After the discovery of the remains of 215 Indigenous children buried near a school in Canada, Canadian journalist Terry Glavin wrote a piece in The National Post titled, The Year of the Graves: How the World's Media Got It Wrong on Residential School Graves. In the piece, Glavin walks through what was actually found on reserves and near residential schools, what the chiefs and leaders of those communities actually said, and why this matters.
00:11:24.220The word confirmed, you know, I think if she looked back on it, she would not use that word.
00:11:29.700Certainly by the Tuesday, she was not saying anything of the kind, saying, oh, it's all very preliminary and there's not a mass grave.
00:11:39.400And, and subsequent statements, she was, you know, she, she would say things like, well, you have to remember that there, we don't know, but there may be children in the ground there.
00:11:50.020And in fact, you know, and in fact, you know, I don't know, maybe there are, that's kind of immaterial.
00:11:56.780What's material here is that the, the, the Kamloops people never claimed that there was a mass grave discovered.
00:12:32.380You know, the, and this is global, by the way, like the, the Guardian in the UK.
00:12:37.860The headline was, or the lead paragraph was, a First Nations community in Western Canada has announced the discovery of at least 160 unmarked graves close to a former residential school.
00:12:53.120The latest in a series of grim announcements from across the country in recent weeks.
00:12:58.120The Penelicott nation made no announcement.
00:13:03.600There was a memo that the chief sent to her fellow chiefs in the Cowichan tribes announcing a march that was coming up in Shumanis.
00:13:16.620And in that memo, she said, you know, it was about residential schools and the, and the legacy.
00:13:22.940And she mentioned, she mentioned, she mentioned, that's what the march was about.
00:13:26.620And she mentioned something about ground penetrating radar having turned up 160 possible burials in their territory.
00:13:36.960Which includes Sussie in the mainland and parts of the Gulf Islands.
00:13:41.360And the foreshore is what she, I don't even know if she mentioned the word residential school.
00:13:47.020There was also St. Eugene's, now St. Eugene's, adding up the alleged, you know, 1300.
00:13:56.500In that case, again, you know, you get big story, oh, you know, another discovery of unmarked graves at a residential school site announced by a First Nation.
00:14:14.780In fact, the Amak people made no announcement.
00:14:22.820There was no, the first thing that the chief said at St. Eugene's was that there's no news here.
00:14:37.900He said it was, his name's Joe Pierre.
00:14:41.400And the first thing he said about it was, the leadership of Acham wishes to clarify information that has appeared on various social media platforms, as well as national and international news.
00:14:53.100He went on to explain that a year beforehand, a year earlier, a single burial was inadvertently disturbed during remedial work adjacent to the former residential school at Acham.
00:15:10.520There's a grand old building there, by the way, and it's been acquired by a number of Tunaha communities.
00:15:15.660And it's repurposed as part of the St. Eugene's Golf Resort and Casino, come early, come often.
00:15:30.700It was a white people, you know, cemetery.
00:15:34.040And then there was a residential school and a hospital.
00:15:36.940And, you know, they're mostly Catholics up there.
00:15:41.020So that's where they buried their dead.
00:15:43.520And the chief went on to explain, look, there's grass fires, you know, the crosses get burned.
00:15:49.240And so all we were doing, because, you know, we weren't sure of the boundary of the graveyard, because that burial was inadvertently disturbed a year earlier.
00:16:00.900They were using ground penetrating radar to locate the precise sites of each of the burials in the cemetery so that they could put crosses up again.
00:16:16.320One thing I find so interesting, found it then, a year ago, and I find it now again as we discuss this and as your story gets discussed by people,
00:16:26.400is there was so little, I think, rigorous unpacking of what was going on, despite the fact that everybody was talking about this.
00:16:36.200So, okay, there's these graves, you know, who is in the graves, you know, what are the particulars, what happened to these individuals?
00:16:43.760And maybe the answers are known to some of these questions.
