The Candice Malcolm Show - 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

00:00:05.760 Residential School of the Former Grounds, but has this story ever really been verified?

00:00:10.520 Is Canada really guilty of committing genocide?

00:00:13.260 I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is the Candice Malcolm Show.

00:00:15.120 So one year ago on May 27th, 2021, the Kamloops Indian Residential Band released a bombshell

00:00:35.720 of a press release with a stunning accusation.

00:00:38.440 This accusation made its way around the world.

00:00:40.560 The band claimed that it had used ground-penetrating radar to detect the remains of 215 children

00:00:46.460 who were said to have died while attending the local residential school.

00:00:50.760 Now, this statement, which was issued by an unknown First Nations politician, it was rather

00:00:55.280 amateur in the way it was written.

00:00:57.280 It was void of any facts or evidence.

00:00:59.380 It was heavily built on emotion and quotes from elders who were passing on oral knowledge.

00:01:05.420 It had a catastrophic impact on our country.

00:01:08.140 This one statement sent off a whirlwind of events.

00:01:11.960 It led to exaggerated headlines, erroneous claims of mass graves, accusations of genocide,

00:01:16.880 international shame and contrition from Canadian leaders, more discoveries from other bands,

00:01:21.900 sort of lookalike claims, genuine remorse and concern and sadness from Canadians all across

00:01:26.700 the country, and eager progressive politicians who began competing over who could use the most

00:01:32.340 hyperbolic and anti-Canadian rhetoric.

00:01:34.840 It's not an exaggeration to say that this spurred an existential crisis among Canada's elites.

00:01:41.100 Their whole narrative about Canada being a kinder and gentler, more progressive version of America,

00:01:46.660 well, that all came crashing down with their own hyperbole and self-flagellation.

00:01:52.000 Their whole worldview came crashing down.

00:01:54.440 They tried to cancel Canada Day.

00:01:56.120 They excused away the burning of churches and the toppling of statues,

00:01:59.820 and they tried to force this as a major issue in the past 2021 federal election.

00:02:05.700 In fact, during the English debate of the 2021 federal election,

00:02:09.660 reconciliation with First Nations community was the most prominent topic discussed.

00:02:14.740 And that wasn't organic.

00:02:15.920 It was because of the organizers' themed approach to the debate.

00:02:18.680 They mandated that the topic received the lion's share of discussion.

00:02:22.780 So in a debate about the most pressing issues facing Canada, reconciliation,

00:02:28.240 the discussion on reconciliation, lasted for 27 minutes.

00:02:31.700 They spent 27 minutes of a two-hour debate talking about reconciliation.

00:02:37.060 Now, by comparison, during that election, a leger survey that was done with the National Post

00:02:41.440 found that First Nations reconciliation and that issue didn't even crack the top 10 issues

00:02:46.240 that Canadians were focused on during the election.

00:02:49.060 Canadians were focused on the cost of living.

00:02:50.640 They were focused on increased funding for health care.

00:02:53.760 They were focused on the post-pandemic economic recovery and managing the pandemic.

00:02:57.920 Those were the top four issues.

00:02:59.780 And instead, we spent one quarter of the debate talking about reconciliation with First Nations.

00:03:06.000 Elites tried to force that conversation onto us, and that remains their obsession and their purpose. 0.98

00:03:11.980 They tried to force this conversation, even though the details of that original story

00:03:16.620 remain spurious and unverified.

00:03:19.080 And so I want to go back to the original story and talk about what we know, what has been verified,

00:03:24.420 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.

00:03:37.100 Tom is a professor emeritus at the University of Calgary School of Public Policy.

00:03:41.720 He served as a campaign manager to Stephen Harper's Canadian Alliance Leadership Campaign.

00:03:46.640 And again, on Harper's Conservative Party Leadership Campaign, he is an award-winning author

00:03:50.460 specializing in Canadian politics and Indigenous rights.

00:03:54.420 So, Tom, thank you so much for joining the show.

00:03:56.880 It's great to have you back.

00:03:58.180 Well, nice to be here, Candice.

