Juno News - The legacy media is not telling the truth about the “unmarked graves”

00:00:00.000 It has now been one year since the apparent discovery of graves found in the Kamloops

00:00:05.720 Residential School of the Former Grounds.

00:00:07.700 But has this story ever really been verified?

00:00:10.440 Is Canada really guilty of committing genocide?

00:00:13.200 I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is the Candice Malcolm Show.

00:00:15.080 So one year ago on May 27th, 2021, the Kamloops Indian Residential Band released a bombshell

00:00:35.680 of a press release with a stunning accusation.

00:00:38.400 This accusation made its way around the world.

00:00:40.520 The band claimed that it had used ground-penetrating radar to detect the remains of 215 children

00:00:46.420 who were said to have died while attending the local residential school.

00:00:50.620 Now, this statement, which was issued by an unknown First Nations politician, it was rather

00:00:55.240 amateur in the way it was written.

00:00:57.240 It was void of any facts or evidence.

00:00:59.340 It was heavily built on emotion and quotes from elders who were passing on oral knowledge.

00:01:05.380 It had a catastrophic impact on our country.

00:01:08.100 This one statement sent off a whirlwind of events.

00:01:11.900 It led to exaggerated headlines, erroneous claims of mass graves, accusations of genocide,

00:01:16.840 international shame and contrition from Canadian leaders, more discoveries from other bands,

00:01:21.860 sort of lookalike claims, genuine remorse and concern and sadness from Canadians all across

00:01:26.660 the country, and eager progressive politicians who began competing over who could use the most

00:01:32.300 hyperbolic and anti-Canadian rhetoric.

00:01:34.800 It's not an exaggeration to say that this spurred an existential crisis among Canada's elites.

00:01:41.060 Their whole narrative about Canada being a kinder and gentler, more progressive version of America,

00:01:46.620 well, that all came crashing down with their own hyperbole and self-flagellation.

00:01:51.940 Their whole worldview came crashing down.

00:01:54.400 They tried to cancel Canada Day.

00:01:56.080 They excused away the burning of churches and the toppling of statues,

00:01:59.780 and they tried to force this as a major issue in the past 2021 federal election.

00:02:05.640 In fact, during the English debate of the 2021 federal election,

00:02:09.620 reconciliation with First Nations community was the most prominent topic discussed.

00:02:14.680 And that wasn't organic.

00:02:15.880 It was because of the organizers' themed approach to the debate.

00:02:18.640 They mandated that the topic received the lion's share of discussion.

00:02:22.740 So in a debate about the most pressing issues facing Canada, reconciliation,

00:02:28.160 the discussion on reconciliation, lasted for 27 minutes.

00:02:31.640 They spent 27 minutes of a two-hour debate talking about reconciliation.

00:02:37.020 Now, by comparison, during that election, a leger survey that was done with the National Post

00:02:41.400 found that First Nations reconciliation and that issue didn't even crack the top 10 issues

00:02:46.200 that Canadians were focused on during the election.

00:02:49.020 Canadians were focused on the cost of living.

00:02:50.600 They were focused on increased funding for health care.

00:02:53.720 They were focused on the post-pandemic economic recovery and managing the pandemic.

00:02:57.880 Those were the top four issues.

00:02:59.740 And instead, we spent one quarter of the debate talking about reconciliation with First Nations.

00:03:05.940 Elites tried to force that conversation onto us, and that remains their obsession and their purpose. 0.98

00:03:11.940 They tried to force this conversation, even though the details of that original story

00:03:16.580 remain spurious and unverified.

00:03:19.040 And so I want to go back to the original story and talk about what we know, what has been verified,

00:03:24.220 what facts are out there, and what remains just vague and unknown.

00:03:30.280 And so joining me to have this discussion is I'm very pleased to be joined by Professor Tom Flanagan.

00:03:37.060 Tom is a professor emeritus at the University of Calgary School of Public Policy.

00:03:41.680 He served as a campaign manager to Stephen Harper's Canadian Alliance Leadership Campaign.

00:03:46.620 And again, on Harper's Conservative Party Leadership Campaign, he is an award-winning author specializing in Canadian politics and Indigenous rights.

00:03:54.380 So, Tom, thank you so much for joining the show.

00:03:56.840 It's great to have you back.

00:03:58.140 Well, nice to be here, Candice.

00:03:59.700 So 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.