00:17:08.400Well, there's the tweet, there's the ticker board, and then on my iPhone, there's this thing, Apple News, and it, boom, and it gives you this sentence to tell you the news.
00:17:14.920Now you can click through to an article, nobody clicks through, and it just shows up on your phone.
00:17:19.880And it just tells you, this is the thing you need to think about today, and it's one sentence long.
00:17:24.360And to what degree has this whole story, which, as you retell these items, and I know people are going to quibble with you on their particulars, and that's fine, but this is a very complex and detailed story.
00:17:34.560No, no, no, I don't think people can quibble.
00:18:48.220And then you had that totemic image of Justin Trudeau kneeling at what, you know, was presented as a just-discovered, you know, child burial beside a residential school.
00:19:42.380And the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has identified about, I think it was nine children who died after having been enrolled at the Mary Aval Residential School at Cowessus.
00:19:57.540So there you got Trudeau kneeling with a teddy bear.
00:20:08.040And so, you know, you've got basically, and I think the observation I've made, and it's not an original thought, is that this government is kind of like a social media marketing strategy in charge of a G7 country.
00:20:23.620You know, it's not even about Canadian politics or Canadian issues half the time.
00:20:28.060Those kids get killed in that horrible atrocity in Texas.
00:20:33.100And the next thing you know, Trudeau, I'm going to be tightening up Canada's gun laws.
00:20:37.340You know, the leak of the Roe versus Wade draft from the Supreme Court in the United States has everybody, you know, out in the streets protesting.
00:20:46.340And Trudeau makes an announcement that basically Canada will behave like an American blue state.
00:20:53.300If American women want abortions, they can come to Canada.
00:20:56.800It's just one thing after another after another.
00:20:59.880Well, he manages to make all these moments about himself, the George Floyd incident, what's going on here with the schools.
00:21:05.820Yeah, I don't mean to bang on about what an idiot Trudeau is.
00:21:09.100I mean, you know, anybody can do that.
00:21:12.340It's just a kind of a feature of the age, right?
00:21:15.720You mentioned, you know, the way you put it is, you know, there are, when you look at the news media today, because legacy journalism has been gutted, let's face it, you know, something like 2,000 journalists have lost their jobs in Canada in the year leading up to Canada.
00:21:34.360And so, you know, everything is digital now, too.
00:21:37.740I don't know how many people actually buy print editions and newspapers anymore.
00:21:41.020So you've got this strange kind of galaxy of legacy news sites, sort of, you know, a lot of foreign propaganda sites that you wouldn't know are foreign propaganda sites.
00:21:58.100It's CG, you know, global times, RT news sites sponsored and run out of Caracas, Venezuela, and run, run.
00:22:08.920And then you've got all of these new kind of startups and so on.
00:22:14.600And events that may not even be events get kind of bounced around like a pinball in a pinball machine.
00:22:25.300And that is the milieu in which certainly the Trudeau government inhabits, okay?
00:22:34.340I mean, they make major foreign policy announcements on Twitter.
00:22:53.340And I think that's what made last year so different from other kind of long overdue reckonings about residential schools in Canada, which we seem to have, by the way, every five years or so.
00:23:08.740I think that's one of the reasons why last year was so weird and unique.
00:23:15.420We'll be back with more with Terry Glavin in just a moment.
00:23:17.700One thing I found really interesting was I also am the op-ed editor for the Sun Papers.
00:23:25.240And we had a column come in that touched upon a couple of the points that you made in your feature, nowhere near as exhaustive as your piece.
00:24:08.160And yet these items are not amplified to the degree that they could be to just help us have, to help us include all the information.
00:24:17.140Well, this is occurring, you know, at a time that's been described as, you know, a crisis of epistemology in the Western world.
00:24:28.400And I don't want to get too pointy-headed about this.
00:24:30.520Jonathan Rauch wrote a really good book recently.
00:24:34.140He's one of these Brookings Institute Atlantic magazine fixtures.
00:24:38.920A great book called The Constitution of Knowledge.
