00:03:19.040And so I want to go back to the original story and talk about what we know, what has been verified,
00:03:24.220what facts are out there, and what remains just vague and unknown.
00:03:30.280And so joining me to have this discussion is I'm very pleased to be joined by Professor Tom Flanagan.
00:03:37.060Tom is a professor emeritus at the University of Calgary School of Public Policy.
00:03:41.680He served as a campaign manager to Stephen Harper's Canadian Alliance Leadership Campaign.
00:03:46.620And again, on Harper's Conservative Party Leadership Campaign, he is an award-winning author specializing in Canadian politics and Indigenous rights.
00:03:54.380So, Tom, thank you so much for joining the show.
00:03:59.700So let's start with the original claim, the story that came out just about a year ago now that 215 children's bodies had been discovered at a residential school.
00:04:12.580Has there been any new developments, any new facts that we should know about from the story?
00:06:24.780So to this point, there is not a single piece of concrete evidence that anybody is buried in these sites,
00:06:33.520let alone children from the Kamloops Indian Residential School.
00:06:40.600So, I mean, this is the greatest fake news story in Canadian history.
00:06:45.660There's absolutely no evidence for what's been claimed, and yet the story has gone around the world several times, as you pointed out in your opening remarks.
00:06:55.200Well, it's really interesting that the – like, that there was no demand for evidence, that the – you know, this press conference – this press release was sent out.
00:07:04.920I remember reading it over and over and over again trying to figure out, you know, the facts that you would see in the Washington Post or the CBC or the Globe and Mail.
00:07:13.440They weren't from a report, as you said, because the report wasn't published.
00:07:16.300It was all based on quotes from people who had their own recollection of things that happened.
00:07:22.180So it didn't seem like the standard that we would usually apply to news stories was taken into consideration at all.
00:07:29.680They just sort of ran with the most hyperbolic aspects of it and used that to basically condemn Canada as an evil genocidal state.
00:07:39.100I'm just wondering, you know, if you can comment on why you think that the media was so sort of quick to jump on the story, why there wasn't any verifying of facts, why they didn't ask for more evidence, and sort of, you know, why this story took on a life of its own.
00:07:56.600Well, there are several background factors here that help to explain how this story could gather so much momentum so quickly.
00:08:04.780First of all, it played to an existing narrative.
00:08:07.040The narrative had already been established over, well, let's say, about 30 years previously, ever since Phil Fontaine made his famous interview with Barbara Frum in 1990.
00:08:22.900The story has been built that the residential schools were evil places where students were deprived of their language and culture.
00:08:32.880And, you know, in fact, even tortured and killed.
00:08:38.700So there had been lots of oral testimony to this in this direction over a period of many years.
00:08:49.040So the media were primed to report what they thought or what they heard to be physical evidence of this pre-existing narrative.
00:08:59.740So when something plays into an existing media narrative, it's bound to get uncritical coverage.
00:09:08.860Secondly, at a more technical level, one of the major thrusts of aboriginal ideology in the last, again, approximately maybe 30 to 40 years has been reliance on oral testimony.
00:09:23.780And this is not just having to do with claims about unmarked graves, but this has been a major trend in treaty interpretation as well, that the treaties don't necessarily mean what the treaty text says it means.
00:09:37.440But that they have to be interpreted in the light of memories.
00:09:44.220But, of course, nobody's alive today who was alive when the treaties were negotiated.
00:09:49.960So what you typically get is something along the lines of, you know, this is what I heard from my grandfather is what the treaty meant, which is often contrary to the explicit wording of the treaty.
00:10:01.460So here you have oral testimonies from elders, so-called elders at the Kamloops Indian Band, talking about not necessarily their own experiences at the school, but what they claim to have heard from others about things that took place at the school.
00:10:19.680But that fits into the notion of oral, traditional oral testimony, which has become quite crucial in the world of indigenous politics.
00:10:29.500So there's another factor that helps to explain how this story could gather so much momentum so quickly.
00:10:37.860One of the things that you and some of your colleagues who have taken an interest in researching and bringing some more truth to light, some facts to light, is just information about the school, the Kamloops Indian Residential School.
00:10:50.080You had a recent piece in True North talking about how they had this sort of world-class Olympic swimming pool.
00:10:55.620You found archived photos of children, sort of carefree, playing, happy.
00:11:02.620A lot of these pictures came from our friend Chris Champion over at Dorchester Review, the publisher over at Dorchester Review.
00:11:09.860And it seemed, as well as firsthand accounts of individuals who had gone to that school, people who had transferred to that school, people who had taught at that school, including many First Nations people who taught at that school, that really seemed to show a very different perception of the school.
