Full Comment - Things you can't say about residential school grave discoveries

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00:01:26.760 Hello, I'm Anthony Fury. Thanks so much for joining us for the latest episode of Full Comment.

00:01:40.600 If you haven't already, please consider subscribing.

00:01:43.040 It was just about a year ago that Canada began quite the national conversation

00:01:46.540 about residential schools and their legacy.

00:01:50.140 Attention was turned to this issue like almost never before.

00:01:52.680 There was a lot of discussion, debate, and emotion.

00:01:55.340 And yes, there was the burning of many churches across the country

00:01:58.440 and the toppling of statues.

00:02:00.740 There were loud calls to cancel Canada Day.

00:02:03.300 This whole conversation, this whole reckoning, as some people called it,

00:02:06.960 really got started, and I'm going to read from a CNN headline here,

00:02:11.360 after the remains of 215 children were found buried near a school in Canada.

00:02:17.440 Is that headline, though, and any others resembling it,

00:02:21.680 because there were quite a few, fully accurate?

00:02:24.640 Canadian journalist Terry Glavin writes that it is not accurate,

00:02:28.080 and neither is a lot of the ways people talked about the whole story.

00:02:32.060 And in a 5,000-word feature with the headline,

00:02:35.160 The Year of the Graves,

00:02:36.660 How the World's Media Got It Wrong on Residential School Graves,

00:02:40.540 recently published in the National Post,

00:02:42.800 Glavin walks through what was actually found on reserves

00:02:45.680 and near residential schools,

00:02:47.360 what the chiefs and leaders of those communities actually said,

00:02:50.720 how the narrative went awry,

00:02:52.560 and why this matters.

00:02:54.420 The publication of this piece received a great deal of attention,

00:02:57.740 some of it not so positive.

00:03:00.380 Terry Glavin, the author of many books,

00:03:02.040 including several about First Nations communities,

00:03:04.880 joins us now.

00:03:05.840 Hey, Terry, great to have you on.

00:03:07.760 Hi, actually.

00:03:08.780 Let's go back to the beginning here,

00:03:10.340 at least the origins of this feature that you wrote.

00:03:13.880 What compelled you to write this piece?

00:03:16.100 You obviously worked on it for a while,

00:03:17.240 and you were thinking about it well before it was published.

00:03:20.020 Why did you feel the need to tackle this subject?

00:03:24.580 Well, I don't know if I felt the need at all.

00:03:26.120 I was assigned to do it.

00:03:27.800 The anniversary of the Kamloops event was coming up.

00:03:33.420 All the major news organizations were devoting some resources

00:03:36.500 to looking back on the year.

00:03:40.140 And because, I mean, among other things that I do,

00:03:43.540 I have some background in writing about indigenous issues,

00:03:48.300 and I co-authored a book with the survivors of the residential,

00:03:51.340 the former students of a residential school,

00:03:55.960 that the big bosses at the Post figured,

00:03:59.260 well, Glavin's the guy to do this.

00:04:00.820 So, I said, okay, I'm not going to make a lot of people happy.

00:04:08.400 So, that's what happened.

00:04:09.920 Why did you know, though, in getting the assignment

00:04:12.700 that you would not be making people happy?

00:04:15.920 Well, I think there were those of us in the journalism racket

00:04:19.640 who knew that this was kind of,

00:04:23.180 I don't know what the vernacular would be

00:04:26.160 without resorting to foul language.

00:04:28.860 It was not what it said on the tin from the very beginning.

00:04:34.200 And it was the New York Times when everything went crazy, right?

00:04:38.660 It was a horrible history,

00:04:40.760 mass grave of indigenous children reported in Canada.

00:04:44.600 And that was May 28th, 2021.

00:04:47.320 And interestingly, that was the anniversary weekend

00:04:52.900 of the George Floyd craziness in the United States.

00:04:58.800 You know, National Guard called out in 30 states.

00:05:02.340 And it was just, you know, crazy.