00:24:41.260And the argument is essentially that, you know, all of the methods and the means by which truth is established, knowledge is produced, the way knowledge is produced, is breaking down in particularly the Anglosphere, mostly in the United States.
00:24:59.860Whether it's peer review, fact-checking, replication, you know, in science, certainly in the social sciences and humanities.
00:25:11.680And truth is being kind of problematized, you know.
00:25:16.120And Trumpism, the rise of Trumpism, I think, can be explained through this or understood through this lens as well.
00:25:25.000And there's also what the French writer Pascal Bruckner described as the tyranny of guilt that seems to be possessing a lot of the elites of the liberal democracies.
00:25:40.420There is, you know, this is something that people have been, you know, smarter guys than me, have been looking at for quite a while.
00:25:47.820Jeremy Stangroom and Ophelia Benson wrote about it about 20 years ago in a book called Why Truth Matters.
00:25:53.780And this whole kind of problematization of truth and the supremacy of narrative, right, is something that I think weakened newsrooms are susceptible to.
00:26:09.340It's just so hard to do the actual work.
00:26:14.540You know, the first question a journalist should always ask is, is this true?
00:26:17.520And what's happening is knowledge is being substituted with belief.
00:26:27.580This worries me because, I mean, for the last 20 years or so, my kind of beat has been the rise of police states and authoritarian regimes around the world.
00:26:36.860And how, essentially, when you substitute belief for knowledge and you enforce belief in the place of knowledge and facts, you know, what happens is the narrative that prevails is the one with the loudest voice, the shiniest boots, the deepest pockets.
00:27:01.840And, you know, I'm not saying that's where Canada is headed exactly, but that's the pattern, that when you substitute belief for knowledge, and that is the state doing that, you know, it's not long before there's a knock in the door in the middle of the night.
00:27:19.700It's fascistic, and that's why I'm particularly concerned with this.
00:27:26.040And I just happen to have some background in what we used to call Indian country and about residential schools that I think gave me a bit of an edge.
00:27:35.820And I know some people up in Kamloops, and I know some people in some of these communities.
00:27:40.840I'd spent, you know, a lot of time, I'd written extensively about Penelica.
00:27:43.940So, yeah, what happened last year was almost a teachable moment, if you like, in this very, very dangerous dysfunction that is enfeebling countries like Canada.
00:28:05.300You know, open liberal democracies, multicultural democracies like Canada are being enfeebled by this kind of sociopathology.
00:28:16.460And all I'm asking, and I mean, you know, I don't think it's much for journalists to ask, can we at least pay attention to what the local indigenous people are saying here?
00:28:26.300For God's sake, could we not please just ask them, what's going on?
00:28:36.320And this is something that's part of another story that I've noticed over the years is that we don't really pay much attention to what local indigenous people are actually saying and what they actually want.
00:28:50.520And what they've been asking for from the federal government half the time is just to be left alone and to get on with their lives.
00:29:00.020And, of course, because they are still under the Indian Act and almost wards of the state, they, you know, they can't really move unless they have some kind of federal bureaucrat signing off.
00:29:12.240But this is something actually to pay attention to as well is that I don't know if it's a theory, a bit of a hypothesis, you know, like I think when you look at the Indian Affairs budget under the true government, what we used to call the Indian Affairs budget, it's now Crown Indigenous Relations and Indigenous Services.
00:29:35.320And when you look at where that money's going, you know, it's going to people, you know, who want a wellness center.
00:29:42.660And it's going to people who want to do ghoulish things like, I shouldn't say that, but, you know, dig up graves.
00:29:50.520And I certainly not suggested once that indigenous people have anything to prove at any of these sites or that there has to be excavations.
00:29:58.600They shouldn't get the funding for the graves?
00:30:00.660No, no, what I'm saying is, is that there's basically three casts, if you like, and this is really an overgeneralization of indigenous leadership in this country.
00:30:10.960There's the, what you might call the old guys, people who still know the language.
00:30:17.460And a lot of them are interested in forestry and mining.