00:11:26.740It shows children looking happy, healthy, enjoying a variety of activities.
00:11:31.640This doesn't really seem to reconcile with the sort of overly negative doom and gloom.
00:11:39.200You know, these schools were death camps that were murdering children.
00:11:43.920So, well, first of all, thank you for unearthing that and publishing it through True North.
00:11:48.020But again, do you think that these pieces of evidence that sort of punch holes in the narrative will have any impact in sort of changing the conversation?
00:11:59.680And if not, why do you think that, you know, these sort of powerful pieces of historical documentation don't impact the conversation on this topic?
00:12:08.760Yeah, well, first of all, as far as some of the evidence goes, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission published a list of 51 children whom it alleges to have died at the school.
00:12:26.940That's over a period of more than 100 years.
00:12:32.140Now, of those 51, a majority have death certificates in the British Columbia archives, which are available to the public, although the TRC didn't bother to check on this source of information.
00:12:45.280And what the death certificates show is that the children died for, you know, sort of normal causes.
00:12:55.360A few were runaways who suffered accidents.
00:12:58.820The majority died of, you know, kind of ordinary diseases of the day, such as tuberculosis.
00:13:05.620And they were buried typically at their home reserves.
00:13:10.060Children came to that school from all over British Columbia.
00:13:15.420It wasn't always feasible to send the body back.
00:13:18.880But most of them were sent back to the home reserve where they were buried.
00:13:24.440So there was nothing secretive or mysterious about the about these deaths.
00:13:30.200I mean, you know, every death is sad, but people do die.
00:13:34.480And particularly in an age before antibiotics, diseases like tuberculosis and typhus were epidemic killers.
00:13:44.620There's a lot of evidence that the, as you said, the Kamloops Residential School was all things considered not a bad, not a bad place.
00:13:57.260There's, I mean, they had their own swimming pool, large swimming pool at a time when that was very unusual for a school to have a swimming pool, any kind of a school in the 1950s.
00:14:08.700There's, there's many, many pictures of children playing in the pool or otherwise enjoying sports and recreation.
00:14:21.880We have the testimony of prominent people who attended there, like Len Marchand, first Indian member of the federal cabinet, political liberal, who said it was, you know, a pretty good place.
00:14:33.580They said the potatoes were sometimes kind of watery, but overall it was pretty good.
00:14:40.700As you correctly point out, some of the teachers were Indians.
00:14:53.040These, these, these schools were major centers of employment for First Nations people.
00:14:56.640So, because they had janitors, they had dorm supervisors, they had secretaries, on and on.
00:15:02.460And a majority of these people were, were First Nations.
00:15:06.860So, there's all kinds of, of the, his evidence that a historian would regard as the typical stuff of history, showing that while the schools maybe were not perfect, that they're, they weren't charnel houses where, where children were slaughtered.
00:15:22.980So, um, so I come back to my point about how a story plays to an ideological preconception.
00:15:48.400And so they tend to run with something that, that fits their preconceptions.
00:15:53.140And there's been so much priming over the years as to, uh, as to what residential schools were like.
00:16:01.240So that this story takes on a life of its own.
00:16:03.660And if you read the coverage, um, many, many of the articles go way beyond what even the chief had announced.
00:16:11.760The chief, uh, said that she thought that, uh, she had found grave sites, but many of the stories claim that 215 human remains had been found as if, as if bodies had been excavated.
00:16:24.940You know, there was, there was nothing like that.
00:16:27.040But another journalistic practice is to, uh, base your story on what other journalists have written.
00:16:34.180And I mean, at one time you'd go to the, the, the clippings file in the newspaper, the morgue, so to speak, and look at the stories.
00:16:43.840So a reporter reads one story, adds a couple of comments, passes it off as his own story.
00:16:49.860And so the same fallacies get repeated and repeated and repeated.
00:16:53.460The more they're repeated, the more they, uh, uh, come to seem true to people because they're being, uh, repeated now.
00:17:01.580Uh, and of course our prime minister was no help here because he immediately jumped on the story and three days afterwards, he announced, uh, that all the flags on federal buildings in Canada would be flown at half mast until further notice.
00:17:15.520And in fact, they weren't put back to normal flying position until a veteran's day and, uh, uh, November the 11th.
00:17:25.160So what's that June, July, August, September, October, it's about six months of flying at half mast.
00:17:31.760I mean, this is completely unprecedented in Canadian history and, uh, all in the service of, uh, of, of, of what, of nothing of, of, of no real discovery.
