Rebel News Podcast - SHEILA GUNN REID ｜ Where are the excavations？

00:00:00.000 What's the truth behind the recent spate of documentaries detailing the alleged abuses

00:00:07.260 at Canada's residential schools? I brought in an independent researcher

00:00:12.620 to tell us what she found. I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed and you're watching The Gunn Show.

00:00:30.000 With several critically acclaimed documentaries about Canada's residential school system

00:00:40.480 and the alleged atrocities that took place therein, I wondered how much of this has been

00:00:47.340 fact-checked. Well, there are people fact-checking these documentaries in real time. One of them

00:00:54.860 is my friend Michelle Sterling from Friends of Science. So today's interview is long. I'm going

00:01:01.420 to cut to the chase. I'm going to stop my introduction here and just go directly into

00:01:07.680 my interview with Michelle. Take a listen.

00:01:24.860 So joining me now is my friend and good friend of The Rebel, Michelle Sterling. Michelle is,

00:01:54.040 I would describe you as an independent researcher, specifically on this topic of residential

00:01:59.000 schools. Before we get into your article with the Western Standard that has this incredible title,

00:02:05.560 Before the Priests and Nuns, When Every Child Did Not Matter, why don't you tell us how this topic

00:02:15.300 became an area where you have become not just an independent researcher, but an independent

00:02:21.680 journalist I would describe you as? Tell us how this became a focus for you.

00:02:27.680 Well, years ago in the 1980s, I did a series of documentaries with CTV Calgary and we were like

00:02:34.640 a very small crew, but we traveled all over southern Alberta and to some extent in the north of Alberta

00:02:41.120 up to around Edmonton as well and interviewed various pioneers. I worked under the supervision of

00:02:47.680 Dr. Hugh Dempsey, also known as Potena, who was the honorary chief with the Blackfoot Nation. He was married to

00:02:55.680 Pauline Dempsey, Pauline Johnson Dempsey, the daughter of Senator, sorry, Pauline Gladstone Dempsey, the daughter of Senator Gladstone.

00:03:09.680 And so, you know, I interviewed all these different pioneers. And when the first stories of mass graves

00:03:17.680 and genocide started coming out, and even going back to when Senator Lynn Bayek stood up in the Senate and

00:03:24.880 said, hey, you know, a lot of people benefited from Indian residential schools. I wrote her a letter based on my

00:03:31.680 research at the time, saying that that's true. Some did suffer, but many did benefit. So, you know,

00:03:40.320 the whole concept of a genocide just is ludicrous because I also did a documentary on the many genocides

00:03:50.240 in the world. And it was so dark that we actually decided not to release it. But what went on at

00:03:57.120 residential schools was not genocide? And I even argue that it was not cultural genocide, because

00:04:03.120 many of the Oblate Fathers actually made written forms for these Indigenous oral languages, which had

00:04:11.120 no written form before. They created dictionaries. They, in Kamloops, one priest was publishing

00:04:18.720 a regular weekly newspaper in what was known as Chinook Wawa, which was kind of a variation on shorthand.

00:04:29.920 But it allowed people to read all this information from the local tribes in a very simple and easy way.

00:04:40.400 So, you know, I've rejected the genocide concept for a long time. And I think, you know,

00:04:48.160 when the first story of mass graves came out, I too felt terrible. But it was my understanding

00:04:55.120 that, you know, what probably had been discovered at the time might have been like a mass grave related

00:05:00.640 to, say, a typhus epidemic or tuberculosis, passing of a family, because entire families often passed away

00:05:08.880 from it, or cholera, Spanish flu. But I didn't ever think that there was something nefarious going on.

00:05:20.160 And so, I guess I just started talking from my heart, you know, and realizing there are,

00:05:28.640 I think about half a million Aboriginal people in Canada who are Catholics. So, and their families were

00:05:38.400 Catholics long before they ever went to residential school or continued in the Catholic faith. And

00:05:44.720 there's another, I think, about 200,000 who are Christians of other denominations. So, you know,

00:05:51.520 this is really a divisive issue within the Aboriginal community, as well as in the broader Canadian

00:05:58.720 community. And it's a total distortion of history. So, I just, you know, I feel the burden of all the

00:06:05.760 people I interviewed back in the 80s. I feel I have to carry their stories forward and create some balance

00:06:13.840 in the narrative. And so, how do you respond to accusations of this new shut up? The new shut up is,

00:06:24.400 if you question the official narrative by the bans, and I guess by extension, the Trudeau government,

00:06:31.680 that the residential schools were a form of genocide, and that there are these mass graves at many of the

00:06:38.480 former residential schools, that you are a residential school denialist. How do you respond to that?

00:06:43.760 Well, I usually start pulling out historical documents and books. Like, here's the volume one of the

00:06:53.440 official history of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, or the Northwest Mounted Police, as they were called

00:06:59.120 at the time. So, these things were documented at the time. And that's the historical record. So, I pull

00:07:08.240 out these kinds of documents. There's nobody in the 1800s, 18 or 1900s, sitting there thinking, wow, you know, I

00:07:17.920 bet in the future, somebody's gonna wanna, you know, accuse us of doing bad things. So, let's just hide them.

00:07:25.680 You know, that's not a thing. So, in fact, most people are unaware that in the United States,

00:07:33.680 there were Indian wars going on there between the US cavalry and Native people from 1644.

00:07:42.160 You know, and they went until 1924. So, while we were educating Indigenous people in Canada,

00:07:50.800 giving them the skills of reading, writing, arithmetic, with which they are now using today

00:07:56.800 to launch class action lawsuits against non-Indigenous people, and the Government of Canada,

00:08:02.880 and the Roman Catholic Church and other churches, while we were educating and caring for these

00:08:09.200 children, the United States was hunting down and gunning down Indigenous people. These were

00:08:16.400 real wars, and they were really vicious. And in some cases, you know, certainly Native people in

00:08:22.800 the US were provoked because settlers kept coming in and just plunking themselves down on what looked

00:08:28.720 like, you know, here's some good farmland. I'm gonna sit here. There was no treaty. So, Native people

00:08:34.480 would say, hey, wait a minute. You know, you're sitting on our land. Boom, boom. People would shoot each

00:08:39.360 other. Cavalry would come in. Chaos. That never happened in Canada. You know, in Canada, we had trading

00:08:46.480 partners with the Aboriginal people from the earliest times here. I think the first Christian convert in

00:08:54.320 Canada was back in the 1600s. And Indigenous people adopted Christianity because they saw

00:09:02.320 that somehow these people coming here had manifestly more useful things, tools. Now, whether they

00:09:10.640 understood it as some kind of magical spiritual advantage, or whether they felt there was an

00:09:18.160 alignment, a spiritual alignment with many of the aspects of Christianity, they adopted it.