00:03:59.740 So, let's start with the original claim, the story that came out just about a year ago now,

00:04:06.120 that 215 children's bodies had been discovered at a residential school.

00:04:12.660 Has there been any new developments, any new facts that we should know about from the story?

00:04:17.560 What is the latest?

00:04:20.040 Well, nothing that you could call a fact.

00:04:21.860 You know, it's really important to understand what happened on May 27th.

00:04:28.160 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,

00:04:39.680 which had been conducted by an anthropologist from Simon Fraser University.

00:04:45.780 There was the anthropologist's report was never made public.

00:04:51.860 In fact, the Department of Anthropology, Simon Fraser, refused to make the report public.

00:04:58.980 They said it was just between the anthropologist and the Kamloops Indian Band,

00:05:04.680 which in a business sense was true that the Kamloops Indian Band had paid for it.

00:05:10.840 But it's really unusual to make public claims based on a scientific report,

00:05:17.300 which you refuse to release to the public.

00:05:19.440 So, that's the first thing.

00:05:21.860 Secondly, the anthropologist did later clarify that no human remains had been found.

00:05:29.720 What she found was, she originally said, 215 potential burial sites.

00:05:39.780 These were disturbed Earth.

00:05:42.160 Later, the number was reduced to 200, but that's not a significant difference here.

00:05:46.960 That's what ground penetrating radar could do.

00:05:51.960 It can show that the Earth has been disturbed, but you don't know what's there unless you excavate.

00:06:01.880 Now, it's not surprising that the Earth would have been disturbed in this area because it was an apple orchard.

00:06:07.200 So, trees had been planted there at one time.

00:06:12.020 Apples, trees don't grow naturally in British Columbia, so they had to be planted.

00:06:16.300 So, there had to have been soil disturbances taking place.

00:06:21.240 There has been no excavation there.

00:06:23.140 So, to this point, there is not a single piece of concrete evidence that anybody is buried in these sites, let alone children from the Kamloops Indian Residential School.

00:06:40.640 So, I mean, this is the greatest fake news story in Canadian history.

00:06:45.700 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.

00:06:55.240 Well, it's really interesting that there was no demand for evidence, that this press release was sent out.

00:07:05.040 I remember reading it over and over and over again, trying to figure out the facts that you would see in the Washington Post or the CBC or the Globe and Mail.

00:07:13.480 They weren't from a report, as you said, because the report wasn't published.

00:07:16.420 It was all based on quotes from people who had their own recollection of things that happened.

00:07:22.100 So, it didn't seem like the standard that we would usually apply to news stories was taken into consideration at all.

00:07:29.740 They just sort of ran with the most hyperbolic aspects of it and used that to basically condemn Canada as an evil genocidal state.

00:07:39.960 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,

00:07:48.360 why there wasn't any verifying of facts, why they didn't ask for more evidence, and sort of, you know, why this story took on a life of its own.

00:07:56.000 Yeah.

00:07:56.660 Well, there are several background factors here that help to explain how this story could gather so much momentum so quickly.

00:08:04.840 First of all, it played to an existing narrative.

00:08:07.080 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.

00:08:22.480 The story has been built that the residential schools were evil places where students were deprived of their language and culture and, you know, in fact, even tortured and killed.

00:08:38.040 So there had been lots of oral testimony to this in this direction over a period of many years.

00:08:49.200 So the media were primed to report what they thought or what they heard to be physical evidence of this pre-existing narrative.

00:08:59.540 So when something plays into an existing media narrative, it's bound to get uncritical coverage, and that's exactly what it did get.

00:09:09.560 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.

00:09:23.820 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, but that they have to be interpreted in the light of memories.

00:09:43.200 But, of course, nobody is alive today who was alive when the treaties were negotiated, 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.

00:10:01.500 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.

00:10:19.720 But that fits into the notion of oral, traditional oral testimony, which has become quite crucial in the world of indigenous politics.

00:10:29.540 So there's another factor that helps to explain how this story could gather so much momentum so quickly.

00:10:37.900 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.

