Greg Wycliffe - Kamloops Mass Grave Roundtable - 4 Years of Lies- Frances Widdowson, Jim McMurtry, Michelle Stirling

00:00:00.000 all righty welcome everybody i am very excited we're going to have a round table tonight it's

00:00:05.520 almost the fourth anniversary of the big breaking cam loops story the mass grave and uh over the

00:00:14.340 course of that time we saw calls to cancel canada day we saw a huge outcry across the country we saw

00:00:22.480 statues of our founding fathers fall to the ground uh and it was said it was we were told

00:00:29.220 it was understandable. Since then, even internationally, a lot of people believed,

00:00:34.680 well, I guess Canada is inherently racist. It's history. And not only that, but there was a motion

00:00:40.120 passed in Parliament that was unanimously agreed upon by all members of Parliament that

00:00:46.720 residential schools are or were genocide. And on the panel with me tonight, we have people who

00:00:55.360 disagree with this claim and have some of them have been studying indigenous issues for over a

00:01:00.880 decade i'll give a quick introduction to them and uh from there we're going to pass it off to

00:01:07.160 francis widdowson because uh it sounds like they have a plan to fight back against all this

00:01:12.600 misinformation that is tainting uh canadian history canadian identity and trying to really

00:01:19.440 well, we'll get into the kind of the ramifications of why it's so important to correct the record

00:01:25.800 here and more importantly, just be able to, you know, question history and interrogate

00:01:31.980 these sort of beliefs that have been aggressively thrust upon the entire nation and that we're

00:01:36.700 just supposed to agree as fact.

00:01:39.720 So we'll get some people on here in just a moment.

00:01:42.600 but of course we have

00:01:45.180 Francis Widdowson who is a

00:01:47.300 professor who was

00:01:49.360 fired

00:01:49.880 speaking out on some of these

00:01:53.340 issues we have

00:01:55.020 a filmmaker

00:01:56.960 Simon Hergott and the two

00:01:59.280 of them have already released a

00:02:00.840 short documentary

00:02:03.080 What Remains

00:02:04.360 What Remains or What

00:02:07.160 Remains with a question mark but that's a great

00:02:09.180 documentary we'll be covering as well

00:02:11.000 And we also have Michelle Sterling on the roundtable tonight. 0.99

00:02:15.300 And, of course, Jim McMurtry, who is a schoolteacher who was fired basically instantly for speaking out against this news item about four years ago.

00:02:29.080 Now, let me get Francis Widows in up here just one second, and we'll pass it off to Francis. 1.00

00:02:41.000 um let's see can you hit the request to speak button

00:02:47.160 francis

00:02:49.960 you there francis am i here can you hear me yeah we can hear you excellent

00:03:00.220 thank you so much greg i'm incredibly excited to be here this matter is very urgent at this stage

00:03:10.600 because we are coming up to the four-year anniversary of the announcement that happened

00:03:16.680 on May 27, 2021, which I'll talk about shortly, which was the Kamloose Indian Band's claim that

00:03:25.160 the remains of 215 children have been confirmed at the site next to the former residential school.

00:03:34.040 but before I just give a brief introduction into that issue I just wanted to first of all thank

00:03:41.160 Greg so much for hosting this space because we really want to talk about this issue which many

00:03:50.280 people have suffered serious consequences from trying to speak the truth about what has happened

00:03:58.760 and the resulting terrible divisiveness and falsehoods that we have been fed by a number of

00:04:08.360 institutions. Anyway, I have a long background in this area. I was a professor at Mount Royal

00:04:16.680 University in Calgary. My area of specialization was Aboriginal policy and as a professor for 13

00:04:25.720 years from 2008 to 2021, I was tenured, which meant that I could only be fired if I engaged in

00:04:35.880 malpractice or was incompetent or corrupt. These were very serious charges. Anyway,

00:04:45.320 I have been going through many processes for the last five years.

00:04:50.040 and I went through arbitration a whole year of arbitration in 2023 the arbitrator although the

00:04:58.680 decision was terrible and had many problems I was found to have been wrongfully terminated

00:05:05.500 but it was decided that I could not be reinstated because aboriginal scholars at Mount Royal

00:05:12.560 University felt unsafe at me being there because I asked questions about Indigenous science,

00:05:21.760 and I asserted that the residential schools were not genocidal. And these issues were seen

00:05:30.000 as a deal breaker for me being at Mount Royal University. And in terms of my views on genocide,

00:05:38.560 which is what's called a prescribed doctrine in universities now. You must assert that the

00:05:46.160 residential schools were genocidal. And if you don't, you will suffer serious consequences.

00:05:52.640 And many people just don't say anything about it because they're afraid when they see what's

00:05:57.360 happened to me and other people. This idea, my opposition to this idea of the residential schools

00:06:04.560 being genocidal comes about from 30 years of research and albert howard and i wrote a book

00:06:12.800 in 2008 which has never gone out of style and is becoming more and more relevant because people are

00:06:19.360 now talking about the reconciliation industry in british columbia and this is part of a wider

00:06:25.120 entity called the aboriginal industry which is a group of lawyers and consultants who earn their

00:06:32.640 living from maintaining aboriginal people in a state of dependency and the residential schools 1.00

00:06:40.480 is a major aboriginal industry initiative and lawyers have made hundreds of millions of dollars

00:06:49.280 off of the residential schools and i started studying the residential schools in particular

00:06:55.120 in 2016 and discovered all the legal kinds of machinations which were happening where

00:07:02.640 um students were encouraged former students were encouraged to make various claims to get

00:07:08.720 settlements and and we've been seeing that over the last you know 20 30 years and then things all

00:07:15.760 fell apart in 2021 with the announcement that i was just talking about and 320 million dollars

00:07:24.960 just off the start was awarded on the basis of this claim. The Kamloops Band received $12.1

00:07:34.480 million to do excavations, yet not one shovel has gone into the ground. And then we have a whole host

00:07:44.160 of legal initiatives that were started because of the Kamloops case and as well the United Nations

00:07:52.320 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was pushed through the House of Commons immediately

00:08:00.080 after the announcement. So that brings us to the matter at hand, which is the Kamloops case,

00:08:07.680 the grave error at Kamloops. And there's a book that has been produced about this that is edited

00:08:14.480 by Chris Champion and Tom Flanagan called Grave Error, How the Media Misled Us and the

00:08:22.940 Truth About Residential Schools. 0.53

00:08:25.400 I have a contribution in there and it's called Billy Remembers and what it talks about is,

00:08:34.400 as I mentioned on May 27, it was announced by the Kamloops Band that the remains of

00:08:41.760 215 children had been confirmed it wasn't a speculation it wasn't for potential there's

00:08:49.420 no wording like that they said that they had confirmed this and they're because of this

00:08:54.980 because people thinking that there had been a whole bunch of children slaughtered and put into

00:09:01.560 a mass grave because that's what you think when you hear about 215 you're not going to have

00:09:06.240 individual burial sites dug for that purpose. We had the flags lowered at half-mast, we had

00:09:13.680 memorials all across the country, we had all sorts of politicians making very emotional statements,

00:09:20.240 and then we had the burning of dozens of churches. And it turned out that this was false,

00:09:30.240 that no such remains had been confirmed and no remains continue to be there's no confirmation

00:09:38.480 of any remains and it is highly improbable it's not probable it's possible but it's highly

00:09:48.080 improbable that there will be any remains found there because we don't have any parent who has

00:09:55.520 said that their children never came home from the Kamloops Indian Residential School. And if this is

00:10:00.800 the case, who are the 215 children that are buried in the apple orchard? Anyway, a group, I'm on a

00:10:10.480 research group, which includes Michelle Sterling and Jim McMurtry. We have been investigating this

00:10:16.080 for the last four years. And now because of the traction that we are starting to gain with our

00:10:23.840 research, there is something which is called residential school denialism, which is criminalizing

00:10:33.580 asking questions about these falsehoods that are being perpetrated. And British Columbia

00:10:40.500 is where it's all falling apart. Dallas Brody, who's an MLA there, she was, you know, pushed

00:10:47.840 out of the Conservative Party because she was defending James Heller, who just wanted

00:10:52.220 to have some information put forward by the law society instead of they were saying that unmarked

00:10:58.140 graves had been found at Kamloops he just wanted to have the word potential put in those materials

00:11:04.940 he was called a residential school denialist and also it was implied that he was a racist

00:11:11.920 he is now suing the law society and Brody was defending him and said zero bodies had been found

00:11:19.600 and then she was attacked called a residential school denialist and so on and eventually pushed

00:11:24.600 out of the conservative party so we have a whole bunch of things unfolding now and that's what our

00:11:31.560 documentary so simon hair got and i have teamed up to produce a documentary on the kamloops case

00:11:38.220 and we want to investigate why the truth is under assault so you cannot speak the truth anymore

00:11:48.900 in Canada about this issue, and why there has been this massive institutional failure from

00:11:55.980 the media, from politicians, from universities, from the RCMP, from the coroner,

00:12:04.820 and it just goes on and on. And why has there been this promotion of these falsehoods? We want

00:12:12.640 to investigate this. And that's what we'd like to talk about tonight is the Kamloops case and the

00:12:18.700 wider issue of the residential schools and the falsehoods that are being perpetrated.

00:12:24.940 And who I've got on this roundtable are Simon Hergott, who is an incredible videographer

00:12:31.160 from Kamloops, who has done very important documentaries, but he was the videographer

00:12:37.440 on What Remains. You can watch that on YouTube. I think it is incredibly insightful and very

00:12:44.300 informative. And thanks to Simon, it has incredible shots that we were able to get in the town of

00:12:51.420 Pell River. It's about how Pell River was impacted by the Kamloops announcement. And we have Jim

00:12:57.620 McMurtry, who is a teacher who I've known for quite a while. And I'm very impressed by Jim's

00:13:04.120 tenacity. He was fired in 2021, and he just is going to dig in. He's digging in, and he's going

00:13:12.000 to fight them with everything that he has, and that's the kind of people we need. And he was

00:13:17.360 fired for trying to tell the truth about the Kamloops case. And then finally, we have Michelle

00:13:23.320 Sterling, who is a researcher and is the producer of a documentary called The Bitter Roots of

00:13:32.800 Sugarcane, which is a critique of and an expose of a documentary that was produced by National

00:13:40.720 Geographic amongst, you know, who's supposed to be a prestigious entity. And this, that was supposed

00:13:47.920 to be a documentary. And it was all sorts of highly questionable types of arguments and

00:13:56.540 insinuations of things which did not happen. And Michelle's probably going to want to talk about

00:14:02.140 that her critique of that supposed documentary, which was nominated for an Academy Award. That's

00:14:09.980 how people thought that it was so important. Anyway, what I'd like to do is I'd like, first

00:14:15.100 of all, to call upon Simon, maybe to say a few words about what remains the documentary, as well

00:14:22.860 as the documentary that we're planning, and also his experience in the media, because he was a

00:14:29.740 journalist for over a decade with mainstream media outlets and has some experience with the media

00:14:35.740 and then we'll turn it over to jim mcmurtry and then michelle sterling

00:14:39.520 uh simon i think we sent you a an invitation invitation to speak um let me just double check

00:14:52.300 on that but uh yeah if it's there then click and if simon's not available at this point he needs

00:15:04.140 to get some technology we can just pass it on to jim mcmurtry i'm here if needed

00:15:16.140 jim why don't you speak since you're available well what are the parameters here because

00:15:24.120 obviously i'd be happy to many people know my story i'd be happy to take questions um starting

00:15:30.720 with anything that greg might have to ask i'd love to know how much time you would like me to speak

00:15:35.840 for i think you just speak for a couple of minutes about your case and how it relates to the cam

00:15:43.300 loops uh the cam loops uh the gray bear at cam loops just because there might be someone some

00:15:49.380 people on this this uh x space that don't don't know what happened to you oh okay you don't need

00:15:56.100 all the details but i won't go for too long because many people um of course um starting

00:16:00.820 with you and michelle i know this all all so well so um i'd love to take a couple of minutes and so

00:16:06.660 So I'm a teacher and who was asked one day by my principal to speak about the news out of Kamloops.

00:16:15.140 This precise day will always be open because it was my father's birthday.

00:16:19.720 May 31st, 2021. There's an article in the Western Standard just today by the remarkable former judge Brian Giesbrook, who talked about the social hysteria at the time.

00:16:34.740 I certainly never as a teacher anytime in the last 10 or so years went near the subject of residential schools because it's verboten to use a German word.

00:16:44.680 It's just it's something that's too dangerous for teachers.

00:16:47.060 But I didn't have a choice because the whole school was prepped to undertake a two-minute hate against people like me, white teachers, because of their actions in Kamloops and murdering and secretly burying 250 Indigenous children.

00:17:07.360 But I was given no choice because that's what the school did.