00:09:23.920 And they became trading partners. So, we have, you know, over 400, 300 years of trading,

00:09:32.000 economic trade partnerships with Aboriginal communities. At any time, they could have

00:09:38.000 overwhelmed and murdered the small groups of people who came here had they wanted to. And, you know,

00:09:45.840 certainly there were a couple of priests who were brutally murdered down in the Ontario region.

00:09:53.680 I can't remember, but that was very early on. But subsequently, it was a trade arrangement.

00:09:58.560 That's what we've always had in Canada. And it's completely different than in the United States.

00:10:04.000 It's a completely different relationship.

00:10:06.800 I think you're referring to it.

00:10:07.520 I forgot what your question was.

00:10:08.960 No, it's okay.

00:10:11.840 No, I think you did. I think you're referring to the martyr's shrine in Midland, Ontario.

00:10:15.520 But I'm glad that you pointed out earlier in our conversation that there were specific efforts

00:10:25.600 from Catholic priests to preserve the cultures of not just Indigenous people, but where I'm from,

00:10:34.240 to preserve the culture of Ukrainian people. So, we have the Basilian Fathers Museum, where the

00:10:40.400 fathers there recognized that the Russians or the Soviets were slowly smothering the Ukrainian culture.

00:10:48.640 And the place that would survive would be the place where so many Ukrainians settled. And they

00:10:52.960 started gathering up the cultural artifacts to make sure that when the evil empire of the Soviet Union

00:10:58.640 fell, that there would be remains of a culture that was being smothered somewhere else. And the

00:11:06.720 Oblate fathers did a lot of that work, too, to preserve Indigenous culture.

00:11:11.600 Oh, I was just going to say, they created the syllabics. They created a written form

00:11:16.560 of Aboriginal languages. Many of them were ethnologists, anthropologists, highly trained men.

00:11:22.640 And they also, you know, they really navigated in the West, almost independently, like with a guide

00:11:30.160 or two. And just imagine a tribe looking at these people, roaming around in their long black

00:11:37.600 robes, you know, setting up a mission, traveling with them, fighting on their behalf. At one point,

00:11:46.960 you know, it was Father Lacombe who helped stop the Blackfoot and Cree warring, who used to battle on the

00:11:53.520 Battle River in central Alberta. That was the demarcation line. I mean, he waded out into a gunfight,

00:12:00.960 calling for them to stop. And the Blackfoot were calling, stop, stop, to the Cree, you know, stop.

00:12:07.040 Pale Lacombe is in the middle of the fight, and he actually got wounded in the head. So, you know,

00:12:13.440 these were peacemakers. They cared deeply about the Native people that they lived with and worked with

00:12:22.080 and documented their languages and their cultures. And they also, you know, transferred a lot of Indian

00:12:32.000 culture into their own ceremonies as well, sometimes because it was such a beautiful fit.

00:12:38.880 So, you know, people who live in condos in downtown, wherever, in Canada or the US, don't know any of

00:12:46.240 this. They've never read a historical book, or they've only read the contemporary ones, which are

00:12:50.800 filled with, you know, genocide, colonial oppression, what bad, horrible people. And they don't realize that,

00:12:58.320 you know, the Oblate Fathers and Sir Johnny MacDonald and other people like that saw that with the

00:13:05.680 secession of the buffalo, all these people would die, because that's what they lived on, particularly

00:13:12.720 the Plains people. So they said, you know, we have to find a way to help them survive, and they did.

00:13:18.720 You know, I'm glad you pointed out the story of Father Lacombe, because the town of Wetasquin,

00:13:24.960 Alberta is its Cree name. It was a name suggested by Father Lacombe, and the name means the hills where

00:13:36.880 peace was made. It was long before the trend of renaming places to their original Indigenous names.

00:13:44.640 Father Lacombe suggested that this is the place, and we should give it a Cree name,

00:13:52.400 because it is the place where peace was made. And that is the act of one lone Catholic priest

00:14:00.160 doing his best to preserve the culture of the area. I want to ask you, one of the reasons I wanted to

00:14:08.000 have you on the show is because you have an incredible article in the Western Standard.

00:14:12.560 You wrote it back in June, but I didn't want our interview to die in the sort of summer dead season

00:14:19.440 of the news. And we're getting back into the news and this stuff. And your article is entitled,

00:14:26.400 Before the Priests and the Nuns, When Every Child Did Not Matter. Tell us about this article,

00:14:33.200 because I thought it was incredible. Well, it's a bit difficult in that there are some

00:14:40.160 rather grisly details, historical details. But, you know, people don't realize that

00:14:48.080 Native people did not live as sort of noble savages surrounded by riches. They were living a hunter-gatherer

00:14:55.120 existence. And in such a context, you can't afford to have weak or extra, unuseful people around.

00:15:04.400 And if you read the Grey Nuns' Diaries, which is online as a PDF, you find that the

00:15:15.440 Missionary Sisters of Mackenzie of the Sacred Heart Hospital saw at a glance what a great field

00:15:21.200 of labor awaited their courage and self-denial. So a handful of these nuns decided to come west and

00:15:27.440 help the priests. And they wanted to lift up the people from this form of barbarism.

00:15:36.080 And so I'm just going to read this passage. I must give you a few instances to show you what is the

00:15:40.960 depth of moral misery, which we are called to relieve. What I tell you will shock you to hear,

00:15:47.920 as it sickens me to tell. It was rather the general custom of the savages in these countries to kill

00:15:55.120 and sometimes eat the orphaned children, especially the little girls. Religion has made a great change

00:16:02.560 in this respect, but infanticide is still by no means rare. A mother looking with contempt on her

00:16:10.720 newly born daughter will say, her father has deserted me. I'm not going to feed her. So she'll wrap

00:16:17.280 her up in the skin of an animal, smother her and throw her into the rubbish heap. Now you understand

00:16:23.520 that all these people would rather have given their children to us, the nuns, than have them killed or

00:16:29.360 let them die. So that's what the nuns did, is they took in orphans, primarily girls, but not only girls.