00:05:05.240 And so, you had all this mass grave, mass grave,

00:05:09.380 and you had Carolyn Bennett saying, you know,

00:05:12.420 this has got to be our George Floyd moment.

00:05:14.720 And the flags were pulled down on Parliament Hill.

00:05:21.080 And everybody was, you know, my gosh,

00:05:24.180 genocide, mass grave, 215 bodies found.

00:05:28.960 And it, you know, it was the next, the following Tuesday

00:05:32.720 that Chief Casimir at Kamloops first had the opportunity to say,

00:05:39.440 we actually never said we found a mass grave.

00:05:42.900 And there may be children in the ground there.

00:05:45.640 We don't know.

00:05:46.460 There's been some radar work that we've done.

00:05:50.280 You know, it's all very tentative.

00:05:54.280 There's no mass grave.

00:05:55.600 But by that time, the flags had been pulled down

00:05:59.080 on all federal buildings across the country.

00:06:01.900 They stayed that way for several months.

00:06:04.140 And through that weekend, you know,

00:06:07.960 you had Indigenous leaders being pressed on this subject.

00:06:12.040 You know, how many mass graves are there?

00:06:14.480 And it kind of opened a nightmare drawer in the minds of a lot of white people. 0.87

00:06:23.700 You know, this idea of an archipelago of secret mass graves

00:06:28.160 at residential schools across Canada had been floating around

00:06:32.480 like a satanic ritual abuse kind of a deal for some years.

00:06:37.220 And the Aboriginal People's Television Network had tried to debunk it

00:06:41.060 and I think did a fairly good job.

00:06:43.200 I did a bit of an expose and investigation back in 2008, I think it was.

00:06:50.040 But it was always kind of there and there were these weird stories.

00:06:53.040 It was almost like, oh, my gosh, UFOs are real.

00:06:56.800 That was the kind of atmosphere of that first weekend.

00:07:00.420 And it never really got itself sorted.

00:07:05.660 So by the end of the summer, you had 1,300, the way it was usually reported,

00:07:12.080 you know, 1,300 unmarked graves discovered, you know,

00:07:18.360 after Kamloops and so on.

00:07:22.980 And there were riots and dozens of churches were vandalized

00:07:27.240 and statues were toppled and ridiculous things were said 0.99

00:07:31.200 and white people lost their minds in this country. 0.99

00:07:36.120 And yeah, that's the story I wrote.

00:07:39.740 Well, to take it back, I mean, you're talking about it now

00:07:42.000 as if it's now been established that there are some corrections

00:07:44.840 on the broader public record and how we think about this issue.

00:07:47.580 I'm not so sure that's true, though, if you stop, 0.97

00:07:49.720 or at least your phrase about white people losing their minds.

00:07:52.080 I mean, if you were to stop people in, 0.94

00:07:54.900 a lot of people in the streets of Canada and say,

00:07:57.600 what happened a year ago?

00:07:58.320 What did we learn?

00:07:59.440 I think you would hear something along the lines of,

00:08:02.120 yes, there were the initial 200,

00:08:03.960 then another 700, 1,300, say, as you put it,

00:08:07.180 mass graves, bodies, remains, something like that,

00:08:10.180 found adjacent to residential schools.

00:08:13.580 And I think that is still what's in the public consciousness right now.

00:08:17.740 So what actually did happen a year ago?

00:08:20.900 What did those chiefs say and why did chiefs send out press releases?

00:08:25.700 What's actually happened?

00:08:26.900 Yeah, that's a good idea.

00:08:28.340 We'll walk through that.

00:08:29.760 But just on that point, I think you're right.

00:08:32.480 I think a lot of people have yet to be properly disabused of this idea.

00:08:36.740 But again, there was a really interesting survey.

00:08:39.760 The Toronto Star reported on it a couple of days ago.