00:17:12.220 it was it became the theater that was served most of the kids were in in orange in one way or another

00:17:17.180 including face paint which i thought was very politically incorrect and um so it was very

00:17:22.820 intentionally they'd worked all day at the school on friday it was a substitute teacher so i didn't

00:17:26.640 know that it wasn't at the school preparing for this so the first thing out of my mouth when the

00:17:31.520 when i um got to the school was i asked the kids why were they wearing orange why i'll decorate

00:17:38.540 and orange because there isn't an orange shirt days you know in canada but that's september 30th

00:17:44.460 so it didn't make any sense you know they were doing it but right away i guess i presented myself

00:17:49.420 as to use the word that prince already brought up a denialist so anyhow i said the wrong thing

00:17:55.900 with regard to the to the social hysteria i was supposed to present the the saint and nuns and

00:18:02.860 and the Oblate priests, and also the Indigenous staff, because there were three teachers

00:18:08.960 who were Indigenous at the school, which is in, of course, in the heart, was in the heart 1.00

00:18:14.180 of the reserve in Kamloops, right across from the downtown part of the city of Kamloops,

00:18:19.180 and was visited all the time by Indian agents, government inspectors of different stripes,

00:18:25.020 by doctors, nurses, by parents as well. So there was even, in the latter years of the school,

00:18:31.420 the Camelops Indian Residential School there was a native an indigenous principal so it's not just

00:18:38.300 people like my four recent ancestors who who worked as missionaries in Canada and it was

00:18:45.700 the indictment is also of indigenous people who worked at the school and not just again I'm

00:18:50.880 teaching staff but they're doing duty residential duty and cleaning and cooking and so forth

00:18:56.440 so to me it was the whole thing is outrageous i was blocked out within half an hour

00:19:01.480 of saying that these kids didn't um didn't die nefariously that they were died mostly from

00:19:07.900 disease in fact there was a sanitarium for for tuberculosis victims um only 20 minutes drive

00:19:15.140 away from the school so i think most most people i'm sure if not everybody right that is listening

00:19:22.300 to me right now and is very aware of the fact that disease killed all sorts of people not so

00:19:28.140 long ago. And I was just reading a book on Sir Johnny MacDonald. And Sir Johnny MacDonald had

00:19:34.080 three children. And one of them ended up being terribly disabled. Another one died without

00:19:39.220 getting a childhood. And the third one ended up becoming a member of parliament. But that was one

00:19:46.020 out of three had the regular sort of life that we would want everybody to have. Life was very

00:19:52.180 different 100 150 years ago so just turning so that's the beginning of my story I won't say

00:19:57.520 anything more except outside of the what Francis has already indicated and that my tenacity and

00:20:04.980 it's and I will frame it a little bit differently that it's my outrage that I worked very hard for

00:20:11.280 a long time and for over 40 years to be the best teacher that I could be I'd hoped to be

00:20:18.020 university professor because I did a PhD of the University of Toronto I studied deeply ever since

00:20:24.240 on anything to do Canadian educational history and philosophy and so I knew I didn't do anything

00:20:30.520 wrong but even if I had done something wrong said something wrong the idea of marching me out and

00:20:36.120 having me sit at home now for four years it's been almost four years to the day that I haven't been

00:20:42.140 able to teach children and i know i never will be again so to me without people like francis and me

00:20:50.060 um and and others um of course including um but particularly francis me because we were both fired

00:20:57.020 um because of this the tremendous sensitivity toward anything indigenous to the extent where

00:21:03.580 people believe anything out of their mouths including the fact that that queen elizabeth

00:21:07.900 then prince philip kidnapped 10 children from the school in the early 1960s who were never seen

00:21:13.760 again so and this gets into the media and so forth so there's just no um um discrimination

00:21:19.940 discernment um by anyone in the media and government they'll run with anything indigenous

00:21:24.020 person says so this is not just cost me my job it's cost me my dignity and it's over my dead

00:21:30.960 body that i'm going to give up um i've been offered money i've been offered of course many

00:21:36.400 threats. I'm experiencing the tactic of just slow walking my proceedings since it's been four years

00:21:44.980 and but I'm not going away. I've written a book that's going to come out in a week or so

00:21:50.240 and I'm just hoping that other people recognize that without people like me and Francis that this

00:21:55.600 would happen to other people and it's very wrong and what students need, Francis's focus is

00:22:00.620 universities mine is the k-12 system but students not only need but merit is the truth

00:22:07.580 they ask me about anything i think it's incumbent upon me to tell them what science tells them it

00:22:14.940 to be what the established opinion is and the fact that i'm supposed to blatantly lie to kids

00:22:21.580 about murdered children in a school not so far away from the school that i was teaching

00:22:26.060 is just unacceptable. So I am not bending. Thank you for listening to my little introduction.

00:22:34.760 Thank you so much, Jim. Just wanted to hop in really quick. Like you said, you face a lot of

00:22:40.960 consequences for speaking out. And I feel very passionately about this because I'm also working

00:22:47.100 on a documentary and it's about how people will get systematically smeared. They'll have their

00:22:52.120 sort of uh dignity and reputation attacked wrongfully and it's seems to all be coming

00:22:57.740 from a similar space uh place coming from a sort of uh you know far left authoritarian uh place

00:23:04.500 and uh good on you for fighting for your not only just your reputation but fighting for you know

00:23:10.760 what is good you know like it's like too often people who are get thrown in that's into the

00:23:17.880 deplorable basket of being right-wing or far-right because you have the wrong opinion.

00:23:23.880 I personally, I struggle with this. Sometimes I'm so used to it. I'm so used to being called the

00:23:29.560 bad guy that I almost start to believe it. But in reality, we are the good guys. We are the ones who

00:23:35.300 are trying to tell the truth here. We're trying to correct the record. And it becomes so obvious

00:23:39.300 when you were talking about the possibility of people getting sick and dying at these residential 0.81

00:23:45.480 schools because it was so long ago and even presenting something reasonable like that

00:23:49.520 there's no nuance allowed you know it's just like genocide or nothing and that really that's sort of

00:23:55.160 like authoritarian black or white thinking of canadian history and something as complicated

00:24:02.000 as that is obviously a red flag for anybody who's thinking clearly but um i really i really appreciate

00:24:08.520 you uh talking about that attitude of like over my dead body am i gonna you know let my reputation

00:24:14.880 get smeared and kind of let the truth be uh misrepresented by these people um thank you

00:24:21.280 i could just do a quick rejoinder and say to you i think many people in the audience but also in

00:24:25.720 our country have come to the realization that there are no graves in kamloops that there were

00:24:31.640 no murdered children that there are no missing children there never were any missing children

00:24:36.400 and as francis said no parent ever said oh you know i'm missing a child um so and yet what you

00:24:42.920 hear from people who have got to that point so certainly that's an advance but they go but

00:24:47.880 but but but residential schools were like the holocaust and still in government and media and

00:24:54.420 so forth we refer to anyone that went to these schools as survivor which to me really cheapens

00:24:58.980 the experience of people who really have experienced a physical a biological genocide

00:25:04.380 and so i think one of the things that should be accomplished this evening is not only i think we

00:25:10.880 prove that there's nothing buried in Kamloops other than the truth but I think we also need

00:25:16.160 to move to the fact that we need to have a balanced account of these schools these schools

00:25:20.880 were not houses of horror these schools were educational centers for children in many cases

00:25:26.080 who didn't have any parents orphans children who didn't have the necessities of life in the home

00:25:31.840 children who were already um dealing with terrible diseases like tuberculosis and and

00:25:38.720 were better off being at the schools where there was again regular visits from nurses and doctors

00:25:44.400 and what where there was beginning in the 40s vaccines vaccines for these kids so to me it's

00:25:51.040 not just there are no graves there is no there's none of the ghost stories about residential schools

00:25:56.480 are true the teachers did their best in almost every case and many kids said it was a very happy

00:26:01.600 experience for them and if i could just add a little bit to jim's comments there you know no

00:26:07.840 one is denying that you know children did have there were children who were sexually abused in

00:26:13.920 various contexts there was uh could be physical abuse this is teachers uh and so on who could

00:26:22.640 have personality defects just like all people have personally personality defects in various contexts

00:26:30.000 but just going at the kamloops indian residential school which i've been looking at in a detailed

00:26:35.760 way over the last few weeks, just again going back into the records. They had a swimming pool.

00:26:42.320 They had a large swimming pool. It was the first of its kind in a school. They had a dance troupe

00:26:49.760 that toured the province. They had three Aboriginal teachers who were on staff in that period where

00:26:57.600 they were saying all these children were murdered. And it just doesn't make any sense

00:27:03.200 that that would have happened at that that residential school so that's what we have to

00:27:09.760 get to the bottom of and it's very important it's very urgent now because we've now had four years

00:27:16.120 of falsehoods that have been perpetuated and if we can't get this straightened out

00:27:23.960 this year to get some people to have a reckoning to figure out what actually happened at Kamloops

00:27:31.660 and how did things go so far off the rails we're never going to be able to have a foundation of

00:27:38.140 truth from which to try to figure out how to create a better society for all people and what

00:27:46.140 we heard originally when the can loops announcement was made was how traumatized aboriginal people were

00:27:55.020 after hearing that these children had been buried at this school. If this were the case,

00:28:03.500 if this is true that they were feeling huge amounts of grief and trauma, wouldn't it be a

00:28:09.900 good idea to try to figure out whether that actually happened or not? Shouldn't that be

00:28:15.660 something that we're doing as a Canadian society to try to figure out instead of trying to charge

00:28:22.220 people with residential school denialism and put them in jail for asking perfectly rational

00:28:30.800 questions about what happens at that school yeah and it's it seems as though like the more you ask

00:28:39.100 questions about topics like this the more it makes more sense to see that there's a political agenda

00:28:45.880 behind it you know because it's like it makes a lot more sense if it's like they're trying to

00:28:51.520 scare the crap out of everybody they're trying to use indigenous issues as a wedge or the tip 1.00

00:28:55.680 of a spear and that'll probably come up in your documentary the uh what's the group of legislation

00:29:01.920 it's like un uh un drip is it undrip yeah un declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples

00:29:11.400 and actually michelle sterling um has written quite a lot on this subject but this is now

00:29:17.100 breaking in British Columbia. There's a recognition that this is going to... 200 Aboriginal groups are

00:29:26.700 claiming sovereignty in British Columbia. If there is no sovereignty in British Columbia,

00:29:33.100 there is no way to have a final decision made about things like what development should proceed,

00:29:41.740 what should be done with crown lands, which is public lands, which all British Columbians

00:29:48.220 benefit from. And that really is the end game of much of this, is to get people to feel

00:29:56.440 compassion for Aboriginal people, which we should feel. Everyone should be feeling compassion for

00:30:04.040 Aboriginal people. But we shouldn't allow the Aboriginal industry, the lawyers and consultants 1.00

00:30:10.000 who are making money off that, to use this compassion to push through incredibly divisive

00:30:18.380 and irrational pieces of legislation, which are going to destroy the ability of people

00:30:26.020 to work together in the province of British Columbia.

00:30:31.180 I know, absolutely.

00:30:33.120 And as a reminder, this topic is very important for multiple reasons.

00:30:37.980 It's become a free speech issue because they're tabling legislation to criminalize residential school denialism.

00:30:45.520 Obviously, it undermines Canadian identity.

00:30:47.860 And as we're pointing out now, it looks like they're trying to use it as a tip of the spear to push more sort of thinly veiled authoritarian legislation.

00:30:56.720 So if you want to correct the record on this and help these brave Canadians kind of like, you know, shed light on the actual truth, there is a link in the nest here to the GoFundMe for the Grave Error documentary.

00:31:12.160 If you're watching on YouTube, the link is in the description, but just as a reminder.

00:31:16.680 And so let's get Simon or Michelle on the mic, but I do want to be respectful of time, Jim.

00:31:23.680 you know like if you want to drop out at eight o'clock that's that's fine or you know we would

00:31:30.500 like to you know have you as long as you'd like but how long can you stick around? I can stay

00:31:36.900 it's very funny that you said that because I in an hour and a half time I'm being interviewed by

00:31:41.960 somebody else so it doesn't happen every day it's just happening tonight but I so I'm certainly

00:31:48.880 available for another um well almost two hours but the um but i may step out before yeah just

00:31:55.360 before your time all right perfect perfect thanks uh who do you think we should go to

00:32:01.280 next here francis maybe michelle since i brought michelle up as the under she has done research on 0.99

00:32:07.500 that but i'm sure michelle is probably going to want to talk about her documentary that is exposing

00:32:13.820 the supposed documentary

00:32:16.600 Sugarcane

00:32:18.680 which was put up for an Academy Award

00:32:20.700 oh wow

00:32:22.200 Michelle

00:32:24.640 can you hit

00:32:26.480 unmute

00:32:27.060 Michelle

00:32:34.420 are you there? Michelle Sterling

00:32:35.920 look for the microphone

00:32:40.460 icon and just tap on that

00:32:42.100 click on that

00:32:43.560 to unmute yourself maybe we should go to Simon in the meantime while Michelle is

00:32:54.660 trying to figure out some of her oh wait hello yourself hello Michelle hello am I

00:33:01.820 here you are yeah we can hear you maybe we should go to Simon in the meantime

00:33:07.200 well Michelle is trying to figure out some of her all right I just muted

00:33:15.360 everybody so just Michelle unmute yours again and continue speaking I just want

00:33:22.340 to make sure that see where the feedback is coming from there oh and now she's a

00:33:29.760 He's a listener.

00:33:39.320 I'll go here.

00:33:43.000 Let's go to Simon.

00:33:44.540 There we go.

00:33:45.500 I think I'm here now.

00:33:47.500 Okay.

00:33:48.080 Yes, you are.

00:33:49.500 Okay.

00:33:50.240 Thank you for having me on this important roundtable.