00:16:37.680 And, you know, there was a lot of mystical things going on at the time. For instance, there's another

00:16:44.240 story that there was a little boy, Gabriel. He was about eight years of age. He saw his mother kill

00:16:53.280 his father and throw his little brother into the fire. Gabriel himself was saved from the same fate by his

00:17:00.960 grandmother, who took him to a Sicanis named Barbie, who had no children of his own. But a few days later,

00:17:08.720 Barbie's wife sickened and died. The Sicanis thought Gabriel had brought bad spirits and so a terrible

00:17:16.320 thing happened. Barbie left the child alone on the opposite bank of the river with no food or fire,

00:17:23.120 almost naked. And the Grey Nuns recount that Barbie took deliberate aim at him, Gabriel, with his gun,

00:17:31.600 whenever he saw the boy wandering around the grave or coming to the water to drink or pulling up roots

00:17:37.280 to satisfy his hunger. So a passing Hudson Bay trader, Boniface Lafferty, heard of the case from the

00:17:45.120 grandmother and he saved the child. Although he lived with the nuns for a couple of years, he subsequently died.

00:17:50.640 But, you see, it was very difficult to have an orphan around because, you know, then you had another

00:18:00.560 mouth to feed. It would be one thing if they were 15 or 16, they could join the hunt. But, you know,

00:18:06.480 if you were a baby or a very small child, they called them the weepers because they just let them follow

00:18:14.160 the tribe. And if they lived, great. And if they died, okay. So people don't realize what incredible

00:18:23.920 effort the Grey Nuns and the priests put into saving the frail and vulnerable. And that continued right

00:18:31.360 up to the end of the operation of Indian residential schools. In fact, many of the people who are very

00:18:38.240 critical of these schools were themselves saved from being orphans. Now, that part is completely excluded

00:18:48.160 from all of this. You know, there's only one narrative. And despite historical records, because

00:18:55.520 a lot of your journalism relies on the historical records as opposed to the changing stories

00:19:03.840 of the people involved, why do you think they're just getting away with changing the story? Why is

00:19:12.800 that happening?

00:19:13.360 Well, first of all, it's a huge industry. I mean, we found out recently, and this is thanks to Nina Green's

00:19:23.760 sharp eye, according to a document that Leah Red Crow of the Blue Quills First Nation wrote,

00:19:30.320 uh, archaeologist Scott Hamilton wrote, uh, the, uh, Truth and Reconciliation Calls for Action. I think

00:19:38.400 it was numbers 72 to 76, which basically say, we have to dig up every grave and return everybody home.

00:19:45.680 Well, you know, he's an archaeologist and that would appear to be a form of self-dealing.

00:19:51.840 And if you look at the historical record, most of the children who did die at residential schools,

00:19:57.760 and remember, there was a lot of TB going around at the time, and, uh, thousands of Canadians of

00:20:05.200 every stripe died of tuberculosis in those days. Um, but anyway, most of the children who did die,

00:20:13.680 there is a death certificate, is signed by a parent, and the child's body was sent home to the reserve.

00:20:21.040 So most of these bands are digging around in former community church graveyards.

00:20:27.680 So what would happen in the settlement of the Canadian West is that a missionary would come here,

00:20:34.320 an oblate priest, most likely, and set up a mission post. So he'd set up like a little church

00:20:40.880 in his little house, and he would consecrate some ground. And that became the place where people of

00:20:46.800 the community, if they died, they were buried there. And so, um, many of these graves are unmarked now,

00:20:55.600 of course, um, because time, you know, time and the fact that many of the relatives also passed away

00:21:03.120 because of things like TB, or they moved away. And so no one was there to maintain the family graveyard.

00:21:09.600 Anyway, over time, the mission outpost grew, and often an Indian residential school was placed

00:21:16.720 near or on the same site. But that doesn't mean that the graves in the community graveyard

00:21:23.360 are those of Indian residential school students. Most of those students, if they died,

00:21:29.120 were sent home for burial on the reserve. Most of the people in the community graveyards,

00:21:34.880 where people are saying, oh, we've got 300 unmarked graves here. Those graves are probably

00:21:40.640 your relatives, Sheila, and mine. Yeah. And the other point I want to make is regarding the, um,

00:21:48.160 the find, so-called find in Kamloops. No one did prior land use review before issuing their statement.

00:21:57.520 And the land use review shows that the same area where the claim of 215 unmarked graves or mass graves are

00:22:07.280 found is where there used to be septic field trenches. And they match up pretty closely.

00:22:14.160 So even the Kamloops First Nation in, uh, now three years after the original declaration that human remains

00:22:22.400 had been found, children as young as three, they issued a statement on the anniversary this year

00:22:28.160 saying that they had found anomalies, which is a far cry from a mass grave, human remains and three-year-old

00:22:34.160 children. So, um, you know, but it's a huge, huge business now for, uh, Indian residential school

00:22:44.160 survivors, for Indian bands, for the archaeologists, for the law lawyers, um, all kinds of land claims are

00:22:52.480 being based on this, uh, you know, and Canadians are more or less rolling over and saying, oh my God, we

00:22:58.880 never knew we committed genocide. Here, take it. So, you know, it's a atrocity process, propaganda with benefits.