00:10:49.580 You had a recent piece in True North talking about how they had this sort of world-class Olympic swimming pool.

00:10:56.120 You found archived photos of children sort of carefree, playing, happy.

00:11:02.660 A lot of these pictures came from our friend Chris Champion over at Dorchester Review, the publisher over at Dorchester Review.

00:11:09.880 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.

00:11:26.760 You know, it shows children looking happy, healthy, you know, enjoying a variety of activities.

00:11:31.680 This doesn't really seem to reconcile with the sort of overly negative doom and gloom.

00:11:39.240 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.

00:11:48.580 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?

00:11:59.180 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?

00:12:09.900 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.

00:12:26.860 That's over a period of more than 100 years, not 215, 51.

00:12:33.080 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.

00:12:43.900 And what the death certificates show is that the children died for, you know, sort of normal causes.

00:12:55.420 A few were runaways who suffered accidents.

00:12:59.460 Majority died of, you know, kind of ordinary diseases of the day, such as tuberculosis.

00:13:04.740 And they were buried, typically at their home reserves.

00:13:10.120 Children came to that school from all over British Columbia.

00:13:14.160 And, you know, it's a big province.

00:13:15.480 It wasn't always feasible to send the body back.

00:13:18.920 But most of them were sent back to the home reserve where they were buried.

00:13:24.480 So there was nothing secretive or mysterious about the about these deaths.

00:13:30.240 I mean, you know, every death is sad, but people do die.

00:13:34.520 And particularly in an age before antibiotics, diseases like tuberculosis and typhus were epidemic killers.

00:13:44.660 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.

00:13:57.300 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.

00:14:08.740 There's, there's many, many pictures of children playing in the pool or otherwise enjoying sports and recreation.

00:14:17.600 They look like happy, healthy kids.

00:14:19.960 They're well-fed.

00:14:20.760 They're well-nourished.

00:14:21.840 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.

00:14:33.620 They said the potatoes were sometimes kind of watery, but overall it was pretty good.

00:14:40.760 As you correctly point out, some of the teachers were Indians.

00:14:44.600 They were graduates of that school.

00:14:46.960 A majority of the overall staff members were Native Americans.

00:14:51.340 I mean, there are many jobs.

00:14:53.080 These, these, these schools were major centers of employment for First Nations people.

00:14:56.700 So, because they had janitors, they had dorm supervisors, they had secretaries, on and on.

00:15:02.500 And a majority of these people were, were First Nations.

00:15:06.920 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 are, they weren't charnel houses where, where children were slaughtered.

00:15:23.040 So, um, so I come back to my point about how a story plays to an ideological preconception.

00:15:29.680 It becomes truer than true.

00:15:31.660 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.

00:15:39.920 They're not trained to evaluate evidence.

00:15:42.100 Uh, they work under deadlines.

00:15:43.640 They get some facts.

00:15:44.720 They put it together.

00:15:46.180 Um, and they run with it.

00:15:48.440 And so they tend to run with something that, that fits their preconceptions.

00:15:53.180 And there's been so much priming over the years as to, uh, as to what residential schools were like, so that this story takes on a life of its own.

00:16:03.700 And if you read the coverage, um, many, many of the articles go way beyond what even the chief had announced.

00:16:11.820 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.

00:16:24.980 You know, there was, there was nothing like that, but another journalistic practice is to, uh, base your story on what other journalists have written.

00:16:34.240 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.

00:16:42.080 Well, now it's all on the internet.

00:16:43.940 So a reporter reads one story, adds a couple of comments, passes it off as his own story.

00:16:49.900 And so the same fallacies get repeated and repeated and repeated.

00:16:53.480 The more they're repeated, the more they, uh, uh, come to seem true to people because they're being, uh, repeated now.

00:17:01.640 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.

00:17:16.340 And in fact, they weren't put back to normal flying position until a veteran's day and, uh, uh, November the 11th.

00:17:25.200 So what's that June, July, August, September, October, it's about six months of flying at half mast.

00:17:31.860 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 no real discovery.

00:17:42.800 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.

00:18:01.640 And yet, you know, that, that term was, was, was, was shuffled around.

