00:06:23.140So, 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.
00:06:40.640So, I mean, this is the greatest fake news story in Canadian history.
00:06:45.700There'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.
00:06:55.240Well, it's really interesting that there was no demand for evidence, that this press release was sent out.
00:07:05.040I 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.
00:07:13.480They weren't from a report, as you said, because the report wasn't published.
00:07:16.420It was all based on quotes from people who had their own recollection of things that happened.
00:07:22.100So, it didn't seem like the standard that we would usually apply to news stories was taken into consideration at all.
00:07:29.740They just sort of ran with the most hyperbolic aspects of it and used that to basically condemn Canada as an evil genocidal state.
00:07:39.960I'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,
00:07:48.360why 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.
00:07:56.660Well, there are several background factors here that help to explain how this story could gather so much momentum so quickly.
00:08:04.840First of all, it played to an existing narrative.
00:08:07.080The 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.
00:08:22.480The 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.
00:08:38.040So there had been lots of oral testimony to this in this direction over a period of many years.
00:08:49.200So the media were primed to report what they thought or what they heard to be physical evidence of this pre-existing narrative.
00:08:59.540So when something plays into an existing media narrative, it's bound to get uncritical coverage, and that's exactly what it did get.
00:09:09.560Secondly, 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.
00:09:23.820And 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.
00:09:43.200But, 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.
00:10:01.500So 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.
00:10:19.720But that fits into the notion of oral, traditional oral testimony, which has become quite crucial in the world of indigenous politics.
00:10:29.540So there's another factor that helps to explain how this story could gather so much momentum so quickly.
00:10:37.900One 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.
00:10:49.580You had a recent piece in True North talking about how they had this sort of world-class Olympic swimming pool.
00:10:56.120You found archived photos of children sort of carefree, playing, happy.
00:11:02.660A lot of these pictures came from our friend Chris Champion over at Dorchester Review, the publisher over at Dorchester Review.
00:11:09.880And 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.
00:11:26.760You know, it shows children looking happy, healthy, you know, enjoying a variety of activities.
00:11:31.680This doesn't really seem to reconcile with the sort of overly negative doom and gloom.
00:11:39.240You know, these schools were death camps that were murdering children.
00:11:43.920So, well, first of all, thank you for unearthing that and publishing it through True North.
00:11:48.580But 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?
00:11:59.180And 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?
00:12:09.900Yeah, 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.
00:12:26.860That's over a period of more than 100 years, not 215, 51.
00:12:33.080Now, 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.
00:12:43.900And what the death certificates show is that the children died for, you know, sort of normal causes.
00:12:55.420A few were runaways who suffered accidents.
00:12:59.460Majority died of, you know, kind of ordinary diseases of the day, such as tuberculosis.
00:13:04.740And they were buried, typically at their home reserves.
00:13:10.120Children came to that school from all over British Columbia.
00:13:15.480It wasn't always feasible to send the body back.
00:13:18.920But most of them were sent back to the home reserve where they were buried.
00:13:24.480So there was nothing secretive or mysterious about the about these deaths.
00:13:30.240I mean, you know, every death is sad, but people do die.
00:13:34.520And particularly in an age before antibiotics, diseases like tuberculosis and typhus were epidemic killers.
00:13:44.660There'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.
00:13:57.300There'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.
00:14:08.740There's, there's many, many pictures of children playing in the pool or otherwise enjoying sports and recreation.
00:14:21.840We 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.
00:14:33.620They said the potatoes were sometimes kind of watery, but overall it was pretty good.
00:14:40.760As you correctly point out, some of the teachers were Indians.
00:14:53.080These, these, these schools were major centers of employment for First Nations people.
00:14:56.700So, because they had janitors, they had dorm supervisors, they had secretaries, on and on.
00:15:02.500And a majority of these people were, were First Nations.
00:15:06.920So, 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.
00:15:23.040So, um, so I come back to my point about how a story plays to an ideological preconception.
00:15:48.440And so they tend to run with something that, that fits their preconceptions.
00:15:53.180And 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.
00:16:03.700And if you read the coverage, um, many, many of the articles go way beyond what even the chief had announced.
00:16:11.820The 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.