00:23:08.640 You know, I'm, I'm glad you pointed out the amount of money involved because, uh, I think it's eight

00:23:13.360 million dollars has been. Well, that's just, yeah, eight million. That's just to the Kamloops First

00:23:19.280 Nation. I mean, now with all the contingent liabilities, Canadians are paying something like

00:23:24.400 76 billion dollars in land claims, class actions. And, you know, it should be noted that one of the

00:23:31.520 main people involved in the Kamloops find, um, directly benefited from the, I think it was the

00:23:39.360 Day Scholars, uh, settlement, which had been stalled out for 12 years prior. Uh, I think it was about

00:23:46.240 nine days to two weeks after the Kamloops claim that was settled. So everybody got a bunch of money

00:23:53.760 for that. Um, and there's 320 million dollars in a fund that was put together by the government

00:24:00.320 government for this, uh, research in unmarked, uh, of unmarked graves in former, in old graveyards,

00:24:07.440 uh, that was recently, um, that was issued for, I think a three or four year period. And they were

00:24:13.680 going to cut it back to $500,000 cap. Well, no, no, no. You know, recently, uh, Tanya Talaga

00:24:21.440 wrote a big article in the Globe and Mail and a number of, of other activists stood up and said,

00:24:27.520 no, no, no, no. You know, we need that money. We have to bring every child home. Um, even though

00:24:33.200 most of the children are already at home on reserve in the unmarked grave there, you know,

00:24:40.560 so they've never even produced, they can tell you allegedly the ages of these children that are

00:24:49.440 occupying these so-called anomalies. But as you pointed out in your medium article on sugarcane,

00:24:56.000 which we'll talk about in a second, they've never produced a list of names.

00:25:00.320 Right. Right. And actually there was, there was just an article in the Western Standard,

00:25:07.440 uh, looking for a family that went missing years ago. And the Western Standard has their names,

00:25:13.520 has the names of the father, the mother, and the two children, uh, indigenous family. They went for,

00:25:18.960 uh, a job opportunity, you know, drove someplace in Northern BC and they disappeared. It's like a 35

00:25:27.280 year old, uh, cold case, but they're still looking and they have their names. So, you know, if I go to

00:25:35.760 the police and say, I want to find someone there, the first thing they're going to say, okay, who's it,

00:25:39.840 you know, what's their name? Where did you last see them? Who are they related to? Where did they live?

00:25:45.440 So if you're going to claim that there are thousands of missing children,

00:25:51.920 then you better be able to produce a list of their names.

00:25:55.760 Or one name, but they haven't even produced a single name.

00:26:00.560 Yeah.

00:26:00.640 And, you know, as much as I have a particular dislike for the United Nations, um, I feel now more so than

00:26:08.720 ever. One of the things they're really good at is investigating genocide. It's not real great at

00:26:15.200 preventing them, but, uh, investigating genocides after the fact, after they've watched from afar

00:26:22.720 and the, you know, like they've excavated mass graves in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia and all

00:26:29.520 those places to determine who the people are in the graves, how old they are when they died and who

00:26:36.560 did it. And yet, while we are accused of genocide, mass genocide, nobody's ever said,

00:26:45.440 well, we better bring in the UN genocide investigators. Then they know exactly how to do this.

00:26:50.560 They've even shut out the RCMP.

00:26:52.080 Uh, that's not exactly true. Well, first of all, the Kamloops ban did shut out the RCMP. It was

00:26:58.640 actually Murray Sinclair, who was a former commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation

00:27:03.840 Commission. After the announcement, the RCMP went in and started questioning the person who had done

00:27:09.360 the GPR work, Sarah Beaulieu. And Murray Sinclair, in various published documents, I think including

00:27:16.960 statements to the Senate, said that they were being far too aggressive and they were called on

00:27:22.000 off the investigation, even though, uh, you know, and you might say, oh, well, that's good because

00:27:27.040 they're probably a bunch of mean white guys. Well, actually the supervisor of the, of the detachment

00:27:33.520 was an indigenous fellow at the time. So it's not like he didn't have cultural sensitivity.

00:27:39.680 Uh, anyway, so the RCMP were called off. And in fact, the federal government at one point,

00:27:48.240 a couple of years ago contracted with the, uh, international commission on missing persons

00:27:54.800 for about $2 million for a contract to help with the grave searches. Now they likely did this in

00:28:02.080 good faith, but of course the indigenous community said, no, we don't want that because you never

00:28:07.360 consulted with us first. So then they seem to back off for a while, but in time passing,

00:28:14.800 it seems that, uh, certainly the Blue Quills First Nation and Lea Red Crow have continued to work with

00:28:21.680 them. And, uh, there was an online, uh, webinar where the Blue Quills people said that they had sent

00:28:30.960 photographs of a, um, of some bone structures that had been dug up in their graveyard. And that, uh,

00:28:39.360 I think her name is Sonia, uh, Blau of the international commission on missing persons.

00:28:46.080 Uh, she said that, yes, this would be sort of the lower part of the cranium and spine of a child

00:28:53.040 under the age of five. Now this sounds shocking and horrible, but again, the Blue Quills people have

00:28:59.600 been digging in the community graveyard since about 2000 to dig graves, newly dug graves for members of

00:29:08.240 their tribe who have sadly passed away. Unfortunately, in the process, they've been digging up

00:29:15.680 old graves and finding all these old skeletons. Um, and quite a lot of time has gone by and they found

00:29:23.440 quite a few of them. So all these human remains are displaced from their original site. And it is known

00:29:31.440 that that, uh, site at Blue Quills, which was formerly Saddle Lake, um, it is known that there were three

00:29:39.920 typhus epidemics and, uh, there are some mass graves there of people who died. Again, likely pioneer

00:29:50.240 settlers. And, um, there were two nuns that died as well. Their bodies were buried there. They have been

00:29:56.720 exhumed and moved, uh, to consecrated ground elsewhere by the church. So, you know, like

00:30:04.720 everything, there's always a bit of truth to it. Yes, there are bodies. Yes, there are unmarked graves.

00:30:09.920 Yes, there are some mass graves, but no, there's no evidence of genocide and there's no list of

00:30:15.360 missing persons. So you would think that the first thing the International Commission on Missing

00:30:20.640 persons would do is say, okay, where's the list? Because then you can start going through all

00:30:27.280 the historical, archaeological, archival records and saying, okay, here's a birth record for this

00:30:34.400 person by this name, and here's a death record for them. And look, it says right here that they're

00:30:39.440 buried in this place. Or you can look and say, well, here's a birth record for this person,

00:30:44.880 and here's their family, and here's the census from the year that people claim they went missing.

00:30:50.240 They don't appear on the census after that, and we don't find a burial record. So then you can,

00:30:55.920 you know, through a lot of the archival documents, you can pinpoint who, when, where, and what.

