00:05:11.120There were no bodies found and no identities confirmed.
00:05:14.560So let me refer back to a National Post story that I've talked about before on the show.
00:05:18.700And it explains what ground penetrating radar actually does.
00:05:22.280So for this report, they interviewed a professor of anthropology, who is also the director of the Institute of Prairie and Indigenous Archaeology.
00:05:31.980She said this of ground penetrating radar, quote,
00:05:38.460What it actually does is look for the shaft.
00:05:40.860When a grave is dug, there is a grave shaft dug, and the body is placed in the grave, sometimes in a coffin, as in the Christian burial context.
00:05:49.140What the ground penetrating radar can see is where that pit itself was dug, because the soil actually changes when you dig a grave.
00:05:56.940And occasionally, if it is a coffin, the radar can pick up the coffin sometimes as well, unquote.
00:06:02.380So this technology is not completely accurate, and it doesn't tell us anything about who is buried.
00:06:09.320So this brings me to my third point about what the media has been getting wrong, and that is whose graves were actually discovered.
00:06:15.740The first band in Kamloops claimed that the graves belonged to children at the former residential school.
00:06:21.900So when the second two bands came forth with their claims, many in the media just sort of conflated all the information
00:06:28.120and said that these graves, too, were from children at residential school.
00:06:34.360In fact, in both the cases of the Cowessus and the Lower Kootenay, the graves were believed to be community cemeteries belonging to both First Nations and the broader Canadian community.
00:06:46.000So this is tucked away at the very end of a report in the Globe and Mail on the findings of that Cowessus reserve in Saskatchewan.
00:06:52.620It says this, it appears that not all the graves contain children's body, Lorette said.
00:07:00.120He said the area was also used as a burial site by the rural municipality.
00:07:05.280We did have a family of non-Indigenous people show up today and notified us that some of those unmarked graves had their families in them, their loved ones, he said.
00:07:13.320So what we have here is an abandoned community cemetery where people of different backgrounds were buried.
00:07:20.260So that's quite the leap from the original storyline, which were that these graves all belong to children who died at the residential school.
00:07:34.200Several media outlets, both in Canada and international outlets like BBC, Al Jazeera, CNN, New York Times and Washington Post, all erroneously labeled these findings as mass graves.
00:08:00.880Well, mass graves are a hallmark of genocide.
00:08:04.120They conjure images of pure evil, the kind of evil that characterize the collective governments of the 20th century, governments like Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot.
00:08:14.760These are truly evil leaders who use mass graves to cover their atrocities and crimes against humanity.
00:08:21.340These leaders carried out mass murder and the mass graves went hand in hand.
00:08:25.360So using this term mass graves is wrong.
00:08:29.300And it's also reckless because it conflates Canada's policy, which was forced assimilation through mandatory universal education.
00:08:37.720It conflates that with actual Nazi death camps.
00:08:45.140And in too many cases, those who were responsible for caring for children in this country, let them down and they let the whole country down.
00:08:52.740But that doesn't put Canada's residential schools on any sort of equivalence with Auschwitz and actual Nazi concentration camps.
00:09:00.600And that brings me to my fifth point, which is also connected, which is the cause of death.
00:09:05.040So many of the children who died at these schools died of natural causes.
00:09:07.960According to the Truth and Reconciliation Report in 2015, the number one cause of death for children at these schools was tuberculosis.
00:09:15.720The number two cause of death was influenza.
00:09:18.740Now, you can argue that these children didn't receive proper health care and that some of their immune systems simply couldn't handle living in close proximity to other children.
00:09:26.120But negligence resulting in accidental death is very different from firing squads and gas chambers.
00:09:33.500And yet there was this weird universal assumption in the media that the discovery of these graves was somehow evidence of Canada's Holocaust and that these children had been deliberately killed in some kind of a genocide.
00:09:49.040It requires a concerted and systematic effort to conduct mass murder and eliminate an entire race of people.
00:09:56.120Canada's residential schools, however misguided, had the intent of educating children, of assimilating them into the broader Canadian population, and ultimately of lifting children out of poverty.
00:10:08.600It was flawed and it resulted in much harm.
00:10:11.440But there are a few orders of magnitude that separate the misguided intent of Catholic priests, nuns, and Canadian government officials versus those of Nazi soldiers in the Second World War.
00:10:23.220Next, the sixth point where the media gets this story completely wrong.
00:10:28.300It's possible that the graves that we're talking about are not even necessarily unmarked graves.
00:10:34.080Did you see this story in global news over the weekend?
00:11:19.980Sophie Pierre, former chief of the St. Mary's Indian Band and survivor of the school itself.
00:11:27.680Notice how they use the term survivor.
00:11:29.440Again, this is supposed to conjure images of Holocaust survivors.
00:11:33.000And they just, you know, also use it here to describe people who went to a school.
00:11:36.540But it says a survivor of the school told Global News that while the news of the unmarked graves had a painful impact on her and surrounding communities, they had always known the graves were there.
00:11:52.840The fact that there are graves inside a graveyard shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.
00:11:58.140According to Pierre, wooden crosses that originally marked the grave sites had been burned or deteriorated over the years.
00:12:05.000Using a wooden marker at a grave site remains a practice that continues to this day in many Indigenous communities across Canada.
00:12:12.320So when we're talking about these so-called unmarked graves, what we're more likely talking about is abandoned cemeteries.
00:12:20.100Abandoned cemeteries where people of different backgrounds, not just children from residential schools, and not just First Nations people were buried.
00:12:26.840We should obviously make an effort to address this problem and make sure that graves and cemeteries are cared for.
00:12:33.280But what an amazing leap of logic to go from an uncared community cemetery to mass graves, mass murder, and genocide.
00:12:43.580Mark Twain once said, never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
00:12:47.300Well, for many journalists, it seems, they never let facts get in the way of a good narrative.
00:12:51.700And that narrative is that Canada is an evil white supremacist nation that committed genocide against its First Nations people.
00:12:59.720It's not true, but that is the narrative that they are pushing.
00:13:03.200So is it any wonder then that some out there are so angered by this news that they've reacted with violence and rioting?
00:13:10.260Or is it any wonder that a radical faction of the far left are using this crisis as an opportunity to wreak havoc, tear down our history, tear down all the statues, and burn down the churches that they hate so much?
00:13:23.160Of course, these violent criminals who are burning down churches are the ones who are to blame for their own actions.
00:13:28.580But the media are also partially to blame for raising the temperature, for pushing a hysterical narrative that in no way represents the facts of this story, and for wrongly and recklessly accusing Canada of unspeakable crimes like genocide.
00:13:44.020I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.