00:30:20.760A lot of them are interested in saying, no, get the hell away from me.
00:30:24.600We're going to continue our traditional way of life as much as we possibly can.
00:30:28.600They're hard to deal with if you're a federal bureaucrat.
00:30:31.860And then there's the kind of administrative business class that tends to be in charge of the tribal councils, some of the larger bands.
00:30:39.820And, you know, they've got MBAs and they've got law degrees.
00:30:43.960And, you know, a lot of them want to, you know, implement a more rigorous taxation regime on their reserve properties.
00:30:52.480And they want to develop industry and they want to be, a lot of them are actually on unceded, you know, their reserves are in unceded territories, as they're called.
00:31:01.380You know, you know, great swaths of the country where there were no treaties.
00:31:05.740And essentially they're standing up and they're saying, look, we own this damn place.
00:31:18.980It's all, you know, that bless their hearts.
00:31:21.400A lot of them are victims of residential schools abuse.
00:31:26.560And, you know, they're kind of, they've got one foot in the indigenous culture and one foot in some kind of, I don't know, imaginary indigenous culture.
00:31:37.040And that's there, that's the people that Trudeau finds it easy to deal with.
00:31:43.680Well, and I also wonder, you know, to what degree and your original point about this is about white people or people who are not part of the indigenous community.
00:31:52.160So much of the gestures that we saw in the immediate aftermath of this news reporting, the lining up, the shoes, the 250 shoes, putting, putting signs or what have you on your windows, on your property.
00:32:12.900I mean, I can only speak for Toronto by people who were not indigenous persons, first nations persons.
00:32:17.600To what degree was this performative for each other?
00:32:19.960I know, again, a few days after this, at my children's school, there was already discussion about it and the Toronto school boards were wanting to codify basically the immediate news reports as curriculum and discussion for small children.
00:32:34.400I appreciate in high schools, you talk about what's in the news and there's classes for that.
00:32:37.380And you talk about the daily newspaper and I don't have a problem with that at all, but small children, you know, learning right away initial reports and talking about that and coming home.
00:32:46.500And one goes, yes, let's talk about the history of our nation.
00:32:51.320If these news reports spur Canadians to go and read the truth and reconciliation report, as I've done, and one can only be better off learning from that by all means, but there was much more performative measures for each other that had nothing really to do with the betterment of the lives of indigenous people in this country.
00:33:10.180And I feel like so much of this story kind of snowballing the way it did had to do with that phenomenon.
00:33:19.280I don't want to suggest, by the way, that no good came of it, right?
00:33:23.880I think you could make the case that some good actually did come of it.
00:33:27.960I remember a kind of a really, really interesting turning point interview that Perry Bellegarde did.
00:33:35.520He was the national chief of the AFN with over that weekend, that first weekend when everybody was losing their marbles over this alleged mass grave with Evan Solomon.
00:33:46.600And I don't want to, you know, I think Evan's a good guy and he was just sort of reading what everybody else was reading.
00:33:54.140But Evan, you know, what Perry was trying to get in, a word edgewise, was that, yeah, well, you know, Trudeau got elected on a promise to implement all of the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Report.
00:34:06.600We've been waiting five, six years now, you know, where's the money and the national coordination for finding the location of the 3,200 kids that the TRC identified as missing?
00:34:19.600And, you know, where's all the money for the proper, the proper coordinated surveying of residential, of graves, cemeteries that are residential school sites?
00:34:30.740You know, where is, that's, that's, you know, what the hell?
00:34:34.760Because by the time of Kamloops, only 27, no, pardon me, I think it was $33 million had been set aside from the federal government for this and only something like 6 million of it had been spent.
00:34:48.700This is six years after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission came out.
00:34:53.140So if anybody was going to have a serious conversation about, you know, what the hell, when the Kamloops story broke, the federal government, you know, I think quite deftly preempted a proper conversation that involved necessary questions that should be asked.
00:35:12.080Like, like, where the hell have you guys been?
