In the wake of the recent revelation that the bodies of at least 215 Indigenous children were buried by Catholic priests and nuns at the Kamloops Indian residential school, the CBC and CTV have been quick to point the finger at the Canadian government. What does the TRC have to say about this, and why should the RCMP investigate?
00:00:00.000And speaking of the RCMP, why hasn't there been an investigation or, you know, shouldn't we be demanding an investigation then if indeed that we feel there's bodies that have been buried from murdered children?
00:00:10.900Well, my understanding is that at Kamloops, the RCMP did in fact begin an investigation.
00:00:21.340And then, and I don't know all the details of this, Corey, but it's a very serious matter.
00:00:26.180Apparently, they were personally contacted, I believe, by the former TRC chair, Murray Sinclair, who basically told them to lay off.
00:00:47.460Now, this is, I don't know all the details of this and I don't want to give any misinformation, but that is my understanding.
00:00:55.140Now, this, to me, it seems like a very serious business.
00:01:00.320If the RCMP are contacted by somebody who says, well, please lay off this murder investigation for whatever reason, the RCMP would normally simply say, I'm sorry, we'll just do our job as we see fit.
00:01:19.740Now, there is a call to action in the TRC report that basically says, well, indigenous communities should be able to do their own burial site investigations.
00:01:34.900Well, that makes a certain amount of a sense if you were looking for ancient relics or something like that.
00:01:39.820But if we're talking about an allegation of what is really a mass murder here, 215 secret burials by night, where somehow the Catholic clergy, this would be the priests and nuns who were at the Kamloops School, had somehow caused the death of children and then somehow decided they would be secretly buried with the help of six-year-olds.
00:02:06.760This would be the biggest crime in Canadian history.
00:02:10.260And, of course, the RCMP should immediately go into the area.
00:02:14.720They should secure the area and then do their investigation.
00:02:18.340After all, some of the people, these six-year-olds that apparently were forced to dig graves, well, goodness, they would still be around.
00:02:26.480I don't know how old they would be, but they would still be around.
00:02:29.440Obviously, these supposedly occurred in the 1950s and 60s.
00:02:36.460So some of these people would be alive.
00:02:38.380Why the RCMP have not actually properly investigated, I do not understand.
00:02:44.380And I think Canadians should demand that the RCMP do their job, take over the investigation even at this late stage.
00:02:53.740And that would definitely involve securing the area properly and then excavating if they believed that there was enough evidence.
00:03:02.140Yeah, and just to clarify a little more, one of our commenters, Paulette Burghardt, saying, what is TRC?
00:03:08.140And that's the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, right?
00:03:11.520Yes, that's the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which recorded in 2015.
00:03:19.220And I can just jump right into the genocide question if you want, Corey, because we've had so much of that now in the news.
00:03:35.000And I think some simple facts would be useful for your viewers.
00:03:44.000And I'll try not to give many numbers here, but we have the story that 150,000 Indigenous children were forced to attend residential schools.
00:04:00.780And that fits into the genocide definition.
00:04:05.360In other words, if you take 150,000 children and force them into schools and indoctrinate them,
00:04:11.240yeah, that probably would be called cultural genocide or even genocide.
00:04:23.320And even the mainstream newspapers keep repeating this misinformation.
00:04:28.200So I just thought I'd let you know, I think, where this comes from.
00:04:31.760The TRC, that is the Truth and Reconciliation Commissioners, made a speech to the United Nations a number of years ago before the TRC hearings even began.
00:04:47.800And there they said that they said 150,000, for seven generations, 150,000 Indigenous children were forced to attend residential schools.
00:04:59.080And then they went on to list all the terrible things that had happened.
00:05:02.200This is in advance of even doing, in advance of even doing the hearings to get the evidence, which is shocking in itself.
00:05:08.520But every part of that statement is not true in the first place, the idea that every Indigenous children child that went to residential school is just demonstrably false.
00:06:00.820It's actually between like one twelfth and one sixth.
00:06:04.580And if you want to get to go further into how many were Catholic, about half of the students were Catholic, you had something like between one twenty-fourth and one twelfth who actually went to residential schools.