00:08:42.580 So, I mean, my case, part of the controversial, you know, whatever,

00:08:48.460 attachment to the piece that I wrote,

00:08:51.800 I said nothing has been added to the public record about residential schools.

00:08:56.400 After this national reckoning and all of the hubbub,

00:08:59.740 nothing has been added to the public record about residential schools.

00:09:03.160 That is a true thing.

00:09:04.180 And curiously, this survey that was done that the Toronto Star reported on it

00:09:10.460 found that something like 62% of Canadians, I may be, I'm not quite accurate about this.

00:09:17.200 I'm just going by memory.

00:09:18.580 62% of Canadians were sort of at least somewhat aware of Canada's residential schools legacy

00:09:25.580 before last summer, and about 62% of Canadians are dimly aware of Canada's residential schools legacy now.

00:09:38.960 So, yes, but I also would say that I think tragically, a lot of, you know,

00:09:46.580 the baby's kind of being thrown out with the bathwater because I've never disputed the,

00:09:52.520 in fact, I've argued for the proposition that residential schools were a form of cultural genocide.

00:10:02.160 And people can, you know, we can have conversations about that, whatever.

00:10:05.420 But I've never disputed the unforgivable abuse that so many Indigenous people suffered in those schools.

00:10:16.640 So that's kind of one thing.

00:10:18.260 And what I was really writing about wasn't even about residential schools.

00:10:23.220 It was about this, I don't know how to put it, like a mass hysteria event.

00:10:27.960 It was about how the media got all these stories wrong.

00:10:30.500 So let's just, we'll walk through that.

00:10:33.700 Okay, like.

00:10:34.800 Well, let me, can I ask you about the nothing being added to the public record?

00:10:38.700 Because when the Kamloops chief, she gave her press conference and released a statement,

00:10:42.880 was she not saying, we've used this ground penetrating radar, we've identified these,

00:10:48.180 these, I'm going to use the wrong term here, but these, these spaces where we believe there's the holding of remains,

00:10:54.080 and that we had always had suspicions about this.

00:10:56.700 And now we have confirmed that there is the presence of something underground here.

00:11:00.020 So that is something of additional information.

00:11:02.360 It's like a confirmation of suspicion.

00:11:04.240 That does not add anything to the public record about, about residential schools in Canada.

00:11:13.380 I think, I don't want to criticize Chief Kazinier.

00:11:16.080 I don't think there's anything that woman has said since this whole blew up, whole thing blew up that I've disagreed with.

00:11:22.380 I certainly haven't challenged.

00:11:24.220 The word confirmed, you know, I think if she looked back on it, she would not use that word.

00:11:29.700 Certainly 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.

00:11:39.400 And, 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.

00:11:50.020 And in fact, you know, and in fact, you know, I don't know, maybe there are, that's kind of immaterial.

00:11:56.780 What's material here is that the, the, the Kamloops people never claimed that there was a mass grave discovered.

00:12:06.920 Not once.

00:12:07.860 And then we can move on.

00:12:10.380 We can move on to, let's add up that 1300 children who were allegedly found or discovered in unmarked graves or whatever.

00:12:22.380 Through the, through that summer that created such craziness.

00:12:27.440 July 13th, Penelicott, Cooper Island.

00:12:32.380 You know, the, and this is global, by the way, like the, the Guardian in the UK.

00:12:37.860 The 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.

00:12:53.120 The latest in a series of grim announcements from across the country in recent weeks.

00:12:58.120 The Penelicott nation made no announcement.

00:13:02.960 None.

00:13:03.600 There was a memo that the chief sent to her fellow chiefs in the Cowichan tribes announcing a march that was coming up in Shumanis.

00:13:16.620 And in that memo, she said, you know, it was about residential schools and the, and the legacy.

00:13:22.940 And she mentioned, she mentioned, she mentioned, that's what the march was about.

00:13:26.620 And she mentioned something about ground penetrating radar having turned up 160 possible burials in their territory.

00:13:36.960 Which includes Sussie in the mainland and parts of the Gulf Islands.