00:31:02.720 And then you go to the newspaper archives, you go, oh, look, there was a terrible car accident in BC,

00:31:09.040 and the entire family died there, and they're buried there. So, you know, there, there are things like

00:31:15.520 this that, you know, really narrow down the search, but you need that name of the missing person,

00:31:22.000 or at least their family. Now, of course, what's happened in the meantime is that Chief TG of the BC

00:31:30.160 First Nations Assembly, I think it was on City News, he was interviewed and someone asked him about why

00:31:37.040 haven't you found, or have you found any remains? And he said, well, no, we haven't, you know,

00:31:43.200 and there have been quite a few excavations in Canada, no remains found, no graves. And he said,

00:31:49.360 well, that's probably because the bodies were incinerated at the schools. And that brings us to sugarcane.

00:31:56.640 Right. Tell us about sugarcane, because sugarcane is just one of a few documentaries out there

00:32:03.680 that are making the rounds that appear to be rewriting history. And, and the people in the

00:32:13.760 documentaries are contradicting their prior statements that they made publicly. They've just

00:32:19.200 decided there's a camera in front of me now. This is a really controversial thing happening in Canada.

00:32:25.920 There's a lot of money involved. So I'm going to change my story. And that's happened in sugarcane.

00:32:30.960 That's happened in another documentary as well. Yeah. Well, sugarcane is a particularly high

00:32:36.320 profile. First of all, National Geographic has picked it up. Secondly, the directors,

00:32:42.080 the co-directors are a young woman named Emily Cassie, who's got very high profile credentials,

00:32:48.800 Emmy Award nominee, Peabody nominee, also has worked with the very high profile

00:32:55.680 magazines in the United States. She's also a Canadian originally from Toronto. And her co-director

00:33:02.240 is a Julian noise cat, Julian brave noise cat. And he's a fairly high profile climate activist in the

00:33:12.000 States. Bill McGibbon wrote an article about him for Time magazine. His mother is a high profile,

00:33:19.120 very powerful executive in high tech. At one point, she was working with IBM. I'm not sure where she is

00:33:25.360 right now. So, you know, these are not ordinary people. And, um, apparently, uh, Emily Cassie

00:33:35.440 was gut punched by the news of the Kamloops find and decided to try and track down another band that

00:33:42.480 was doing such research like GPR research, ground penetrating radar. And by chance found the Williams

00:33:49.920 Lake Band was about to do that, sent an email to, uh, Chief Willie Sellers. He responded immediately.

00:33:56.800 And it turns out serendipity that the Williams Lake Band also owns a, um, an archaeological excavation

00:34:06.480 company called Sugarcane Excavations, which was set up in 2016. Anyway, maybe that's just a coincidence.

00:34:15.040 Sugarcane is the name of the, uh, reserve, Indian reserve near Williams Lake and near St. Joseph's

00:34:22.640 Mission, which became St. Joseph's, uh, in Indian Residential School. The formal name for it is the

00:34:30.240 Caribou Industrial Residential School. Most people refer to it as St. Joseph's, but if you're looking

00:34:36.320 for information on it, on the National Truth and National Center for Truth and Reconciliation,

00:34:42.240 it's under, um, under Caribou Industrial, uh, Residential School. So here's the, the big thread.

00:34:50.960 The, the premise is that priests at St. Joseph's impregnated young girls and burned the unwanted

00:35:00.320 babies in the school incinerator. And the proof of this, supposedly the way that the story is framed in

00:35:06.960 the documentary is the father of Julian Brave Noisecat. His name is Ed Archie Noisecat. He's a very

00:35:16.640 well-known and very clever, um, indigenous carving artist. He does beautiful work. Um, but both these

00:35:27.520 people knew before they made the film, and both of them had written about the fact that Ed's father is

00:35:33.920 actually a man named Ray Peters, who is also an indigenous fellow who had, um, uh, seven other

00:35:41.680 children with Ray's, uh, with Ed's mother and fathered 17 children in total with five women.

00:35:49.280 So not a priest. But if you look at the film reviews, you will find that film critics across

00:35:55.680 North America are quite convinced that Ed was the product of a priest and, um, and that he's just

00:36:05.760 lucky to have escaped the incinerator at the school. So, um, you know, sadly, in the way the story is told

00:36:15.840 in the documentary, they skip over some important details. They show the Williams Lake Tribune article of

00:36:23.280 August 26, 1959. And in it, it tells this tragic story of how the dairyman, Antonius Stoop, I think

00:36:33.360 his name was, came home late and he happened to hear a strange sound coming from the, uh, garbage

00:36:41.120 burner on site, went to investigate because he thought maybe a cat had gotten trapped in there and found

00:36:46.960 this abandoned baby. And what had happened is, um, Ed's mother and perhaps the father, I'm not too

00:36:54.960 sure if he was with her. They were driving home from Williams Lake to their reserve at Cannon Lake.

00:37:01.040 And, uh, maybe she went into labor prematurely. Uh, maybe they hoped to find a registered nurse on site

00:37:08.320 at the school because there usually would be maybe, but not during the summer days. Anyway, they abandoned,

00:37:14.960 she or they abandoned the baby in the incinerator and, uh, Antonius Stoop, the dairyman saved it,

00:37:22.400 took it to the Williams Lake hospital and baby had survived. The mother was tracked down subsequently.

00:37:30.400 Um, she claimed that she thought the baby was dead and that's why she abandoned it. You know,

00:37:35.520 who knows? These are very difficult times, but the key point is she was 20 years old

00:37:40.400 and school ended for all children when they turned 16. So she was not a student at the school.

