Excavation after 14 anomalies detected at former residential school site found no evidence of graves: Manitoba chief : r/canada - "Cultural genocide isn't actually a form of genocide. The term is a metaphor to describe the gravity of the crime that happened. But the UN's definition of genocide explicitly excludes the destruction of culture."
Frybread - "For Lewis and many other Native Americans, frybread links generation with generation and also connects the present to the painful narrative of Native American history. Navajo frybread originated 144 years ago, when the United States forced Indians living in Arizona to make the 300-mile journey known as the "Long Walk" and relocate to New Mexico, onto land that couldn't easily support their traditional staples of vegetables and beans. To prevent the indigenous populations from starving, the government gave them canned goods as well as white flour, processed sugar and lard—the makings of frybread"
New evidence suggests Stone Age hunters from Europe discovered America - "New archaeological evidence suggests that America was first discovered by Stone Age people from Europe – 10,000 years before the Siberian-originating ancestors of the American Indians set foot in the New World... Some genetic markers for Stone Age western Europeans simply don’t exist in north- east Asia – but they do in tiny quantities among some north American Indian groups"
Oops. Turns out white people are indigenous to the Americas, not "BIPOCs"
🚨 Katherine Brodsky on X - "How do we determine who is indigenous to a land? Do we go back 100 years? 200? 500? 2000? Based on what is that decided exactly?"
Wilfred Reilly on X - "This...is actually a critically important question. Why - as I ask in "Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me" - should specifically the SIOUX get the billion-dollar Black Hills? The tribes they conquered them from still exist, no? Why should the USA pay reparations, but not the mighty Lakota, or ~wealthy Arabia and Nigeria for SELLING the slaves? Etc."
Mike Lemmer on X - "The darkly ironic part is the Lakota claiming the Black Hills as sacred land... after driving out the Crow & Cheyenne tribes in the late 1700s/early 1800s. We've held onto the land longer than they did at this point."
Abby on X - "I think the answer is based on whether the group is white or not."
Michael Pitre on X - "My favorite example of this is the Falkland Islands. Argentinians decry British imperialism when Britons were, in fact, the first human beings to set foot there."
Nota on X - "I think the real question is what value do we place on it in the first place? So often in the Canadian context we hear platitudes of “unceded” territory from elected officials. But what do they mean by it? It’s not like given the opportunity they’d return the rights of authority over the unceded lands to the indigenous. It amounts to little more than an insincere genuflect once one considers their intentions."
Jonathan Riopel on X - "The whole of Quebec is unceded lands because the French never asked the natives to give them any lands. They lived in peace. The west is ceded because the British could not live side by side with the Natives and forced them to. Those treaties were signed with armies at the door."
Andy Matteo Music on X - "I’ve been making this point lately. Aren’t Americans born in America indigenous to it? That’s the nativist perspective usually associated with anti-immigration but isn’t it factually true. Like most or all of leftist language it’s used to distort reality to their ends."
John C. Miller on X - "It's all a means to differentiate and divide people based on identity and power. Why? To create the utopia, there has to be a revolution that replaces the culture and values that made the capitalistic society."
(((. . . n))) on X - "Someone remarked that to qualify as indigenous a people must have lived in the region for thousands of years and contributed little or nothing to civilization"
Nunov Yurbiznez on X - "Does that mean Jewish people aren’t indigenous to Israel? Because whilst they were there before anyone else, they were a cradle of civilisation?"