00:17:42.760Well, I saw that with the use of the term mass graves, because of course, mass graves usually conjure images of, you know, shooting fields or killing fields and, and, you know, Eastern Europe during the second world war or like Cambodia, um, in the, in the early eighties, not something that would happen at a Canadian school.
00:18:01.600And yet, you know, that, that term was, was, was shuffled around.
00:18:04.640There were some corrections, uh, for, for, for more responsible media outlets, but other media outlets still, still use that term, uh, mass graves.
00:18:12.460I, I, I wanted to ask you because, okay, so, so if there were 50 confirmed reported deaths from the school, and then, you know, we had this bombastic report saying 215.
00:18:23.400I mean, one of the first things you, you, as a researcher or a journalist, you would do is, is, okay, who were these children?
00:18:32.820Presumably the families would be distraught looking for their child.
00:18:37.280You'd send their child away to school, and then all of a sudden the child's gone.
00:18:40.600It, the, the, just the whole premise of the idea that, that we, we could just throw around these numbers.
00:18:45.420And, you know, the, the, the 215 from the Kamloops band was just the first one we heard, I think it was, uh, 715 from a band in Saskatchewan, and then another 250 from another band in Central British Columbia.
00:18:57.280And, and, you know, the, the numbers keep accumulating.
00:18:59.500I, I haven't even really kept track of all of the, you know, latest numbers, but, but it seems like every few weeks we still, to this day, a year later, we have reports from reserves saying that they too have found X number of, of, of, of buried children.
00:19:13.260I, I just wonder, you know, from, from a research perspective, perhaps someone in the government or Truth and Reconciliation Commission, do they have a archive of lists?
00:19:27.580Is, is, is, is someone looking into it?
00:19:29.660Or, or, or again, why, you know, why are we so quick to accept these large, large numbers without the, without the first bit of evidence, which would be names and, and, you know, family records of, of who these children were?
00:19:46.340There are, there are really three big pieces of mythology, which come together to, to create this story.
00:19:52.700The first one is the so-called unmarked graves, which, um, you know, at this point, we don't even know if they're burial sites, they're soil disturbances.
00:20:02.540Uh, secondly, there's the legend of the missing children.
00:20:05.180and this is a huge source of confusion yes there were children who died at school
00:20:12.680which is sad and there were but there were children who died at home too that was
00:20:18.180sad I mean a lot of children died um until the discovery of antibiotics because the these
00:20:27.020diseases that were brought in from the old world were particularly lethal for uh first nations
00:20:34.500populations that did not have inherited uh any kind of inherited uh resistance to them so yeah a lot
00:20:41.920of children died but that doesn't mean that they're missing uh maybe they're missed it's parents always
00:20:50.440of course miss a child that they've lost but missing implies that nobody knows what happened
00:20:56.640um now these children are are listed in in records like the uh um the diaries of those who ran the
00:21:09.900schools although many of these you can't get access to I mean for example there's a document called the
00:21:16.080codex historicus for the um Kamloops Indian residential school which is in the archives in the provincial
00:21:25.180museum in um uh in vancouver but it's sorry is that in vancouver or victoria I can't remember which
00:21:33.100anyway um one of those major bc cities but nobody can get access to that the facility's been closed
00:21:41.080and they're not making copies of uh of the uh of documents for researchers and uh um
00:21:53.000so there there are sadly there are dead children but they're not really missing now the trc threw around
00:22:01.960at various times numbers of thousands of missing children but you know it's never clear exactly who
00:22:10.200these kids were it's it's a mix of kids who may have died at school kids who may have died at home
00:22:17.160uh statistical artifacts that arise from inadequate comparison of records failing to consult birth
00:22:23.400certificates it's a real hodgepodge I mean just to give you one example uh if you remember the name
00:22:28.840helen betty osborne a teenage cree girl who was killed in manitoba decades ago
00:22:36.840um she's listed as a residential school fatality in manitoba while she wasn't living in a residential
00:22:44.920school at the time that she was killed um there's there's many many uh uh cases of that type so these
00:22:54.360but but the trc made matters worse by referring to you know not just three or four thousand missing
00:23:00.840children but 15 or 25 000 you know numbers with absolutely no uh basis in in evidence uh and
00:23:10.440then the third the third mythical pillar of this story is that uh the idea that uh that all indian
00:23:17.400children were forced to attend these schools um i mean only a minority of uh indian children ever
00:23:25.400went to a residential school uh there were more uh who went to day schools on reserves than to
00:23:33.800residential schools and there was a large number who never went to any school at all up until you know
00:23:40.440as late as the 1940s a plurality of indian children appeared not to have been in any kind of school
00:23:47.400so yeah residential schools were a reality but they weren't the dominant reality of