00:33:52.960 Thank you, Francis, and thank you, Greg.

00:33:56.200 I just want to give people a bit of background.

00:33:58.660 I'm not an academic. In the 1980s, I did a series of documentaries in Calgary with CTV, and Dr. Hugh Dempsey, who was then the curator of the Glenbow Museum, was my research supervisor.

00:34:12.360 He was married to Pauline Gladstone, who just recently passed away, sadly, and she was the daughter of Senator James Gladstone.

00:34:22.200 So he wrote several, many, many books and articles on the early days in the West and, you know, was very close to people who had been either at Treaty 7 or within that proximity.

00:34:38.700 So I interviewed several hundred people in those documentaries.

00:34:44.700 It wasn't specifically on residential schools.

00:34:47.700 But some of the things that I did learn about at the time was about tuberculosis and how devastating it was.

00:34:54.700 Smallpox, Spanish flu.

00:34:57.700 So when I first heard of the mass graves claim, that's the first thing that sprang to mind,

00:35:03.700 mind that someone might have found a mass grave because at the times when many people died in

00:35:09.760 quick succession there just simply wasn't enough manpower to dig individual graves although they

00:35:16.880 did try to document who's who but these are very very traumatic epidemics that passed through

00:35:25.000 Canada and the world there's actually a new book out called everything is tuberculosis by

00:35:33.140 John Green. And though his statistics about Canadian tuberculosis deaths at residential

00:35:39.480 schools are way off, wildly exaggerated, the book does give a good perspective on how

00:35:45.840 impactful it was. And there's another PBS documentary I recommend people watch. It's

00:35:51.480 called The Forgotten Plague. So first of all, I would like to address the question of why

00:35:57.860 is it that some people are certain? I believe there are many Indigenous people, and probably

00:36:05.440 quite a few non-Indigenous as well, who are certain that there were children who were missing.

00:36:11.860 And I think one of the best references is in Eric Bay's book about the Anglican schools,

00:36:21.180 and he tells a story of Fort Albany. Now, a fur trader came into the Hudson Bay Company

00:36:28.560 trading post. He was sick and he said that his wife was sick in a tent with the children and

00:36:35.800 they had no food and he then died. So, the Hudson Bay Company sent out a couple of fellows with

00:36:42.640 food. When they got to the tent, they found that the mother, in fact, had died. There was a two

00:36:48.280 months old baby. There were three small children about ages two up to, I don't know, two, three,

00:36:56.020 five. And there was a 16 year old boy. So they sent the 16 year old boy off with other relatives

00:37:04.220 on a hunt. They gave the two month old baby to another relative. And they took the three small

00:37:11.120 children to an Indian residential school. So you can imagine that in that community that day,

00:37:17.600 a whole family completely was wiped out as a family and those three children went away

00:37:24.920 and would never have come home again because there were no family to receive them. There

00:37:29.660 were no parents to receive them. So who knows where the parents were buried? Who knows what

00:37:35.980 the 16-year-old would have remembered other than the fact that they took away his siblings

00:37:40.020 and he never saw them again? Who knows what the baby grew up understanding or hearing from the

00:37:47.120 adoptive family, which was a relative, of course. So, you know, I think that this is where these

00:37:54.420 kind of knowings come from. And there's another thing I'd like to talk about from a paper by

00:38:01.880 Moffat et al., I think it was 2013. And this was talking about TB sanatoriums. And today people

00:38:10.260 don't realize that back in the day tuberculosis was the kiss of social death like once you once

00:38:18.320 they realized in the late 1800s that tb was not hereditary but it was actually contagious

00:38:25.660 then you know if someone in your family was identified as having tb then you know you might

00:38:34.420 get kicked out of your rental apartment you might lose your job you know so there were many efforts

00:38:40.220 made to hide the fact that somebody in the family had TB. It was a very serious social problem and

00:38:46.940 still is today. There's still a huge stigma attached to it. Anyway, Moffat writes about

00:38:53.660 an Indigenous family who said that their brother went to the TB sanatorium when he was seven years

00:39:00.620 old. He didn't come home until he was 13 years old. Nobody saw him in that period of time. So

00:39:08.380 So when he came back, of course, he didn't speak the language anymore.

00:39:11.360 He had no idea what the customs were anymore.

00:39:14.060 And all these people, there were new children in the family who never even knew he existed.

00:39:19.980 So, you know, for the people in the community, it would be as if that seven-year-old had, in fact, disappeared.

00:39:26.780 And probably he was sent from the Indian Residential School on to the TB Sanatorium.

00:39:33.740 because many of the children who went to these schools in fact I think Peter Bryce Dr. Peter

00:39:40.760 Bryce wrote that 93 percent of the children who were admitted were carrying TB and you can carry

00:39:47.180 it and not have it active in your body but you know it does it can progress and then if it became

00:39:55.560 active they would be sent on to a TB sanatorium the family would not see their child for you know

00:40:02.560 six or seven years anyway so you can see where these senses of of missing children come from

00:40:10.480 so there is some validity to this idea of it but the actual reality is much different than what

00:40:17.620 people think and you have to remember that only one-third of status indians went to residential

00:40:22.520 school one-third went to day school on reserve which is like an ordinary public school where

00:40:28.100 you'd go home at night. And one third went to no school at all. So you can imagine that those who

00:40:33.700 did not go to school at all would, you know, certainly conjure up explanations. And that also

00:40:41.060 leads us to the next story that I'd like to talk about. And that would be the film Sugarcane.

00:40:48.120 So I have a background in making films and writing screenplays, and I began to wonder what was going on with Sugarcane, because I saw that it was being very heavily promoted last summer, and I thought, well, that's odd.

00:41:10.440 And then I happened to be able to see it twice in a row.

00:41:16.700 And it was not shown in very many theaters.

00:41:19.500 It just kind of skipped across the country, one showing here, there at film festivals.

00:41:25.040 And all of the film critics had this one particular view that the film,

00:41:30.940 they said for sure that the film showed that the lead character,

00:41:35.880 Ed Archie Noise Cat was the product of a woman who had been raped by a priest and that he was

00:41:42.840 the only baby to have survived the incinerator at St. Joseph's residential school at the Williams

00:41:50.820 Lake First Nation. So that sounded pretty wild to me because as most people know there are the

00:41:56.840 Ten Commandments and one of them is thou shalt not kill. So you know it's hard to believe that

00:42:02.580 priests and nuns who dedicated their lives to thousands of Indigenous people across Canada,

00:42:08.080 who went through the worst extremes of this country in a time when it was very difficult

00:42:14.740 to survive just in order to try and uplift these people. It's very difficult for me to believe

00:42:22.880 that they intentionally had priests raping and burning babies, unwanted babies. But there is 0.94

00:42:31.280 one element of truth, and that is that there was a Father O'Connor at St. Joseph's who had an affair

00:42:38.280 with Phyllis Bob. Now, Phyllis Bob was a 22-year-old seamstress, so she wasn't a student 1.00

00:42:45.940 anymore. And likewise, in the film Sugarcane, there's a very brief encounter with the Williams

00:42:53.420 lake tribune story from 1959 about this woman who went to jail for a year why because she delivered

00:43:03.020 her baby alone at st joseph's in the summer of that year and thinking that the baby was dead

00:43:10.460 that's what she told the court she put him in the incinerator now what happened is antonius stoop

00:43:17.420 the dairyman came home late that night from a knights of columbus meeting in williams lake

00:43:23.020 he heard curious sounds in the incinerator outside he looked inside thinking there was a cat

00:43:30.540 trapped in there somehow and found the baby and took it back to the hospital and saved

00:43:35.740 ed archie noise cat's life so this williams lake tribune story is in the film and this

00:43:45.020 was the thing that really twigged me when i was watching the film because it said the mother was

00:43:48.940 20. Well, children were only allowed to go to school at an Indian residential school until

00:43:55.960 they were 16 years old. So obviously, she was an adult. And then it turns out that Julian Brave

00:44:04.400 Noiscat, who is a co-director of the film and son of Ed Archie Noiscat, and grandson of Antoinette

00:44:13.540 Archie, the woman who put Ed in the incinerator, it turns out that he'd even written about

00:44:20.680 the fact that actually his father, Ed Archie Noiscat, was the son of Ray Peters, who was a

00:44:29.740 rodeo rider who had eight children with Antoinette and fathered 17 children in total. He was a bit

00:44:38.900 of a tomcat. So, you know, now this completely changes the story. So, it wasn't a priest,

00:44:45.560 and, you know, it can't be a priest because actually Ed Archie Noy's cat claims his

00:44:52.400 Indigenous carving heritage from his father, Ray Peters, and grandfather, Chief Harry Peters,

00:45:00.460 of the Lilwa Nation. So, you see, none of these facts are explored within the documentary Sugar

00:45:07.740 cane even though that one document is displayed in the film so after that uh nina green who's 0.64

00:45:16.700 uh sorry sorry michelle sorry to cut you off uh what document specifically is in the film

00:45:23.660 this document is the williams lake tribune uh news article from 1959 which refers to the

00:45:32.220 incident with the incinerator or that's right yeah it gives the details but it doesn't give

00:45:37.340 the name of the woman. So anyway, Nina Green started doing some research and found all of

00:45:44.900 these details that I've just told you. And then, you know, the two of us started putting together

00:45:51.460 a low-budget documentary rebuttal. And so you can see that on my sub-stack. I have a sub-stack

00:45:59.160 called Sorry No More, Exposing the Bitter Roots of Sugarcane. And that's what I called the low-budget

00:46:06.460 documentary mini documentary the bitter roots of sugarcane because um you know one of the ironies

00:46:13.980 of it is that a woman named charlene bellew was in the film and in 1993 she testified to the royal

00:46:22.620 commission on aboriginal people that she had been orphaned when her alcoholic father had had a car

00:46:29.180 accident and died um and gone to the school and she said that she had a good experience that her

00:46:36.940 mother and grandmother had gone to the school and they both had good experiences though she knew

00:46:41.900 that others had bad experiences but now many years later she's claiming that babies were incinerated 0.54

00:46:48.940 by priests who are raping young girls and blah blah blah blah blah you know and claiming that

00:46:56.300 we knew this was happening we told you you know now we have the proof well there is no proof 0.93

00:47:02.540 in the documentary sugarcane it's all innuendo and i must say one thing i find very interesting

00:47:07.900 as a filmmaker british columbia has excellent filmmakers but for this film they brought in a

00:47:16.060 whole cadre of outsiders probably because people who work in vancouver and who have made films all

00:47:22.460 over the province would have quite a few questions about this thesis of priests incinerating babies

00:47:29.420 yes and michelle i just wanted to ask you a question about that the incinerating of babies 0.99

00:47:35.180 assertion which i should mention has now become widespread so sugarcane was where we saw that

00:47:43.100 being made the most uh public in the sense that this is a mass documentary that a lot of people

00:47:49.500 are watching. But in the Kamloops case, we have heard numerous Aboriginal leaders claim

00:47:56.140 about the incinerators at the Kamloops case, two of them being Jeanette Jules, who is a

00:48:03.860 major figure at Kamloops, and as well, Gary Godfruitson, who is a poet and also on staff

00:48:11.900 at Thompson Rivers University. Both of them are making claims about the incinerators and burning

00:48:18.620 of babies. And this is also the claim of Terry Teegee, who is the head of the British Columbia

00:48:26.620 Association, Assembly of First Nations, British Columbia branch. I just wanted to get your

00:48:32.940 thoughts. Where does this come from, this idea that priests are incinerating, priests and nuns

00:48:42.460 are incinerating babies because if i know anything about the catholic religion which is not much 0.75

00:48:49.260 that would be a terrible sin if you were incinerating babies so that would be a highly

00:48:54.300 improbable circumstance what what do you think that comes from that idea of the incineration

00:49:00.860 of babies well if you look at the gray nuns diaries you can see that back in the day 0.99

00:49:06.620 even infanticide and cannibalism was part of life of a subsistence tribe and when the grey nuns came 1.00

00:49:16.080 to the northwest one of the first things they began doing was adopting these orphaned children

00:49:23.280 so that they wouldn't be put in that situation or bringing in you know any any child or person that

00:49:29.980 was about to be abandoned and you can read their rather grisly references written at the time

00:49:38.660 and understand that this probably is you know part of the folklore of the tribes themselves

00:49:46.820 you can also understand this idea that in the summer let's say you have some nice young women

00:49:54.940 they see a handsome rodeo rider like let's say ray peters you know they have a good time together

00:50:02.320 whether whether by coercion or whether just having fun normal human sexual relations they go back to

00:50:09.680 school in the fall so that would be two months later most women don't start to show that they're 1.00

00:50:14.520 pregnant until they're about three or four months along five months along and um so they in the case 0.79

00:50:23.160 St. Joseph's they were sent on to Vancouver to a home for unwed mothers but you can understand that 1.00

00:50:28.120 the scuttlebutt back in the reserve would be oh we sent this woman this young woman to Indian

00:50:34.040 residential school and she became pregnant there you know that would be the conclusion when in 0.99

00:50:39.480 fact it was far more likely like in the case of Annette that it was you know some handsome young

00:50:47.720 rodeo fellow uh i should mention uh the the work of kevin annette in case people do not know the

00:50:56.520 work of kevin annette it's possible that some of this could be due to his books and um pieces that