00:37:51.120 She was involved with Ray Peters already. They married that year. I don't know if they married

00:37:56.640 immediately after. It appears they may have been living common law before. I don't know. Um,

00:38:02.480 and, uh, and, uh, and the, the baby in the incinerator had nothing to do with a priest,

00:38:10.080 but that's not how the story is framed. And I'd also like to say, I think it's highly unethical

00:38:18.240 because one of the principal characters in the film is Charlene Bello. And Charlene is related to the

00:38:25.920 woman who had the baby. Charlene knows this story inside out and backwards, but she is presented

00:38:32.320 as an investigator, as if they're going to find out, you know, who's the dad, right? When everybody

00:38:39.760 knew it's a very small community, everyone knew. And this was a deep wound for everyone in that

00:38:46.560 community. In fact, at one point early on in the film, um, Julian's father, Ed, who was the baby,

00:38:55.920 in the incinerator, uh, or garbage burner is more correct. You know, Ed says to him, what do you want

00:39:02.960 from me? And Julian's like, well, I want to know the truth about what happened to you. And he says,

00:39:09.600 it just keeps on damaging. And here we have this story in my view. It is horribly damaging. It's

00:39:18.080 damaging to Canada's reputation. It's damaging to the community involved. It's damaging to the Roman

00:39:24.480 Catholic church. It's incitement. And so much of it is false. That's the problem. It's not a

00:39:31.600 documentary. It's a shockumentary. And it actually, in one, in one interview that they did, someone said,

00:39:38.160 well, why did you decide to do this documentary now? And they said, well, because the residential

00:39:45.120 school story of, of Kamloops was waning. So the intention was to once again, hype up the mass

00:39:53.360 graves genocide. And, and what do you need for genocide? Well, you know, they, the whole principle

00:39:58.400 of the Canadian genocide is that children were forcibly taken from their parents and put in

00:40:03.840 residential schools, which is not true. Most children were, had to be enrolled by their parents.

00:40:10.240 There was a wait list in many cases. They needed a medical exam. The children who may have been taken

00:40:16.000 away are those who were orphaned, whose families were destitute, or who were at risk of domestic

00:40:22.800 violence. Because prior to the 1960s, the residential schools functioned as the social safety net

00:40:32.080 for families in distress. And people don't realize that there was no social services before,

00:40:38.400 you know, mid sixties. Um, and this is where children in distress from indigenous communities

00:40:44.320 were placed because there was nowhere else for them. Yeah. So there was no foster care system,

00:40:52.080 no particular, particularly in these communities. And in fact, it kept the kids in the community

00:40:58.160 connected to their culture. Um, I'm curious in this documentary, did they ever once do

00:41:06.560 what they've been doing on daytime television for the better part of two decades? Did somebody say,

00:41:12.160 let's get a DNA test to see if you are a sibling of your siblings, uh, they, with the shared father,

00:41:19.200 or did they say, okay, let's see if we can track down a living relative of this priest. Um, because I'm

00:41:26.160 willing to bet given the size of Catholic families back then, I bet he has a ton of living relatives.

00:41:34.160 Can we track them down and see if you are related to this man? Did they ever try to do the basic

00:41:40.880 of investigation? Well, they did actually. Good point. Uh, apparently Emily Cassie,

00:41:47.760 the director, apparently she lived with the former chief whose name is Rick Gilbert and his wife,

00:41:55.680 Anna. Apparently she lived with them for about two years during the making of the film.

00:42:00.640 And, uh, that, that struck me as odd when I was watching the film that somehow someone gained

00:42:06.400 access to Rick Gilbert and his wife, looking at a DNA test on a laptop. And I guess it's because, uh,

00:42:14.240 Cassie had ingratiated herself into their lives. So they had done that basic search.

00:42:22.080 Now, you know, when you get these things and they pop up and they say, you have,

00:42:26.400 you have five more relatives. Oh, well, we're not, you know, we're not even talking about it,

00:42:33.600 like an actual DNA test. We're just doing 23 and me, I guess.

00:42:36.800 Yeah. No, they did some kind of actual DNA test. I couldn't, I only saw the film twice,

00:42:42.480 so I was not able to actually detail what they found, but, uh, a person pops up on screen named

00:42:48.560 McGrath and he goes, you may be related to McGrath. So this young fellow pops up and, um,

00:42:56.800 then in the film, they cut to a picture of Father McGrath standing beside a bunch of kids from

00:43:03.680 St. Joseph's and everyone goes, see, you know, you were fathered by a priest. So I thought, you know,

00:43:10.880 that's interesting. Let's look at the demographics of Williams Lake and see what they'd said is that he

00:43:16.240 had, uh, about 45% native heritage and I don't know, 23, 33, 5%, whatever Scottish, Irish, English

00:43:25.920 kind of heritage. So I looked at the demographics of Williams Lake area. And even to this day,

00:43:31.920 the ethnicity there is enormously Scottish, Irish, English. So, you know, at that point in time,

00:43:40.560 Rick's mother was 18. So also she was not a student at St. Joseph's. Um, and, um, you know,

00:43:50.560 that was an area, Williams Lake was an area where young men were pouring into their building the

00:43:55.760 railway, prospecting, logging, mining, a ranching, a rodeo. You know, there are literally thousands of

00:44:05.280 other McGrath heritage people who could have been his father. Now it could have been a priest,

00:44:11.440 but she was not a student at the school. So they would have had to have an illicit

00:44:16.160 offsite relationship of some kind, which in a small community, you know, that's not very easy

00:44:22.560 to accomplish back in the day. Right. So again, they made this very simplistic connection. And sadly,

00:44:30.160 from, from my point of view, they also followed him to the Vatican where he was part of the group

00:44:36.560 that received an apology from the Pope, but he went and met with the superior general of the

00:44:42.080 Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the order of the Oblates that was here. I believe the fellow's name

00:44:47.600 was Louis Logan. I'm not sure if I pronounced that correctly. He met with him and sort of made a public

00:44:54.800 confession to him that his mother was abused by a priest. And that's why he exists. That's why he's

00:45:00.480 here because he's the product of a priest who broke his vows and had illicit sex with his mother.

00:45:08.480 But as I said, his mother was 18, not a student at the school anymore. And it could have been any

00:45:15.920 people in, in the area. I mean, imagine a handsome rodeo cowboy comes to town, you're at the, at the

00:45:23.040 rodeo, you fall in love for the night, then he moves on. Well, you know, it's, it's not unusual in

00:45:30.400 that time either. I mean, you know, if you look at the history, I said, it's not unusual in this time.