00:18:04.680 There were some corrections, uh, from, from, from more responsible media outlets, but other media outlets still, still use that term, um, mass graves.

00:18:12.500 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.

00:18:23.440 I mean, one of the first things you, as a researcher or journalist, you would do is, is, okay, who were these children?

00:18:30.240 What, what are their names?

00:18:31.200 Where were they from?

00:18:32.000 Where are their families?

00:18:32.860 Presumably the families would be distraught looking for their child.

00:18:37.320 You'd send their child away to school, and then all of a sudden the child's gone.

00:18:41.120 Just the whole premise of the idea that, that we, we could just throw around these numbers.

00:18:45.460 And, you know, the, the 215 from the Kamloops band was just the first one.

00:18:49.620 We heard, I think it was, uh, 715 from a band in Saskatchewan, and then another 250 from another band in Central British Columbia.

00:18:57.340 And, and, you know, the, the numbers keep accumulating.

00:18:59.540 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.

00:19:13.300 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?

00:19:23.280 Like, who, who are these children?

00:19:25.020 What are their names?

00:19:26.060 Do, do we know this information?

00:19:27.620 Is, is, is, is someone looking into it?

00:19:29.620 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?

00:19:43.300 Yeah.

00:19:43.620 Yeah.

00:19:44.300 Yeah.

00:19:44.420 Yeah.

00:19:44.840 Yeah.

00:19:45.420 Yeah.

00:19:45.920 Yeah.

00:19:46.420 Yeah.

00:19:46.480 Okay.

00:19:46.540 There are, there are really three big pieces of mythology, which come together to, to create this story.

00:19:52.300 The first one is the so-called unmarked graves, which, you know, at this point, we don't even know if they're burial sites, they're soil disturbances.

00:20:01.760 Secondly, there's the legend of the missing children.

00:20:05.140 And this is a huge source of confusion.

00:20:09.220 Yes, there were children who died at school.

00:20:12.740 Uh, which is sad.

00:20:14.560 And there were, but there were children who died at home too.

00:20:17.760 That was sad.

00:20:19.100 I mean, a lot of children died, um, until the discovery of antibiotics, because the, these, uh, diseases that were brought in from the old world were particularly lethal for, uh, first nations populations that did not have inherited, uh, any kind of inherited, uh, uh, resistance to them.

00:20:40.280 Um, so yeah, a lot of children died, but, uh, that doesn't mean that they're missing, uh, maybe they're missed.

00:20:49.160 It's parents always, of course, miss a child that they've lost, but missing implies that nobody knows what happened.

00:20:56.680 Um, now these children are, are listed in, in records, like the, uh, um, the diaries of those who ran the schools, although many of these you can't get access to.

00:21:12.580 I mean, for example, there's a document called the Codex Historicus for the, um, um, Kamloops Indian Residential School, which is in the archives in the Provincial Museum in, um, uh, in, in Vancouver.

00:21:29.580 But it's, sorry, is that in Vancouver or Victoria?

00:21:32.380 I can't remember which, anyway, um, uh, one of those major BC cities, but, uh, nobody can get access to that.

00:21:38.940 The, the facility's been closed and they're not making copies of, uh, of the, uh, of documents for researchers.

00:21:48.300 And, uh, um, so there, there, there, sadly, there are dead children, but they're not really missing.

00:21:59.460 Now, the TRC threw around at various times numbers of thousands of missing children, but, you know, it's never clear exactly who these kids were.

00:22:11.360 It's, it's, it's a mix of kids who may have died at school, kids who may have died at home, uh, statistical artifacts that arise from inadequate comparison of records, failing to consult birth certificates.

00:22:24.340 It's a real hodgepodge.

00:22:25.960 I mean, just to give you one example, uh, if you remember the name Helen Betty Osborne, uh, teenage Cree girl who was, um, killed in Manitoba decades ago.

00:22:36.980 Um, she's listed as a residential school fatality in Manitoba while she wasn't living at a residential school at the time that she was killed.

00:22:48.020 Um, there's, there's many, many, uh, uh, cases of that type.