00:13:41.360 And the foreshore is what she, I don't even know if she mentioned the word residential school.

00:13:47.020 There was also St. Eugene's, now St. Eugene's, adding up the alleged, you know, 1300.

00:13:56.500 In 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.

00:14:14.780 In fact, the Amak people made no announcement.

00:14:22.820 There was no, the first thing that the chief said at St. Eugene's was that there's no news here.

00:14:32.360 There, we didn't discover anything.

00:14:34.920 Those exact words, there's no news here.

00:14:36.980 Something like that.

00:14:37.900 He said it was, his name's Joe Pierre.

00:14:41.400 And 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.

00:14:53.100 He 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.

00:15:10.520 There's a grand old building there, by the way, and it's been acquired by a number of Tunaha communities.

00:15:15.660 And it's repurposed as part of the St. Eugene's Golf Resort and Casino, come early, come often.

00:15:24.000 Anyway, there was a graveyard there.

00:15:29.440 It was actually for white people.

00:15:30.700 It was a white people, you know, cemetery.

00:15:34.040 And then there was a residential school and a hospital.

00:15:36.940 And, you know, they're mostly Catholics up there.

00:15:41.020 So that's where they buried their dead.

00:15:43.520 And the chief went on to explain, look, there's grass fires, you know, the crosses get burned.

00:15:49.240 And 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.

00:16:00.900 They 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.

00:16:13.600 That's all that was happening.

00:16:14.760 That's it.

00:16:16.320 One 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,

00:16:26.400 is there was so little, I think, rigorous unpacking of what was going on, despite the fact that everybody was talking about this.

00:16:36.200 So, okay, there's these graves, you know, who is in the graves, you know, what are the particulars, what happened to these individuals?

00:16:43.760 And maybe the answers are known to some of these questions.

00:16:46.080 Maybe they're not.

00:16:46.820 And as a reporter, you would want to answer what you can, explain why you can't fill in the gaps to those other questions,

00:16:53.240 and really give a full accounting of the whole picture.

00:16:56.460 And there really wasn't much of that.

00:16:58.340 And I wonder, to your point of the white people losing their minds, to what degree it's the soundbite culture.

00:17:04.060 And you mentioned one of the chiefs making clarification, saying statements on social media.

00:17:07.380 Well, isn't that interesting?

00:17:08.400 Well, 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.

00:17:14.920 Now you can click through to an article, nobody clicks through, and it just shows up on your phone.

00:17:18.380 I want to disable it, I haven't yet.

00:17:19.880 And it just tells you, this is the thing you need to think about today, and it's one sentence long.

00:17:24.360 And 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.

00:17:34.560 No, no, no, I don't think people can quibble.

00:17:35.980 See, this is the interesting thing.

00:17:36.780 Okay, okay, well, let's say they can't, but my whole point is...

00:17:39.260 Nobody's identified a single inaccuracy in that 5,500-word piece.

00:17:43.880 But I guess my point is, we've taken an in-depth story, and we've given it the tweet treatment.

00:17:49.880 Yeah, but even, is there a story there?

00:17:53.520 Here's the interesting thing.

00:17:56.620 You're right.

00:17:57.640 You know, this is kind of about, you know, the strange hybridization of legacy media with social media.

00:18:04.640 I think this is really key to understand what's happening, is that it's all very emblematic.

00:18:11.540 You know, you get photographs, right, imagery.

00:18:14.200 And a key image, you know, a real totemic image from last summer was, and don't forget, and I have to insist on this,

00:18:22.680 this wasn't something that Indigenous people were doing or planning.

00:18:26.380 I mean, even Chief Casimir, I'm sure she must have been shocked that, you know, something...

00:18:32.560 I don't even know if she issued a press release or whether it just showed up in the news section of the Kemlip's website.

00:18:39.760 But this was the federal government saying, we need, in fact, Carolyn Bennett's words.