00:04:12.580 Has there been any new developments, any new facts that we should know about from the story?

00:04:17.520 What is the latest?

00:04:18.700 Well, nothing that you could call a fact.

00:04:23.300 You know, it's really important to understand what happened.

00:04:26.840 On May 27th, the chief of the Kamloops Indian Band gave a press conference.

00:04:34.080 In the press conference, she talked about the findings of ground penetrating radar,

00:04:39.640 which had been conducted by an anthropologist from Simon Fraser University.

00:04:44.740 There was – the anthropologist's report was never made public.

00:04:52.260 In fact, the Department of Anthropology and Simon Fraser refused to make the report public.

00:04:58.960 They said it was just between the anthropologist and the Kamloops Indian Band,

00:05:04.640 which in a business sense was true that the Kamloops Indian Band had paid for it.

00:05:10.460 But it's really unusual to make public claims based on a scientific report, which you refuse to release to the public.

00:05:19.560 So that's the first thing.

00:05:21.800 Secondly, the anthropologist did later clarify that no human remains had been found.

00:05:28.680 What she found was – she originally said 215 potential burial sites.

00:05:39.740 These were disturbed Earth.

00:05:42.100 Later, the number was reduced to 200, but that's not a significant difference here.

00:05:48.820 That's what ground penetrating radar could do.

00:05:51.920 It could – it can show that the Earth has been disturbed, but you don't know what's there unless you excavate.

00:06:02.020 Now, it's not surprising that the Earth would have been disturbed in this area because it was an apple orchard.

00:06:07.300 So trees have been planted there at one time.

00:06:12.000 Apples – trees don't grow naturally in British Columbia, so they had to be planted.

00:06:16.160 So there had to have been soil disturbances taking place.

00:06:21.180 There has been no excavation there.

00:06:24.780 So to this point, there is not a single piece of concrete evidence that anybody is buried in these sites,

00:06:33.520 let alone children from the Kamloops Indian Residential School.

00:06:40.600 So, I mean, this is the greatest fake news story in Canadian history.

00:06:45.660 There'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.

00:06:55.200 Well, 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.

00:07:04.920 I 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.

00:07:13.440 They weren't from a report, as you said, because the report wasn't published.

00:07:16.300 It was all based on quotes from people who had their own recollection of things that happened.

00:07:22.180 So it didn't seem like the standard that we would usually apply to news stories was taken into consideration at all.

00:07:29.680 They just sort of ran with the most hyperbolic aspects of it and used that to basically condemn Canada as an evil genocidal state.

00:07:39.100 I'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.

00:07:55.980 Yeah.

00:07:56.600 Well, there are several background factors here that help to explain how this story could gather so much momentum so quickly.

00:08:04.780 First of all, it played to an existing narrative.

00:08:07.040 The 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.

00:08:22.900 The story has been built that the residential schools were evil places where students were deprived of their language and culture.

00:08:32.880 And, you know, in fact, even tortured and killed.

00:08:38.700 So there had been lots of oral testimony to this in this direction over a period of many years.

00:08:49.040 So the media were primed to report what they thought or what they heard to be physical evidence of this pre-existing narrative.

00:08:59.740 So when something plays into an existing media narrative, it's bound to get uncritical coverage.

00:09:07.380 And that's exactly what it did get.

00:09:08.860 Secondly, 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.

00:09:23.780 And 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.

00:09:37.440 But that they have to be interpreted in the light of memories.

00:09:44.220 But, of course, nobody's alive today who was alive when the treaties were negotiated.

00:09:49.960 So 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.

00:10:01.460 So 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.

00:10:19.680 But that fits into the notion of oral, traditional oral testimony, which has become quite crucial in the world of indigenous politics.

00:10:29.500 So there's another factor that helps to explain how this story could gather so much momentum so quickly.

00:10:37.860 One 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.

00:10:50.080 You had a recent piece in True North talking about how they had this sort of world-class Olympic swimming pool.

00:10:55.620 You found archived photos of children, sort of carefree, playing, happy.

00:11:02.620 A lot of these pictures came from our friend Chris Champion over at Dorchester Review, the publisher over at Dorchester Review.

00:11:09.860 And 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.

00:11:26.740 It shows children looking happy, healthy, enjoying a variety of activities.

00:11:31.640 This doesn't really seem to reconcile with the sort of overly negative doom and gloom.

