Western Standard - August 26, 2025


Exposing the Residential School Grave Hoaxes： Government Funds & Media Missteps

Topics
residential school grave hoaxes
Mentioned
Anna Kelly Radar
How sustainable is Canadian municipalities' spending？ Will Alberta's new insurance model cost more than it pays？

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

219.31

Word count

1,023

Sentence count

69

Harmful content

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

A native band in BC claims that radar has identified the graves of murdered children. The CBC repeats the story from the band without checking it, the government lowers the flags in apology, and then the band shuts down communications, refuses to allow further investigation into the alleged graves, despite having taken millions in tax dollars to do that very thing.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 The story, it sounds so familiar, right? A native band in BC claims that Radar has identified the
00:00:05.340 graves of murdered children. The CBC repeats the story from the band without checking it.
00:00:09.960 The government lowers the flags in apology, and then the band shuts down communications,
00:00:14.420 refuses to allow any further investigation into the alleged graves, despite having
00:00:18.240 taken millions in tax dollars to do that very thing. Story sounds familiar, because the hoax
00:00:24.260 is proving lucrative, and the grifters won't change the narrative that works. It's been over
00:00:28.340 four years since a band in Kamloops claimed they'd discovered the remains of over 200 murdered
00:00:33.900 children in a field next to a former Indian residential school. So the federal government
00:00:38.520 allocated $246 million to search for the bodies of children at former residential school sites.
00:00:44.500 And the Kamloops band, well, they took $8 million of those dollars in funds and apparently didn't
00:00:48.740 find a thing. I mean, they say they know the location of 200 bodies, but with $8 million to
00:00:53.120 work with, they were incapable of taking a shovel and digging even one of those alleged graves up.
00:00:57.240 It's a hoax. I'm going to say it outright, and the band knows it's a hoax. If they really
00:01:01.940 believed there were children's bodies interred there, a forensic excavation would have begun
00:01:05.380 within weeks of the discovery of the anomalies. The government's willing to give them millions
00:01:09.240 of dollars without oversight, so why should they stop asking for more? And they are asking for
00:01:13.140 more, by the way. They want $12 million now. The claim made in, as Sheldon probably mispronouncing
00:01:17.400 it, B.C. is just up north of Vancouver. This is the new one. They're saying radar identified
00:01:21.940 the graves of 81 children. When the Kamloops hoax was announced, it made international
00:01:26.920 headlines. This is something that's kind of promising. The response to this latest hoax
00:01:30.520 has been more muted. Only a few outlets have given it any coverage. This one didn't make
00:01:34.540 any waves really, aside from CBC, though, who dutifully called the radar anomalies unmarked
00:01:38.640 graves. After a backlash over that inaccurate and inflammatory reporting, CBC reporter Alana
00:01:43.760 Kelly actually deleted her posting on X where she said graves had been found and locked down
00:01:48.300 her account. People are getting sick and tired of being fed this host. A hoax, not to mention
00:01:52.320 paying for it. Another grift being carried out by many Indigenous bands is to do GPR surveys 1.00
00:01:57.100 over known cemeteries and then acting aghast when indications of graves are found. That was
00:02:02.380 done in Gourard, Alberta in 2022. It was reported that a possible mass gravesite was there. The
00:02:07.060 news faded away when it became clear that all they did was prove that a cemetery contained
00:02:10.540 bodies. How much funding they got to establish this is unknown. Most burials on Native reserves
00:02:16.160 historically, and even today, all they mark them with is wooden crosses, which deteriorate
00:02:20.360 after a few years. They don't maintain the cemeteries, it's just the way it goes, and
00:02:23.660 they get overgrown. It's common for cemeteries to have large sections of unmarked graves. It
00:02:29.080 doesn't mean the bodies were surreptitiously buried there or there was foul play. Makes
00:02:32.960 for great news copy, though, when these sites are discovered anew, aren't they? The reluctance
00:02:37.520 to dig these sites proves the motivations of the activists to be fraudulent rather than
00:02:41.840 genuine. In Winnipeg, activists lobbied to have tens of millions of dollars dedicated to
00:02:45.900 digging up a local landfill to find the bodies of two murdered women suspected to be in there.
00:02:50.680 It was claimed that burial for Indigenous people is sacred and these bodies must be found and
00:02:54.820 properly interred at any cost. Why then aren't the alleged bodies at the residential schools
00:02:59.140 considered sacred? Why hasn't it become a priority to return these remains to the families? This
00:03:04.280 exposes another part of the hoax. While it's alleged that hundreds of children were killed and buried at
00:03:08.480 these residential school sites, there aren't any families to be found making the claims that their
00:03:11.780 children disappeared. I don't think at least a few would be kind of demanding know where their
00:03:15.300 children went. The schools also kept meticulous records of the students they needed to in order
00:03:20.780 to be reimbursed by the government. There's no records of vanishing children to be found. And
00:03:24.020 guys, this was supposed to be happening in the 50s and 60s. Where did these alleged children come
00:03:28.100 from? At a church site in Manitoba and a hospital site in Edmonton, activists made the air of actually
00:03:32.280 they believe their own soup and excavated the alleged graves. And guess what? There was not a single
00:03:37.580 body found, despite the oral history claiming they were there. Since those failures, Indigenous bands have learned not to
00:03:43.140 excavate. They just do the radar surveys and demand more money. Speaking of oral history, the claims of the
00:03:48.540 attendees of the Kamloops residential school that they were forced to go out and dig graves in the night for
00:03:52.420 their murdered classmates as recently as the 60s. If this is true, it's possible the perpetrators might
00:03:57.080 still be alive to be prosecuted. If the RCMP believed any of this, there'd be excavations. Mass murders
00:04:02.220 don't just remain uninvestigated. The RCMP knows there's no bodies to be found. It's a hoax. The child burial
00:04:07.880 hoaxes at residential school sites have caused real hurt, though, and real social division. Also,
00:04:12.340 over 100 churches have been vandalized or burned to the ground in response to this hoax, and hundreds
00:04:16.660 of millions of dollars have been wasted. And this is only going to be continuing, this is going to
00:04:20.520 keep continuing, as long as the hoaxes are indulged rather than called out. It's time to take the
00:04:24.540 shovels out and prove what's underground at these sites once and for all, no matter what the local band
00:04:29.000 thinks. Guess what, guys? Indigenous bands aren't sovereign nations. They have no authority to block murder 1.00
00:04:33.620 investigations, despite what they like to claim. That's a different hoax than for another column.
00:04:38.260 In the meantime, let's get digging.