00:18:45.520 We need our...

00:18:46.580 This is a Rodney King moment.

00:18:48.220 And 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.

00:19:02.580 It's all about him.

00:19:03.380 The teddy bear.

00:19:05.300 Okay, that was at Cowessus.

00:19:08.240 At Cowessus, the chief said, this is not a residential school burial site.

00:19:15.220 This is a Catholic cemetery.

00:19:19.920 751 of those graves of the 1300 were at Cowessus.

00:19:25.840 And that was Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, children, adults, Métis, a well-known established cemetery set aside for, you know, for Catholics.

00:19:42.380 And 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.

00:19:57.540 So there you got Trudeau kneeling with a teddy bear.

00:20:01.020 I mean, taking a knee again.

00:20:02.800 It's a very, you know, that's what he did the year before during the Rodney King hubbub.

00:20:07.340 He took a knee.

00:20:08.040 And 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.

00:20:23.620 You know, it's not even about Canadian politics or Canadian issues half the time.

00:20:28.060 Those kids get killed in that horrible atrocity in Texas.

00:20:33.100 And the next thing you know, Trudeau, I'm going to be tightening up Canada's gun laws.

00:20:37.340 You 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.

00:20:46.340 And Trudeau makes an announcement that basically Canada will behave like an American blue state.

00:20:53.300 If American women want abortions, they can come to Canada. 0.99

00:20:56.800 It's just one thing after another after another.

00:20:59.880 Well, he manages to make all these moments about himself, the George Floyd incident, what's going on here with the schools. 1.00

00:21:05.820 Yeah, I don't mean to bang on about what an idiot Trudeau is. 0.99

00:21:09.100 I mean, you know, anybody can do that. 1.00

00:21:12.340 It's just a kind of a feature of the age, right?

00:21:15.720 You 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.

00:21:34.360 And so, you know, everything is digital now, too.

00:21:37.740 I don't know how many people actually buy print editions and newspapers anymore.

00:21:41.020 So 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.

00:21:58.100 It's CG, you know, global times, RT news sites sponsored and run out of Caracas, Venezuela, and run, run.

00:22:08.920 And then you've got all of these new kind of startups and so on.

00:22:14.600 And events that may not even be events get kind of bounced around like a pinball in a pinball machine.

00:22:25.300 And that is the milieu in which certainly the Trudeau government inhabits, okay?

00:22:34.340 I mean, they make major foreign policy announcements on Twitter.

00:22:39.520 It's all about the imagery.

00:22:42.320 It's all about, in Trudeau's case, situating himself at the vanguard of the kind of, you know, radical sheep bourgeoisie. 0.62

00:22:51.200 And it's very American.

00:22:53.340 And 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.

00:23:08.740 I think that's one of the reasons why last year was so weird and unique.

00:23:15.420 We'll be back with more with Terry Glavin in just a moment.

00:23:17.700 One thing I found really interesting was I also am the op-ed editor for the Sun Papers.

00:23:25.240 And 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.

00:23:33.100 And I read it.

00:23:34.040 And I'd only read, this was only a few days after, a week after.

00:23:37.000 I'd only read the CBC stories and, you know, the wire service stories and, of course, the tweets.

00:23:42.040 And it talked about what Chief Kazimir actually said.

00:23:44.660 And I went, okay, and I'm the editor here, so I go, I'm not so sure about this.

00:23:49.920 I haven't heard this before.

00:23:50.740 I should, you know, I'm going to fact check this thing.

00:23:53.220 And I did.

00:23:54.060 And I found the posting on the community's website.

00:23:57.340 And I said, okay, well, there you go.

00:23:58.780 Wow, didn't know this.

00:24:00.040 Why isn't this being amplified more?

00:24:01.460 And it's interesting that these primary sources are more readily available to journalists and regular folks than ever.

00:24:07.220 They're posted right there.

00:24:08.160 And 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.