00:11:39.200 You know, these schools were death camps that were murdering children.

00:11:43.920 So, well, first of all, thank you for unearthing that and publishing it through True North.

00:11:48.020 But 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?

00:11:59.680 And 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?

00:12:08.760 Yeah, 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.

00:12:26.940 That's over a period of more than 100 years.

00:12:30.240 Not 215, 51.

00:12:32.140 Now, 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.

00:12:45.280 And what the death certificates show is that the children died for, you know, sort of normal causes.

00:12:55.360 A few were runaways who suffered accidents.

00:12:58.820 The majority died of, you know, kind of ordinary diseases of the day, such as tuberculosis.

00:13:05.620 And they were buried typically at their home reserves.

00:13:10.060 Children came to that school from all over British Columbia.

00:13:13.920 And, you know, it's a big province.

00:13:15.420 It wasn't always feasible to send the body back.

00:13:18.880 But most of them were sent back to the home reserve where they were buried.

00:13:24.440 So there was nothing secretive or mysterious about the about these deaths.

00:13:30.200 I mean, you know, every death is sad, but people do die.

00:13:34.480 And particularly in an age before antibiotics, diseases like tuberculosis and typhus were epidemic killers.

00:13:44.620 There'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.

00:13:57.260 There'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.

00:14:08.700 There's, there's many, many pictures of children playing in the pool or otherwise enjoying sports and recreation.

00:14:17.540 They look like happy, healthy kids.

00:14:19.920 They're well-fed.

00:14:20.720 They're well-nourished.

00:14:21.880 We 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.

00:14:33.580 They said the potatoes were sometimes kind of watery, but overall it was pretty good.

00:14:40.700 As you correctly point out, some of the teachers were Indians.

00:14:44.560 They were graduates of that school.

00:14:46.920 A majority of the overall staff members were Native Americans.

00:14:51.300 I mean, there are many jobs.

00:14:53.040 These, these, these schools were major centers of employment for First Nations people.

00:14:56.640 So, because they had janitors, they had dorm supervisors, they had secretaries, on and on.

00:15:02.460 And a majority of these people were, were First Nations.

00:15:06.860 So, 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.

00:15:22.980 So, um, so I come back to my point about how a story plays to an ideological preconception.

00:15:29.640 It becomes truer than true.

00:15:31.620 It doesn't require any evidence in the minds of media reporters, you know, who for the most part are not, um, uh, trained historians.

00:15:39.880 They're not trained to evaluate evidence.

00:15:42.040 Uh, they work under deadlines.

00:15:43.600 They get some facts.

00:15:44.680 They put it together.

00:15:46.120 Um, and they run with it.

00:15:48.400 And so they tend to run with something that, that fits their preconceptions.

00:15:53.140 And there's been so much priming over the years as to, uh, as to what residential schools were like.

00:16:01.240 So that this story takes on a life of its own.

00:16:03.660 And if you read the coverage, um, many, many of the articles go way beyond what even the chief had announced.

00:16:11.760 The 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.

00:16:24.940 You know, there was, there was nothing like that.

00:16:27.040 But another journalistic practice is to, uh, base your story on what other journalists have written.

00:16:34.180 And 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.

00:16:42.040 Well, now it's all on the internet.

00:16:43.840 So a reporter reads one story, adds a couple of comments, passes it off as his own story.

00:16:49.860 And so the same fallacies get repeated and repeated and repeated.

00:16:53.460 The more they're repeated, the more they, uh, uh, come to seem true to people because they're being, uh, repeated now.

00:17:01.580 Uh, 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.

00:17:15.520 And in fact, they weren't put back to normal flying position until a veteran's day and, uh, uh, November the 11th.

00:17:25.160 So what's that June, July, August, September, October, it's about six months of flying at half mast.

00:17:31.760 I 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.

00:17:42.760 Well, 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.

00:18:01.600 And yet, you know, that, that term was, was, was shuffled around.

00:18:04.640 There were some corrections, uh, for, for, for more responsible media outlets, but other media outlets still, still use that term, uh, mass graves.

00:18:12.460 I, 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.

00:18:23.400 I mean, one of the first things you, you, as a researcher or a journalist, you would do is, is, okay, who were these children?

00:18:30.200 What, what are their names?

00:18:31.160 Where were they from?

00:18:31.960 Where are their families?

