Western Standard - Professor Tom Flanagan on the latest round of GPR anomalies found on former residential school sites

00:00:00.000 We first booked you, which was a while back, it was based on, which reserve that was, one of the ones, Star Blanket announcing that they'd found a bunch of anomalies with their GPR.

00:00:11.280 And even since then, yet another one up in Port Alberni, B.C. area now is reporting the same thing.

00:00:15.700 Like, this issue is just going on and on and on, but there doesn't seem to be any resolution going on.

00:00:20.860 Yeah, well, this has happened now in seven or eight different First Nations around the country and will happen at Moore because the federal government has appropriated a large amount of money for this kind of searching.

00:00:35.860 And so bands are taking advantage of it to hire somebody to push ground penetrating radar around.

00:00:44.360 It's more than that. They also will hire some of their own people to go do sort of oral history projects, talking to members about their memories or perhaps what they have heard about residential schools.

00:01:00.560 So it becomes a fairly major effort engaging a lot of people. So anyway, you're going to hear more stories like that for sure.

00:01:07.360 Yeah, well, and oral history, I mean, that's kind of a whole loaded realm on its own.

00:01:11.340 I mean, I understand wanting to give some weight to oral history.

00:01:16.080 You have a culture that's been around that didn't have a written language, so you had to rely on things being passed down.

00:01:23.860 But all the same, we have to recognize and understand that oral history is also notoriously inaccurate at times.

00:01:29.760 And to base something as serious as this on just the oral history, I mean, we need much deeper investigation into some of the things that have been alleged.

00:01:36.520 Yeah, I think we can use our court system as an example.

00:01:41.340 Oral testimony is admitted all the time in the form of eyewitness testimony, and even some forms of hearsay evidence are admitted if it's expert testimony, for example, scientist or whatever.

00:01:57.260 But oral history in the court proceeding is always subject to testing.

00:02:04.760 First of all, there's a possibility of cross-examination by counsel for the other side.

00:02:10.680 And then there is introduction of other kinds of evidence to compare against oral evidence.

00:02:16.220 Other kinds of evidence would be, for example, written documents.

00:02:20.620 In the case of ancient events, you might have archaeological evidence.

00:02:26.080 Even linguistic evidence about language change can give you ideas about movement of people.

00:02:32.280 So there are many kinds of evidence.

00:02:33.640 And what our courts do is admit oral evidence but triangulate it against others.

00:02:39.360 And I think that's what we should be doing here.

00:02:41.540 There may be something to these oral accounts that are being gathered.

00:02:44.640 But until they're subject to corroboration, and maybe even against other oral accounts, this is another part of it.

00:02:52.720 You know, in a court proceeding, you have a witness for one side.

00:02:55.340 You have a witness for another side.

00:02:56.640 Maybe they saw different things or, you know, don't remember it differently.

00:02:59.460 So you've got to do all this triangulation, and that's what's not being done at the present time.

00:03:06.100 No, and as you'd said, I mean, that explains a lot of it.

00:03:09.360 I mean, when people have a means to make money, they've kind of created a cottage industry.

00:03:12.540 It was a large amount put out just for GPR surveys and things such as that.

00:03:16.360 And I guess people can't necessarily even be faulted for taking advantage of the program.

00:03:19.960 But, you know, getting to the truth of things, I kind of want to come around back in a bit with the oral history

00:03:24.460 and the Kamloops Residential School, which set the whole thing off sort of to begin with.

00:03:28.760 Because a lot of that was based on stories of, I mean, it was terrible stories of children basically being murdered,

00:03:36.180 snuck out in the night, buried in an apple orchard.

00:03:39.260 But aside from the oral history of that, there's no other record or anything could be found to corroborate that.

00:03:45.640 Now, the GPR has been done, and they found a bunch of anomalies, but nothing else has been done since.

00:03:51.540 Is there going to be further investigation?

00:03:53.640 And if not, I mean, how can we prompt it?

00:03:56.060 Well, I doubt there will be.

