cemetery. The residential school was in operation from 1912 to 1970, but nobody could say whether any residential school students were buried in its unmarked graves. After the single burial was exposed in 2020, the community employed ground-penetrating radar to survey the site. The survey suggested the presence of 182 graves that had long lost their wooden crosses. That’s where the 182 “unmarked graves” in the headlines came from. “Graves were traditionally marked with wooden crosses and this practice continues to this day in many Indigenous communities across Canada. Wooden crosses can deteriorate over time due to erosion or fire which can result in an unmarked grave,” Chief Pierre explained. “These factors, among others, make it extremely difficult to establish whether or not these unmarked graves contain the remains of children who attended the St. Eugene residential school.”... At Shubenacadie, extensive surveys came across the graves of Irish immigrants from a century before the old residential school there first opened its doors. Their graves were found in the area where former students had reported a burial site... in the Canadian senate, Beijing-friendly senators Yuen Pau Woo and Peter Harder used the pretext of the residential schools legacy to condemn a motion that would have replicated a House of Commons resolution declaring Beijing’s treatment of the Uyghurs of Xinjiang a genocide. China’s foreign ministry praised the no-vote senators as “people of vision.” In the Canadian Press news agency “newsmaker of the year” balloting, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, the two Canadians released last September after nearly three years’ imprisonment in China, came in third, with nine votes. Front-line health workers came in second, with 14 votes. Editors gave 56 out of 88 votes to the children who never returned from residential schools."
The mystery of Canada’s indigenous mass graves | The Spectator - "on the strength of Beaulieu’s theory, the media and government chose to unleash a wave of violence, anti-Catholic sentiment and national shaming that lasted from the beginning of June last year through to the fall of 2021, damaging the reputations of both Canada and the Catholic Church. Both the government and the media took for granted that the soil disturbances picked up by Beaulieu’s radar were graves. They assumed the potential graves contained the bodies of children. They assumed that these children had been buried in a clandestine manner, they assumed their deaths were caused by abuse or other criminal behaviour, and they concluded — with no evidence — that the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, who had run the school since 1893, were complicit in 200 deaths and covered them up. The media began describing the site as a ‘mass grave’. A Manitoba politician who said the residential schools were founded with good intentions triggered a meltdown. Not only did he apologise, but two weeks later he said, with a straight face, that the residential school system was part of a genocidal plan devised by John A. MacDonald, Canada’s first prime minister, to kill off indigenous peoples. Nobody dared to object. Sixty-five churches were vandalised, burned or desecrated in what many applauded outright as acts of justified protest — ‘Burn them all!’ — while politicians shrugged off the anti-Christian violence as ‘understandable.’ China wagged its finger, calling for an investigation into Canada’s human rights violations. The flag over Canada’s parliament flew at half-mast for five months. Canadians were urged not to celebrate Canada Day or wear national colours; instead they were encouraged to dress in orange, symbolising shame at their nation’s past... Canadian bishops grovelled, and spoke about sacrilegious church burnings in the most moderate language. A priest who dared to say that some good things had come out of the residential schools (an enormous system that existed for nearly a hundred years, garnering in many instances the support and gratitude of indigenous people otherwise lacking access to education) was forced to resign from his parish. His archdiocese apologised to anyone who was offended. After the ‘discovery’ in Kamloops, ground-penetrating radar indicated at least 34 similar soil disturbances near Camsell Hospital in Edmonton, where stories of undocumented burials abounded. Excavations over the course of several months found nothing and the investigation was eventually closed... Sensational reports likewise came out about unmarked graves near the residential school of Cranbrook, British Columbia. But what initial reports failed to mention was that the remains were in a cemetery still used today — and that the original markers could simply have rotted away, as wooden crosses were often used. A former chief from the area dismissed claims of suspicious activity, saying locals knew perfectly well that the graves were there. The Canadian government and the media now have some serious questions to face when it comes to Kamloops. Why didn’t they wait for more proof before castigating the nation and sending it into a tailspin of anger and anti-Christian violence? And will they apologise? And why, after all this, are there still no plans to excavate in Kamloops? After the dramatic fallout for so many ordinary Canadians and Catholics, doesn’t the whole country deserve some answers?"