00:18:32.820 Presumably the families would be distraught looking for their child.

00:18:37.280 You'd send their child away to school, and then all of a sudden the child's gone.

00:18:40.600 It, the, the, just the whole premise of the idea that, that we, we could just throw around these numbers.

00:18:45.420 And, 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.

00:18:57.280 And, and, you know, the, the numbers keep accumulating.

00:18:59.500 I, 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.

00:19:13.260 I, 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?

00:19:23.240 Like, who, who are these children?

00:19:24.980 What are their names?

00:19:26.020 Do, do we know this information?

00:19:27.580 Is, is, is, is someone looking into it?

00:19:29.660 Or, 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?

00:19:43.260 Yeah.

00:19:44.460 Um, okay.

00:19:46.340 There are, there are really three big pieces of mythology, which come together to, to create this story.

00:19:52.700 The 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.

00:20:02.540 Uh, secondly, there's the legend of the missing children.

00:20:05.180 and this is a huge source of confusion yes there were children who died at school

00:20:12.680 which is sad and there were but there were children who died at home too that was

00:20:18.180 sad I mean a lot of children died um until the discovery of antibiotics because the these

00:20:27.020 diseases that were brought in from the old world were particularly lethal for uh first nations 1.00

00:20:34.500 populations that did not have inherited uh any kind of inherited uh resistance to them so yeah a lot

00:20:41.920 of children died but that doesn't mean that they're missing uh maybe they're missed it's parents always

00:20:50.440 of course miss a child that they've lost but missing implies that nobody knows what happened

00:20:56.640 um now these children are are listed in in records like the uh um the diaries of those who ran the

00:21:09.900 schools although many of these you can't get access to I mean for example there's a document called the

00:21:16.080 codex historicus for the um Kamloops Indian residential school which is in the archives in the provincial

00:21:25.180 museum in um uh in vancouver but it's sorry is that in vancouver or victoria I can't remember which

00:21:33.100 anyway um one of those major bc cities but nobody can get access to that the facility's been closed

00:21:41.080 and they're not making copies of uh of the uh of documents for researchers and uh um

00:21:53.000 so there there are sadly there are dead children but they're not really missing now the trc threw around 1.00

00:22:01.960 at various times numbers of thousands of missing children but you know it's never clear exactly who

00:22:10.200 these kids were it's it's a mix of kids who may have died at school kids who may have died at home

00:22:17.160 uh statistical artifacts that arise from inadequate comparison of records failing to consult birth

00:22:23.400 certificates it's a real hodgepodge I mean just to give you one example uh if you remember the name

00:22:28.840 helen betty osborne a teenage cree girl who was killed in manitoba decades ago

00:22:36.840 um she's listed as a residential school fatality in manitoba while she wasn't living in a residential

00:22:44.920 school at the time that she was killed um there's there's many many uh uh cases of that type so these

00:22:54.360 but but the trc made matters worse by referring to you know not just three or four thousand missing

00:23:00.840 children but 15 or 25 000 you know numbers with absolutely no uh basis in in evidence uh and

00:23:10.440 then the third the third mythical pillar of this story is that uh the idea that uh that all indian

00:23:17.400 children were forced to attend these schools um i mean only a minority of uh indian children ever

00:23:25.400 went to a residential school uh there were more uh who went to day schools on reserves than to

00:23:33.800 residential schools and there was a large number who never went to any school at all up until you know

00:23:40.440 as late as the 1940s a plurality of indian children appeared not to have been in any kind of school

00:23:47.400 so yeah residential schools were a reality but they weren't the dominant reality of

00:23:53.720 um of the first nations childhood experience uh and the the records of the federal government are

00:24:01.640 clear that for decades after they started funding residential schools um there was no compulsion to

00:24:09.080 attend um sometimes it was recommended to parents but uh they uh they weren't required to send

00:24:18.360 their children to residential school there wasn't anything like compulsory attendance until well the

00:24:28.120 late 19 after world war ii when the welfare state started to expand into the world of indian reserves and

00:24:35.960 um that led to a lot of family breakdown that's a long story but there was an infusion of cash and

00:24:43.560 uh alcohol became traded on reserves and there was a lot of family breakdown and for for several decades

00:24:50.760 the residential schools served like orphanages for children that were believed to be in danger or

00:24:57.880 neglected so at that sort of late date yes there were children that because there was no provincial