00:03:57.820 Some of the leaders at Kamloops promised that there would be, but it hasn't happened,

00:04:03.920 and more than a year has gone by, and no soil has turned.

00:04:08.960 I think there's a recognition at some level that digging is risky because it might upset the whole apple cart.

00:04:17.180 I mean, what they're going to find at Kamloops, I'm pretty sure, is that these soil anomalies in that particular place are due to the installation of a septic field in the 1920s.

00:04:30.120 A new sanitation system was put in the school, and there was a big septic tank, and then there was a field of weeping tile to disperse the liquids.

00:04:39.040 And about something like 2,000 feet of weeping tile were planted in the same area where the apple orchard now is,

00:04:45.020 and in the same area where they did the testing with the GPR.

00:04:49.440 So that's probably what they're going to find if they ever do actually dig.

00:04:53.220 So I think a lot of people perhaps realize that digging is too risky for the cause that they're engaged in.

00:05:01.320 And they're much better off by issuing press releases about soil anomalies, hoping that gullible figures in the press, as they often do,

00:05:09.860 will turn those into reports of actual burials.

00:05:13.740 I mean, it was in the headline today on the one from Bordell-Burney about, you know, more unmarked graves.

00:05:19.840 No unmarked grave has been found anywhere yet in Canada before or after the reports from Kamloops.

00:05:29.260 There have been now thousands of soil anomalies have been reported, but, well, maybe thousands are too strong, but certainly over 1,000.

00:05:37.140 No, actually 1,000, excuse me, 1,000 is not too strong because from Libret in the Capel Valley, they claim to have 2,000 soil anomalies.

00:05:45.020 So we're up into the thousands, but there is not a single credible report or any kind of report, really,

00:05:52.300 not even a dubious report of exhuming a human skeleton, child or otherwise.

00:05:58.860 I mean, there's nothing.

00:06:00.940 I've never seen a story go so far with so little evidence.

00:06:05.420 It's really quite remarkable.

00:06:07.920 Well, yeah, and in oral history, was it, oh, I can forget the name of it.

00:06:11.800 There was a hospital in Edmonton.

00:06:13.700 It was a tuberculosis hospital way back in its time.

00:06:16.340 And there were some First Nations people claimed that First Nations kids had been buried on the grounds of that.

00:06:22.580 And they did a GPR survey, and they found 33 anomalies, and in two different digs, didn't find a single bit of human remains.

00:06:30.220 We didn't hear a heck of a lot about that, though.

00:06:31.760 No, you don't hear about the negative evidence.

00:06:35.440 But so anyway, I'm not holding my breath for any digs to take place.

00:06:41.700 Now, the most recent report is that the federal government has engaged a company from the Netherlands that specializes in looking for remains of missing children,

00:06:50.900 and apparently as a serious company with scientific credibility, to come over and consult about the right way to approach this.

00:06:58.500 But, you know, we're already getting protests from this side of the water from Native leaders about, well, there wasn't enough consultation.

00:07:06.640 These people are going to be insensitive to our culture.

00:07:09.180 What are their protocols?

00:07:10.980 You know, on and on.

00:07:12.220 Oh, sorry, Corey.

00:07:13.420 I bumped my rig here.

00:07:15.440 All we're hearing is reasons not to fully cooperate with this investigation from outside.

00:07:24.480 So my guess is that at the end of the day, we will continue to get the reports without any real verification,

00:07:30.500 or in some cases, highly dubious verification, like the bone that was found in part of a skull, I think it was, was found at Librette.

00:07:42.180 You know, but that wasn't handled properly, didn't really tell us very much.

00:07:49.300 And we have no idea that, for sure, whether it came from an Indian child who might have been at the school or some other child.

00:07:57.220 I mean, there's all kinds of people who have lived in the Capella Valley for a long time.

00:08:01.200 So that's where we are.

00:08:05.340 No, frankly, no, no serious evidence, no evidence that a competent court would, you know, would grant any credence to.