(((. . . n))) on X - "By that definition they aren't, which might help explain why some consider Muslims indigenous and Jews non-"
“You’re not welcome here” Quesnel councillor tells residential school book contributor in chaotic meeting - "A British Columbia city council meeting erupted in chaos as debates over a controversial book on residential schools led to heated exchanges and calls for the mayor’s resignation. The book at the centre of the controversy, “Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth about Residential Schools)” sparked a widespread backlash from some in the B.C. city of Quesnel, particularly among council members and Indigenous groups... The controversy began when Pat Morton, the wife of Mayor Ron Paull, distributed 10 copies of the book, which has stirred controversy over its critical analysis of certain claims about residential schools in Canada, specifically those regarding purported unmarked grave discoveries... During the meeting, some attendees, many wearing traditional Indigenous attire, jeered at speakers defending the book, including Morton and Prof. Frances Widdowson, one of the Grave Error’s several contributors... Morton asked the audience to listen to her as she had listened to other speakers. “I’d like you to listen to me. I listened to you, so please listen to me,” said Morton. Widdowson faced significant opposition when she questioned the council’s stance on misinformation, specifically regarding claims of unmarked graves at the Kamloops Indian Residential School which were spread by the media but have never been verified. When it was Widdowson’s turn to speak, members of the gallery jeered the professor and author. “Does the council concern itself with misinformation? Is it opposed to misinformation being spread and entered into the record? If so, does it agree that this is misinformation because there is no evidence of unmarked graves at the Kamloops Indian Residential School?” asked Widdowson. In response, councillors Laurey-Anne Roodenburg and Scott Elliott said Widdowson’s queries and opinions were unwelcome because she didn’t have lived experience as an Indigenous person. “Her opinion in this chamber does not count. She’s asking us to comment on something that comes from qualified individuals that dealt with this that lived through this. Ma’am, you are not welcome here,” said Elliott. Earlier in the meeting, Elliott criticized the book as “denialist literature,” despite the fact that the book does not deny the facts surrounding abuses that took place at the historic schools... Elliot then asked for Paull’s resignation as mayor. Elliott was also joined by a group of First Nations chiefs who called on the mayor to resign. The meeting, attended by over 300 people, followed a larger gathering of more than 500 at the Nazko office, with many participants marching to city hall in protest. The Lhtako Dene Nation has accused the book of downplaying the harms inflicted by residential schools, a sentiment echoed by the city council in a unanimous motion to denounce the book as harmful, passed on March 19. In defense, the book’s editors, C.P. Champion and Tom Flanagan, issued a press release arguing that the council’s condemnation was unfounded, asserting that “Grave Error” does not question the existence of Indian residential schools. Widdowson added that the book aims to correct false claims regarding clandestine burials at the Kamloops Indian Residential School, questioning the council’s familiarity with the book’s content."
The indigenous-industrial complex still pretends that tons of bodies were found
The only "critical" thinking allowed is Critical Theory
Being an "indigenous" person magically changes objective reality
B.C. mayor censured over book questioning Indigenous residential schools - "A British Columbia mayor has been censured by city council – stripping him of his travel and lobbying budgets and removing him from city committees – for allegedly distributing a book that questions the history of Indigenous residential schools in Canada. The Lhtako Dene First Nation brought the issue to the Quesnel city council in March after learning that Mayor Ron Paull's wife had circulated copies of the book Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth About Residential Schools) in the community, including to the local school board... the Lhatko Dene announced they were stepping away from any further co-operation with the mayor and council and prohibited the mayor from entering Lhtako Dene territory unless expressly invited. The Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs issued its own statement in solidarity with the Lhtako Dene, saying the book "essentially questions the very existence of residential schools and their well-documented harms against Indigenous peoples." Quesnel council voted unanimously to sanction the mayor, removing his travel and lobbying budgets and barring him from city committees and organizations such as the Cariboo Regional District and the Northern Development Initiative Trust."
Truth is dangerous, and the establishment is threatened by heretical ideas
Clearly, if you say it was implausible that 600 billion Jews died during the Holocaust, you are a Holocaust Denier
Jonathan Kay on X - "daily dose of Cdn insanity: Taxpayer-funded @CBCNews hypes a cancel campaign vs. a BC mayor bcuz his *wife* (who is cast as the man’s responsibility/property) likes a book deemed to be forbidden “denialist” literature (tho no one can refute its contents)"