00:51:06.280 he posts on the internet kevin annette made the claim of incinerators babies being incinerated

00:51:14.440 considerated by priests. And Kevin Annette had quite open hostility. He was a minister. He was

00:51:20.700 a United Church minister in, I believe, Port Alberni. And he had a grievance. He had a lot

00:51:29.600 of grievances against religious institutions, befriended Billy Coombs, who is the man who

00:51:38.900 claimed that Queen Elizabeth II had abducted 10 children from the Kamloops Indian Residential

00:51:46.260 School. Anyway, the idea of incinerated babies looms large in the work of Kevin Annette,

00:51:55.380 and I'm wondering whether his work has been absorbed by Indigenous people who went to

00:52:04.420 residential schools and so on well i'm sure it has done um because uh you know it's a fairly small

00:52:10.580 community and so this kind of of storytelling at powwows and such like would probably have

00:52:16.580 proliferated there's another woman that lloyd hawkeye robertson introduced us to in his work

00:52:25.060 about residential school syndrome because he does agree that many people who went to residential

00:52:30.660 school have sort of a form of ptsd which he's written a paper about it but in that paper

00:52:36.900 there's another psychologist indigenous psychologist in the states who he refers to

00:52:43.860 braveheart i can't remember her full name but um she asks people to imagine themselves

00:52:51.780 in a holocaust or in some kind of crisis horrible torture situation which is basically sort of 0.64

00:53:00.660 imparting memories that don't exist to someone, as far as I'm concerned. And I think also there's

00:53:06.720 a role that psychologists in general have played in this, where, just like in the case of the

00:53:13.500 satanic panic in Saskatchewan in the 1990s, you know, it's quite easy to lead people or to put

00:53:21.520 ideas in their head so that they remember things that never happened, or never happened quite as

00:53:27.680 described and this is the view of david raskin who's an american psychologist who was called to

00:53:33.140 testify in that satanic panic case so i think that um you know it's um as i said in beginning

00:53:43.800 there is some some validity to this idea that people went missing and you can imagine just

00:53:50.060 imagine if you were an orphan child like i've seen a video interview with a woman that's posted on

00:53:56.400 jaguar birds uh youtube channel and this woman is saying you know i was taken away from my

00:54:03.260 grandfather when i was six and along with my sister my brother had to stay behind he was too

00:54:08.940 young and the and it sounds terrible and then they say well you know didn't your parents object and

00:54:14.180 she's like well my parents had died my grandmother had died my grandfather was taking care of the

00:54:19.640 four of us and nine others you know so she herself was apparently not even aware of what that meant

00:54:28.360 for an elderly person back in like the 1950s i imagine 40s you know where where the people would

00:54:36.020 have been destitute imagine taking care of 13 children yourself today it would have been

00:54:41.060 impossible so of course people were given away in that way they were given up for care that because

00:54:48.100 As Robert Carney, he was a historian and also the father of Mark Carney, our new Prime Minister, as he wrote, you know, that these were the medical and social services hub, the Indian residential schools.

00:55:02.920 So people of all kinds went to them for help of all different natures and they gave whatever help they could.

00:55:08.980 And so you can imagine, though, an orphan going to a school, their parents having just died and perhaps dying of TB, which is a horrible thing.

00:55:19.940 You know, usually people cough up blood and then they start uncontrollably coughing.

00:55:24.820 There's blood everywhere and then they die right in front of you, you know.

00:55:29.340 So you can imagine if you were an orphan child being taken to this totally new place, your parents having just died, you wouldn't have that closure.

00:55:37.320 You would have this ambiguous loss that you would carry with you for the rest of your life, depending on, you know, your ability to mentally adapt.

00:55:47.700 So and I think all of this death cult, I call it, is exacerbated today by the ongoing tragedy of the unbelievable number of opioid deaths and alcohol deaths and suicides.

00:56:02.740 I mean, you know, life on reserve in most cases is really a tragedy, and, you know, blaming Indian residential schools is not going to address this tragedy, but the sort of death cult, the hope for graves, the mass graves, this kind of psychological imagery somehow probably mixes well with the tragedies that are going on today.

00:56:30.120 it kind of makes sense of them even though you can't make sense of them as well we should not

00:56:36.520 fail to mention the aboriginal industry which is the lawyers and consultants who work for

00:56:41.720 aboriginal organizations they uh perpetuate these ideas because they are trying to extract

00:56:51.560 various forms of what is called rent which can either be compensation or various financial

00:56:58.360 transactions. And the more you can claim that it was the responsibility of the churches, the

00:57:07.720 governments, so on, the more lawsuits can be filed and the more money can be diverted

00:57:15.320 to Aboriginal organizations. And of course, this money, which is distributed, does not benefit

00:57:22.280 the opioid addicted and the fetal alcohol syndrome uh you know kind of plagued population

00:57:30.840 which needs desperate intervention needs uh serious intervention and some kind of um thoughts

00:57:38.560 as to how to deal with this these state of emergency conditions which exist in aboriginal

00:57:45.580 communities but anyway michelle i think that that's very interesting all your work but i was

00:57:52.120 wondering if um we might want to bring in simon but before before we move to simon i just wanted

00:57:58.180 to hop in real quick thank you for that michelle i i shared a few of your tweets in the nest uh

00:58:03.360 specifically about the sugarcane documentary and your rebuttal there's actually a link to the vimeo

00:58:09.280 in one and a tweet in the chat there i believe i also found the the newspaper clipping you're

00:58:15.080 talking about that says newborn babe saved from garbage burner and kind of uh tells the story of

00:58:21.680 how this this baby was abandoned there but um uh so you guys can check that out and i also did

00:58:27.840 uh link to one of your uh substacks about tuberculosis and how that's a major kind of

00:58:34.780 factor in a lot of this sort of rewriting of history when it comes to uh the indigenous and

00:58:39.980 um residential schools but before we go to simon i thought you know we were talking about all these

00:58:45.140 sort of falsehoods and and and uh burning babies priests burning babies apparently uh i'm curious

00:58:51.680 jim if you wanted to hop in and share any comments uh mr mcmurtry on this uh on this topic before we

00:58:59.820 move on to simon well i there's a lot to say i must admit i'm still charmed tantalized listening

00:59:08.140 to michelle and francis i think they're incredible women so there's nothing that they haven't said

00:59:14.000 that um that probably wanted to say but if i could just maybe just point out one thing in particular

00:59:20.000 and that is is said um i provide the dimension of being an educator and i want to get people just

00:59:29.120 maybe think for a moment what it's like for children um children generally michelle was

00:59:36.080 talking about the trauma that that that all children certainly indigenous children would 0.99

00:59:40.640 have experienced living on reserves 100 150 years ago but even children's schools today there are a

00:59:46.960 lot of them that are that are that are dealing with with trauma that are dealing with things

00:59:52.560 that are very sad whether it's divorce whether it's coming from a country and whether it's war

00:59:57.120 um whether it's um you know someone dying in the family cancer whatever it is there's there's a lot

01:00:02.720 of things so the thing one of the things that we shouldn't lose sight of when when we have

01:00:09.200 live in a society where everybody is perpetuating the the darkest of of lives that that murray 1.00

01:00:16.880 sinclair estimated up to 25 000 children disappeared or as um um kimberly murray said the um the

01:00:25.200 special interlocutor is that you know these children as many 25 children thousand indigenous

01:00:31.760 children at residential schools were disappeared and of course none of that's true but but what

01:00:37.360 effect does that have on children particularly small children and there's so many rituals at

01:00:42.640 schools it's not just orange shirt day it's so many events through the years um through the year

01:00:48.240 every school year where they they do one exercise or another um one school near me teacher said to

01:00:55.840 me the other day that all their professional development for this uh for this whole school

01:01:01.440 year has been about indigenous stuff and every single time it's just again about the how atrocious 1.00

01:01:07.360 people were to Indigenous people. I think it must be particularly hard to be an Indigenous child

01:01:12.780 in a school system and to be repeatedly told because land acknowledgements are daily.

01:01:19.380 And at my last school, there was always about not only genocide in the past, but an ongoing genocide

01:01:24.860 against Indigenous people in Canada. What kind of effect does this have on children?

01:01:31.180 so this is why it's so absolutely essential as um as it's framed here by francis in the title of

01:01:37.580 this um this meeting this evening um four years of deception this deception has to end because

01:01:44.140 what we're doing is we're victimizing a whole generation of children who are viewing our

01:01:49.020 ancestors as monsters and are looking at adults thinking um you know what imagining the the the

01:01:57.420 capacity they too may have for doing something horrific toward them. So any, that's, that's it.

01:02:05.240 Thank you, Jim. I appreciate that perspective too, because, you know, the, the, these people

01:02:10.440 who are pushing this narrative, they also do this ironic thing where they say that they want to stop

01:02:15.360 hate and that they, they want to stop all this, like, you know, evil things happening. And it's

01:02:20.660 like, well, maybe you shouldn't continually try to demonize all white Canadians in our entire

01:02:26.580 history because when you do that you're going to obviously get people hating one another when you

01:02:31.340 start to mischaracterize uh broadly paint with these broad brush strokes as if um you know any

01:02:38.920 white canadian person is responsible or any christian or catholic in canada is responsible

01:02:45.000 for you know burning children alive and and you know fill in the other horrible horrific blanks

01:02:50.780 um you know if you really cared about stopping hate you know you would want people to know the

01:02:56.780 truth and be able to sift into the nuance of you know the the the tough times of that were part of

01:03:03.160 our history um the good and the bad instead of kind of just creating this crazy caricature

01:03:08.040 um but uh yeah as a reminder to correct the record you know like

01:03:13.240 let me just grab my soapbox for a quick minute um it's great to have all these people together

01:03:20.420 talking about this, because we're, you know, this is very almost, I would argue, an existential

01:03:25.220 thing, because this directly relates to Canadian identity, Canadian history. And I really think

01:03:31.420 that the nation is sort of in a crisis right now, especially because this conversation doesn't,

01:03:36.660 this honest conversation about the actual truth doesn't permeate the mainstream, doesn't permeate

01:03:42.760 even the mainstream parties, not even the Conservative Party will touch this. They are

01:03:46.840 part a party that agreed that residential schools are genocide and uh it's up to us is the point it's

01:03:53.340 up to us to correct the record it's up to up to us to push this conversation and i want to draw

01:03:58.540 attention again to the uh the documentary the grave error documentary that uh francis widdowson

01:04:04.120 is fundraising for uh the link is there at the uh the gofundme in the nest um the link is in the

01:04:11.200 description on youtube speaking of which i think we're going to introduce oh no did he duck out

01:04:16.140 did simon duck out he's shy uh-oh uh we were gonna throw it to simon who is the the filmmaker

01:04:24.960 who's gonna be helping you with this uh with this project uh let's let's wait around till

01:04:29.860 simon comes back but francis maybe you could kind of uh talk a little bit more about the project

01:04:33.880 sure yes and so simon hair got if he's around um he is an incredible videographer who used to work

01:04:41.720 for Global News and other media outlets for over a decade and had terrible problems working for

01:04:48.780 these media organizations because of the fact that they've been captured. Largely, what I

01:04:56.280 understand, like I think wokeism, which is identity politics that has become totalitarian,

01:05:01.700 I'm not using it as a pejorative. I'm trying to explain this phenomenon that we encounter all

01:05:09.380 the time. And Greg was just saying about the hate that is being perpetuated by all of these

01:05:16.720 arguments. But I was going to say, Greg, hate is not being opposed. It's hating what is considered

01:05:24.040 to be the, like it is the idea that you cannot have any criticism of representatives of groups

01:05:33.440 perceived to be oppressed, because then it is believed that people will start to hate those

01:05:39.620 people. It's fine to hate people who are perceived to be oppressors. So that's going to be important

01:05:47.140 distinction in this, what would be called woke ideology. But in terms of the media's problems,

01:05:55.940 which is really quite shocking, the fact that we had this false statement made by the Kamloops

01:06:04.780 Ban, it was not a mistake. For many months afterwards, we thought, well, maybe they just

01:06:12.300 misunderstood GPR, you know, the purpose of GPR, which is not to find remains. GPR finds soil

01:06:23.080 disturbances which could be cobbles it could be animal burrows it could be a huge number of things

01:06:30.920 and when they excavated the pine creek which is in saskatchewan manitoba

01:06:37.720 oh sorry i thought it was in saskatchewan and manitoba thank you so much my geography is

01:06:42.760 terrible um they found rocks when they actually elders the so-called knowledge keepers believed

01:06:52.920 people were buried in the basement of this church. They spent the money to bring in the forensic

01:06:59.800 people to sift through all the dirt, and they found rocks. That GPR cannot tell the difference

01:07:07.720 between rocks and remains. And we should mention in the Kamloops case that we had the number 215

01:07:16.520 originally, and that got downgraded in July 2021 to 200 because Sarah Bollier, who was the so-called

01:07:25.960 GPR expert, who is not an expert, she's not a geophysicist, she's some kind of conflict 0.71

01:07:32.600 anthropologist with a GPR machine, she found out after the fact that the archaeology department

01:07:41.000 at Simon Fraser, had done some shovel test pits in that area where she had found these anomalies,

01:07:49.880 and so she downgraded her findings to 200. So this was kind of a mistake, perhaps, initially,

01:07:58.480 but then we found out in July that it was 200 targets of interest, and the band continues to

01:08:05.160 make arguments about children being buried there, remains being found, unmarked graves.