00:24:17.140 Well, this is occurring, you know, at a time that's been described as, you know, a crisis of epistemology in the Western world.

00:24:28.400 And I don't want to get too pointy-headed about this.

00:24:30.520 Jonathan Rauch wrote a really good book recently.

00:24:34.140 He's one of these Brookings Institute Atlantic magazine fixtures.

00:24:38.920 A great book called The Constitution of Knowledge.

00:24:41.260 And 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.

00:24:59.860 Whether it's peer review, fact-checking, replication, you know, in science, certainly in the social sciences and humanities.

00:25:11.680 And truth is being kind of problematized, you know.

00:25:16.120 And Trumpism, the rise of Trumpism, I think, can be explained through this or understood through this lens as well.

00:25:25.000 And 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.

00:25:40.420 There is, you know, this is something that people have been, you know, smarter guys than me, have been looking at for quite a while.

00:25:47.820 Jeremy Stangroom and Ophelia Benson wrote about it about 20 years ago in a book called Why Truth Matters.

00:25:53.780 And this whole kind of problematization of truth and the supremacy of narrative, right, is something that I think weakened newsrooms are susceptible to.

00:26:09.340 It's just so hard to do the actual work.

00:26:14.540 You know, the first question a journalist should always ask is, is this true?

00:26:17.520 And what's happening is knowledge is being substituted with belief.

00:26:26.060 And this worries me.

00:26:27.580 This 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.

00:26:36.860 And 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.

00:27:01.840 And, 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.

00:27:19.700 It's fascistic, and that's why I'm particularly concerned with this.

00:27:26.040 And 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.

00:27:35.820 And I know some people up in Kamloops, and I know some people in some of these communities.

00:27:40.840 I'd spent, you know, a lot of time, I'd written extensively about Penelica.

00:27:43.940 So, 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.

00:28:05.300 You know, open liberal democracies, multicultural democracies like Canada are being enfeebled by this kind of sociopathology.

00:28:16.460 And 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?

00:28:26.300 For God's sake, could we not please just ask them, what's going on?

00:28:34.740 Like, what happened?

00:28:36.320 And 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.

00:28:50.520 And 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.

00:29:00.020 And, 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.

00:29:12.240 But 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.

00:29:33.020 I think it's almost double.

00:29:35.320 And when you look at where that money's going, you know, it's going to people, you know, who want a wellness center.

00:29:42.660 And it's going to people who want to do ghoulish things like, I shouldn't say that, but, you know, dig up graves.

00:29:50.520 And I certainly not suggested once that indigenous people have anything to prove at any of these sites or that there has to be excavations.

00:29:58.600 They shouldn't get the funding for the graves?

00:30:00.660 No, 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.

00:30:10.960 There's the, what you might call the old guys, people who still know the language. 1.00

00:30:14.500 They're tough as nails.

00:30:15.580 They've been out on the land.

00:30:17.460 And a lot of them are interested in forestry and mining.

00:30:20.760 A lot of them are interested in saying, no, get the hell away from me.

00:30:24.600 We're going to continue our traditional way of life as much as we possibly can.

00:30:28.600 They're hard to deal with if you're a federal bureaucrat.

00:30:31.860 And then there's the kind of administrative business class that tends to be in charge of the tribal councils, some of the larger bands.

00:30:39.820 And, you know, they've got MBAs and they've got law degrees.

00:30:43.960 And, you know, a lot of them want to, you know, implement a more rigorous taxation regime on their reserve properties.

00:30:52.480 And 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.

00:31:01.380 You know, you know, great swaths of the country where there were no treaties. 0.98

00:31:05.740 And essentially they're standing up and they're saying, look, we own this damn place. 0.94

00:31:09.560 We're going to start acting like it. 0.99

00:31:11.160 And you better pay attention.

00:31:13.660 Trudeau doesn't want to deal with them either.

00:31:15.440 So there's this third caste. 0.91

00:31:18.980 It's all, you know, that bless their hearts.