00:25:04.520 mechanism for dealing with indian children at that point the provinces didn't get legal authority to deal with

00:25:11.080 children on reserves until much later so there was a period of several decades when um children that

00:25:18.760 you know at a later date might have been taken into care by provincial governments were instead were sent to

00:25:24.760 residential schools but that's a later piece of the story and and uh only a only a small piece overall

00:25:33.560 so you have these interlocking bits of mythology of uh unmarked graves missing children forced to attend

00:25:41.640 and then they all come together into this story about canada's not only a cultural genocide but maybe

00:25:50.120 even a physical genocide of first nations people and they say it's it's not supported by evidence but it

00:25:58.120 plays to ideological preconceptions about progressive ideology about the role of so-called white supremacy

00:26:06.360 and colonialism and mistreatment of uh everybody except white uh white people and so you got this

00:26:14.280 receptive uh ideology it's just waiting there for uh some semblance of proof which of course is in this

00:26:21.800 case is not proof at all but it's packaged to look like proof and and then it's it's easily it's seized

00:26:28.680 upon then by journalists and politicians well it's it's it's tremendous the impact that it's had on our

00:26:35.400 country over the past year i think they've done a tremendous disservice to first nations people

00:26:40.200 because i i can't imagine how you can you carry on living a a normal life or or consider you know your

00:26:47.400 own future and and and and building a life yourself in a country uh when you're told to believe that you 0.88

00:26:53.320 know that that people that that the people who you run canada are genocidal white supremacists who are 0.92

00:27:00.520 trying to kill you basically or eliminate your entire uh race i i think it's such a disservice to 0.88

00:27:06.120 to first nations people but uh tom i'm wondering if if you can uh tell us a little bit about what you 0.93

00:27:11.800 think should be done at this point because i i know when you're in your piece that you wrote for true

00:27:16.200 north you said that there must be an excavation we need to sort of put this issue to rest um i'm

00:27:21.400 wondering how you know sensibly minded canadians can counter this this really damaging narrative uh what we

00:27:28.520 can do to to push back against it and uh from a public policy perspective uh what what do you

00:27:34.040 think can be done to you know not only move past this this this chapter but also um help to you know

00:27:41.160 raise the uh fortunes of first nations people and enable them to have uh you know good lives in canada

00:27:50.520 well i'm trying to do my little bit by writing about it uh you might say i'm trying to expose fake

00:27:55.480 news and true north i hope you'll appreciate the sly humor there uh but uh no seriously uh i and

00:28:02.840 friends are writing about this as much as we can hoping to create a a body of of literature that even

00:28:09.160 if it doesn't have a lot of impact immediately will be there for uh for the future secondly there need

00:28:17.560 to be excavations to test uh to test the theory but uh not just any excavations um there's recent news

00:28:28.360 report from the um saddle hills for uh first nation saddle hill saddle lake which is it anyway saddle

00:28:37.400 something in northeastern alberta which is uh where the blue quills residential school was located

00:28:45.160 and um they've been digging uh and they claim according to cbc reports to have found perhaps

00:28:53.400 200 plus skeletons you know but but first of all uh there's no professional or rcmp supervision

00:29:05.000 uh these it's just people digging and they're digging in a cemetery now it's not surprising that

00:29:10.200 you're going to find burials in a cemetery they claim to have found um children's remains but they

00:29:18.360 also say that they've been reburying as they go so there's no evidence that can be shown uh to the uh to

00:29:27.800 the public so this this story has generated headlines about remains being found but it's not the kind of

00:29:35.480 evidence that any um court or any any uh serious scholar would accept as as evidence is just based on

00:29:45.080 uh somebody say so about what they claim to have seen when they dug in a cemetery uh

00:29:52.120 according to this story that's circulating the the records of the blue quill school show i think it was

00:29:59.560 22 children who died there whereas they say the records of the catholic church i mean and this

00:30:06.600 was a common situation where you had a residential school but you also had a parish church and you

00:30:12.120 had a common cemetery and the cemetery was used by the members of the reserve as well as by the

00:30:18.440 residential school um so they claim catholic church records which again nobody is able to see

00:30:25.640 uh they claim that uh um there were over 200 children died but the story as originally reported

00:30:38.200 said between the ages of four and i forget what the upper limit was well children weren't admitted to

00:30:45.000 residential school until they were six so if a four-year-old died it wouldn't have been at a