01:08:11.000 This was a carefully orchestrated attempt to mislead the public. And what Simon found is when

01:08:21.340 he was a journalist working in British Columbia, his employer, his employers with the corporate

01:08:29.900 media had no interest whatsoever in trying to get to the bottom of this story. And so what is left

01:08:38.960 up to now is we can't rely on these traditional institutions to tell the truth. We need to rely

01:08:46.560 upon people who are not affiliated with any of these corporate entities. And that falls to people

01:08:55.880 like Simon and me, who have no, we have no connections to any corporate interests, any

01:09:03.680 types of entities that could control the coverage. So that, of course, makes us reliant on

01:09:11.080 the public to help us to create something which has the potential to put us on a more accurate

01:09:21.840 and democratic foundation because if we are not able to have a reckoning at Kamloops and find out

01:09:28.380 exactly what happened there there is just going to be more attempts to push through this false

01:09:37.340 and divisive agenda which is masterminded by a number of entities. Could I just add something

01:09:47.040 there, Frances? Yes, go ahead. I think one of the things that people don't realize that happened

01:09:53.300 with this GPR search, this was announced over a long weekend. Now, no one, as far as we can

01:10:01.740 understand, no one did any research on previous land use. And Nina Green has done a whole thing

01:10:10.220 on her Kamloops website page she has a whole website that looks at residential schools that

01:10:18.940 has all the death certificates that talks in detail but she's referring to

01:10:28.380 it's under indianresidentialschoolrecords.com Kamloops and she's referring to some work by

01:10:35.980 by a person who goes by a pseudonym of Cam Rez, who did previous land use record research

01:10:45.180 and found that actually right under where the claim is that all these mass graves are,

01:10:51.400 just happens to be 2,000 feet of septic trenches that were dug in the 1920s.

01:11:00.580 So that would create these kind of repetitive patterns that Sarah Beaulieu understood to

01:11:08.500 be repetitive patterns of graves.

01:11:10.640 I believe she even said that they were facing in the east-west configuration consistent

01:11:15.240 with Christianity, which, you know, when you think about it, if you've got priests and

01:11:20.480 nuns out in the middle of the night with six-year-old kids burying children as young as three in

01:11:25.640 unclandestine burials after they just murdered them, why would they care about what configuration 0.54

01:11:31.880 these alleged graves would be, right? So anyway, that's a very basic research requirement.

01:11:39.820 You know, it's a basic research requirement that's very similar to the Bitter Roots of 1.00

01:11:44.700 Sugarcane, where the sugarcane filmmakers used that Williams Lake Tribune article in their paper

01:11:54.220 to support their contention but they obviously never either they never read it or they willfully

01:12:00.380 misused it same thing here with Kamloops where you know no one did any previous land use

01:12:08.940 review and no one ever said look these results are extremely preliminary you know no one should

01:12:15.660 ever have released it to the press actually but as mentioned before um this is the trigger that

01:12:23.660 pushed UNDRIP through. And you have to remember that six premiers and several First Nations were

01:12:29.740 completely opposed to UNDRIP. They wanted a lot of changes. They wanted to know what consent

01:12:35.260 actually meant. Was it retroactive? How would this impact resource and energy development?

01:12:42.380 Whose rights were what? So because it was COVID lockdowns during that spring period,

01:12:49.980 they hadn't been able to meet and discuss these things and negotiate changes to UNDRIP once this

01:12:57.500 claim, atrocity propaganda of mass graves, was published around the world. And curiously,

01:13:04.460 no journalists asked any questions. Once it was published, then UNDRIP was pushed through.

01:13:11.340 And, you know, we've heard a lot lately from Sam Cooper and Jason James of Brave New Normal

01:13:17.660 on the chinese infiltration in canada is very interesting that the day after undrip received

01:13:24.540 royal assent china accused canada of genocide against indigenous people at the un backed by a

01:13:32.780 number of other despot nations and they used kamloops as the example and the person who brought 0.95

01:13:39.420 that interesting tidbit forward is terry glavin in the year of the graves yes and that was one of

01:13:48.420 the first breakthroughs in canada was terry glavin writing the piece in the national post and i just

01:13:54.460 wanted to echo michelle sterling's comments about nina green i didn't want to mention nina green's

01:14:00.060 name because i know she's a very uh kind of guarded person but i just cannot help myself

01:14:06.260 because I think Nina's research is just absolutely incredible and it's allowed you know over 10

01:14:15.480 researchers to do the work that we do and her website if people are interested in her website

01:14:22.260 which is residentialschoolrecords.com you can find you know the massive amounts of work that she's 1.00

01:14:29.160 done on this file but I just wanted to mention about the GPR which is where we all went wrong

01:14:36.080 on this, not all of us, like there's many of us who were very skeptical about these claims to

01:14:41.740 begin with, but one thing we weren't sure about is, was that an abandoned cemetery in the Kamloops

01:14:48.900 Indian Residential School? We weren't completely informed about this because what's happened is

01:14:54.480 there's many cemeteries across the country, the most important one being Cowessus, which was the

01:15:01.640 announcement shortly after the Kamloops case of supposedly 751 unmarked graves, which Cadmus

01:15:10.060 DeLorem, who is the chief of that band, said was a crime scene, when he knew very well that that

01:15:18.140 was an abandoned cemetery, and it wasn't even an Indigenous cemetery. It was a cemetery that was

01:15:24.700 attached to the parish where you had a hospital where people died in the hospital, and you had

01:15:31.000 both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people buried in that cemetery. And that was the site where

01:15:36.540 Prime Minister Trudeau went and knelt over a teddy bear, and Jagmeet Singh went and did a

01:15:43.600 huge emotional kind of statement about how this was evidence of genocide. These politicians

01:15:50.720 should hang their heads in shame for what they have done. They need to retract everything that

01:15:59.120 they have stated about this because this was a completely manufactured thing which had nothing

01:16:05.580 to do with anything about murders or mass graves or genocide. They were using it purely for political

01:16:14.520 points and I think that was a complete disgrace. Yes and may I add something here? Yes. Well

01:16:23.860 Well, regarding people putting down teddy bears or kneeling with teddy bears and all the little displays of shoes, you know, Calgary, where Francis and I are planning in Calgary to do a memorial scene called the Confluence, which was formerly Fort Calgary.

01:16:46.500 And remember that the Mounties came west and stopped the actual genocide of the Blackfoot nation by American whiskey traders, for which Crowfoot was very happy. 0.98

01:17:00.480 And he signed Treaty 7 because of that, because he was so grateful to them.

01:17:05.520 But anyway, they're planning on taking all these plastic shoes that were made in China by probably by Uyghur slaves who are facing a real genocide. 0.96

01:17:15.040 they're planning on sort of bronzing them all and also uh the teddy bears that were part of

01:17:22.000 the display at calgary city hall now the thing is um teddy bears were created in honor of theater

01:17:30.300 roosevelt president of the united states he went on a hunting trip and he couldn't uh he wanted to

01:17:36.540 get a bear and he couldn't get one but some fellow found a bear tied it up to a tree and said there

01:17:42.000 now you can shoot the bear and he declined saying that he didn't think that was sportsmanlike

01:17:46.000 so this person made a teddy bear in his honor for being such a great guy but theater roosevelt 0.95

01:17:52.680 actually hated native people and had very ill will toward them and wanted them dead this was

01:18:01.120 entirely in opposition to the view of the canadian uh public toward native people you know we have

01:18:09.800 been economic trade partners for three or four hundred years here in this country. And the

01:18:16.140 Mounties came west to protect the Native people from the Indian Wars in the States, which had

01:18:22.480 been raging from 1644 to 1924. So in 1924, children had been at Indian residential schools

01:18:30.140 in Canada, learning how to read and write and operate in modern day society. And in the States,

01:18:37.260 The cavalry was still running them down and gunning them down in Indian wars.

01:18:42.400 So, you know, very, very different histories.

01:18:44.360 But the point is, the teddy bear is probably the absolute worst symbol that anybody could think of for this scenario.

01:18:53.680 And it only shows you how poor the history is on the part of politicians and all the indigenous activists. 0.60

01:19:00.040 i uh as i was looking for the uh the tweet of trudeau kneeling i thought it was interesting

01:19:08.900 because i found a whole bunch of him kneeling for blm as well remember when he did that whole

01:19:12.940 display kneeling with the for blm which again probably only uh raises raises tensions between

01:19:18.960 groups uh but he said it's it's just such like perfect like you know news speak double speak

01:19:25.240 language um it's hard to find the words that are enough but to all those affected know that i'm

01:19:31.220 here as your partner to walk the path of reconciliation and right these historical

01:19:36.060 wrongs you know it's uh such twisted such twisted language um but anyway i just wanted to throw that

01:19:45.140 in there you know i know that there's we don't want to be partisan about this matter here

01:19:49.320 because the Conservatives were just as bad.

01:19:52.660 Like Aaron O'Toole was the leader at the time

01:19:56.080 and the embarrassing things that he said

01:19:58.420 in the House of Commons,

01:20:00.440 even bringing his son into the whole thing

01:20:02.720 about how his son had asked him about this.

01:20:06.000 And it was just, the whole thing is a complete failure

01:20:10.720 of any kind of responsible types of ways of examining this.

01:20:15.720 And there's a lot of blame to go around

01:20:18.060 in terms of all the institutions but we can correct it like this was the kind of the key

01:20:23.820 thing is that we are you know lurching forward into the future with no with not being tethered

01:20:31.020 to reality in any way and the time is now to do that we can do it now we can say hey

01:20:39.020 everyone kind of lost their heads a bit here it's easy to get swept up in the emotions of the time

01:20:46.640 But now we know it was a huge deception. So we can, you know, put our hands up and say enough. We need to have, I don't know what it's going to take to have a review of the massive failure of all these institutions.

01:21:06.700 But most importantly, I think what I think is at the roots of a lot of this is the destruction of the idea of truth, which has been happening for decades.

01:21:20.580 And this is what Dallas Brody got in trouble for when she was saying in a somewhat sort of sarcastic tone, it's not your truth, it's not my truth, it's not your grandmother's truth.

01:21:35.180 it's just the truth although the the tone that she used there might have been you know we can

01:21:41.820 take issue with but those words are exactly correct your grandmother might believe 0.55

01:21:49.980 but that is what we are all trying to figure out um and we need a universal understanding

01:22:02.580 And if we don't have that, we have lost our ability to act democratically in Canadian society.

01:22:11.360 Very well, very well said, Francis.

01:22:13.960 And that's why this documentary is so important, you know, to correct the record, to have a common view on reality where we actually interrogate the facts.

01:22:24.820 You know, like this is what historians, this is what academics are supposed to do.

01:22:29.020 And as I said, it's going to be up to people like us to uphold a sort of like, you know, a rigorousness to to upholding what actually happened.

01:22:42.240 And once again, the link is the GoFundMe is in the nest there to support funding this grave error documentary.

01:22:51.180 Sorry, Michelle, you're going to say something.

01:22:52.660 um i was uh you know one thing i would like to talk about if i may i don't know how time is for

01:23:00.040 people um yeah uh so i was thinking we'll keep waiting for for simon but uh i was thinking um

01:23:07.320 maybe we could either have some closing statements soon or maybe we could throw to some questions from

01:23:12.840 the audience to listeners what do you think francis i think a lot of questions from the

01:23:16.720 audience would be great if michelle if you just have a quick point that you want to see and then

01:23:21.040 we can go to questions from the audience so guys start start uh start requesting to speak if you

01:23:25.720 have a question uh so uh one thing that i would like to bring up is that uh people like myself

01:23:32.360 often say okay there's no list of names of missing children but recently you may have seen the news

01:23:38.400 that said that the onabigan family in ontario has found the remains of a long lost uh what it would

01:23:46.780 have been uncle to the woman, Claire Onabagan, and that they have exhumed his body from a place

01:23:55.000 near Woodstock, and they're bringing him home to the Long Lake No. 58 reserve and repatriating him.

01:24:02.040 So the story goes that he was either six or eight years old. They claim that he was forced to go to

01:24:08.700 an Indian residential school, although he was allegedly paralyzed and partially paralyzed and

01:24:15.040 epileptic and that from there he was taken away by the government disappeared by the government

01:24:21.280 to various other institutions and ultimately he died at age 27 in a facility like that near

01:24:29.040 Woodstock and was buried there without notification to the family so they found part of this through

01:24:35.600 the research of Kimberly Murray who was the special interlocutor on missing children and

01:24:41.120 unmarked graves related to Indian residential schools. But what has happened, and this is thanks

01:24:46.960 to the detailed research of Nina Green, what has happened is actually Percy Nabogun died at three

01:24:54.240 and a half months old on the reserve. He's buried on the reserve. He actually died in hospital of

01:25:01.280 pneumococcal meningitis that was exacerbated by what's called

01:25:05.680 called marasmic, meaning marasmus. It means extreme malnutrition. So this family was living

01:25:17.240 in absolute poverty. The father at one point went to a TB sanatorium, as did one of the sons.

01:25:24.540 And so basically they have dug up the remains of someone else with a slightly different name.

01:25:32.080 But this example will be used as an example of a missing child that was disappeared by the government.