00:22:52.940 So these, but, but the TRC made matters worse by referring to, you know, not just three or 4,000 missing children, but 15 or 25,000, you know, numbers with absolutely no, uh,

00:23:07.820 basis in, in evidence.

00:23:10.160 Uh, and then the third, the third mythical pillar of this story is the, uh, the idea that, uh, that all Indian children were forced to attend these schools.

00:23:20.420 Um, I mean, only a minority of, uh, Indian children ever went to a residential school.

00:23:27.760 Uh, there were more, uh, who went to day schools on reserves than to residential schools.

00:23:35.520 And, uh, there was a large number who'd never went to any school at all up until, you know, as late as the 1940s, a plurality of Indian children appear not to have been in any kind of school.

00:23:46.560 Um, so, uh, yeah, residential schools were a reality, but, uh, they weren't the dominant reality of, um, of the first nation's childhood experience.

00:23:57.220 Uh, and the, uh, the, the, the records of the federal government are clear that for decades after they started funding residential schools, um, there was no compulsion to attend.

00:24:09.640 Um, sometimes it was recommended to parents, but, uh, they, uh, they weren't required to send their children to residential school.

00:24:21.300 There wasn't anything like compulsory attendance until, well, the late 19, after World War II, when the welfare state started to expand into the world of Indian reserves.

00:24:35.040 And, um, um, um, that led to a lot of family breakdown.

00:24:40.200 That's a long story, but there was an infusion of cash and, uh, alcohol became traded on reserves.

00:24:46.680 And there was a lot of family breakdown and for, for several decades, the residential schools served like orphanages for children that, uh, were believed to be in danger or neglected.

00:24:58.960 So at that sort of late date, yes, there were children that, because there was no provincial mechanism for dealing with Indian children at that point, the provinces didn't get legal authority to deal with children on reserves until much later.

00:25:12.940 So there was a period of several decades when, um, um, uh, children that, uh, you know, at a later date might've been taken into care by provincial governments were instead were sent to, uh, residential schools, but that that's a later piece of the story and, and, uh, only, uh, only a small piece overall.

00:25:33.260 So you have these interlocking bits of mythology of, uh, uh, unmarked graves, missing children forced to attend.

00:25:41.480 And, and then they all come together into this story about, uh, Canada is not only a cultural genocide, but maybe even a physical genocide of first nations people.

00:25:54.380 And as they say, it's, it's not supported by evidence, but it plays to ideological preconceptions about progressive ideology, about the role of so-called white supremacy and colonialism.

00:26:07.260 And mistreatment of, uh, uh, everybody except white, uh, white people.

00:26:12.860 And so you got this receptive, uh, ideology.

00:26:16.540 It's just waiting there for, uh, some semblance of proof, which of course is in this case is not proof at all, but it's packaged to look like proof.

00:26:25.480 And, and, and then it's, it's, it's easily, it's seized upon then by journalists and politicians.

00:26:31.880 Well, it's, it's, it's tremendous, the impact that it's had on our country over the past year.

00:26:36.920 I think they've done a tremendous disservice to first nations people, because, uh, I can't imagine how you can, you know, carry on living a, a normal life or, or consider, you know, your own future. 1.00

00:26:48.060 And, and, and, and building a life for yourself in a country, uh, when you're told to believe that, you know, uh, that, that, that people, uh, that, that the people who, you know, run Canada are genocidal white supremacists who are trying to kill you basically, or eliminate your entire, uh, race.

00:27:04.480 I, I think it's such a disservice to, to first nations people, but, uh, Tom, I'm wondering if, if you can, uh, tell us a little bit about what you think should be done at this point. 1.00

00:27:13.320 Because I, I know in your, in your piece that you wrote for True North, you said that there must be an excavation.

00:27:18.280 We need to sort of put this issue to rest.

00:27:20.800 Um, I'm, I'm wondering how, you know, sensibly minded Canadians can counter this, this really damaging narrative, uh, what we can do to, to, to push back against it.

