Led by its compulsively woke Pied Piper, the CBC, Canada’s mainstream media continues to trumpet the evidence-challenged notion that thousands of missing indigenous children forcibly sent by the government to the country’s Indian Residential Schools (IRS) lie buried in unmarked graves, some of them mass graves, across the land where their remains have been discovered by the inconclusive and fallible technique called ground penetrating radar (GPR).
These near axiomatic assertions began with the May 27, 2021, announcement from the Kamloops BC Indian Reserve that “This past weekend … the stark truth of the preliminary findings came to light – the confirmation of the remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School.”
No such “confirmation” has ever occurred at Kamloops or the many other communities where similar results have been announced, all based on uncertain GPR soundings.
The only legacy media willing to challenge these announcements, albeit timidly, has been the National Post.
But a much larger unfunded chorus of evidence-based commentators, most of them scholars or lawyers, were skeptical of the Kamloops findings from the start, even though their deep-pocketed Indian Industry opponents immediately pilloried them as “residential school denialists.”
Because our close neighbour, the United States, has been somewhat less captured by the left on indigenous issues, its legacy media began challenging the established narrative early on. Two other respected media houses, the Wall Street Journal and the National Catholic Register, have just jumped on a slow but steadily growing truth-telling bandwagon whose findings have been articulated in the book Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth About Residential Schools). Co-authored by C.P. Champion, editor of The Dorchester Review, and Tom Flanagan, a retired University of Calgary political scientist, the book is a collection of heavily footnoted chapters written mainly by academics and lawyers.
Grave Error and allied publications found here, here, here, and here have carefully debunked the mainstream media position on “missing children buried in unmarked mass graves” using a mountain of unbiased factual and logical evidence.
They have done so by highlighting the implications that no unmarked graves, let alone “mass graves,” containing missing children have been found to date at residential schools. The only way to learn whether this allegation was truthful was to excavate the soil anomalies revealed by GPR surveys. But the only completed excavation to date was conducted in 2023 at Pine Creek, Manitoba, where a ground-radar survey had identified anomalies in the basement of Our Lady of Seven Sorrows Catholic Church, located close to the former Pine Creek Residential School. No human remains were found during that excavation, yet such fruitless searches fully funded by the federal government have never stopped.
Moreover, except for orphans or children taken from abusive or neglectful reserve homes, the students who attended the schools did so voluntarily after receiving written permission from their parents. There were often more applicants than the schools could accommodate.
As for the schools being “houses of horror,” student living conditions, including the provision of food, clothing, shelter, learning, recreation, and supervision, were generally better than they experienced in their poor, hungry, and alcohol-devasted home communities.
The statement by Murray Sinclair, chief commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, that “for roughly seven generations nearly every Indigenous child in Canada was sent to a residential school” is grossly untrue because only one-third of eligible students attended for an average of 4.5 years. Sinclair also tied residential schools to “unacceptably poor education results” and “runaway rates of suicide, family violence, substance abuse, high rates of incarceration, street gang influence, child welfare apprehensions, homelessness, poverty, and family breakdowns,” thereby ignoring that residential schools achieved better results than day schools, which had high rates of absenteeism.
Likewise, because only a minority of Indian children voluntarily attended residential schools for a few years, the system can’t explain the broad social breakdown in indigenous Indian communities in the past and present.
While Grave Error has been a Canadian nonfiction best-seller since it was published in December 2023, its arguments received virtually no coverage from Canadian media outlets until a controversy erupted after the wife of the mayor of the British Columbia community of Quesnel distributed some copies of the book. Highlighting the book’s condemnation by local First Nations representatives as “absolute bigotry and hatred,” a CBC account of the controversy suggested Grave Error was a clear example of residential school “denialism.”
The CBC article noted that any questioning of the claims made against residential schools has been publicly condemned as “denialism” by Kimberly Murray, who was appointed as the federal government’s “special interlocutor” in the wake of the 2021 allegations regarding graves.
In the interim report she submitted to the government in June 2023, Murray characterized “denialism” as “the last step in genocide.” He recommended that the federal government make it a criminal offence. David Lametti, who was then serving as Canada’s justice minister, responded to Murray’s recommendation by saying that he was open to applying the same criminal and civil measures as those that are now in force in Canada against those who deny, minimize or condone the Holocaust, the CBC reported.
With Murray’s final report set to be released on October 29, Trudeau’s Liberal government has not yet taken any action concerning her recommendation that “denialism” should be criminalized; the bill that The Wall Street Journal commentary referenced was introduced into Parliament in September by another party member. But Murray doubled down on her claims in another unauthorized interim report titled “Sites of Truth, Sites of Conscience” that she released in July 2024 “as an antidote to denialism.”
“The histories of the cemeteries that were located at former Indian residential school sites are evidence of genocide and mass human rights violations,” the report states without providing the necessary evidence that this genocide ever occurred.
On the contrary, the “progressive” view that the residential schools engaged in genocide is a ludicrous blood libel simply because it fails to meet any of the requirements of the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide such as “killing members of the group” or “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”
Separating fact from fiction on this issue requires open and honest debate. Attempts to stifle speech by prosecuting so-called denialism won’t lead to reconciliation and won’t restore the well-being of Canada’s indigenous communities.
Hymie Rubenstein is editor of REAL Indigenous Report, a retired professor of anthropology, the University of Manitoba, and a senior fellow, Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
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