01:25:40.040 And when I say disappeared, I mean as if in a military junta, like in Argentina or Guatemala, where there was civil war and people were literally stripped from their bed in the middle of the night and no one ever saw them again.

01:25:55.340 But in those cases, the mothers and sisters and brothers would stand with pictures of the person, their name, their date of birth, where they were taken from.

01:26:05.620 We have none of that kind of evidence in this phantom genocide in Canada.

01:26:11.420 So I just wanted to mention that because it's a very important kind of turning point in this whole story because it will be used to claim from now on that any Indigenous person who went to not only a residential school, but to an Indian hospital, a mental institute, a home for the disabled, TB sanatorium, that their remains should also be repatriated and Canadian taxpayers should pay for it.

01:26:36.420 Even though for the past hundred years, no one's ever gone looking for these people and no one ever cared. So keep that in mind.

01:26:45.300 Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for sharing that story. And I think it is worth mentioning that, you know, there are there is a pretty long history of RCMP corruption throughout history.

01:26:58.360 So it's like, I think even more important is, you know, to, to recount history, to separate the truth from the bullshit, uh, because there probably is some horrible things that have happened.

01:27:11.580 And, uh, you know, if it's like the boy who cried wolf, you know, it's like, if you're going to say that this was bad and that was bad and like, it's, it's a bunch of fabricated stories, um, that kind of ignore really important facts like tuberculosis.

01:27:25.620 like that's that's not that makes you know potential rcmp corruption where maybe they did

01:27:32.200 you know make certain indigenous women disappear uh you know like that that almost like discounts 0.85

01:27:39.540 the real stuff uh that's probably not the most elegant way to put it but um yeah i think i just

01:27:45.960 brought up uh nula nula would you like to ask any of the panel members a question or anything to uh

01:27:53.840 add that to the discussion um for now i'd like to just make a note on some housekeeping for the

01:28:00.680 fundraiser um with gofundme you have the option to turn off tip so that you're not charged more

01:28:07.580 than your donation so just um make sure that if you don't want to give gofundme a tip to just

01:28:14.200 slide over that green bar towards the left amazing thank you for that that's fantastic again the uh

01:28:25.160 the um go fund me is in the nest there to support the uh grave error documentary

01:28:35.640 uh again if you guys want to ask any questions then then be sure to uh to request to speak

01:28:41.760 and we'll get you up here i have a question for the panel um if anyone wants to elaborate on

01:28:50.720 some of the social damage that uh has affected canada i mean we have our domestic social damage

01:28:58.780 um and and you know we have our international reputation as well so what kind of things

01:29:06.160 have you seen that like affect even our everyday lives uh that has been social damage caused by

01:29:13.620 this and of course it's aboriginal and non-aboriginal people who are suffering because

01:29:21.440 of this narrative um you know like francis said that there's aboriginal people who

01:29:27.620 felt traumatized had grief um and now we also have non-aboriginal children like 0.89

01:29:34.560 going to school and being forced to wear orange shirts and which is a form of conformity training

01:29:39.960 um you know in jobs it becomes like a struggle session that you have to wear the orange shirt

01:29:45.020 these sorts of things um what else what other ways that have you seen social damage

01:29:50.220 from this i would i wouldn't mind taking a quick stab at that saying to you that i have

01:29:56.060 number of grandchildren one of them just turned three and his daycare read from a book and there's

01:30:02.980 so many books, not just in schools now, but in daycares that present, obviously, the darkest,

01:30:09.400 the most dystopian image of Canadian society. He came home and he said he learned about residential

01:30:15.580 schools and how the children all had their hair cut. So the idea that educators are getting away

01:30:23.340 with, and when I say educators, we're talking about more than 100,000 people in Canada,

01:30:28.300 are getting away and of course it'd be double that if we added all the people working in daycares

01:30:34.640 they're getting away with frightening children so it's not just a question of misinforming children

01:30:41.540 about our past it's taking small children and traumatizing them so if anyone here or if anyone

01:30:48.720 anywhere wants to say it was awful for children in residential schools because in part some were

01:30:55.420 traumatized with the experience i think that's very much exaggerated um but there certainly would

01:31:00.540 have been some trauma what about why reproduce that trauma today with all school children

01:31:06.620 um so as we see with the gender cult gender ideology um it wasn't being done with high

01:31:13.180 school students where there is a little bit more strength and ability to critically process what

01:31:18.700 is being told but if you're dealing with six-year-olds or in case my grandson three-year-olds

01:31:23.100 they have no ability to process this so i think the darkness has to come to an end and i think

01:31:30.540 an awful lot of people not just people in media and people in government and higher up in our

01:31:34.940 institutions i think every single person that peddles um these dark fairy tales has to stop now

01:31:42.860 yes i'd like to add to that if i may um i'm putting in the uh i'm putting out a tweet here

01:31:49.500 related to rod clifton and mark de wolfe's co-edited book from truth comes reconciliation

01:31:58.940 and rodney clifton actually worked in a indian residential school up north and he explained

01:32:07.580 you know why were kids given a number well because they had individual clothes assigned to them

01:32:14.060 with numbers and he spent a lot of his time in the laundry room sorting these clothes and why

01:32:20.300 were they why was their haircut because a lot of kids who over the summer lived out on the land

01:32:26.780 you know didn't have showers didn't have baths they came in with all kinds of infections and

01:32:33.020 often infestations lice and such like and you can imagine back in the day like today it's pretty

01:32:40.460 hard to get rid of lice but back in the day think of how hard it would really have been so um and

01:32:47.900 and in a communal setting like a residential school you would not want to have kind of communicable

01:32:57.100 infestations or infections running through the school so uh you know as unpleasant as it was

01:33:04.460 the first order of business was to get those clothes off and either get them washed and then 0.98

01:33:09.580 later they'd be returned to the kids at the end of the year or if they were in bad shape they'd be

01:33:13.740 tossed and get that hair cleaned up and get rid of those lice so uh it's uh it's too bad you see

01:33:21.980 that historical context is missing so and why would children be called you know 193 well 193 come and

01:33:28.620 get your clothes but does it make sense to you that nuns and priests would call children and by

01:33:36.300 their number rather than just their name isn't it easier to say okay um jackie or charlene

01:33:45.500 can you come up to the board in english for me are you going to say oh 159 come up here and you

01:33:52.860 know that's three words you have to remember obviously that's ridiculous and the whole

01:33:57.180 principle of roman catholicism and christianity in general is to treat people with human dignity

01:34:04.540 because, you know, the Judeo-Christian faith believes that people are made in the image of God,

01:34:11.600 that they're divine beings.

01:34:13.660 And, you know, that elevates the importance of treating a person with dignity and respect

01:34:21.940 and likewise treating their body, their temporary house, with respect

01:34:27.360 because Christians generally believe in the resurrection.

01:34:31.260 So that's why the idea of incinerating bodies and such like, or being so brutal to people would be outside of most Christian thinking.

01:34:45.900 And if I may just add something, which I'm not sure of, well, I have briefly touched upon this.

01:34:51.320 I think one of the biggest tragedies of this entire episode is the distraction, the terrible distraction that's happened, which much of aboriginal policy, why we're concerned about aboriginal policy, is because of the terrible conditions that exist in these isolated, remote communities.

01:35:17.280 The biggest secret, which people don't want to talk about, is high, very high rates of fetal alcohol syndrome, which mean that a whole generation of Aboriginal children are destined to not be able to thrive in society.

01:35:36.180 And instead of focusing our attention on those terrible problems, we have people like Keisha Supernant and Sarah Bollier being paid thousands of dollars to pull their GPR machines all over the country, looking for non-existent missing children.

01:35:56.180 Not to mention people like Kimberly Murray, the special interlocutor whose office had a budget of millions of dollars to write an absolutely outrageous report which castigated a whole bunch of people, including me, as being a residential school denialist who should be put in jail for my views.

01:36:17.480 Well, and not to mention, Kimberly Murray is operating from Oshweken, which claims to be not even in Canada. It's on Mohawk territory, there's a big sign. And, you know, so are we paying a foreign agent, is my question, to denigrate our great country.

01:36:39.460 And in fact, you know, by doing so, that simply hands China a tool to take to the U.N. and say, see, look at this, all these claims, a murder, incest, rape, blah, blah, blah. 0.68

01:36:53.300 So, you know, it's a it's a very big question, like what's going on there with this person?

01:37:02.420 Absolutely. Thank you so much, Nula, for the question. I just brought up a rotoscoped rod puppet.

01:37:09.460 Uh, if you have a question, uh, sir, then, then, then let her rip. 1.00

01:37:14.180 You can unmute yourself and ask a question or make a comment.

01:37:18.740 Not a question.

01:37:20.100 Uh, just a comment.

01:37:21.540 Can you hear me?

01:37:22.300 All right.

01:37:23.120 Yep.

01:37:23.680 Sound good.

01:37:25.100 Just, just a comment.

01:37:26.580 Um, Jim, uh, mentioned the effect that all of this has on, uh, on children.

01:37:33.180 All of these stories have on children.

01:37:35.520 And it just reminded me of, uh, I'm, I'm from Manitoba.

01:37:38.620 I'm from northern Manitoba and I was at a hockey game in March and there was an 11 or 12 year old girl, a young girl, a native girl with her friends just watching the game and running around.

01:37:52.160 She was wearing a hoodie which said a genocide survivor across the front.

01:37:59.320 And I thought, what an awful thing to buy a kid.

01:38:02.360 Why would you put your kid in that?

01:38:03.800 Why would you want your kid to think that about themselves and their family?

01:38:06.940 And I wonder, what does she think when she looks at someone like me?

01:38:11.580 Because I'm white.

01:38:13.060 What kind of stories has she been told?

01:38:15.760 You know, I'm from northern Manitoba.

01:38:17.600 I've lived pretty much my whole life.

01:38:20.060 And as a white minority in a Native majority region,

01:38:23.560 I have a familiarity with Native people and with Indigenous issues

01:38:28.320 that most Canadians just don't have.

01:38:30.960 And I think for a lot of people,

01:38:32.040 residential schools is still a a new or exciting or exotic topic a very salacious

01:38:39.180 topic well I can tell you where I live it's been a not a weekly but a daily

01:38:44.700 topic for 20 years now and it's done nothing the the narratives that would

01:38:52.220 have done nothing to improve living conditions have done nothing to improve

01:38:58.440 social relations it's just billions of dollars have been moved around to create

01:39:05.520 these sort of less office jobs and to further all of these ideas which are

01:39:10.700 just increasingly detached from reality and I think I think scam loops was kind

01:39:16.500 of it was a bridge too far I think I think a lot of people were introduced

01:39:20.320 to residential schools through through the announcement from Kamloops but I 0.99

01:39:24.780 I know when I heard it back in 2021, right away, I thought, this is bullshit. 1.00

01:39:31.560 Ridiculous. 1.00

01:39:32.520 And sure enough, it was. 0.78

01:39:33.960 But just to go off of what Jim said, everything that's happened in the last 20 years, it's done nothing for relations.

01:39:42.040 It's done nothing for material and conditions.

01:39:44.800 It's caused a lot of damage.

01:39:46.460 So that's what I have to say.

01:39:48.700 Thanks so much for sharing that.

01:39:50.480 Scam loops.

01:39:51.400 That's the first time I've heard that one.

01:39:53.240 I like that.

01:39:54.180 That's catchy.

01:39:54.780 Uh, and yeah, I, right here, I'm somebody who only first heard about the residential

01:40:00.020 schools, uh, when this story broke four years ago.

01:40:04.600 And, um, yeah, like the, I've always said that the, the indigenous get treated, that

01:40:13.900 they are the original political football, you know, they've always been like, they're

01:40:19.300 always just kind of commodified, turned into a football for the political class, the ruling

01:40:22.920 class to kind of just bat around and use um like they're they're the original sort of like blm

01:40:28.800 sort of uh you know using that as a sort of a political wedge or political football to to like

01:40:36.100 you said not actually improve material conditions for the indigenous not actually uh you know when

01:40:41.940 they stopped the pipelines for example you know that that was that could have enriched a lot of

01:40:47.740 indigenous communities by creating, um, you know, enterprise and, and jobs. But, uh, I mean,

01:40:54.060 that's a whole other, that's a whole other documentary, uh, in terms of why the, why the,

01:40:59.920 uh, why the, uh, pipelines weren't made, but, uh, they certainly kind of weaponize the indigenous

01:41:06.700 community for that as well. But I just brought somebody else. Uh, thank you for the comment,

01:41:10.820 rotoscoped rod puppet. Uh, I think I brought up Josh, Josh, how's it going? Do you have

01:41:17.720 a comment or question yes thank you Greg and thank you for your to Francis and

01:41:25.580 Michelle and Jim for hosting this excellent space this has been very

01:41:29.960 informative and I consider it anti algorithmic in that you know it's not a

01:41:36.100 new story of the day and and it's it's still very very important that we learn

01:41:44.060 when we come on these platforms and tonight i've definitely learned a lot so i'm in ontario and

01:41:50.100 parent councils at schools uh as of late have taken issue with uh saying uh land acknowledgement

01:42:03.640 ceremonies uh before meetings start uh and i've noticed a correlation between land acknowledgement

01:42:12.040 ceremonies and these and and this um camp loops uh situation so if you guys want to comment on

01:42:21.440 that i also want to just mention quickly uh that i have seen cadmus delorum speak

01:42:28.760 i've also seen negan sinclair speak and i just would like to know how much money

01:42:37.080 these individuals are making to tour around Canada

01:42:41.560 and espouse their half-truths in the way that they are.

