Grave Slander

Canada’s Residential Schools: A Saga of Journalistic Malfeasance

On May 27, 2021, Rosanne Casimir, the local leader of the main Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc reserve in British Columbia’s southern interior, made a startling announcement: ground-penetrating radar had discovered 215 children buried at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. The following day, the New York Times reported, “‘Horrible History’: Mass Grave of Indigenous Children Reported in Canada.” World media swiftly followed suit, and claims about the graves of more than 1300 missing children at former residential school sites suddenly popped up across Canada.

The stories grew more sensational. As veteran political reporter Terry Glavin noted in the National Post one year later, the public had been told of “Youngsters thrown into incinerators. The corpses of children thrown into lakes and rivers. Priests ‘decapitating’ children. Little girls conscripted to bury babies. Dead boys hanging by their necks in a barn.”¹ The credulity of most media seemed boundless.

The Canadian government’s official grief spared no detail. The flag on the Peace Tower was lowered for 161 days. One week after the Kamloops story broke, Bill C-5 was introduced to create a new federal holiday on September 30: the “National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.” Canada Day, observed every July 1 since 1868, was drowned out. In October, the House of Commons voted unanimously to recognize what had happened as a “genocide,” a move which appeared to confirm the horrific media stories.² Surveying the unfolding drama, Cabinet Minister Carolyn Bennett opined, “This week has opened the eyes of many Canadians. Like George Floyd did.”

A Wave of Violence

As if sensing permission from the top, activists began to tear down monuments to Captain Cook, Queen Victoria, and Queen Elizabeth II. A wave of anti-Christian violence spread through Canada. Close to 100 churches have been burned to the ground or vandalized, a level of crime far in excess of past years’ numbers. As Glavin reported, they included“beloved old Indian reserve churches where Indigenous communities had baptized their children and eulogized their dead going back generations.” Statistics Canada later recorded a 260 percent increase in hate crimes against Catholics for the year.³ Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, while professing to be saddened by the violence, stated that anger “against institutions like the Catholic Church [is] real, and it’s fully understandable.”⁴

In many ways, Trudeau was the perfect political figure for such a moment. An iconic photo from 2021 shows him holding a teddy bear and kneeling before a little flag marking the site of a grave near a residential school in the Qu’Appelle Valley in Saskatchewan. A telling detail, given subsequent developments, is that the graveyard in which he knelt for the cameras was not in fact a long-hidden, just-discovered burial ground for Indigenous schoolchildren. It was the local community Catholic cemetery, where all sorts of people had been buried for generations.

Unsubstantiated

During the long period of public mourning, some started looking for evidence. By 2024, the federal government had spent $8 million at the Kamloops site alone but found no evidence of burials.⁵ The ground-penetrating radar which had first given the story legs had apparently picked up evidence of tiles from an old septic system.⁶ Traditional-culture issues prevented excavation at Kamloops, but where sites could be excavated, no unrecorded burials were found. In some instances, the traditional wooden crosses marking graves had succumbed to the elements, thus giving cover to dubious headlines about “unmarked graves.” Wherever documentary records were consulted, it turned out there were few or no missing children.⁷ The incredible but baseless atrocity reports were traced to the decades-long work of a defrocked United Church minister with a history of disseminating wild stories.⁸ 

Few claimed that the residential schools, which operated roughly from the 1820s through the 1970s, were a success. But, as Glavin—a sympathetic but hard-nosed reporter—noted, the government-driven moral panic added no new information to the dismal record. The 139 underfunded, mostly church-run Catholic institutions did inflict “brutal sexual, emotional and psychological abuse” and saw a mortality rate, especially in the early years, that was much higher than average. Of course, any abuse is inexcusable, but these actual harms had already been exhaustively documented and addressed during the Truth and Reconciliation hearings of 2008–2015.

Criminalizing Doubt

No evidence was found to substantiate the claims that children had been murdered. Nonetheless, as Glavin noted, as of late 2023, “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.”⁹ That made it difficult for the federal government to walk back “the worst fake news in Canadian history,” as Tom Flanagan, co-editor of Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth About Residential Schools), put it.¹⁰

One government strategy has been to try to make “residential school denialism” a crime. In February 2023, Immigration Minister Marc Miller was reported to be considering such a law.¹¹ If it passes, Grave Error might end up as a test case. A book of essays by accredited scholars, investigative journalists, judges, lawyers, and independent researchers, it was published late last year by a small indie press, because, as veteran columnist Barbara Kay put it, “No mainstream publisher would have touched this book with a ten-foot pole.” It was reviewed mainly in independent media, that is, media not supported financially by the Canadian government, as Canada’s mainstream media are.

Grave Error is devastating, precisely because, in striking contrast to most media coverage of the topic, its analysis is entirely evidence-based. Thus it has, predictably, been denounced as “’hate literature’, ‘hateful’, has ‘caused harm’ and represents ‘denialism.’”¹² Clearly, not every Canadian agrees. Despite its lowly, unadvertised beginnings, the book has been a consistent reader favorite since publication, at times reaching No. 1 on Amazon Canada. So if Miller is serious about his proposed new law, Grave Error should be his first target.