00:27:30.620 And, uh, from a public policy perspective, uh, what, what do you think can be done to, you know, not only move past this, this, this chapter, but also, um, help to, you know, raise the, uh, fortunes.

00:27:43.320 Of, of first nations people and enable them to have, uh, you know, good lives in Canada.

00:27:50.580 Well, I'm trying to do my little bit by writing about it.

00:27:53.340 Uh, you might say I'm trying to expose fake news and true north. 0.96

00:27:57.480 I hope you'll appreciate the sly humor there.

00:28:00.420 Uh, but, uh, no, seriously, uh, I am friends are writing about this as much as we can, hoping to create a, a body of, of literature.

00:28:08.820 That even if it doesn't have a lot of impact immediately, we'll be there for, uh, for the future.

00:28:15.180 Um, secondly, there need to be excavations to test, uh, to test the theory, but, uh, not just any excavations.

00:28:26.580 Um, there's recent news report from the, um, saddle Hills for, uh, first nation saddle Hills, saddle Lake, which is it.

00:28:36.180 Um, anyway, saddle something in Northeastern Alberta, which is, uh, where the blue quills residential school was located.

00:28:45.300 And, um, they've been digging, uh, and they claim according to CBC reports to have found perhaps 200 plus skeletons.

00:28:56.100 Um, you know, but, but first of all, uh, there's no professional or RCMP supervision.

00:29:05.120 Uh, these, it's just people digging and they're digging in a cemetery.

00:29:08.760 Now it's not surprising that you're going to find burials in a cemetery.

00:29:13.100 They claim to have found, um, uh, children's remains, but they also say that they've been reburying as they go.

00:29:21.240 So there's no evidence that can be shown, uh, to the, uh, to the public.

00:29:28.380 So this, the story is generated headlines about remains being found, but it's not the kind of evidence that any, um, court or any, uh, any, uh, serious scholar would accept as, as evidence.

00:29:43.140 It's just based on, uh, somebody say so about what they claim to have seen when they dug in a cemetery.

00:29:49.520 Uh, according to the story that's circulating, the, uh, the, the records of the blue quill school show, I think it was 22 children who died there.

00:30:02.880 Whereas they say the records of the Catholic church, I mean, and this was a common situation where you had a residential school, but you also had a parish church and you had a common cemetery.

00:30:13.440 And the cemetery was used by the members of the reserve, as well as by the residential school.

00:30:20.520 Um, so they claim Catholic church records, which again, nobody is able to see, uh, they claim that, uh, um, there were over 200 children died, but the story has originally reported said between the ages of four.

00:30:39.880 Uh, and I forget what the upper limit was, well, uh, children weren't admitted to residential school until they were six.

00:30:47.520 Uh, so if a four-year-old died, it wouldn't have been at a residential school.

00:30:52.500 So, you know, this is all mixed up and we don't even know if they're interpreting the church records properly, because at this time, most Catholic church records were kept in Latin.

00:31:02.040 Uh, and, uh, I've done some of my own family research, uh, 19th century, Irish immigrants, parish churches kept records in Latin.

00:31:10.160 Uh, it's not that simple.

00:31:11.980 There's a lot of abbreviations.

00:31:13.320 Uh, I am a former altar boy who has studied Latin and I can read it more or less, but when you're confronted with handwriting and abbreviations and it was, it's, it's, it's, it's not that easy.

00:31:25.760 Um, so anyway, I'm sure there's going to be a lot of stories around the anniversary of Kamloops, but they have to be, they have to be read very critically.

00:31:38.520 So come back to your question about what should be done well, excavations above all, but properly supervised excavations in which the, uh, the RC, if not the RCMP, at least, uh, some kind of professional supervision is there.

00:31:54.520 I mean, ideally it would be the RCMP because the allegations are that these are crime scenes, that these are children who were, uh, murdered or died of neglect or abuse at, uh, at the schools.

00:32:05.960 Well, if that's true, it would be a crime scene and there should be police supervision, but at the very least there should be a professional supervision with, with the records made available to the public, not kept, uh, secret, like the record of, uh, the original, uh, uh, ground penetrating radar at the Kamloops.