01:42:49.380 And ideally, you know, the money that they're given to come

01:42:54.380 and deliver half-truths should go back to the people

01:42:59.360 within their communities who are clearly struggling.

01:43:04.100 I think it's very unfortunate when we see this sort of pyramid effect where we got guys like Cadmus and Negan getting all of this money, yet their people don't have clean drinking water and are clearly struggling as a result of this opioid crisis.

01:43:19.520 So I'll land there. And thanks again, Greg, for this great space.

01:43:22.940 Thanks for the question, Josh.

01:43:24.140 and before uh because i see some people unmuting to answer francis and michelle could could we just

01:43:29.920 clarify who these two individuals are for everyone else listening because i'm not familiar with these

01:43:34.180 these two names you brought up cadmus de lorme and negon sinclair yeah uh cadmus de lorme is the chief

01:43:41.640 of the uh cowas's uh indian band he was the and someone did say i noticed in the youtube comments

01:43:51.240 that he did at some point say that it was a cemetery,

01:43:54.380 but that's not the first message that was put out.

01:43:57.900 The first message that was put out

01:43:59.600 was that it was 751 unmarked graves,

01:44:03.140 which were originally marked,

01:44:05.600 and then what happens to cross all the markers deteriorated.

01:44:09.980 And so he was a big spreader of misinformation.

01:44:13.540 Negan Sinclair is the son of Murray Sinclair,

01:44:17.480 who is an unbelievable bad actor

01:44:20.340 and professor at the University of Manitoba, who said that my firing from Mount Royal University

01:44:29.140 was a Christmas gift that kept on giving, and he had a big celebration about that. The pushing out

01:44:36.080 of a professor from their job for trying to speak the truth about things, that gives people a bit

01:44:43.000 an understanding of Negon Sinclair's professional ethics. Anyway, someone mentioned the gentleman,

01:44:54.040 very interesting comments that he made about Manitoba, about the money that's being obtained

01:45:00.200 through speaking engagements. I'm not sure. I know that Sean Carlton, who's another terrible,

01:45:05.080 bad actor from the University of Manitoba, says he gives all of his money to, you know,

01:45:11.480 the survivor society and so on so i don't i don't quite know but i think the big tragedy is is that

01:45:17.640 cadmus delorme and negon sinclair are in the position that they are in because of the education

01:45:25.800 and their ability to integrate into canadian society that's why they're successful what they

01:45:32.840 are advocating is for the continuous tendency and impoverishment of the marginalized aboriginal 1.00

01:45:41.400 population in these isolated communities they don't live in isolated communities they are able

01:45:48.200 to participate on equal footing with other people in canadian society that is not what is happening

01:45:55.400 in these remote communities where people are trapped and they have no skills to be able to

01:46:01.560 survive in canadian society and they cannot leave those terrible isolated places and that

01:46:09.400 is the big problem is what's being argued for by negon sinclair and cadmus delorme

01:46:15.480 is terribly destructive for the aboriginal population aboriginal people need the same 1.00

01:46:21.400 things that all other human beings do which is high quality health care high quality education

01:46:27.560 a scientific education not a bunch of fairy tales and spiritual mythology and they need to have

01:46:37.000 expert educational assistance which is not being provided in the substandard conditions

01:46:44.840 that exist in those remote communities and also if i may uh add a point regarding uh

01:46:53.320 the uh person's request about you know how this was affecting policy you know after the

01:47:00.360 kamloops band made their claim in may by september they issued a full page ad in the

01:47:08.360 globe and mail which nina found and they claimed that because of this genocide that happened you

01:47:16.120 know they were due reparations and they wanted the right to collect taxes on all their land and

01:47:21.160 they had many sweeping demands and subsequently to that they also made some kind of a covenant

01:47:27.480 with the Roman Catholic Church, which has implications for all of Canada

01:47:33.540 and all Christian and Catholic diocese.

01:47:38.000 And again, they're trying to squeeze reparations

01:47:41.620 and various kinds of parts out of them based on this alleged genocide.

01:47:49.320 Now, I've had one or two encounters with Canadian clerics, Catholics,

01:47:54.760 and they know very little about Canadian history.

01:47:59.620 And so that's one reason if you wonder,

01:48:02.260 well, why don't the Catholics speak up?

01:48:04.020 Why don't the Catholic Church speak up? 0.98

01:48:05.620 I think a lot of Catholics in general are ignorant of Canadian history 0.57

01:48:10.340 and particularly at the bishop level, which is unusual, 0.92

01:48:15.860 but they didn't go through the Oblate diaries or the Grey Nance diaries

01:48:20.060 and they should, or maybe they should just go to the Dorchester Review

01:48:24.100 or the Indian Residential School Research Group websites

01:48:27.280 and read some of the shorter works there,

01:48:30.020 particularly by Professor Jacques Royard.

01:48:34.900 And so they're trying to squeeze these reparations

01:48:38.640 out of the broader society.

01:48:41.920 And there was no genocide,

01:48:43.560 so there's no place for these kinds of claims.

01:48:47.660 As long as citizens don't know their own history,

01:48:51.540 they're not going to be able to stand up against this kind of uh extraction and uh shakedown 0.95

01:48:59.220 yeah and if i could just add to that it's the last comment i make because i um i have to leave

01:49:04.340 now for another another commitment and that is that's the thesis of british historian nigel

01:49:09.940 biggers that that perpetuating these myths about residential schools is that people don't know

01:49:16.100 history people don't read history people don't care about history and i think it's um it's

01:49:24.200 incumbent on all of us listening today to spread the word that there is a very different and a much

01:49:30.480 more accurate account of the past not just with the residential schools with all of canada we're

01:49:36.240 very lucky to be in this country and we owe much to our ancestors thank you so much thanks so much

01:49:43.140 for stopping by jim we appreciate it um we'll probably wrap it up here soon i had a couple

01:49:49.100 questions that i wanted to ask you guys um actually sorry before we move on i i think the

01:49:55.920 person josh's question was do we know where this money is coming from to pay uh these people to

01:50:02.720 like to tour around and kind of propagate the sort of half truths of scam loops uh do we kind

01:50:10.760 of answer that part uh well i think it's for example uh various institutions like sean carlton

01:50:20.480 who is probably the most well-known academic talking on this subject uh who wants to

01:50:28.180 school denialism and spreads all sorts of misinformation and and is you know changes

01:50:35.320 his tactics all the time to avoid the false information that he's provided in the past

01:50:42.380 he's given like someone will invite him to come and speak and pay him you know his expenses

01:50:49.860 definitely to come and speak so like all sorts of universities various non-profit organizations

01:50:58.820 that want him to come, for example, in Powell River, Vancouver Island University, the Powell

01:51:07.300 River campus paid John Carlton to come and give a talk there. So, but Carlton claims that he's

01:51:15.120 giving, he doesn't take any honorarium for himself, but he gives it to various Indigenous

01:51:22.340 organizations and and that could be the same for other um other people so it's not known how much

01:51:28.700 they're making personally but i think it's more the the kind of message like do you have an academic

01:51:35.440 arguing in favor of criminalizing speech is quite amazing to me that you would see that happening

01:51:44.760 because the academics should be the people in favor of open inquiry and critical thinking.

01:51:53.520 And if they're going to criminalize speech, that means that people are going to be afraid

01:51:58.660 to state what they think is true. And we should be encouraging people to state what they think

01:52:03.680 is true. We should also be encouraging people to argue with them and to expose how what they're

01:52:10.280 saying is flawed so that we can all reach a better understanding of the nature of reality but but

01:52:17.040 that's not what's happening with the universities or the media or the school system which is where

01:52:23.600 we rely upon to develop our understanding of the world very well said very well said and uh

01:52:30.960 it's really basic you know free speech being able to debate this stuff being able to disagree with

01:52:36.480 one another i think a lot of us can agree especially if you're in this space or watching

01:52:41.320 this that uh canada has really lost its way in terms of being an actual like free and democratic

01:52:47.220 society you know there may not be official uh too many laws that prevent you from speaking freely

01:52:53.780 but there already is this horrible social uh this social code that so many canadians fall into where

01:53:00.640 they do not speak freely and they don't want to ruffle any feathers and they're afraid to actually

01:53:05.320 use their free speech and um you know this this residential school denialism they've just created

01:53:10.420 another label like racist you want to be a racist you don't want to be a residential school denialist

01:53:15.380 uh they can't keep on inventing these words to shame and main people uh for speaking out and

01:53:21.180 you're right like we need to be fighting for that fundamentally thank you for safe free speech uh

01:53:26.040 dot ca for hosting this uh this space i wanted to ask like in the spirit of trying to push for the

01:53:32.440 truth push this conversation into the mainstream obviously we're doing this fundraiser for the

01:53:36.540 documentary grave error uh you can check out the link there the fundraiser at um uh go fund me you

01:53:43.200 guys are doing well what do we got here already over a thousand dollars we just cracked oh my god

01:53:48.420 amazing we're well on our way we're getting there gotta start somewhere but i wanted to ask jody

01:53:54.320 willson raybolt okay she's a she's a sort of outstanding former liberal mp she was infamously

01:54:02.760 or famously uh stood up to trudeau during the snc lavalin scandal she's part indigenous i

01:54:09.640 believe she's also in bc british columbia um has she said anything about this issue does she kind

01:54:16.840 of fall in line with kind of the official narrative does she look like she has any

01:54:21.500 potential in terms of trying to get down to the truth of the matter? Or is she kind of happy to

01:54:25.520 just kind of shill the same sort of narrative that, you know, Canadians are inherently 0.98

01:54:30.440 judicidal maniacs? Well, she's one of the people who when she left office, she left what's called 1.00

01:54:37.520 a practice directive to the government lawyers that rather than trying to litigate any further

01:54:44.500 claims against the government, they should just settle. And Tom, Dr. Tom Flanagan has written

01:54:51.160 about this in a report for the Fraser Institute called, I think it's called a noble idea from

01:54:58.840 reconciliation to reparations, something like that. But this means that without parliamentary

01:55:06.360 oversight, hundreds of billions of dollars are being handed out or tens of billions of dollars

01:55:12.380 are being handed out for all kinds of causes. You know, people are saying, look, you know, we got to

01:55:18.740 go um do ceremony across canada i mean uh i guess uh tanya talaga was talking in a cbc interview

01:55:29.340 once about how one indigenous group brought a canoe to kamloops and they filled it up with

01:55:35.800 the spirits of the 215 and took them home and how touching it was you know so people are

01:55:41.340 getting lots of money you can go online to Canada Grants and look up different groups and actually

01:55:50.480 I've posted on X here I've posted an article called Peanuts and Elephants that outlines some

01:55:57.560 of the fortune of money that's pouring from taxpayers pockets to God knows what kind of

01:56:04.280 causes most of it related to this kind of issue in fact a while ago I was talking with someone

01:56:09.980 who told me that the cows and plows payments are coming through, meaning that somehow the effort

01:56:16.200 to teach agriculture to Indian residential school students in the past and treaty people in the past

01:56:23.280 failed, therefore they're entitled to payments today. And the person said, you know, it's not

01:56:28.220 going to be much. It's going to be, I don't know, maybe $20,000 or $40,000 each. And I'm like, you

01:56:34.040 know, for most people, $20,000 or $40,000 is a lot of money. But they didn't think so. They thought

01:56:43.580 it was nothing. And this is a potential recipient of this money. So, you know, this is a situation

01:56:51.660 that Jody Wilson-Raybould set up with this practice directive, and Parliament has no oversight. So

01:56:58.780 it's basically like there are two parallel tracks in Canadian society now does not know what the

01:57:05.540 other is doing and I would say that people like myself and Francis and Jim and the others who are

01:57:11.320 trying to expose this you know we are a thin bridge between the aboriginal industry if you like

01:57:19.580 and the and the mainstream society and parliament is completely disconnected from it as far as I'm

01:57:27.860 concern, other than, you know, Crown and Indigenous

01:57:29.900 Affairs, where like, for instance,

01:57:32.360 Gary Anandasanguri

01:57:34.040 as

01:57:35.160 former minister in Crown and Indigenous,

01:57:38.540 he actually rewrote

01:57:40.140 Canadian history, and he made

01:57:41.960 the

01:57:43.160 Lakota Sioux people, who came

01:57:45.920 to Canada as refugees,

01:57:48.280 and it's written all over their documents

01:57:49.900 that that's what they were.

01:57:51.760 He said, we're sorry

01:57:53.900 we ever called you refugees.