00:23:53.720um of the first nations childhood experience uh and the the records of the federal government are
00:24:01.640clear that for decades after they started funding residential schools um there was no compulsion to
00:24:09.080attend um sometimes it was recommended to parents but uh they uh they weren't required to send
00:24:18.360their children to residential school there wasn't anything like compulsory attendance until well the
00:24:28.120late 19 after world war ii when the welfare state started to expand into the world of indian reserves and
00:24:35.960um that led to a lot of family breakdown that's a long story but there was an infusion of cash and
00:24:43.560uh alcohol became traded on reserves and there was a lot of family breakdown and for for several decades
00:24:50.760the residential schools served like orphanages for children that were believed to be in danger or
00:24:57.880neglected so at that sort of late date yes there were children that because there was no provincial
00:25:04.520mechanism for dealing with indian children at that point the provinces didn't get legal authority to deal with
00:25:11.080children on reserves until much later so there was a period of several decades when um children that
00:25:18.760you know at a later date might have been taken into care by provincial governments were instead were sent to
00:25:24.760residential schools but that's a later piece of the story and and uh only a only a small piece overall
00:25:33.560so you have these interlocking bits of mythology of uh unmarked graves missing children forced to attend
00:25:41.640and then they all come together into this story about canada's not only a cultural genocide but maybe
00:25:50.120even a physical genocide of first nations people and they say it's it's not supported by evidence but it
00:25:58.120plays to ideological preconceptions about progressive ideology about the role of so-called white supremacy
00:26:06.360and colonialism and mistreatment of uh everybody except white uh white people and so you got this
00:26:14.280receptive uh ideology it's just waiting there for uh some semblance of proof which of course is in this
00:26:21.800case is not proof at all but it's packaged to look like proof and and then it's it's easily it's seized
00:26:28.680upon then by journalists and politicians well it's it's it's tremendous the impact that it's had on our
00:26:35.400country over the past year i think they've done a tremendous disservice to first nations people
00:26:40.200because i i can't imagine how you can you carry on living a a normal life or or consider you know your
00:26:47.400own future and and and and building a life yourself in a country uh when you're told to believe that you
00:26:53.320know that that people that that the people who you run canada are genocidal white supremacists who are
00:27:00.520trying to kill you basically or eliminate your entire uh race i i think it's such a disservice to
00:27:06.120to first nations people but uh tom i'm wondering if if you can uh tell us a little bit about what you
00:27:11.800think should be done at this point because i i know when you're in your piece that you wrote for true
00:27:16.200north you said that there must be an excavation we need to sort of put this issue to rest um i'm
00:27:21.400wondering how you know sensibly minded canadians can counter this this really damaging narrative uh what we
00:27:28.520can do to to push back against it and uh from a public policy perspective uh what what do you
00:27:34.040think can be done to you know not only move past this this this chapter but also um help to you know
00:27:41.160raise the uh fortunes of first nations people and enable them to have uh you know good lives in canada
00:27:50.520well i'm trying to do my little bit by writing about it uh you might say i'm trying to expose fake
00:27:55.480news and true north i hope you'll appreciate the sly humor there uh but uh no seriously uh i and
00:28:02.840friends are writing about this as much as we can hoping to create a a body of of literature that even
00:28:09.160if it doesn't have a lot of impact immediately will be there for uh for the future secondly there need
00:28:17.560to be excavations to test uh to test the theory but uh not just any excavations um there's recent news
00:28:28.360report from the um saddle hills for uh first nation saddle hill saddle lake which is it anyway saddle
00:28:37.400something in northeastern alberta which is uh where the blue quills residential school was located
00:28:45.160and um they've been digging uh and they claim according to cbc reports to have found perhaps
00:28:53.400200 plus skeletons you know but but first of all uh there's no professional or rcmp supervision
00:29:05.000uh these it's just people digging and they're digging in a cemetery now it's not surprising that
00:29:10.200you're going to find burials in a cemetery they claim to have found um children's remains but they
00:29:18.360also say that they've been reburying as they go so there's no evidence that can be shown uh to the uh to
00:29:27.800the public so this this story has generated headlines about remains being found but it's not the kind of
00:29:35.480evidence that any um court or any any uh serious scholar would accept as as evidence is just based on
00:29:45.080uh somebody say so about what they claim to have seen when they dug in a cemetery uh
00:29:52.120according to this story that's circulating the the records of the blue quill school show i think it was
00:29:59.56022 children who died there whereas they say the records of the catholic church i mean and this