00:35:15.300You said you were going to implement the terms of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the four recommendations specifically about, about residential school grave sites, and missing kids.
00:35:32.120And instead, you know, we basically lost our minds.
00:35:37.100And the thing that's interesting about this to me, too, is that, I mean, I, you know, when I say some good is being done, finally, the federal government did start pouring a whole bunch of money into this project.
00:35:51.400But I wonder how much damage was done as well.
00:36:00.240You know, we're no longer talking about history and particular institutions and actions by the state that we should understand as having been, you know, retrograde and wrong and harmful.
00:36:13.920We're talking about white people and how bad white people are.
00:36:17.740Well, what if you're a kid from some poor Indian reserve?
00:36:21.940You know, your uncle, you know, something happened to him when he was a kid when he was at residential school.
00:37:05.880I think we're both in agreement that, you know, learning more about our nation's history and learning more about people who are not necessarily us or who we see ourselves as I think is beneficial.
00:37:18.900And, you know, I often say whether it's getting the story right in the ways we're talking about with the year of the grave story or, you know, many conservatives who kind of don't want to think about this stuff.
00:37:28.580But I say, guys, you're always going on about the nanny state decrying it.
00:37:49.060You know, what's really interesting is that, you know, down through the years, like decades and decades and decades ago, people and they were actually conservatives.
00:38:00.520Their argument was that it was about the family and it was the case against conservatives making the case against residential schools.
00:38:12.000You shouldn't break up the family like this.
00:38:15.020And, of course, some of those guys were basically rednecks who would say, well, you know, why are we spending all this money educating Indians?
00:38:21.460You know, just, you know, let them be like the rest of us or live their lives out in the bush.
00:38:26.380But then the liberals, the progressives, the reformers of the time were the oblates of Mary Immaculate, were the churches that ran the residential school.
00:39:06.800It's not, you know, it's not just one thing happening after another.
00:39:10.200And I think the danger, you see, the reaction to the piece, I think, was very, very telling, is that, you know, all I was saying is, you know, what, you know, is this true?
00:39:26.240And what can we say about what we know?
00:39:31.820That's extremely, these are extremely insurrectionary questions to be asking of, you know, I hate the term woke, but that's the term people use.
00:39:41.860But this day and age, that's the issue.
00:39:44.100I was, your people taking issue with you asking these basic questions reminds me of some COVID writing I've done the past two years.
00:39:50.820I was denounced in the House of Commons by Patty Hadjew when she was health minister for writing just basic facts out of public health documents that hadn't yet been reported.
00:40:17.780I think that's the thing that really, I think, should worry us all.
00:40:20.720And speaking of Patty Hadjew, I remember when, you know, when some reporter at a press conference asked her about the reliability of China's COVID statistics, she's lit into the guy, sort of banging on about, oh, this is just a conspiracy theory.
00:40:36.140And the hilarious thing about that was that only two days before, the Chinese government itself had admitted that it had underreported the known number of COVID cases in China.
00:40:54.620So, you know, I mean, this is an age in which, because of the rigor that was, you know, we've conventionally applied to the production of knowledge, say, has broken down.
00:41:09.620That conspiracy theory is, and it's, of course, so much of it has got to do with social media as well.
00:41:17.660It's just a field day for conspiracy theorists.
00:41:21.260But it's also a time in which it's so easy to dismiss somebody who might discover something that is real, that kind of conflicts with the establishment narrative, to dismiss that person as a conspiracy theorist.
00:41:46.860I know the government's, the federal government's got all kinds of things that they're doing right now to regulate the Internet, regulate hate speech, and all this kind of stuff.
00:41:56.520Now, I'm kind of a fairly conventional social democrat, you know, leftist, whatever, conventional.
00:42:04.060But I just don't believe that the state is capable of intruding like this into, and trespassing, into realms that it has no place, trespassing.
00:42:21.060This has got to be something that we relearn.
00:42:28.280We have to relearn as individuals the capacity to discern truth from fiction.