00:45:37.920 That's true. But today there are contraceptives. So sometimes, yeah, but, uh, you know, even Joni Mitchell,

00:45:45.840 uh, she was 21 and she, she had a baby and, uh, I was just reading an article about her and she said,

00:45:53.120 you know, I couldn't support the child at all. So I gave her up for adoption. Um, so, you know,

00:46:00.560 it was a very common situation at that time. And, uh, and we're looking at it with presentism,

00:46:09.440 you know, plus these people are framing the whole story as if all these people were victims of, um,

00:46:18.080 crazy priests, nefarious acts and incinerating babies. So if you look at the genocide narrative

00:46:25.360 that they've come up with, one aspect is one of the five principles of genocide, which is to tear

00:46:31.520 children from their community and force them to go to another community. As I said, most of the

00:46:37.840 parents approved of it. In other instances, the children were saved from domestic violence or

00:46:44.480 destitution or from being an orphan. And I tell you, some of the communities in that area, like

00:46:51.280 Alkali Lake, a hundred percent of the population were alcoholics at one point, including the children,

00:46:58.400 one hundred percent. Now, Charlene Belleau knows that community well. She lived there and she even

00:47:04.960 celebrated the fact that the community healed itself in a film that was made in, uh, it was made in the

00:47:12.720 sixties. I can send a link to it. So at the end of the film, they all gave each other awards for having

00:47:19.680 both acted in their film that documents their recovery and also that they recovered. So, so

00:47:27.200 anyway, there, you can see that there were a lot of children that might've been in trouble.

00:47:31.600 Uh, the other thing for genocide is, you know, missing persons. Well, we don't have a list of names.

00:47:38.320 The other thing is, uh, that, uh, mass graves. Well, we have these claims, unmarked graves, you know,

00:47:46.800 that would mean intentionally unmarked graves. The graves that everyone is talking about are

00:47:52.000 graves that were marked, but over time, the wooden crosses and headstones disintegrated.

00:47:58.480 So nobody dug a grave and nefariously never marked it. They marked it, but it's a hundred years later.

00:48:05.360 Um, and you know, you need, you need bodies and there's no bodies. So what else do you need?

00:48:12.560 You need ashes. So this sugar cane provides the, the ashes for the final, um, link in the genocide claim.

00:48:24.560 Although as I've shown you, it's completely false.

00:48:29.680 Pretty darn convenient. Uh, Michelle, I could talk to you all day about this. I want to ask you one last

00:48:35.920 question. Um, people will say, Michelle, you're painting the residential school system as just

00:48:43.280 all sun and light. Um, but I, I've never heard you deny that there were problems in the residential

00:48:50.320 school system ever, not even once. Um, but I think there were problems in the school system in general,

00:48:57.680 um, with discipline or whatever in earlier times. My brother got the strap. There's no way in heck

00:49:07.760 they would give kids the strap these days. Things change. Um, and what is considered abuse now is

00:49:14.480 not considered abuse at the time. That's very true. And there were problems at some of the schools.

00:49:21.440 There were problems at St. Joseph's. There were some predatory priests. There were some who were

00:49:26.320 also charged and convicted. So it's not like people were not caring at all. Um, there, there's

00:49:33.600 one factor that people never talk about, and that is student on student abuse, you know, which is quite

00:49:39.360 prevalent. And we know that also from the British boarding school experience. We know that also from

00:49:44.960 schools, ordinary schools, you know, you'll get people who are real bullies. And, uh, if they get a chance,

00:49:51.040 they'll physically or sexually assault a weaker kid. Um, at one point in Pauline Dempsey's, um,

00:49:59.600 article about my life in, uh, Indian residential school, she talks about the fact that in her

00:50:05.440 school, which was on the, uh, Blackfoot reserve, um, she, uh, the, the nuns would keep the smaller

00:50:14.320 boys in the girls dorm until they were old enough because they didn't want, you know, predatory,

00:50:20.640 older boys taking advantage of them. So, you know, these things did happen and it's a tragedy,

00:50:29.760 but, you know, also when you look at what was happening back home on reserve, many times,

00:50:34.960 there were very many tragic, uh, instances of incest, sexual assault, neglect, um,

00:50:43.760 neglect on a scale that's incomprehensible where, you know, a mother might go out on a binge and leave

00:50:50.560 children alone for like five days. The social worker would arrive and find a baby in a diaper,

00:50:56.960 the diaper frozen to the floor. So, uh, you know, it's, it's a grim picture, uh, and people never want

00:51:07.200 to look at that picture. So I, I agree that some people suffered greatly at Indian residential

00:51:14.640 schools. I would like to suggest that many of the people who suffered deep emotional scars,

00:51:22.080 it's more related to the fact that they were recently orphaned. And I think that this may be

00:51:27.440 where a lot of this, uh, focus on graves comes from. Because if you're four or five years old and you're

00:51:35.040 orphaned and you've gone to a funeral where you've seen your parents die, perhaps right in front of

00:51:40.960 you, and then suddenly you're transported to this new environment where things are very strict and,

00:51:47.360 and regimented, completely different from your regular life. Um, you can imagine how jarring that

00:51:54.320 would be for a small child and how embedded those memories would remain. Uh, so, uh, I think people

00:52:01.840 should look at, uh, Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson's interview with Francis Whittowson on rational

00:52:08.080 spaces. He's a, an indigenous psychologist. And he said that, yes, there is what he calls residential

00:52:15.440 school syndrome in some people, not all people. He likens it to a form of post-traumatic stress,

00:52:22.880 but he completely rejects the genocide narrative. And he's dealt with literally hundreds of

00:52:29.280 former residential school students and native people who are going through recovery. And, uh,

00:52:37.280 one other thing I wanted to mention is that he also said, you know, we should honor the Catholic

00:52:42.960 and Christian traditions that many of the older people and younger people in the indigenous community

00:52:49.360 find strength in. You know, people are like, oh, we have to go back to our traditional culture.

00:52:54.880 It's a very small percentage of people who practice traditional Indian culture and spirituality in

00:53:01.040 Canada. Uh, the much greater percentage is Catholicism and Christianity, and it aligns with societal values.