00:06:19.980And you have to ask yourself, well, how could you possibly make a claim that there had been a cultural genocide or genocide when so few of the children actually went to to the schools?
00:06:36.480But it gets worse because the idea that these children were all forced to attend is nonsense.
00:06:44.620And I'll not go into too much detail here.
00:06:47.080But, Corey, before 1920, there was no compulsory attendance at all, mandatory attendance for status Indian children.
00:06:54.640This means that a parent, an Indigenous parent, was not under any type of legal compulsion to send their children to school.
00:07:05.280And yet, about at least some of them did.
00:07:08.760Some of the parents chose to send their children to day schools.
00:07:13.240Some chose to send their children to residential schools.
00:07:17.460And many Indigenous children, most at that time, didn't go to any school at all.
00:07:41.420These parents were under no compulsion at all.
00:07:45.400Now, after 1920, there was compulsory attendance.
00:07:51.320By that time, there was compulsory attendance in all parts of Canada.
00:07:55.940And the law said that an Indigenous parent, or pardon me, a status Indian parent, had to choose either a day school or a residential school and send their children to one of those schools.
00:08:11.040And the only people that were actually compelled to send their children to a residential school were those that did not live near a day school.
00:09:22.520And so the school was not reopened and the parents started sending their children to the day schools.
00:09:29.040Well, the parents, these are the Indigenous parents, brought together and they signed a petition and presented it to the federal government demanding that the school be rebuilt.
00:09:38.860And they explained in that petition that day schools were simply inadequate and not providing the quality of education for the children that they felt was necessary.
00:09:48.580And after receiving that petition, the federal government did go and rebuild that school.
00:09:55.280So that is absolute proof that the Indigenous parents were very much involved with the education of their children and in some cases, in many cases, preferred residential schools to day schools.
00:10:10.060And maybe I should just let you ask some questions and jump in here, Corey.
00:10:15.780And there's so many numbers and things going around right now, a lot of exaggerations.
00:10:19.060And actually, I got a correction sent to me by Jaime Rubenstein, who I had on the other week, because I had my numbers mixed up with how many children, perhaps, you know, because some did pass away while in the care of residential schools.
00:10:29.440And the number from the Truth and Reconciliation Report, anyways, is 832.
00:10:35.080Yeah, it was over the course of, you know, the better part of a century and with 150,000 children.
00:10:41.420So, and in times when mortality was, unfortunately, a lot higher for children than today.
00:10:47.220So, again, we're not getting into the realm of genocide, even if people like lightly throwing that term out there.
00:10:52.920No, and the 832 is even very interesting.
00:10:56.620I know there are a few hundred that died in hospitals afterwards, and there were other numbers that they sort of arbitrarily added to that list.
00:11:07.020But it's really important to understand that most of those 832 died of tuberculosis, and they had that tuberculosis when they first entered residential schools.
00:11:19.700That's what, that's the evidence of Dr. Peter Bryce, who is usually quoted on these things.
00:11:25.760So, the, the important thing there is disease was an unfortunate fact of life in those days, and it was very sad that the disease, disease death rate on reserves was far higher than in the general population.
00:11:41.320And that naturally follows that it would also be far higher in residential schools.
00:11:48.500And instead of saying, well, what is the rate of death at residential schools compared to the rate of death on the reserves, which is the proper comparison?
00:12:00.680And what we all always see in newspapers is, well, the rate of death at residential schools was five times higher than at other schools.
00:12:13.200But those children at the other schools did not come from reserves.
00:12:16.540It was the reserves that, for many historical reasons, had a very high death rate from, from disease, particularly tuberculosis and influenza in those years.
00:12:28.180Yeah, so, kind of pivoting back, you know, to the apparent or alleged 215, or I see they've even sort of backed down and said, well, maybe it's 200.
00:12:38.440But it's the anomalies found with the GPR and in Kamloops, where there, it's felt that there were perhaps that many bodies secretly buried.
00:12:45.280I mean, that's a significant chunk on top of the 832 known.
00:12:50.940Again, I mean, truth and reconciliation, I wouldn't realize that commission would have the ability to tell the police what they can or can't investigate.