Narrative over Truth

Why are such stories told and believed without—or in spite of—evidence? Glavin identifies a key factor: the decline of media throughout North America:

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.

In this case, the media often defaulted to Indigenous sources who fronted sensational, unsourced stories that it became their duty to believe—and “hateful” to doubt.¹³

There may be deeper issues too. Australian writer Kurt Mahlburg notes that the tales are best understood as a sort of “blood libel,” which, by its very nature is not, and doesn’t even try to be, evidence-based.¹⁴

Tiptoeing Around the Reality 

We may see a formal reprise of the 2021 hysterics around the upcoming September 30 National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, nicknamed “Orange Shirt Day.” The ubiquitous tee shirt derives from an account, of which various versions exist, of an orange shirt being taken from a residential-school student upon arrival.¹⁵

In the meantime, the hype is periodically revived. In June, for example, responding to the fact that no graves of missing children have been found, BC Regional Chief Terry Teegee offered a theory: “Some of these residential schools or these institutions also had incinerators, so there could be potential of not finding any remains of any children that have gone missing.”¹⁶

So the faith stays strong. When National Post founder Conrad Black pointed out at a June Western broadcasters’ meeting that “We don’t even today know if there are any graves there”—which is a statement of fact—a number of broadcasters and regulators responded by walking out. The association’s board of directors swiftly issued a formal apology: “We recognize the comments he made today were disrespectful and incredibly hurtful.”¹⁷

The broadcasters may be acting to protect themselves here. Walking out in protest exempts them from having to address the fact that there is no evidence backing the story. Worse, the proposed new law against denialism and another one against “hate speech” could imperil story research. The walkout reassures the powers that be that no awkward questions will be asked. Another safe option, which many are pursuing, is to quietly change or downplay the story.¹⁸ Early on, the term “unmarked graves” began to replace “mass graves,” at least in Canadian media.

The main beneficiary of the panic has been China. The totalitarian state quickly capitalized on the Canadian government’s genocide resolution by forcing Canada to abandon its careful, years-long effort to form an international coalition to condemn human rights violations in Xinjiang.

Warning to America

Could a top-down, institutionalized, mass delusion of this sort happen in the United States? Conrad Black offers a comment that may help answer the question: It couldn’t have happened in Canada, he says, without “a large section of the public, which knows this to be a falsehood but chooses to side with the silent forces”¹⁹ that forbid open discussion. If many Americans place themselves in that section of the public, we can guess the answer pretty accurately.

Notes
1. Terry Glavin, “The Year of the Graves: How the World’s Media Got It Wrong on Residential School Graves,” National Post (May 27, 2022).
2. Rhythm Sachdeva, “House of Commons Unanimously Agrees to Describe Residential Schools as Genocide,” CTV News (October 27, 2022).
3. Kurt Mahlburg, “Canada’s Mass Graves Scandal Is Looking More Like a Modern-Day Blood Libel,” Mercator (September 7, 2023).
4. Brian Lilley, “Trudeau Explains away Arson Attacks on Churches,” Toronto Sun (July 2021).
5. “No Bodies Found after Spending $8 Million Searching for Bodies at Kamloops Residential School,” Western Standard (May 9, 2024).
6. Brian Giesbrecht, “The Kamloops Guilt Trip, Three Years On,” Frontier Centre for Public Policy (May 6, 2024).
7. Barbara Kay, “Hosing Down ‘the Biggest Moral Panic in Canadian History,’” Mercator (January 30, 2024).
8. Frances Widdowson, “Billy Remembers: Analyzing the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc/Kamloops Indian Residential School Moral Panic,” The American Conservative (February 15, 2022).
9. Terry Glavin, “Canada Slowly Acknowledging There Never Was a ‘Mass Grave,’” National Post (May 30, 2024).
10. Tom Flanagan, “Grave Error: Correcting the False Narrative of Canada’s ‘Missing Children,’” C2C Journal (December 7, 2023).
11. Olivia Stefanovich, “NDP MP Calls for Hate Speech Law to Combat Residential School ‘Denialism,’” CBC (February 18, 2023).
12. Tom Flanagan, “Canada’s Most Dangerous Book: How Quesnel, B.C. Went Crazy Over a Local Woman’s Reading Choices,” C2C Journal (April 18, 2024).
13. Nina Green, “Why Canadians Can’t Just Believe ‘Knowledge Keepers,’” Western Standard (September 23, 2023).
14. Mahlburg, Ibid.
15. Nina Green, “Behind the Orange Shirt,” The Dorchester Review (March 11, 2024).
16. Quinton Amundson, “Incinerated Children Claims ‘Truly Laughable,’” The Catholic Register (June 5, 2024).
17. Connie Thiessen, “Conrad Black Comments Result in Walkout at WAB Conference,” Broadcast Dialogue (June 6, 2024).
18. Jonathan Kay, “Canada’s Elusive Unmarked Graves: A Third-Anniversary Update,” Quillette, (May 29, 2024).
19. Conrad Black, “Trudeau Owes Us All an Apology,” National Post (May 04, 2024).