00:08:15.160 Oh, and then there's other showings.

00:08:17.980 And it frustrates me to watch the press and the way they cover that, at least a lot of the legacy media.

00:08:22.140 I had the opportunity last summer.

00:08:24.000 I went up to Gruard in northern Alberta.

00:08:26.060 I had to do some stuff in High Prairie.

00:08:27.660 And I went and checked out the Gruard site.

00:08:29.300 And that was a large residential school in an isolated area.

00:08:31.880 It has actually got a nice big cathedral there.

00:08:33.880 They use it as a college for First Nations people.

00:08:36.080 Still a bit of a rough town, as many reserves are. 1.00

00:08:40.060 But the area, because that was another one where, oh, well, they found a whole bunch of anomalies.

00:08:43.340 And I went physically to where it was.

00:08:45.280 And, yes, it's a Catholic cemetery on a hill.

00:08:49.140 It's fenced in, even.

00:08:50.380 So, yes, they did their survey inside the cemetery.

00:08:52.860 And you could see, even just looking at the grass, the disturbances.

00:08:55.840 Yes, there certainly was somebody buried there at some time.

00:08:59.580 Chances are, and you see on most reserves, there usually a wooden cross gets put in.

00:09:03.380 And after time, it disintegrates and goes away.

00:09:05.640 But this isn't a discovery.

00:09:07.480 This is just establishing a known burial site.

00:09:10.540 But it doesn't get represented that way when it hits the news.

00:09:13.100 Yeah, this is another angle on it.

00:09:14.560 Some of the reports concern areas that you might say are greenfield.

00:09:21.400 They're just seeing what they might find.

00:09:23.720 In other cases, they are running their machines in areas that are known to have been cemeteries.

00:09:30.100 Usually, they're parish cemeteries.

00:09:31.980 I mean, most residential schools were located near towns or villages.

00:09:36.720 And there was a Catholic or Anglican parish there.

00:09:40.160 It would have a cemetery.

00:09:41.160 And sometimes, children who died at the school were buried there.

00:09:46.440 Not great numbers, but, you know, occasionally.

00:09:48.840 But other people were buried there.

00:09:50.600 So you start using ground-penetrating radar on an old cemetery.

00:09:54.940 Sure, you're going to find soil anomalies.

00:09:58.380 And if you dug, you might well find skeletons or remains.

00:10:02.120 But would they be the remains of children who somehow disappeared from the school?

00:10:11.240 Well, for that, you'd have to have other evidence.

00:10:13.860 And, again, we haven't seen any evidence of that.

00:10:18.560 Well, and, again, like, let's just say, for example, they exhumed, you know, that there really were children murdered and buried in some of these sites.

00:10:25.660 I mean, shouldn't this be then a criminal investigation, a forensic one?

00:10:29.080 I mean, if I'd reported, hey, there's a body buried in my backyard there behind my house.

00:10:34.500 But, no, no, no, I don't want you digging it up.

00:10:36.300 I just wanted to tell you it's back there.

00:10:38.140 Well, I'm not going to have a choice in the matter anymore.

00:10:40.100 If there's any evidence of it, the police are going to come in and they're going to dig a hole and see just what the heck happened there.

00:10:45.040 But that doesn't seem to be the case here.

00:10:46.320 No, no, it's the, I mean, it's, again, it's a little different, different in different places.

00:10:53.020 But in most cases, the RCMP aren't involved at all.

00:10:56.580 In a couple of places, the RCMP said, well, we're aware of it, but we're letting the First Nation lead the investigation.

00:11:04.060 You know, well, what does that mean?

00:11:05.200 If, like you say, you find the evidence of a murder in your yard, the police don't say, well, you lead the investigation.

00:11:12.080 Call us if you find something.

00:11:13.340 Yeah.

00:11:13.740 I think the Mounties probably realized that really there's nothing in this and that if a body was found, it probably won't be a child from the school.

00:11:27.960 And in any case, it was probably way beyond the point where police could do anything with it.