01:57:55.920 We're sorry that we saved you from

01:57:57.660 cavalry who were coming to get you after custer and his men were massacred and and so now they

01:58:05.720 turned around and about you know a couple of weeks later after he gives gives gave this apology they

01:58:10.840 said well actually you know downtown winnipeg belongs to us that was our traditional land

01:58:16.200 and they also said we want reparations for you guys having called us refugees 100 when we were

01:58:23.100 refugees we want not only reparations but we also want the lost economic opportunity fulfilled 1.00

01:58:30.340 you know people in the mainstream i really think have no idea that this is going on and of course

01:58:37.440 the mainstream media is not covering it in any detail or they're covering it in a psychophantic

01:58:42.260 way sorry that i went on and on but there you go no it's okay that's if i could just say a few

01:58:48.720 things as well i think um there's we are seriously untethered from reality in terms of aboriginal 1.00

01:58:57.040 non-aboriginal relations and it's been happening for a number of decades but it's only starting to

01:59:02.400 be recognized today which is that people are claiming and this is the aboriginal industry and

01:59:10.920 the activists that original groups are nations just like germany or france and i've heard people

01:59:18.320 say things like this. Aboriginal groups are dependent on enclaves of, you know, often with

01:59:24.860 a thousand people with no economic base and no capacity to be a nation state like anything,

01:59:33.460 like even, again, it's often compared to Quebec, but Quebec has millions of people and has an

01:59:39.220 economy and institutions. So this is kind of the expectation that's been built up. Instead of saying

01:59:48.300 Indigenous people have cultural features which they find are very meaningful to them and they

01:59:55.100 want to maintain those but in terms of surviving they're going to have to integrate into Canadian

02:00:01.700 society just like everyone else is integrating to be able to be productive members to have jobs to

02:00:08.100 raise families and so on but about decades ago this started to these kinds of falsehoods start

02:00:15.920 started to be perpetuated. And now it's even worse because you have politicians that are

02:00:22.800 entering into the political system, not as candidates who are representing an entire

02:00:29.200 geographical area, but as activists who are representing a particular ethnicity.

02:00:36.800 And that's going to have serious consequences for the ability of Canada to function.

02:00:41.920 and you're seeing this in a number of different contexts. And with the Aboriginal activists,

02:00:46.800 this is especially strong because there's the idea that Aboriginal people are nations

02:00:53.760 that have their own sovereignty and so on. And this is just nonsensical talk that has,

02:01:00.880 the reality has to be faced up to, and if an Indigenous person wants to go into politics and

02:01:07.280 and be an MP or an MLA,

02:01:09.840 they are representing a geographical constituency,

02:01:15.040 which has all sorts of ethnicities.

02:01:17.080 They are not an Aboriginal representative 1.00

02:01:20.600 of their tribal grouping, whatever that happens to be.

02:01:24.220 And this role is often seriously confused.

02:01:28.640 And I believe with Wilson-Raybould,

02:01:33.140 there was a bit of this confusion

02:01:34.960 in terms of how she saw her role as attorney general when she was in federal politics.

02:01:40.560 You know, that's a...

02:01:42.700 Sorry, could I just...

02:01:44.100 Yeah, sure. Go ahead.

02:01:46.100 Thank you.

02:01:47.820 Cocked again.

02:01:48.520 Yeah.

02:01:49.940 You know, people don't realize that there are also very big commercial and corporate interests behind this.

02:01:58.140 For instance, you keep hearing that there's going to be an Indigenous-led project or an Indigenous-led wind farm.

02:02:05.840 As Frances said, most bands, most of the 630-odd bands in Canada are 500 people or less.

02:02:15.740 There's only one or two, perhaps 20,000.

02:02:19.620 Most of them are 500 or less.

02:02:23.160 So, you know, within a small community like that, you don't have enough expert people to, like, run a factory or anything like that.

02:02:32.200 But you might have one person, perhaps has a degree or has a particular interest, and they would be your Indigenous lead on the project.

02:02:41.240 Just to give you an idea, Canada has 1.8 million Indigenous people, and Deloitte, which is planning to do a whole bunch of Indigenous-led projects, has globally 450,000 people.

02:02:56.920 so you know all these big accounting firms all these big management firms see this as a huge

02:03:03.320 opportunity to cash in and when you see like oh well this is an indigenous-led pipeline well 0.53

02:03:09.260 they're just tapping into indigenous funding from the federal government right or you look at

02:03:16.100 Williams Lake for instance after they made Sugarcane the movie or as they were making it

02:03:21.260 as they made their claims about unmarked graves at st joseph's um they said that oh williams lake

02:03:29.020 bought the former st joseph mission well they bought it with eight hundred thousand dollars

02:03:35.500 of taxpayers money from bc residents so they didn't buy it bc taxpayers paid for it and gave

02:03:42.460 it to them right so you know the this is the problem is that it sounds um as if an indigenous

02:03:49.980 led project will uplift the entire community when in fact it's usually the Aboriginal industry 0.99

02:03:56.580 consultants and lawyers and one or two people on the reserve who are pocketing enormous sums of

02:04:01.940 money. Hello? It's usually the Aboriginal industry consultants and lawyers and one or two people on

02:04:13.140 reserve who are pocketing enormous. One second, one second.

02:04:30.240 Shoot, shoot. I don't know. No, sorry, sorry. I'm here. I'm 0.99

02:04:35.940 here, guys. I got disconnected on my main account. So what

02:04:41.700 we're going to do is just to just to round it out let's just ask um sorry i'm here i'm here guys

02:04:50.560 oh no yeah i got disconnected on my main account let's just ask for you guys um what we're gonna

02:04:56.120 do is uh why do you think there is such a strong you know push to hide or to kind of change history

02:05:08.720 and to push this narrative we kind of been talking about it all night but like

02:05:12.380 in your kind of closing comments francis and michelle as we round this out

02:05:16.100 like why do you think there is such a concerted effort

02:05:18.680 to uh to push this false narrative

02:05:22.600 uh francis do you want to go ahead okay um well this is a very why do you think

02:05:31.480 there is such a concerted effort to uh to push this false narrative

02:05:38.720 Frances, do you want to go ahead?

02:05:41.720 Okay.

02:05:42.720 Well, this is a very, as you can imagine, a very complicated question, but certainly

02:05:49.720 the Indigenous types of fabrications that are going on, fabrications about Aboriginal

02:05:56.720 policy, there's many, many other issues that are like this as well.

02:06:00.720 So we are entering into a phase of the current economic and political system, which is beginning to collapse. I think that's my own reading of it.

02:06:14.480 And because of the attempts to justify the inability of us to be able to come together and progress, so we're starting to enter into a decline.

02:06:27.320 And because of that, the fabrications and the falsehoods, and this is something that George Orwell was very, very cognizant of, you know, 70 years ago or so, or longer than that.

02:06:40.800 So it's not as if this is anything new, but when you start to enter into an authoritarian period of human history, then you have all sorts of deception that's beginning to take place.

02:06:53.540 And this doesn't really have anything to do with the, you know, ordinary indigenous people. It's Aboriginal organizations being used as a tool by a constellation of political and economic forces, which seem to be tied to international capitalism and the breaking down of sovereignty to destroy democracy, to destroy democratic processes. 0.83

02:07:23.280 and the gains that have been made by working class people over the last 80 years in the post-war

02:07:31.520 period, the gains, the tremendous gains that were made by working class people are now under serious 0.85

02:07:37.740 threat. And I really fear for the future because unless we can recapture our ability to try to

02:07:46.280 understand reality, to develop a common understanding and to fight for a future that is

02:07:52.340 going to benefit all people, we are going to be heading down a very treacherous path.

02:08:00.280 And my perspective is that I tie this in my climate indigenous conspiracy theory. 0.98

02:08:09.920 I believe it's related to the federal government's plan to have nature-based climate solutions

02:08:16.600 where they want to do carbon trading on nature and so the local band will be like the indigenous 0.98

02:08:24.780 led project and people will be employed on the reserve to be water keepers fire keepers

02:08:31.640 air guardians and such like land guardians which are sort of names applied to people who

02:08:39.080 you know, keep the land pristine and do nothing with it. And then around the world, people will

02:08:46.880 use Article 6, which is part of the Paris Agreement. It was something that was finally,

02:08:52.240 the rules were set last fall at COP29, just days after President Trump was elected.

02:08:59.520 And you can see nature-based climate solutions on the government website. It's been there for a

02:09:05.960 while and so it's all about carbon trading between nations and Canada I

02:09:11.240 think the government thinks it's going to cash in real big on this

02:09:16.480 to reach net zero so i'm just going to post that to your twitter feed here

02:09:36.620 and people can see whether or not my tinfoil hat is too tight or not

02:09:40.920 fantastic thank you so much uh for coming on michelle francis widdowson sorry we didn't get

02:09:50.100 to hear from simon but uh once again guys to correct the record documentaries are powerful

02:09:58.260 think of think of your past think from history think from your own experiences

02:10:02.200 you saw that documentary and that change your perspective on something this is really what

02:10:07.820 it's going to take to turn the tides. You know, it's not just going to take a tweet or a Twitter

02:10:12.800 thread. It's going to take a lot more than that. And quality, you know, quality storytelling

02:10:19.800 costs money. And if so, if you're passionate about this issue, if you want to help correct

02:10:25.700 the record with Francis Widowson and these people trying to, you know, rectify Canadian history,

02:10:32.140 then please go to their GoFundMe, which is in the nest.

02:10:37.120 And, of course, oh, also follow Francis Widdowson

02:10:40.260 and follow Michelle on Twitter.

02:10:44.220 Let's pump up their followers as well.

02:10:48.020 That's all I can really think of for me.

02:10:50.820 But is there anything else you wanted to add before we go, Francis or Michelle?

02:10:55.420 Fight now and fight hard before it's all gone.

02:10:59.600 That's right.

02:11:00.160 yeah without free speech it's the cornerstone of everything else without free speech you can't

02:11:05.600 argue for any aspect of your case on anything that you want so um thank you so much greg for

02:11:12.160 hosting us and uh thank you for everyone who listened yeah thanks everyone for coming that

02:11:17.620 was that was very very good absolutely and thanks for all this valuable information and i'm sure

02:11:22.220 we'll we'll talk again soon and we'll uh we will you know the fight continues thanks guys and yeah

02:11:28.760 this this twitter space is recorded if you guys want to uh listen to it back thanks for coming

02:11:33.520 bye for now thank you good night everyone bye

02:11:37.180 oh my gosh i'm sorry guys we had some technical difficulties at the end there

02:11:46.160 um yeah that was that was good though good space love francis widdowson love jim mcmurtry too bad

02:11:54.060 we didn't get to speak to the filmmaker but uh that was a lot of fun glad we got to do that

02:11:58.840 um and yeah someone asked in chat hey greg when is your doc coming out it says liquid gal

02:12:05.740 soon not soon but a a big update is coming soon where we're going to have a trailer we're going

02:12:13.780 to show some of the people that we've already interviewed um working with the professional

02:12:19.000 filmmaker he is starting the editing that's starting to come together and there's still a

02:12:24.660 handful of interviews i need to get done but obviously i didn't finish it as quickly as i

02:12:29.060 wanted to you know this is my first documentary so you know give me i hope you guys can give me

02:12:33.740 some sort of slack here um because it is a much bigger project than just a tweet or just a youtube

02:12:39.740 video and it really is going to be reaching out of our echo chamber you know this is going to be a

02:12:47.540 Film, film with an E on the end that gets submitted to film festivals.

02:12:52.460 It's going to be on streaming services, and it's going to be broadcast ready,

02:12:58.140 which means it can be picked up by, you know, different TV stations

02:13:01.720 or kind of distribution channels and really go far.

02:13:05.340 It's going to be something that essentially sends the message of,

02:13:08.400 hey, Canada is not as free as you thought it was.

02:13:10.780 And here are a bunch of examples why.

02:13:14.200 So it's good.

02:13:15.000 It's taking more time than I wanted, but it's good.

02:13:16.920 It's on the way.

02:13:17.540 And there should be a really spicy, exciting trailer for you guys to see.

02:13:23.340 And hopefully that will start, you know, you'll see me back here fundraising and streaming a lot more and talking about a lot more stuff.

02:13:28.600 It's been a lot of stuff I haven't done before of, like, you know, compiling footage, putting it on hard drives, making sure it's a high quality.

02:13:36.780 And all this, like, you know, this isn't, like I said, this isn't just like your everyday YouTube video.

02:13:42.060 It's a broadcast-ready film.

02:13:45.740 um yeah it's good i'm learning a lot and that sort of thing but yeah there will be new updates

02:13:51.540 soon coming down the pipe thanks again for watching love you guys uh is there anything

02:13:57.060 else i wanted to say thank you for moderating trent in the chat i appreciate it ragin thanks

02:14:03.300 for coming out jen saul liquid gal odious patten uh scott free freedom jen saul

02:14:11.000 Anderson Paladin

02:14:13.160 Ruby Shadow

02:14:14.320 thank you for hanging out

02:14:15.620 yeah there's going to be

02:14:17.940 big stuff on the way

02:14:19.360 I know I've been pretty silent

02:14:20.660 the past little bit

02:14:21.900 but I've been working

02:14:23.260 you know

02:14:23.800 we will talk to you soon

02:14:26.180 thanks again for tuning in

02:14:27.320 and

02:14:28.440 yeah

02:14:30.160 until

02:14:30.720 until

02:14:31.140 next time

02:14:32.320 do do do

02:14:38.860 do do

02:14:39.840 do

02:14:40.820 Do do do do do.

02:14:42.860 Do do do.

02:14:45.660 Do do do.

02:14:48.320 Do do do.

02:14:50.240 Do do do do do.

02:14:52.700 Do do do do.

Greg Wycliffe - May 22, 2025

Kamloops Mass Grave Roundtable - 4 Years of Lies- Frances Widdowson, Jim McMurtry, Michelle Stirling

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript