Juno News - There is still no evidence of ＂unmarked graves＂ at residential schools

This episode is brought to you by Indigenous Voices, a podcast exploring the intersection of Indigenous issues and media in Canada. In this episode, we discuss the growing controversy surrounding the release of a new report by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the reaction of the media to it.

00:00:00.000 Well, it's really interesting that there was no demand for evidence, that this press release

00:00:07.580 was sent out. I remember reading it over and over and over again, trying to figure out

00:00:12.360 the facts that you would see in the Washington Post or the CBC or the Globe and Mail.

00:00:17.340 They weren't from a report, as you said, because the report wasn't published. It was all based on

00:00:21.300 quotes from people who had their own recollection of things that happened. So it didn't seem like

00:00:26.980 the standard that we would usually apply to news stories was taken into consideration

00:00:33.100 at all. They just sort of ran with the most hyperbolic aspects of it and used that to

00:00:38.940 basically condemn Canada as an evil genocidal state. I'm just wondering if you can comment

00:00:47.600 on why you think that the media was so sort of quick to jump on the story, why there wasn't

00:00:53.260 any verifying of facts, why they didn't ask for more evidence and sort of why this story

00:00:58.180 took on a life of its own.

00:00:59.880 Yeah. Well, there are several background factors here that help to explain how this story could

00:01:05.900 gather so much momentum so quickly. First of all, it played to an existing narrative. The

00:01:11.220 narrative had already been established over, well, let's say about 30 years previously,

00:01:20.580 ever since Phil Fontaine made his famous interview with Barbara Frum in 1990. The story has been built

00:01:28.560 that the residential schools were evil places where students were deprived of their language

00:01:36.240 and culture and, you know, in fact, even tortured and killed. So there had been lots of oral testimony

00:01:47.160 to this in this direction over a period of many years. So the media were primed to report what

00:01:57.640 they thought or what they heard to be physical evidence of this pre-existing narrative. So when

00:02:03.960 something plays into an existing media narrative, it's bound to get uncritical coverage. And that's

00:02:11.640 exactly what it did get. Secondly, at a more technical level, one of the major thrusts of

00:02:19.560 Aboriginal ideology in the last, again, approximately maybe 30 to 40 years has been reliance on oral

00:02:27.200 testimony. And this is not just having to do with claims about unmarked graves, but this has been a

00:02:33.120 major trend in treaty interpretation as well, that the treaties don't necessarily mean what the treaty

00:02:39.580 text says it means, but that they have to be interpreted in the light of memories. But of course,

00:02:49.080 nobody's alive today who was alive when the treaties were negotiated. So what you typically get is

00:02:55.300 something along the lines of, you know, this is what I heard from my grandfather, is what the treaty

00:03:01.180 meant, which is often contrary to the explicit wording of the treaty. So here's, you have oral

00:03:07.980 testimonies from elders, so-called elders at the Kamloops Indian Band, talking about not necessarily

00:03:15.840 their own experiences at the school, but what they claim to have heard from others about things that

00:03:22.380 took place at the school. But that, that fits into the notion of oral, traditional oral testimony,

00:03:28.560 which has become quite crucial in the world of indigenous politics. So there's another factor

00:03:34.800 that helps to explain how this story could gather so much momentum so quickly.

Juno News - May 31, 2022

There is still no evidence of ＂unmarked graves＂ at residential schools

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