00:11:34.240 You know, if it's 75 years old, what are the police supposed to do?

00:11:38.120 So, yeah, the police are not involved in any credible way in this.

00:11:44.260 And you're right.

00:11:45.140 They should be.

00:11:45.660 If we took these reports seriously, the police ought to be leading the investigation.

00:11:51.780 There ought to be crime scene tape up and teams exhuming and so on.

00:11:56.820 But none of that is happening.

00:11:57.820 So, that gives you an idea that people who are in a position to understand what's going on actually don't take it seriously.

00:12:07.060 It's all a performance.

00:12:08.420 It's a performance, really.

00:12:09.920 Yeah.

00:12:10.220 So, getting to the bottom of the whole thing, though, because this is really causing a lot of damage.

00:12:14.360 I mean, there's a lot of sensitivity between the First Nations and non-First Nations and people who are concerned.

00:12:20.160 And, I mean, this is just increasing the division.

00:12:22.560 It's increasing a lot of hurt, whether things really, you know, how they happened or where they happened.

00:12:28.020 And we need resolution, though.

00:12:30.420 So, I want to get to the hardest part.

00:12:31.440 How?

00:12:31.820 How are we going to close this off?

00:12:33.460 Because this trend just seems to be snowballing rather than reaching a closure anywhere.

00:12:37.980 Yeah, I think it's going to get worse before it gets better.

00:12:43.340 Unfortunate to have to say that.

00:12:45.140 But I don't see any signs that anybody in authority is going to exert any control over it.

00:12:51.840 So, I think it will continue to grow.

00:12:54.800 Eventually, everything comes to an end and it will burn itself out like the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts in the 17th century. 0.99

00:13:01.800 And then later on, there will be a period of reflection and people will say, how could we have been so stupid? 0.88

00:13:08.840 But these things can go on for a very long time in the absence, maybe especially in the absence of evidence, 0.97

00:13:17.920 because the absence of evidence allows people to keep speculating.

00:13:23.040 So, I wish I could tell your viewers that it's going to get better, but I fear it's going to get worse.

00:13:28.580 Those are all the signs that we're getting more and more of these reports.

00:13:31.800 They're repeating the same methodology of pushing the GPR around, collecting stories, claiming to have found graves,

00:13:40.580 but not exhuming and not testing in any real way.

00:13:43.860 And as long as they continue to get money from the government to do that, I think it will continue.

00:13:50.760 It's unfortunate.

00:13:51.760 I know.

00:13:52.020 I didn't expect a quick, easy answer.

00:13:53.580 But I was hoping maybe, you know, you've spent a lot of time on the First Nation system, that you'd had a revelation and realized how we can, you know, fix this, but it was worth a shot.

00:14:03.120 It's always my weakness as a pundit.

00:14:04.980 I could never foretell the future.

00:14:06.480 I was only good at explaining the past.

00:14:09.860 And you've written, I mean, as we close off, you've done a lot of work on this.

00:14:14.000 You wrote First Nations Second Thoughts. 0.99

00:14:15.580 I remember rushing out to get that.

00:14:16.800 And at least you're going into the subject of how we can work towards fixing.

00:14:20.320 I mean, the whole system in general is failing.

00:14:23.740 I think Canadians and First Nations people altogether.

00:14:26.560 Are you still working on some items now?

00:14:29.460 And where can people find the information?

00:14:31.400 Yeah, most of my research on this topic in recent years has been published by the Fraser Institute.

00:14:37.000 And anybody who's interested, just Google my name in conjunction with Fraser Institute, and you'll find a whole series of studies, many of which have a fiscal focus of, like, how much is the government spending and how much is it accomplishing?

00:14:52.020 I've written quite a bit about the compensation, well, I call it a racket, which has evolved since the big apology in 2008, Prime Minister Harper's apology for the residential schools and the compensation that was paid to the so-called survivors then.

00:15:13.480 Well, in Harper's mind, that was supposed to be the end.

00:15:16.520 You know, this brings it to a close.