FIRST READING: Why much of what you heard about residential school graves is wrong - "Tk’emlúps leadership might have believed they were merely releasing an update on a fact that was already well-known within the Indigenous community: Thousands of children did not come home from residential school and were almost always buried on site, usually as a cost-saving measure. But this one announcement kicked off one of Canada’s most seismic reckonings with the traumas of the Indian Residential School system. Canada Day was effectively cancelled, historic churches fell to arson and flags were kept at half mast for five months – the longest in the history of the Commonwealth... Except that so much of the media and political narrative that summer was false. There were no “mass graves.” There was no evidence of mass murder. There is no evidence the graves were deliberately concealed. And in several cases, First Nations explicitly stressed that radar surveys were likely turning up graves without any immediate links to nearby residential school sites... the story was largely hijacked by non-Indigenous voices."
Fighting 'denialists' for the truth about unmarked graves and residential schooling | CBC News - "Politicians and journalists have openly engaged in residential school denialism. Denialists, to be clear, do not deny the existence of residential schools or even some of the harms of the IRS system. Rather, they seek to downplay or distort basic IRS facts and question the validity of ongoing research to shake public confidence and undermine truth and reconciliation efforts... At this point, no mass grave has been discovered, but more than a thousand potential unmarked graves have already been located, with many more Indigenous Nations just beginning their investigations."
So much gaslighting. I like that they admit that the "denialists" are right
Tomson Highway Has A Surprisingly Positive Take On Residential Schools - "Tomson Highway is a Cree storyteller, so it's fitting that the playwright, novelist, classical pianist and Order of Canada recipient's bio begins like the opening line of a tale: "Tomson Highway was born in a snowbank on the Manitoba/Nunavut border to a family of nomadic caribou hunters."... Lest one think that Highway — whose personal philosophy is best summed up as "life is an act of joy" — wears only rose-tinted glasses, he does acknowledge, "There is hardship, yes absolutely. It's not an easy land. Somebody told me that the only time [white people] read about native people is when aboriginal women are murdered. "Well, the only time we hear about you guys in the papers is when somebody murdered somebody or Pamela Wallin has stolen thousands of dollars. The positive stuff never gets reported. It's the same with the residential school issue." On that subject, Highway speaks from experience. At age six, he was taken from his home and sent to a residential school, returning home only for the two summer months. But here's where Highway's story diverges from many of the experiences portrayed in the media or recounted to The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which released its final report on the legacy of Canada's residential schools this week... All we hear is the negative stuff, nobody's interested in the positive, the joy in that school. Nine of the happiest years of my life I spent it at that school. I learned your language, for God's sake. Have you learned my language? No, so who's the privileged one and who is underprivileged? "You may have heard stories from 7,000 witnesses in the process that were negative," he adds. "But what you haven't heard are the 7,000 reports that were positive stories. There are many very successful people today that went to those schools and have brilliant careers and are very functional people, very happy people like myself. I have a thriving international career, and it wouldn't have happened without that school. "You have to remember that I came from so far north and there were no schools up there." He says that by the time he was 18, he was playing Brahms, Chopin and Beethoven: "How many white boys can get to do that? And they grew up with grand pianos in their living rooms!"... Highway claims he's had no blow back from the indigenous community for his personal dissenting stance on residential schools, a forced assimilation which many Canadians view as a barbaric cultural practice that's left subsequent generations struggling with the aftermath of collective trauma. And it's a trauma he takes seriously. After graduating with a pair of degrees from the University of Western Ontario — a bachelor of arts in honours music and one in English — he spent the next seven years a "native social worker" working with broken families and inmates. These experiences have fuelled his award-winning plays, like "The Rez Sisters" and "Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing," both of which focused on people living on native reserves, incorporating the difficult issues faced with the humour and spirituality of the aboriginal culture. They won Highway accolades and awards, as well as a spot on Maclean's magazine's list of the 100 most important people in Canadian history."
Cost to search for unmarked graves, identify remains at residential schools could exceed $1-billion - The Globe and Mail - "Past searches using ground penetrating radar have scraped by on federal grants as low as $20,000. The sum would cover radar work over a small, well-defined area conducted by academics labouring for free. In Brantford, Ont., meanwhile, Six Nations of the Grand River Chief Mark Hill is asking for $10-million from Ottawa, a figure meant to represent the full tab of a broad archeological search, followed by a forensic examination and all the psychological and spiritual supports needed to help the community grapple with the emotional fallout. If that $10-million estimate is applied to each of the more than 130 former residential school sites identified by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the total national bill quickly reaches north of $1-billion... The Canadian Archaeological Association is developing guidelines for communities. For example, the association’s website advises ground-penetrating radar can never identify burials with 100-per-cent certaintyand that forested areas likely need to be cleared of undergrowth to get a solid signal."
And it looks like this isn't even excavating the "graves"