00:31:21.400 A lot of them are victims of residential schools abuse.

00:31:26.560 And, 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. 0.73

00:31:36.140 And they're wounded.

00:31:37.040 And that's there, that's the people that Trudeau finds it easy to deal with.

00:31:43.680 Well, 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.

00:31:52.160 So 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.

00:32:09.140 I mean, this was being done.

00:32:11.080 I don't think so.

00:32:12.900 I mean, I can only speak for Toronto by people who were not indigenous persons, first nations persons.

00:32:17.600 To what degree was this performative for each other?

00:32:19.960 I 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.

00:32:34.400 I appreciate in high schools, you talk about what's in the news and there's classes for that.

00:32:37.380 And 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.

00:32:46.500 And one goes, yes, let's talk about the history of our nation.

00:32:48.740 Let's talk about Canada.

00:32:50.160 What's going on here?

00:32:51.320 If 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.

00:33:10.180 And I feel like so much of this story kind of snowballing the way it did had to do with that phenomenon.

00:33:16.860 Yeah, there was a lot going on.

00:33:19.280 I don't want to suggest, by the way, that no good came of it, right?

00:33:23.880 I think you could make the case that some good actually did come of it.

00:33:27.960 I remember a kind of a really, really interesting turning point interview that Perry Bellegarde did.

00:33:35.520 He 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.

00:33:46.600 And 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.

00:33:54.140 But 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.

00:34:06.600 We'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?

00:34:19.600 And, you know, where's all the money for the proper, the proper coordinated surveying of residential, of graves, cemeteries that are residential school sites?

00:34:30.740 You know, where is, that's, that's, you know, what the hell?

00:34:34.760 Because 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.

00:34:48.700 This is six years after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission came out.

00:34:53.140 So 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.

00:35:12.080 Like, like, where the hell have you guys been?

00:35:15.300 You 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. 0.77

00:35:26.480 You haven't done a damn thing.

00:35:28.360 But that was missed. 0.83

00:35:29.660 That was completely blown over.

00:35:32.120 And instead, you know, we basically lost our minds.

00:35:37.100 And 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.

00:35:51.400 But I wonder how much damage was done as well.

00:35:57.080 There's a thing that happens now.

00:36:00.240 You 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. 0.98

00:36:13.920 We're talking about white people and how bad white people are. 0.69

00:36:17.740 Well, what if you're a kid from some poor Indian reserve? 0.97

00:36:21.940 You know, your uncle, you know, something happened to him when he was a kid when he was at residential school.

00:36:26.280 He drinks a lot.

00:36:27.860 The poor guy is kind of broken.

00:36:30.240 And he goes to a regular school.

00:36:34.320 And, you know, this is after the parade has passed by, you know, the year of the graves parade and all of the hubbub.

00:36:41.500 And he looks around and he sees white kids.

00:36:43.800 He goes, oh, well, these are the guys that genocided my people.

00:36:47.200 You know, this is not healthy.

00:36:48.960 Right.

00:36:49.040 Did this past year bring us together?

00:36:50.900 Did it push us further apart?

00:36:52.800 Well, I don't know.

00:36:55.600 I think in some cases, actually, in some communities, it did bring people together.

00:37:00.240 I think it did.

00:37:02.160 I think it really did.

00:37:03.520 I think we're both in agreement.

00:37:05.520 Sorry.

00:37:05.880 I 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.

00:37:18.900 And, 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.

00:37:28.580 But I say, guys, you're always going on about the nanny state decrying it.

00:37:31.080 I do that myself.

00:37:31.960 Here we've got this crazy thing where we said, no, you can't be with your parents.

00:37:35.620 You've got to go into the state school.

00:37:37.180 Let's talk about that because that's a problem in our history.

00:37:39.960 You know, let's just talk about it all more and maybe the original message, your pieces, and let's talk about it accurately.

00:37:48.540 Yeah.

00:37:49.060 You 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.