00:15:18.240 It turned out to be just the beginning.

00:15:19.820 It was touched off a whole series of further class actions for different categories of First Nations people with different alleged grievances.

00:15:32.240 And then when the liberals were elected in 2015, Prime Minister Trudeau decided not to contest any of these.

00:15:41.980 So it's like Star Trek, resistance is futile.

00:15:45.280 Now, ever since 2015, the government simply negotiates a settlement every time somebody comes in with one of these class actions.

00:15:55.060 And so billions and billions of dollars are being shoveled out the back of the truck.

00:15:59.020 The biggest one, I don't know how many of your viewers are aware of this, a $40 billion settlement for alleged harms to children through the child welfare system.

00:16:10.460 But there are many other class actions as well.

00:16:14.400 And the government, in my opinion, is derelict in its duty.

00:16:17.000 It's not contesting these so that they get a true hearing in court.

00:16:20.120 They're saying, well, come on, let's negotiate.

00:16:22.020 We'll put up some money for a settlement.

00:16:23.820 And we're running into the many billions of dollars.

00:16:26.120 And the emotionalism surrounding the missing children and unmarked graves myths is a big part of what drives these.

00:16:34.240 It makes it hard for people to view these grievances in any rational context because what's more emotional than a missing child?

00:16:42.700 So all this kind of fits together, and sadly, maybe a new government will bring a change, but I don't know how confident I am.

00:16:57.040 Pierre Pollard's crowd, you know, they voted four months ago for a parliamentary resolution that Indian residential schools were actual genocide.

00:17:08.440 I mean, do they even believe what they're saying?

00:17:10.840 If that's true, there should be an international investigation, and this is what happens when you have a real genocide.

00:17:17.500 I mean, they're just saying, they're playing with words.

00:17:19.600 But it builds the emotionalism.

00:17:24.700 Yeah, well, and, you know, it's funny because I was going to speak.

00:17:27.440 I've got it queued up a little more on that with I have the definition in front of me, at least one definition of what, you know, if you're going to declare something a genocide.

00:17:34.300 And it says, an assessment of both individual and state responsibility requires a considerable body of evidence and must be carried out by a competent tribunal charged with the task.

00:17:43.400 Well, nothing like that has happened yet.

00:17:45.840 So you're really making a big leap to a very loaded word without having followed the process to really claim if that happened or not.

00:17:53.920 Yeah, it's a vocabulary inflation.

00:17:56.600 Of course, this happens all the time in politics.

00:17:58.720 People are constantly reaching for more dramatic language.

00:18:02.640 And so they reached for the word genocide and took it off the shelf.

00:18:05.780 First, it was cultural genocide, which is, well, I think it's a bad phrase, but maybe you could justify it as a kind of a metaphor.

00:18:14.920 But very quickly, cultural genocide turned into actual, literal, physical genocide, which is, you know, crazy, because if that was true, how can there be more indigenous people in Canada now than there ever were before the Europeans came?

00:18:34.440 I mean, if it was a genocide, it wasn't a very effective one.

00:18:38.780 But of course, it wasn't a genocide.

00:18:40.460 It was what it was, was an attempt at acculturation to make it possible for indigenous people to fit into the new society, which was being created by immigration.

00:18:51.280 And you can argue about whether that was right or wrong, but it wasn't genocidal.

00:18:56.780 So even the leading historians who opened up the whole residential school issue, for example, Jim Miller at the University of Saskatchewan, whose book, Shingwauk's Vision, was the first one that I read on the topic.

00:19:08.580 And he's very critical of the schools.

00:19:10.980 And he was a pioneering scholar, you know, excellent scholar.

00:19:14.800 But he's, you know, he's flatly stated there was no genocide and there are no, there are no unmarked graves and there are no missing children.

00:19:22.660 And so this thing is just spiraled out of control.

00:19:27.020 And now it's being driven by people that are are playing with words and ultimately for financial benefit, I think.

00:19:34.760 Well, and if you got another moment, I didn't really want to dive into this.