Thread by @Paracelsus1092 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "In 1990 a tiny tribe of Native Americans donated some blood samples to researchers at Arizona State University, to try and understand their soaring rates of diabetes. The controversy that followed went on to shape Native American DNA research and modern bioethics. In 2003 one of the tribe, the Havasupai, attended a doctoral presentation, and discovered that their previously donated blood had been used for purposes other than diabetes research. All hell broke loose. A university investigation uncovered about 12 papers that had used the blood research data in some way over the last 10 years. Two particularly egregious studies involved analysing the Havasupai blood for markers of schizophrenia, and claiming that their genetics proved the tribe migrated from elsewhere, contrary to their beliefs. The tribe sued ASU and the lead geneticist, Dr Teri Markow. It's hard to know how many claims were filed and pursued, how many courts, private investigators and committees were involved, but the line was clear - the Havasupai did not consent to research beyond diabetes. The outcome was a financial settlement, and the right for the Havasupai to reclaim their samples, which they did, with great solemnity and ritual.The media ran multiple gleeful stories: the Phoenix New Times led with “Indian Givers, The Havasupai trusted the white man to help with a diabetes epidemic. Instead, ASU tricked them into bleeding for academia.” The narrative was too perfect to let up. The story has entered the textbooks as a classic example of postcolonial exploitation, bioethical injustice and inequality. The only trouble is - how much of this story is true? In 2013 a piece appeared on PLOS blog entitled 'Is the Havasupai Indian Case a Fairy Tale?' In it the author defends Markow, detailing how many of the claims against her are based on flimsy to non-existent evidence. The first paper based on the blood samples back in 1993 had looked for variation in HLA genes across the group, as a way of producing some early evidence for genetic susceptibility to diabetes. Was this the evidence for research into schizophrenia? Rather than ignoring diabetes, which was a central claim of the Havasupai, the infamous 2003 doctoral presentation was a look at DNA microsatellites and how they could reveal associations with diabetes. But an irate anthropologist had decided this was not acceptable. Far from secretly studying schizophrenia, Markow claimed that she had denied permission for a student to use the samples for exactly that. The Havasupai and other academics believed that Markow had been lying from the very beginning, that the original diabetes study in 1990 was a cover for schizophrenia research. Well, was it? That 1993 paper was part funded by a grant from the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression. The exact details of the grant appear to have been lost to time, or misplaced? Markow's defenders say grants are fairly flexible, her detractors point to letters of intention, letters which mention schizophrenia research on the Havasupai. The controversy hasn't stopped Markow from pursuing a distinguished career, and few people are interested in digging up the details again. We'll likely never know the whole story... What is clear is that the case has impacted early genetic studies involving Native Americans, which is a huge shame since modern genomics holds so much potential for health, fertility and longevity."
Terry Glavin: Canada slowly acknowledging there never was a 'mass grave' - "Chief Casimir tried to set the record straight, referring to ground-penetrating radar surveys as the “initial horrific findings of what potentially could be, they are very preliminary . . . there could very well be children beneath the surface.” Three days later, on Friday, Chief Casimir was even more emphatic: “This is not a mass grave, but rather unmarked burial sites that are, to our knowledge, also undocumented.” This week, being the third anniversary, Chief Casimir announced a “day of reflection,” with almost exactly the same wording as her 2021 statement, but with an important difference. Casimir described the same “unthinkable loss that was spoken about but never documented,” only this time it was that “the stark truth of the preliminary findings came to light — the confirmation of 215 anomalies were detected.”... In the months following the reported discovery of the Kamloops “mass grave” in 2021, replications of the claim spread from one former residential school site to another — Penalakut, St, Eugene’s, Marieval, Shubenacadie and so on — until the “missing children” reportedly discovered in unmarked graves across Canada ended up numbering roughly 1,300. In each case, however, although you’d never have known it from the tabloid-shock headlines, where there were burials at all they turned out to be either graves in known cemeteries, or merely instances of hyperbolic conjecture. Nonetheless, the Kamloops story sparked a national paroxysm of shame and anger. It came on the anniversary of the Black Lives Matter riots in the United States, and Carolyn Bennett, who was Crown-Indigenous relations minister at the time, said the news out of Kamloops should serve as a catalyst along the lines of the murder of George Floyd, the Black man murdered by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020... You could say that Panic of 2021 was itself a “dark chapter in Canadian history,” and its lasting damage to Canadians’ sense of their own history is not entirely incalculable. Last October, an Angus Reid poll showed that nearly one in five Canadians believe the horribly high mortality rates in the schools were not due to the known causes of infectious diseases like tuberculosis and influenza, but rather the result of children being deliberately killed. Within the T’Kemlups community, however, almost from the beginning there were serious misgivings about the way their story was being told. The 14 major families within the community made it known to Casimir early on that an excavation of the orchard site should begin as soon as possible. Three