00:32:25.820 So I think that properly conducted, uh, excavations would be the way to go.

00:32:32.240 But what I fear is going to happen is that we're going to get more and more, uh, amateur excavations, like the one from the blue kill school that don't actually prove anything, but which are hyped in the media.

00:32:44.780 As you're, you know, here is the evidence.

00:32:47.180 Here is a remains.

00:32:48.380 Well, if you dig in a cemetery, it's not unlikely that you're going to find human remains.

00:32:53.180 Uh, that's, that's what's in a cemetery.

00:32:55.700 So, um, uh, I, I'm not too optimistic right now about excavations, excavations properly carried out.

00:33:03.800 Yes.

00:33:04.160 But I haven't seen any evidence yet of any of these excavations being properly carried out.

00:33:09.740 Well, it's, it's such a good point.

00:33:11.700 I just want to go back, uh, because, you know, the, the, the, the Kamloops or Kamloops First Nations was sort of the big first one.

00:33:17.640 And then the next two, there was Kowasis in, in Saskatchewan and Lower Kootenay in British Columbia. 0.98

00:33:22.900 Um, both of those two secondary ones, uh, the unmarked graves were within existing cemeteries.

00:33:29.160 And, and you did have people from the local communities coming out in the media saying, look, there's no discovery here.

00:33:34.820 It was a graveyard.

00:33:35.600 It shouldn't surprise anyone that there was graves in a graveyard.

00:33:38.160 Um, someone else saying, uh, look, this was a graveyard that serviced the entire community, not just the, the, the residential school.

00:33:44.820 In fact, the one in, in, in, in Cranbrook and Lower Kootenay, the, uh, graveyard was attached to the church, which was attached to a hospital and it predated the residential school by a hundred years.

00:33:56.340 So, so, you know, to your point that, that they're finding skeletons, it's like, well, you know, this would have been a graveyard for the entire community and not, nothing to do with the, the residential school.

00:34:05.700 So I think, I think that's a really excellent point.

00:34:08.220 Well, Tom, I really appreciate your time and I appreciate all of the research and the work that you're doing to bring this really important issue, uh, to light.

00:34:15.040 So thank you so much for your time and thank you for your efforts on this.

00:34:18.240 If I could just toss in one more point about the unmarked graves, uh, graves may be unmarked today, but the, the common way of marking a grave.

00:34:26.340 Grave on, uh, on, on Indian reserve, uh, was, um, a white cross, a wooden cross, uh, you know, now this is Canada white crosses.

00:34:36.300 Don't stand up very well to the Canadian winter.

00:34:39.460 So, and we're talking in many cases about alleged burials that are decades or even more than a century old.

00:34:47.040 Uh, you know, Canada as a country is full of unmarked graves, not, not just of Indians, but of all kinds of people that were originally marked with a white cross.

00:34:56.880 But over time that cross has disintegrated.

00:34:59.760 And so that's another aspect on this, that when they say unmarked graves, that may be, uh, the situation today, but that's not necessarily the situation.

00:35:09.220 Uh, if it, if it ever was a grave, there most likely was a, a wooden cross there to mark it.

00:35:17.100 Uh, yeah, that's such an important point.

00:35:19.320 It's such a nuanced point that I, again, I never saw it reflected in the, in the CBC or the, or the Toronto Star or their coverage.

00:35:25.600 So.

00:35:26.020 No, you won't.

00:35:26.600 At that point?

00:35:27.320 Yeah.

00:35:28.200 Unfortunately.

00:35:29.120 All right, Tom, thank you so much for your time.

00:35:30.480 Great to have you on the show.

00:35:31.460 Okay, Candice.

00:35:32.060 My pleasure.

00:35:32.840 Bye-bye.

00:35:33.500 All right.

00:35:33.840 That's Tom Flanagan.

00:35:34.600 I'm Candice Malcolm.

00:35:35.260 And this is the Candice Malcolm Show.

00:35:36.500 Bye-bye.

00:35:36.520 Bye-bye.

The Candice Malcolm Show - May 30, 2022

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

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