00:16:24.980You know, there was, there was nothing like that, but another journalistic practice is to, uh, base your story on what other journalists have written.
00:16:34.240And I mean, at one time you'd go to the, the, the clippings file in the newspaper, the morgue, so to speak, and look at the stories.
00:16:43.940So a reporter reads one story, adds a couple of comments, passes it off as his own story.
00:16:49.900And so the same fallacies get repeated and repeated and repeated.
00:16:53.480The more they're repeated, the more they, uh, uh, come to seem true to people because they're being, uh, repeated now.
00:17:01.640And 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.
00:17:16.340And in fact, they weren't put back to normal flying position until a veteran's day and, uh, uh, November the 11th.
00:17:25.200So what's that June, July, August, September, October, it's about six months of flying at half mast.
00:17:31.860I 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.
00:17:42.800Well, 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.
00:18:01.640And yet, you know, that, that term was, was, was, was shuffled around.
00:18:04.680There were some corrections, uh, from, from, from more responsible media outlets, but other media outlets still, still use that term, um, mass graves.
00:18:12.500I, 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.
00:18:23.440I mean, one of the first things you, as a researcher or journalist, you would do is, is, okay, who were these children?
00:18:32.860Presumably the families would be distraught looking for their child.
00:18:37.320You'd send their child away to school, and then all of a sudden the child's gone.
00:18:41.120Just the whole premise of the idea that, that we, we could just throw around these numbers.
00:18:45.460And, you know, the, the 215 from the Kamloops band was just the first one.
00:18:49.620We heard, I think it was, uh, 715 from a band in Saskatchewan, and then another 250 from another band in Central British Columbia.
00:18:57.340And, and, you know, the, the numbers keep accumulating.
00:18:59.540I, 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.
00:19:13.300I, I just wonder, you know, from, from a research perspective, perhaps someone in the government or Truth and Reconciliation Commission, do they have a archive of lists?
00:19:27.620Is, is, is, is someone looking into it?
00:19:29.620Or, or, or again, why, you know, why are we so quick to accept these large, large numbers without the, without the first bit of evidence, which would be names and, and, you know, family records of, of who these children were?
00:19:46.540There are, there are really three big pieces of mythology, which come together to, to create this story.
00:19:52.300The 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.
00:20:01.760Secondly, there's the legend of the missing children.
00:20:05.140And this is a huge source of confusion.
00:20:09.220Yes, there were children who died at school.
00:20:19.100I 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.
00:20:40.280Um, so yeah, a lot of children died, but, uh, that doesn't mean that they're missing, uh, maybe they're missed.
00:20:49.160It's parents always, of course, miss a child that they've lost, but missing implies that nobody knows what happened.
00:20:56.680Um, 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.
00:21:12.580I 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.
00:21:29.580But it's, sorry, is that in Vancouver or Victoria?
00:21:32.380I can't remember which, anyway, um, uh, one of those major BC cities, but, uh, nobody can get access to that.
00:21:38.940The, the facility's been closed and they're not making copies of, uh, of the, uh, of documents for researchers.
00:21:48.300And, uh, um, so there, there, there, sadly, there are dead children, but they're not really missing.
00:21:59.460Now, 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.
00:22:11.360It'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.
00:22:25.960I 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.
00:22:36.980Um, 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.
00:22:48.020Um, there's, there's many, many, uh, uh, cases of that type.
00:22:52.940So 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,
00:23:10.160Uh, 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.
00:23:20.420Um, I mean, only a minority of, uh, Indian children ever went to a residential school.
00:23:27.760Uh, there were more, uh, who went to day schools on reserves than to residential schools.
00:23:35.520And, 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.
00:23:46.560Um, 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.
00:23:57.220Uh, 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.
00:24:09.640Um, sometimes it was recommended to parents, but, uh, they, uh, they weren't required to send their children to residential school.
00:24:21.300There 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.
00:24:35.040And, um, um, um, that led to a lot of family breakdown.
00:24:40.200That's a long story, but there was an infusion of cash and, uh, alcohol became traded on reserves.
00:24:46.680And 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.
00:24:58.960So 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.
00:25:12.940So 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.
00:25:33.260So you have these interlocking bits of mythology of, uh, uh, unmarked graves, missing children forced to attend.