00:38:00.520 Their argument was that it was about the family and it was the case against conservatives making the case against residential schools.

00:38:12.000 You shouldn't break up the family like this.

00:38:13.660 No good can come of this.

00:38:14.760 Yes.

00:38:15.020 And, of course, some of those guys were basically rednecks who would say, well, you know, why are we spending all this money educating Indians?

00:38:21.460 You know, just, you know, let them be like the rest of us or live their lives out in the bush. 0.99

00:38:26.380 But then the liberals, the progressives, the reformers of the time were the oblates of Mary Immaculate, were the churches that ran the residential school.

00:38:38.800 This is the sort of big progressive.

00:38:40.660 This is what the allies were doing back in the day.

00:38:45.120 So, I mean, yeah, I think it's really, you know, we should know this history, but we should know this history.

00:38:54.380 This should be about knowledge.

00:38:56.360 It shouldn't be about an enforced belief.

00:39:00.980 And, you know, history is messy.

00:39:05.620 You know, it's complicated.

00:39:06.800 It's not, you know, it's not just one thing happening after another.

00:39:10.200 And 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?

00:39:26.240 And what can we say about what we know?

00:39:31.820 That'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.

00:39:41.860 But this day and age, that's the issue.

00:39:44.100 I was, your people taking issue with you asking these basic questions reminds me of some COVID writing I've done the past two years.

00:39:50.820 I 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.

00:39:58.700 Oh, I remember that.

00:39:59.400 But just writing these basic things, you know, that, you know, for instance, children, influenza is more severe in children than COVID.

00:40:06.400 That's consistently held true.

00:40:07.660 That's just a fact.

00:40:08.540 And people losing their minds over it.

00:40:09.820 Guys, I didn't make this up.

00:40:10.840 It's just the reporting.

00:40:11.760 But it didn't fit the way that we wanted to conceptualize things for a while.

00:40:16.380 Yeah, that's what worries me.

00:40:17.780 I think that's the thing that really, I think, should worry us all.

00:40:20.720 And 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.

00:40:36.140 And 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.

00:40:48.640 She had to out-China China. 0.59

00:40:50.680 She had to stand by their lies, even when they weren't anymore.

00:40:54.140 Yeah.

00:40:54.620 So, 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.

00:41:09.620 That conspiracy theory is, and it's, of course, so much of it has got to do with social media as well.

00:41:17.660 It's just a field day for conspiracy theorists.

00:41:21.260 But 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.

00:41:41.040 So, it's a jumble.

00:41:43.480 It really is a mess.

00:41:45.260 And I don't know.

00:41:46.860 I 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.

00:41:56.520 Now, I'm kind of a fairly conventional social democrat, you know, leftist, whatever, conventional.

00:42:04.060 But 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.

00:42:21.060 This has got to be something that we relearn.

00:42:28.280 We have to relearn as individuals the capacity to discern truth from fiction.

00:42:39.080 It's not that hard.

00:42:41.360 It's really not that hard.

00:42:43.320 But it's something we have to pay attention to.

00:42:45.900 It's a muscle we have to learn how to exercise.

00:42:48.580 And to your point, it connects so many issues that we're dealing with right now.

00:42:53.640 Terry Glavin, you've written a fascinating 5,000-word feature that folks can still find at NationalPost.com, The Year of the Graves.

00:43:00.860 Thanks very much for joining us to discuss it.

00:43:03.500 Nice talking to you.

00:43:04.120 Full Comment is a post-media podcast.

00:43:08.660 I'm Anthony Fury.

00:43:09.780 This episode was produced by Andre Proulx, with theme music by Bryce Hall.

00:43:13.780 Kevin Libin is the executive producer.

00:43:16.240 You can subscribe to Full Comment on Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify, and Amazon Music.

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00:43:27.880 Thanks for listening.

00:43:28.520 Thank you.

Full Comment - July 18, 2022

Things you can't say about residential school grave discoveries

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