In the two years since the first shocking reports of mass graves at Canadian residential schools, not a single actual unmarked grave is known to have been found.
Canada’s grave errors | The Critic - Jonathan Kay:
April 2023 - 'Since 2017, the sesquicentennial of Canadian confederation, the country has been convulsed by a process of 'reconciliation' regarding Indigenous peoples.... Canada’s historical treatment of its Inuit, First Nations, and Métis populations often was marked by bad faith, racism and brutality. To this day, many Indigenous communities suffer high rates of poverty, suicide and substance abuse. Dozens lack even clean drinking water, a problem that has outlived the best intentions of a succession of federal governments, Liberal and Conservative alike. Even the most patriotic Canadian must admit that our record on this file constitutes a stain on the public conscience.
"Of particular note is the history of Canada’s residential schools, church-run institutions that were conceived in the nineteenth century as a means to teach English, French and job skills to indigenous students. Had this system been run on a purely voluntary basis, such a project might have been broadly defensible. But from 1920 onwards, attendance was mandatory. And so tens of thousands of homesick indigenous children were forced to attend European-style institutions far away from their home communities.... At least 3,200 Indigenous children perished after having been sent to these schools, out of a total enrolment of about 150,000. (Many believe the real victim tally is twice as high.) The main cause of death, tuberculosis, also ravaged white communities until well into the twentieth century. But even so, the death rate was markedly higher at residential schools than at other institutions. And the dark legacy of these schools was quite properly made the subject of a high-profile national commission, which reported its conclusions in 2015
"Knowledge of this backstory is required to understand what happened in the spring of 2021, when a First Nations community in Kamloops, British Columbia announced that a ground-penetrating radar (GPR) survey of the grounds of a former residential school indicated the presence of 215 presumed unmarked child graves. The story was instantly treated as a bombshell by the Canadian press corps, and by leading international media outlets as well.
"Most spectacularly, the New York Times reported that the First Nation in question, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc (previously known as the Kamloops Indian Band), had claimed the discovery of a 'mass grave'. In fact, the band’s leader explicitly disavowed the idea that any 'mass grave' had been found. Despite this, the original story remains on the New York Times site in uncorrected form to this day. The same is true of an equally botched New York Times story headlined 'How thousands of Indigenous children vanished in Canada' by the same reporter.
"In retrospect, it seems obvious that these claims of unmarked graves should have been taken with a grain of salt — since GPR data of this type does not directly indicate the presence of graves, much less caskets or actual bodies; but rather of soil dislocations that may also be associated with tree roots, irrigation ditches or previous efforts to locate graves.... I would like to report that I was one of those few wise owls who knew, right from the start, that the story didn’t add up. But I wasn’t. Media figures, government officials, and First Nations leaders all seemed certain that these were indeed actual graves ... of murdered children. During ... late May and early June 2021, mainstream media sources even repeated urban legends about babies thrown into furnaces and clandestine midnight burials. Surely, I thought, all of these public figures wouldn’t embrace such claims if real proof weren’t about to be sprung from the soil. After all, the GPR data indicated exactly where the remains of these supposedly murdered children were lying. All that was required was a forensic examination, something one might expect to occur within weeks....
"It’s been almost two years since those first shocking headlines broke. During this period, not a single actual unmarked grave is known to have been found — either at Kamloops, or any of the other First Nations communities that subsequently conducted their own GPR surveys. Not one. And yet, the credulous narrative that first emerged has continued to dominate Canadian discourse....
"In January 2022, a small conservative publication called The Dorchester Review published an essay entitled 'In Kamloops, Not One Body Has Been Found'. While the reporting it contained was entirely factual, [Justin] Trudeau’s Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations, his schoolboy pal Marc Miller, accused the author of engaging in 'denialism'— a word clearly chosen to suggest a parallel with Holocaust denial. Frances Widdowson, a Canadian professor, was fired by her university after pointing out that no graves had been discovered.
"Not until May 2022, on the one-year anniversary of the original unmarked-graves story, did a large national media outlet, the National Post, publish a comprehensive account of how the Canadian media had been duped. And even then, the chairperson of the Canada Council for the Arts publicly demanded that other journalists shun both the author, Terry Glavin, and his journalism. This propaganda campaign worked. To this day, no other major Canadian outlet has dared follow the Post’s example, even as foreign publications such as the New York Post offer candid reports.
Justin Trudeau at alleged mass grave site, 2021.
PHOTO BY LIAM RICHARDS/POOL VIA REUTERS
"The personal intervention of not one but two Canadian federal officials in a bid to suppress accurate reporting provides an unusually vivid insight into the surreal state of Canadian politics under Trudeau, a man who’s made theatrical displays of national shame central to his political brand. The Prime Minister had planned an election for late 2021, and seized on the unmarked-graves story as yet another opportunity to get on one knee for the cameras. In June 2021, most notably, he hauled along a personal photographer to an Indigenous community in Saskatchewan so that he might capture the scene of Trudeau placing a teddy bear ... on the site of a former residential school.
"For Trudeau to now candidly admit that all of this political theatre had been performed on the pretext of an overhyped story would, of course, be mortifying — especially after he ordered flags lowered on federal buildings for more than five months.... Canada is, to my knowledge, the only country on earth where the PM showcases his role as leader of a self-confessed genocide state even while preparing to campaign for his own re-election.
"How will this all end? Possibly with bodies. Until the mid twentieth century, many poor Canadians, indigenous and non-indigenous alike, were buried in simple graves marked with wooden crosses that soon succumbed to the elements... While such a finding would hardly prove the lurid claim that legions of indigenous children were slaughtered and dispatched to secret burial sites, I imagine that this is exactly how such a discovery would be breathlessly reported.... But the equally likely result is that nothing at all will happen. There will be no bodies, but also no truthful national reckoning about our social panic, because everyone involved — politicians, academics, journalists — would be made to look foolish if the truth were to be widely and candidly admitted. And so they will all continue to go double or quits on a narrative that’s been growing more doubtful by the day since mid-2021."
Read more: https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/april-2023/canadas-grave-errors/
Reprinted by permission of Mr. Kay.
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