Western Standard - July 18, 2022


CORY'S RANT： The lack of follow up with the discovery of the alleged residential school grave sites.


Episode Stats

Length

3 minutes

Words per Minute

205.67941

Word Count

775

Sentence Count

44


Summary

In the wake of the discovery of human remains near an Indian Residential School in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada, many have wondered if the remains are those of hundreds of children who died at the hands of residential school workers.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 If I found what I suspected to be human bodies on my property,
00:00:03.220 the area would be taped off and police investigators would methodically excavate
00:00:07.160 to determine if there are indeed bodies, how many bodies are there,
00:00:10.300 and then try and determine why and how the bodies ended up there.
00:00:13.800 I couldn't tell the police, hey, I found some burial mounds on my land
00:00:16.480 and I have some neighbors who assure me they contain the remains of murdered children.
00:00:20.500 I just want to see, though, apologies from those accused of killing these children
00:00:23.700 and compensation for those potentially related to those children.
00:00:26.760 Aside from that, though, I don't want you on my land and those mounds must remain untouched.
00:00:32.260 The scenario I read just sounds absurd,
00:00:34.640 but that's exactly what's happened with the Kamloops residential school issue.
00:00:39.080 It's been 14 months since ground-penetrating radar identified anomalies
00:00:42.720 in what was once an apple orchard next to an Indian residential school in Kamloops.
00:00:47.040 There's no evidence, aside from the GPR anomalies, of graves being in that location,
00:00:51.340 aside from anecdotes from people who attended the school decades ago.
00:00:54.280 There's no record of missing children, no families identified who lost children
00:00:58.840 during the period of alleged burials, no attestations of burials
00:01:03.720 from the many indigenous people who were actually employed at the school at that time.
00:01:07.760 It's all based on stories that children told each other
00:01:10.620 of secret nighttime burials happening in an orchard over 60 years ago.
00:01:14.840 I worked with ground-penetrating radar when I worked in the Arctic.
00:01:18.720 I spent four years up there.
00:01:19.940 We used it to determine ice thicknesses on the Beaufort Sea so we could safely travel on it.
00:01:24.680 And for that application, GPR is fabulously accurate.
00:01:28.360 What GPR does is it records differences in density.
00:01:31.360 Water and ice have distinctly different densities,
00:01:33.360 and the GPR can easily determine ice thicknesses.
00:01:36.240 That said, we didn't rely 100% on our GPR data.
00:01:38.960 We had protocols requiring regular measurements of the ice thickness with an auger
00:01:43.180 and a long measuring rod to ensure the accuracy of the GPR survey.
00:01:47.300 And we'd have to calibrate it at times.
00:01:49.240 That's it, though.
00:01:50.060 It doesn't provide snapshots below that.
00:01:52.000 It doesn't give a 3D image of what's going on underground or underwater.
00:01:55.480 It can only tell you that there have been changes in density.
00:01:58.420 For graves, GPR could work well.
00:02:01.240 A hole that's dug and filled in even decades ago
00:02:03.740 could show distinctively and distinctly on a GPR survey.
00:02:07.280 The thing is, though, many other things can look the same way.
00:02:10.540 An old trench for irrigation would show up as an anomaly every time the GPR passed over it.
00:02:14.620 An old shed site, or even outhouse sites,
00:02:17.080 or pathways where the ground got impacted could present as anomalies.
00:02:20.780 Old root beds from former apple trees would look much like burial sites for an example as well.
00:02:27.000 Our nation was turned upside down over the anomalies registered on a GPR unit.
00:02:31.260 Our flags were kept at half-mast for nearly six months.
00:02:33.740 Churches were burned.
00:02:34.900 Apologies were offered.
00:02:35.780 And billions more in settlements are pending.
00:02:39.660 Why on earth are we not verifying the data from the GPR survey yet?
00:02:43.340 As far as can be seen, not a teaspoon worth of dirt has been moved to try and determine what happened.
00:02:48.800 Hey, maybe there are remains of hundreds of children who vanished,
00:02:51.660 and they've secretly been buried by residential school workers.
00:02:54.240 In that case, though, I want to see the bodies exhumed and a criminal investigation carried out.
00:02:58.340 Maybe there's hundreds of bodies of Spanish explorers down there, and it was a valuable archaeological site.
00:03:04.680 Or maybe there's not a single body in the area, and we need to re-examine just how much weight we're going to give to anecdotal oral history on serious matters.
00:03:12.300 Until a true forensic investigation is done, we're left with nothing but speculation.
00:03:16.500 If such a crime has happened, wouldn't the relations of the victims be eager to get a full picture, find the facts, and, of course, pursue those responsible?
00:03:24.220 Why are we waiting on this?
00:03:25.980 And I fear the answer may come down to money, as so many things do.
00:03:29.020 The mystery is a lot more lucrative than the reality might be.
00:03:32.100 There are a lot of people making a whole lot of money from the residential school issue, and they don't want it to go away.
00:03:36.680 That pipeline of cash would come to a halt if it was determined there was never actually a mass murder of children.
00:03:41.960 It's time to start digging, because this is too serious to keep putting things off.