years and nearly $8 million in federal funding later, no excavation has occurred. Chief Casimir says the work being done is “in compliance with Secwépemc laws, legal traditions, worldviews, values and protocols.” However: “Our investigative findings and investigative steps are currently being kept confidential to preserve the integrity of the investigation.” Just where the stories about secret nighttime burials in the orchard came from is also shrouded in contradiction and conspiracy theory. The stories first came to public attention around 2006, when the defrocked United Church Minister Kevin Annett was in Kamloops with tall tales about Queen Elizabeth taking children from the Kamloops Indian Residential School on a picnic, and the children were never seen again. Annett was the convenor of an imaginary “International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State” who claimed that Queen Elizabeth was named in an arrest warrant issued by the similarly imaginary “International Common Law Court of Justice in Brussels.” One of Annett’s Indigenous collaborators at the time was a certain William Combes, who claims to have witnessed the burial of a child in a hole dug in the orchard when he was enrolled at the Kamloops institution. But T’Kemlups elder Emma Baker, who attended the residential school in the 1950s, told CTV News three years ago that she and her friends used to concoct scary stories about graves on the schoolgrounds. “There was a big orchard there and we used to make up stories of the graveyard being in the orchard,” Baker told CTV News Channel on Saturday. “There was rumours of a graveyard, but nobody seemed to know where it was and we didn’t even know if it was true.” The credibility of the 2021 ground-penetrating radar study was also thrown into doubt in 2022 when Casimir and her council were presented with an independent site analysis showing that the anomalies were less likely graves and more likely the result of decades of ground disturbances — irrigation ditches, utility lines, backhoe trenches, archeological digs, water lines, drainage tiles and so on. But to even point out facts that run counter to Ottawa’s “narrative” is to commit an act of “residential school denialism,” and the federal government isn’t going to tolerate anything like that. The recent federal budget set aside $5 million over the next three years to allow Crown Indigenous Relations — Northern Affairs Canada to “establish a program to combat denialism, a species of thoughtcrime that a succession of federal cabinet ministers has stated a willingness to consider criminalizing. Last June, combating “residential school denialism” was a major focus of the 175-page interim report by Kimberly Murray, Ottawa’s Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites Associated with Indian Residential Schools. Murray’s office is supposed to expire this year, but the push to criminalize dissent from residential-school orthodoxy should be expected to persist. A key element of Murray’s report was its assertion that to dispute the proposition that Canada’s residential schools constituted genocide, or to make a case for the schools’ sometimes benign features, is to engage in denialism, which is to engage in “violence” and a form of “hate speech” that should be outlawed. Last year, a Senate Indigenous People’s Committee report said “denialism” would include criticisms of the credibility of the Tk’emlúps documentation of the orchard graves hypothesis. “Denialism serves to distract people from the horrific consequences of Residential Schools and the realities of missing children, burials and unmarked graves,” concluded the report. Earlier this week, the Assembly of First Nations’ B.C. Regional Chief Terry Teegee suggested that the absence of any physical evidence of human remains in suspected grave sites could be explained by the “incinerators” that were present at most residential schools."
Clearly, even more money is needed, even if excavations never begin
This documents all the mainstream media headlines claiming there were "mass graves" (including the CBC). When even Trudeau acknowledges that there were no mass graves...
The year of the graves: How the world’s media got it wrong on residential school graves - "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.”... 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.”... 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... while the Black Lives Matter protests around George Floyd’s murder rested almost entirely on the premise that police are far more likely to shoot and kill Black people than white people, national crime data indicates the opposite may be the case. It was the same with the residential school grave controversies last year: the contentions came down to a substitution of what was known with what we were asked to believe. 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... 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.”... One particularly unhelpful feature of the residential schools coverage involves the careless conflation of horrific, verifiable crimes with second- and third-hand accounts of childhood horror stories. Reconciliation is not what you get when you render Canadians incapable of believing what they’ve been told about the schools. Truth is not what you get when established and reputable news organizations treat the accounts of genuinely traumatized survivors of criminal acts with no more gravitas than hearsay accounts, often anonymously told, that stretch credulity to the breaking point... Immediately after the Kamloops story broke, the Sipekne’katik First Nation brought ground-penetrating radar to the task of searching for graves. After a couple months of investigation, the only graves discovered were of settlers who were buried a century before the school opened."