00:12:58.180And you would think, I mean, truth is the term in it.
00:13:00.880If people thought there were murders going on, they should be screaming at the police to get in there and get investigating as soon as possible.
00:13:06.940It just seems very counterintuitive that we aren't getting in there if we really thought a crime was happening.
00:13:11.820As you said, it wasn't that relatively long ago.
00:13:13.600The perpetrators might still be alive.
00:13:21.980I don't understand what is happening with the RCMP.
00:13:25.440It seems that political interference here of some type is warping things at the top.
00:13:37.720But there's no question in my mind that when somebody makes an allegation of mass murder and secret burial, whether that person is indigenous or anything else, then the RCMP in a rural area have the duty to immediately investigate.
00:13:53.720Because if they've just let these allegations go, you get what we have today, where these claims are coming in all over the place and people are doing do-it-yourself investigations in their own communities.
00:14:13.200There should be one policing policy that applies to all of Canada.
00:14:19.960And it's very clear to me that the RCMP should immediately, even at this very late stage, say, no, we don't let people do their own murder investigations.
00:14:49.640None of these communities that are alleging that there are these secret burials and with all of these crazy stories about priests secretly burying children and throwing them into furnaces and that sort of thing, I'm predicting that none of them are going to excavate.
00:15:06.440They will hide behind claims of jurisdiction.
00:15:09.940They'll hide behind claims that, no, this is sacred land.
00:15:13.360And we've made these sensational allegations, but we're not going to do anything about them.
00:15:19.320There will be many other excuses given, but no excavations will take place.
00:15:26.060Because if they did, what they would find is exactly what they found where the RCMP did do investigations.
00:15:33.780I mentioned that Shibnickety School in Nova Scotia, for instance, where there were these same crazy claims about priests secretly burying children and that sort of thing.
00:15:45.980And the RCMP investigated and they found, yes, there were graves, but those were graves of Irish settlers who had died 100 years before the school was even built.
00:15:55.300And there are three other places where similar things occurred.
00:15:59.840So there's a type of, and I don't understand this, Corey, but there's a type of hysteria which has taken hold in some of the indigenous communities.
00:16:10.540And that's why I don't call this whole missing children thing a hoax, because many of these unsophisticated people actually believe what they're talking about.
00:16:21.220They believe that there are indeed thousands of children that were murdered in horrible ways at residential schools.
00:16:27.520These are simply conspiracy theories, urban myths, ghost stories, whatever you call them, but they are not true.
00:16:37.280And they've been stoked by some very unscrupulous people.
00:16:42.220And now we have people who I call genocide hustlers who are determined to label Canada as a genocidal nation, which it is not and has never been.
00:16:54.360So there's simply some very bad information out there.
00:17:00.300And for reasons that are not clear to me, the mainstream media seems to be to feel no obligation to start reporting on these things honestly.
00:17:10.260Yeah, well, we are seeing at least more reporting coming out and more calls, you know, questioning the official eye.
00:17:15.460I mean, we heard none of that in the first six months because everybody was horrified and felt that, wow, if this is really happening, we certainly don't want to question it.
00:17:21.720But it's been 14 months. I mean, we need to see some some resolution here.
00:17:26.100So I guess we just keep the pressure up and keep bringing it up until hopefully, as you said, you don't sound optimistic, but we can try and force the law to be applied and see what happens.
00:17:37.420All right. Well, thanks for coming on again to talk to me today.
00:17:41.340And I suspect this story will be going on for quite a while.
00:17:43.640You know, hopefully we can get you on again because I don't plan on letting it go.
00:17:46.620I'm stubborn to this one because we've got a real travesty hanging out there.
00:17:49.820And we'll just keep pressuring and examining and reading into this until we get some resolution, I think.
00:17:55.340Yeah. And thanks for inviting me. And I would just I would just invite watchers or viewers to check out everything I've said, but don't go to sources like Wikipedia and and and many of the other reports.
00:18:12.640Go to primary sources. Go to the actual government record.
00:18:15.860So you get the straight information because there's a great deal of misinformation on this field.
00:18:22.660OK, thanks, Corey. And good to talk to you.