00:25:41.480And, 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.
00:25:54.380And 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.
00:26:12.860And so you got this receptive, uh, ideology.
00:26:16.540It'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.
00:26:25.480And, and, and then it's, it's, it's easily, it's seized upon then by journalists and politicians.
00:26:31.880Well, it's, it's, it's tremendous, the impact that it's had on our country over the past year.
00:26:36.920I 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.
00:26:48.060And, 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.
00:27:04.480I, 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.
00:27:13.320Because I, I know in your, in your piece that you wrote for True North, you said that there must be an excavation.
00:27:18.280We need to sort of put this issue to rest.
00:27:20.800Um, 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.
00:27:30.620And, 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.
00:27:43.320Of, of first nations people and enable them to have, uh, you know, good lives in Canada.
00:27:50.580Well, I'm trying to do my little bit by writing about it.
00:27:53.340Uh, you might say I'm trying to expose fake news and true north.
00:27:57.480I hope you'll appreciate the sly humor there.
00:28:00.420Uh, 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.
00:28:08.820That even if it doesn't have a lot of impact immediately, we'll be there for, uh, for the future.
00:28:15.180Um, secondly, there need to be excavations to test, uh, to test the theory, but, uh, not just any excavations.
00:28:26.580Um, there's recent news report from the, um, saddle Hills for, uh, first nation saddle Hills, saddle Lake, which is it.
00:28:36.180Um, anyway, saddle something in Northeastern Alberta, which is, uh, where the blue quills residential school was located.
00:28:45.300And, um, they've been digging, uh, and they claim according to CBC reports to have found perhaps 200 plus skeletons.
00:28:56.100Um, you know, but, but first of all, uh, there's no professional or RCMP supervision.
00:29:05.120Uh, these, it's just people digging and they're digging in a cemetery.
00:29:08.760Now it's not surprising that you're going to find burials in a cemetery.
00:29:13.100They claim to have found, um, uh, children's remains, but they also say that they've been reburying as they go.
00:29:21.240So there's no evidence that can be shown, uh, to the, uh, to the public.
00:29:28.380So 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.
00:29:43.140It's just based on, uh, somebody say so about what they claim to have seen when they dug in a cemetery.
00:29:49.520Uh, 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.
00:30:02.880Whereas 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.
00:30:13.440And the cemetery was used by the members of the reserve, as well as by the residential school.
00:30:20.520Um, 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.
00:30:39.880Uh, and I forget what the upper limit was, well, uh, children weren't admitted to residential school until they were six.
00:30:47.520Uh, so if a four-year-old died, it wouldn't have been at a residential school.
00:30:52.500So, 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.
00:31:02.040Uh, and, uh, I've done some of my own family research, uh, 19th century, Irish immigrants, parish churches kept records in Latin.
00:31:13.320Uh, 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.
00:31:25.760Um, 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.
00:31:38.520So 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.
00:31:54.520I 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.
00:32:05.960Well, 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.
00:32:25.820So I think that properly conducted, uh, excavations would be the way to go.
00:32:32.240But 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.
00:32:44.780As you're, you know, here is the evidence.
00:33:35.600It shouldn't surprise anyone that there was graves in a graveyard.
00:33:38.160Um, someone else saying, uh, look, this was a graveyard that serviced the entire community, not just the, the, the residential school.
00:33:44.820In 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.
00:33:56.340So, 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.
00:34:05.700So I think, I think that's a really excellent point.
00:34:08.220Well, 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.
00:34:15.040So thank you so much for your time and thank you for your efforts on this.
00:34:18.240If 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.
00:34:26.340Grave on, uh, on, on Indian reserve, uh, was, um, a white cross, a wooden cross, uh, you know, now this is Canada white crosses.
00:34:36.300Don't stand up very well to the Canadian winter.
00:34:39.460So, and we're talking in many cases about alleged burials that are decades or even more than a century old.
00:34:47.040Uh, 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.
00:34:56.880But over time that cross has disintegrated.
00:34:59.760And 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.
00:35:09.220Uh, if it, if it ever was a grave, there most likely was a, a wooden cross there to mark it.
00:35:17.100Uh, yeah, that's such an important point.
00:35:19.320It'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.