00:30:50.840 residential school so you know this is all mixed up and we don't even know if they're interpreting the

00:30:56.680 church records properly because at this time most catholic church records were kept in latin

00:31:02.920 and i've done some of my own family research uh 19th century irish immigrants parish churches kept

00:31:09.240 records in latin uh it's not that simple there's a lot of abbreviations uh i am a former altar boy who

00:31:16.760 has studied latin and i can read it more or less but when you're confronted with handwriting and

00:31:21.960 abbreviations 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

00:31:31.560 of stories around the anniversary of kamloops but they have to be they have to be read very critically

00:31:38.600 so come back to your question about what should be done well excavations above all

00:31:43.160 but properly supervised excavations in which the uh the rc if not the rcmp at least uh some kind of

00:31:52.680 professional supervision is there i mean ideally it would be the rcmp because the allegations are that

00:31:57.960 these are crime scenes that these are children who were uh murdered or died of neglect or abuse at

00:32:05.160 at the schools well if that's true it would be a crime scene and there should be police

00:32:09.400 supervision but at the very least there should be a professional supervision with with the records

00:32:15.000 made available to the public not kept uh secret like the record of the original uh ground penetrating

00:32:24.360 radar at the kamloops so i think that properly conducted uh excavations would be the way to go but

00:32:32.280 what i fear is going to happen is that we're going to get more and more uh amateur excavations like

00:32:38.760 the one from the blue kill school that don't actually prove anything but which are hyped in the media

00:32:44.760 as here you know here is the evidence here is the remains well if you dig in a cemetery it's not

00:32:50.840 unlikely that you're going to find human remains that's what's in a cemetery so um

00:32:56.360 uh i'm not too optimistic right now about excavations excavations properly carried out yes but i haven't

00:33:05.000 seen any evidence yet of any of these excavations being properly carried out well it's such a good

00:33:11.320 point i just want to go back uh because you know the the the kamloops or kamloops first nations was

00:33:16.440 sort of the big first one and then the next two there was kawasis in in saskatchewan and lower kootenay

00:33:21.560 in british columbia um both of those two secondary ones uh the unmarked graves were within existing

00:33:28.360 cemeteries and and you did have people from the local communities coming out in the media saying

00:33:33.400 look there's no discovery here was a graveyard it shouldn't surprise anyone that there was graves in

00:33:37.160 a graveyard um someone else saying uh look this was a graveyard that serviced the entire community not

00:33:43.000 just the the residential school in fact the one in in in cranbrook in lower kootenay the uh graveyard

00:33:49.960 was attached to the church which was attached to a hospital and it predated the residential

00:33:55.400 school by 100 years so so you know to your point that that they're finding skeletons it's like well

00:34:00.440 you know this would have been a graveyard for the entire community and not nothing to do with

00:34:04.360 the the residential school so i think i think that's a really excellent point well tom i really

00:34:08.600 appreciate your time and i appreciate all of the research and the work that you're doing to

00:34:12.280 bring this really important issue uh to light so thank you so much for your time and thank you for

00:34:16.600 your efforts on this if i could just toss in one more point about the unmarked graves uh graves may

00:34:22.600 be unmarked today but the the common way of marking a grave on a on indian reserve uh was a white cross

00:34:31.880 a wooden cross you know now this is canada white crosses don't stand up very well to the canadian winter

00:34:39.320 so and we're talking in many cases about alleged burials that are decades or even more than a century old

00:34:47.400 you know canada as a country is full of unmarked graves not not just of indians but of all kinds

00:34:53.560 of people that were originally marked with a white cross but over time that cross has disintegrated so

00:34:59.720 that's another aspect on this that when they say unmarked graves that may be the situation today but

00:35:06.360 that's not necessarily the situation if it if it ever was a grave there most likely was a a wooden cross there

00:35:15.400 to market uh yeah that's such an important point such a nuanced point that i again i never saw

00:35:21.800 reflected in in the cbc or the or the toronto star or their coverage so no yeah unfortunately all right

00:35:29.240 tom thank you so much for your time great to have you on the show okay can this is my pleasure bye-bye

00:35:33.320 all right that's tom flanagan i'm kendis malcolm and this is the kendis malcolm show

00:35:48.120 fun

00:35:54.920 okay

Juno News - May 30, 2022

The legacy media is not telling the truth about the “unmarked graves”

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