From 2022. Time to jail these Uncle Tochos for denialism
Concept of 'residential school denialism' is the true fringe movement - "The fringe movement Cameron was referring to consists of a coterie of academics and journalists known to their detractors as Residential Schools Denialists. A key focus of Murray’s report is its assertion that to dispute the proposition that Canada’s residential schools constituted genocide and to argue for the schools’ sometimes benign features, as they do, is to engage in denialism, which is “violence” and a form of “hate speech” that should be criminalized. Here’s a paradox for you. The drive to criminalize objections to the genocide thesis and even to publicly question reports of a vast national archipelago of secret graves containing the remains of Indigenous children murdered by priests and nuns, is itself a case of a fringe movement that has gained momentum by being given an extraordinary amount of attention and airtime. The whole concept of “residential schools denialism” is the invention or co-invention of an academic who first made a name for himself in Vancouver by claiming on behalf of the local Indigenous peoples that a Vancouver Canucks jersey appropriated their art in a manner all bound up in the sinister capitalist purpose of their dispossession. It turned out that the local Indigenous leadership had been consulted about the jersey logo, and they said they liked it just fine. A necessary disclosure: The denialism inventor is Sean Carleton, an assistant professor at the University of Manitoba who has turned himself into a pretzel in his zeal to lump me in with the so-called denialists. My primary crime was to have written up for the National Post an extensive enumeration of the multitude of headline-grabbing errors and pressed panic-buttons accompanying Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s flag-lowering histrionics two summers ago. The Trudeau government set its “national reckoning” in motion after an erroneous report to the effect that a “mass grave” had been discovered at the site of the long-shuttered Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia. The report was refuted by the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc leadership almost immediately, but the Maple Leaf stayed at half-mast for several frenzied months of statue-topplings, church burnings and a 260 per cent spike in hate-motivated crimes targeting Catholics, as tabulated by Statistics Canada. For the record, I’ve long argued that “cultural genocide” is a reasonable description of the federal Indian Residential Schools policy, at least in its early years, but this hasn’t acquitted me on the trumped-up charge of denialism, which has been flung at me quite liberally. My transgression was to notice that Ottawa’s residential-schools “narrative” required the substitution of what we were allowed to know with what we were told to believe. And now we’re being told to submit to the genocide thesis on pain of prosecution. Also for the record, the so-called “denialists” are a group of credentialled historians, independent researchers and noisy contrarians associated mostly with the Dorchester Review, the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and the Indian Residential Schools Research Group... “Denialists entered the site without permission. Some came in the middle of the night, carrying shovels; they said they wanted to ‘see for themselves’ if children are buried there.” There was no report of this to the RCMP. We are not invited to know when this happened or to whom these interlopers explained their wicked intentions or who they might have been, exactly. We are simply expected to believe it... we are simply told to believe and be quiet or we’ll be guilty of genocide denial by re-traumatizing survivors with protocol-snubbing questions that quite a few leading T’Kemlups community members have been asking, too, to no avail. The fringe abstraction of “residential schools denialism” gained momentum precisely because its purpose is to end questioning, to enforce a system of belief and to patrol what knowledge we’re entitled to possess... what if the truth of this history also involves priests and nuns and teachers at the residential schools who were animated by compassion and were dedicated to nurturing their students? What about those students who fondly remember their time in the schools? Would the assertion that those stories should be told amount to the moral and legal equivalent of Holocaust denial?... In an essay she wrote for the Calgary Herald 13 years ago, Lea reflected upon “the deep hurt my family feels at their work being routinely described as ‘abusive,’ or ‘cultural genocide.’” Her essay elicited this response to the Herald from National Truth and Reconciliation Commission Chair Murray Sinclair: “While the TRC has heard many experiences of unspeakable abuse, we have been heartened by testimonies which affirm the dedication and compassion of committed educators who sought to nurture the children in their care. These experiences must also be heard.” Is Murray Sinclair a residential schools denialist?"
Aboriginal owners of land order 'white idiot' eco-activists to leave - "Traditional owners have told a parliamentary hearing for a controversial mining and manufacturing project that white 'idiot' activists are blocking their economic development opportunities. Top End Aboriginal Coastal Alliance Chair Julius Kernan says Indigenous Territorians face many 'hurdles' and siding with interstate environmentalists had previously caused them to 'miss out' on the benefits projects bring. It is time for our people to be recognised or identified as people to engage with in a culturally appropriate manner and have space to have a say without interruption from non-Indigenous idiots,' he told a Senate inquiry examining the Middle Arm development in the Northern Territory on Monday. It was a response to NT Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price's question about the detrimental effect of interstate environmental activists blocking projects that could bring economic development to Aboriginal people."