00:53:11.120 So, um, you know, I think that a lot of native people on reserve are really trapped,

00:53:18.960 uh, held hostage, if you like, by the genocide narrative and the vehement hatred toward, uh, our history

00:53:27.200 when they themselves found their faith to be very useful and fulfilling. So, blah, blah, blah. Oh, and I have

00:53:37.760 a new t-shirt. Every living child matters most of all. Yeah. I think that we need to change the narrative

00:53:46.960 from every child matters most of all to every living child matters most of all because our children

00:53:54.960 off reserve and on reserve are dying from fentanyl, from alcohol, from suicide. And these are the children

00:54:03.840 we can help now. We can't help anybody who's in the grave. Michelle, how do people see more of your

00:54:12.080 independent journalism on this topic? Um, I'm on Medium, uh, which is, uh, kind of a blog site,

00:54:21.920 and I have my own blog called, uh, michellesterling.com. And you're frequently published in the Western

00:54:28.000 Standard on this topic as well, which I think is great. So, uh, the more people that see your work,

00:54:33.280 the better. Um, I think as Canadians, we, we are made to feel guilty for our past. And I think it is

00:54:42.400 nothing short of, uh, an outstanding accomplishment of human achievement that we can even live in this

00:54:50.320 country and in this climate, let alone thrive the way that we do. And we should, by and large, look back

00:54:58.080 on the past of this country as, um, as, uh, uh, uh, a piece of success. Now, dark times, of course,

00:55:06.960 um, in every, in the building of every great society, there are dark times, but, um, I don't think we

00:55:12.960 should be ashamed. And I don't think we should be teaching our children to be ashamed of things they

00:55:17.440 never did. Agreed. Great. Well, Michelle, thank you for this. Um, we'll have you back on the show very

00:55:24.320 soon on, I'm sure a different topic as you sometimes are. Um, and, and just thank you so much for taking

00:55:31.120 the time to do this work. I know it is truly a labor of love in that it is, uh, your love of the truth

00:55:38.560 that drives this work. And my love of the children.

00:55:42.640 Well, we've come to the portion of the show wherein we invite your viewer feedback. Unlike

00:55:54.160 the mainstream media, we don't exist without you. So why wouldn't we want to know what you think

00:55:58.840 about the work that we do here at Rebel News? Today's letter comes to me by way of email. If

00:56:05.060 you want to send me an email about the show today for better or for worse, you can send that to

00:56:11.280 Sheila at rebel news.com. But if you're watching a free clip of the show, um, put your comments in

00:56:19.440 the YouTube or the rumble pages, and I will take a look at those as well. I frequently pull comments

00:56:24.060 from there. But as I said, today is from the email inbox. It is on last week's show with my friend,

00:56:31.220 Lise Merle. She's a Saskatchewan mom of six, who was slapped with a $30,000 access to information bill

00:56:39.060 because she asks what local bureaucrats in her local school board were saying about her family

00:56:46.620 behind her back. And she asked for any of their communications about the new pride initiatives.

00:56:53.560 And this is one school board, one family, one mom. And they also told her if they calculated it in a

00:56:59.820 different way that it would be closer to, uh, $200,000. So they were doing her a favor by sticking

00:57:10.900 up this paywall to look for digital documents, digital, like keyword search stuff. I mean,

00:57:16.080 just absolute utter baloney. But anyway, my email was full of, uh, supportive emails about my interview

00:57:28.380 with Lise, uh, because she's a mom just wanting to get answers. And this is how they stonewall you.

00:57:35.660 So I've got an email here from Dale who says, Dear Sheila, first of all, thank you for taking up the

00:57:44.120 news that the media is lying about and hiding from Canadians. And secondly, I have nothing but empathy

00:57:48.780 for your friend who wants to know what is being taught to her children. Then, uh, we get a personal

00:57:54.720 disclosure. I'm a middle-aged married gay guy. I'm sick to death of the misinformation around trans

00:58:01.320 rights. And I strongly disagree with the TQIA plus side of the pride flag. In fact, we would like to see

00:58:08.880 the TQIA plus removed from the LGB flag. Gay and bi people are not transsexuals. We are not girl men or man

00:58:18.020 women. We are men and women who are attracted to the same sex that we were born with. In fact, in their own

00:58:24.420 data, these people admit that something like 80 to 90% of these trans and other gender kids are just

00:58:30.840 gay kids. Yeah. It's the new conversion therapy, isn't it? I take a dim view of this and consider

00:58:38.740 these interventions harmful to gay people. They're trying to trans the gay away. For context, in Saudi

00:58:44.820 Arabia, they will pay for gay people to have a sex change. They do it in Iran too. They say, look, we have

00:58:49.640 no gay people. Then you have this Franken lady behind a hijab who was just a regular old gay kid.

00:58:58.180 If you do not, you will be killed violently. Why are we taking cues from this? Most of these acronyms

00:59:05.720 have been added to the LGB flag are sexual fetishes. They are not sexes and nor are they genders. A way of

00:59:13.500 looking at this is that they are virtual genders. Women do not have penises and men do not have

00:59:19.840 vaginas. It's a biological fact, inarguable. And then he includes a link to the WPATH files.

00:59:26.140 I have read these. These are leaked documents from a gender affirming clinic in the UK, which has

00:59:31.700 subsequently closed. When these facts were revealed in Europe, some countries immediately changed the law.

00:59:38.520 I tried to add the link to your YouTube interview, but it was quickly removed. Of course it was.

00:59:42.340 YouTube is a censorship platform. So here you go. These should be spread around for as many parents

00:59:47.980 to see as possible. It is a long document. I think that this information is being suppressed

00:59:52.880 in Canada. It is. Please tell your friend, and I will, and I did. I've sent her this email and she

01:00:00.400 was very appreciative of it, Dale, that she has an ally in me and keep up the good reporting. Oh, I will.

01:00:07.280 I sure will. You know, you used to be able to search doctors in your area who were doing gender

01:00:14.320 affirming care on the WPATH files. And that was quickly scrubbed. And that's too bad because I would

01:00:23.780 never want to send my kids to a pediatrician who would give them gender affirming care instead of

01:00:31.280 just proper medical care. Right? I feel like I should be provided that conscience, right? But

01:00:39.140 I guess not in Canada. Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight. Thank you so much for tuning in.

01:00:44.000 I'll see everybody back here in the same time, in the same place next week. And as always,

01:00:47.700 don't let the government tell you that you've had too much to think.

Rebel News Podcast - August 28, 2024

SHEILA GUNN REID ｜ Where are the excavations？

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