00:30:06.600was a common situation where you had a residential school but you also had a parish church and you
00:30:12.120had a common cemetery and the cemetery was used by the members of the reserve as well as by the
00:30:18.440residential school um so they claim catholic church records which again nobody is able to see
00:30:25.640uh they claim that uh um there were over 200 children died but the story as originally reported
00:30:38.200said between the ages of four and i forget what the upper limit was well children weren't admitted to
00:30:45.000residential school until they were six so if a four-year-old died it wouldn't have been at a
00:30:50.840residential school so you know this is all mixed up and we don't even know if they're interpreting the
00:30:56.680church records properly because at this time most catholic church records were kept in latin
00:31:02.920and i've done some of my own family research uh 19th century irish immigrants parish churches kept
00:31:09.240records in latin uh it's not that simple there's a lot of abbreviations uh i am a former altar boy who
00:31:16.760has studied latin and i can read it more or less but when you're confronted with handwriting and
00:31:21.960abbreviations and it was it's it's it's not that easy um so anyway i'm sure there's going to be a lot
00:31:31.560of stories around the anniversary of kamloops but they have to be they have to be read very critically
00:31:38.600so come back to your question about what should be done well excavations above all
00:31:43.160but properly supervised excavations in which the uh the rc if not the rcmp at least uh some kind of
00:31:52.680professional supervision is there i mean ideally it would be the rcmp because the allegations are that
00:31:57.960these are crime scenes that these are children who were uh murdered or died of neglect or abuse at
00:32:05.160at the schools well if that's true it would be a crime scene and there should be police
00:32:09.400supervision but at the very least there should be a professional supervision with with the records
00:32:15.000made available to the public not kept uh secret like the record of the original uh ground penetrating
00:32:24.360radar at the kamloops so i think that properly conducted uh excavations would be the way to go but
00:32:32.280what i fear is going to happen is that we're going to get more and more uh amateur excavations like
00:32:38.760the one from the blue kill school that don't actually prove anything but which are hyped in the media
00:32:44.760as here you know here is the evidence here is the remains well if you dig in a cemetery it's not
00:32:50.840unlikely that you're going to find human remains that's what's in a cemetery so um
00:32:56.360uh i'm not too optimistic right now about excavations excavations properly carried out yes but i haven't
00:33:05.000seen any evidence yet of any of these excavations being properly carried out well it's such a good
00:33:11.320point i just want to go back uh because you know the the the kamloops or kamloops first nations was
00:33:16.440sort of the big first one and then the next two there was kawasis in in saskatchewan and lower kootenay
00:33:21.560in british columbia um both of those two secondary ones uh the unmarked graves were within existing
00:33:28.360cemeteries and and you did have people from the local communities coming out in the media saying
00:33:33.400look there's no discovery here was a graveyard it shouldn't surprise anyone that there was graves in
00:33:37.160a graveyard um someone else saying uh look this was a graveyard that serviced the entire community not
00:33:43.000just the the residential school in fact the one in in in cranbrook in lower kootenay the uh graveyard
00:33:49.960was attached to the church which was attached to a hospital and it predated the residential
00:33:55.400school by 100 years so so you know to your point that that they're finding skeletons it's like well
00:34:00.440you know this would have been a graveyard for the entire community and not nothing to do with
00:34:04.360the the residential school so i think i think that's a really excellent point well tom i really
00:34:08.600appreciate your time and i appreciate all of the research and the work that you're doing to
00:34:12.280bring this really important issue uh to light so thank you so much for your time and thank you for
00:34:16.600your efforts on this if i could just toss in one more point about the unmarked graves uh graves may
00:34:22.600be unmarked today but the the common way of marking a grave on a on indian reserve uh was a white cross
00:34:31.880a wooden cross you know now this is canada white crosses don't stand up very well to the canadian winter
00:34:39.320so and we're talking in many cases about alleged burials that are decades or even more than a century old
00:34:47.400you know canada as a country is full of unmarked graves not not just of indians but of all kinds
00:34:53.560of people that were originally marked with a white cross but over time that cross has disintegrated so
00:34:59.720that's another aspect on this that when they say unmarked graves that may be the situation today but
00:35:06.360that's not necessarily the situation if it if it ever was a grave there most likely was a a wooden cross there
00:35:15.400to market uh yeah that's such an important point such a nuanced point that i again i never saw
00:35:21.800reflected in in the cbc or the or the toronto star or their coverage so no yeah unfortunately all right
00:35:29.240tom thank you so much for your time great to have you on the show okay can this is my pleasure bye-bye
00:35:33.320all right that's tom flanagan i'm kendis malcolm and this is the kendis malcolm show