00:19:38.060 But since, you know, it kind of segwayed into it.

00:19:39.720 I mean, we saw a House of Commons motion from the same one who declared that the residential schools were a genocide.

00:19:45.460 The same member of parliament now is proposing to make it a crime to deny or question the genocide.

00:19:51.220 Like, this is very scary turf that they're starting to tread into on criminalizing this discussion you and I are having today, by definition, from what this member of parliament wants to enshrine into law, could land us in the legal soup.

00:20:04.660 I mean, this is getting too far, but it doesn't seem to be stopping.

00:20:08.620 Yeah.

00:20:09.080 Well, maybe Professor Miller and I should be packing our toothbrushes.

00:20:13.040 Don't they let you bring your own toothbrush into prison or not?

00:20:15.880 There was an excellent column today by Chris Selle in the National Post, which went into some of the details.

00:20:24.140 And after reading that, I think maybe people can relax a little bit.

00:20:29.300 And even if the thing is passed, it's probably going to have qualifications in it, which will make it unenforceable.

00:20:36.320 So it will turn out to be probably another exercise in virtue signaling without real world consequences, except for the way in which it debases the climate of public opinion.

00:20:48.280 So if legislation like that is passed, as soon as anybody says something which doesn't agree with current majority opinion, he can be attacked as, you know, purveying hate speech and so on.

00:20:59.720 So, so this should really be strangled before it gets gets any further.

00:21:07.380 Again, what will the conservatives do?

00:21:09.540 What will the liberals?

00:21:10.500 It's an NDP proposal.

00:21:12.060 The bigger parties are supposed to be, excuse me, more responsible, but they voted en masse for the original residential schools equals genocide proposal.

00:21:24.140 Will they now come back and vote for this resolution?

00:21:26.140 I hope not, but, you know, I can't, again, I'm not totally optimistic about it.

00:21:32.020 Yeah, well, we'll, we'll watch with interest.

00:21:34.220 I guess the game just keeps rolling on and on.

00:21:36.680 It's just, it seems to be in such a bad direction right now.

00:21:39.340 I appreciate you coming on to speak to us today, though, and kind of, you know, examine some of these issues a little further and explain a little bit of what's what's going on there and the work you've done and still are doing.

00:21:49.320 And for those guys who are just listening on the audio version, as a professor said, if you Google Tom Flanagan and Fraser Institute, you'll find those sorts of things or you can find a copy of some of those books out there as well and things such as that.

00:22:01.980 So thank you for coming on the show again today.

00:22:04.880 I really appreciate it.

00:22:05.920 And maybe one of these days we'll, we'll see, well, as you said, probably in the long, long run, we'll be using hindsight or our kids will and realizing this was a bad endeavor.

00:22:14.100 But if we could speed the progress towards a conclusion, it would be nice.

00:22:18.320 Well, yeah, final word, what I feel I'm doing and others, we're not really having much opinion on public opinion right now.

00:22:26.300 I mean, we have people like you who are covering the issue, but we're not getting much traction in the mainstream media.

00:22:31.860 But I hope that we're laying down a factual record that when the time comes for reevaluation and something like this is happening at a much more accelerated pace with the COVID hysteria.

00:22:43.380 You know, two years ago, we were all running around about the sky is falling.

00:22:46.740 Now there's a lot of good scientific studies coming out in referee journals like The Lancet.

00:22:51.440 A lot of stuff coming out saying, hey, wait a minute, we overreacted, way overreacted.

00:22:58.160 So I think there is some value in trying to establish a factual record, even if it doesn't have a big political impact at the moment.

00:23:06.900 But it's there when the time comes.

00:23:09.520 Great.

00:23:10.080 Well, thank you very much.

00:23:11.220 And I hope we can talk again soon.

00:23:12.900 Okay, Corey, thanks for what you're doing.

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Western Standard - February 23, 2023

Professor Tom Flanagan on the latest round of GPR anomalies found on former residential school sites

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