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Frontier Centre for Public Policy

Canada’s Indigenous burial hoax is still very much alive

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From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Hymie Rubenstein

The Kamloops “confirmation” – growing more inconclusive all the time – consisted solely of signs of sub-surface soil irregularities: GPR cannot detect human or other organic material, and is only reliable in finding graves in known cemeteries.

History shows that many hoaxes, fake news stories, and conspiracy theories have proven nearly unassailable, even when proven false. So far, it seems a British Columbia burial canard will be added to this list.

The assertion that thousands of Indian Residential School children are buried in unmarked graves across the country, many of them victims of genocide, has been bandied about for decades. Its current promotion skyrocketed in mid-2021 following an Indigenous media release that was heard around the world:

May 27, 2021, Kamloops – It is with a heavy heart that Tk’emlúps te Secwé pemc Kukpi7 (Chief) Rosanne Casimir confirms an unthinkable loss that was spoken about but never documented by the Kamloops Indian Residential School. This past weekend, with the help of a ground penetrating radar (GPR) specialist, the stark truth of the preliminary findings came to light – the confirmation of the remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School.

Although this claim and others like it are slowly being exposed as false, most Canadians still believe them.

This assertion is one of the findings of a February 2024 Macdonald-Laurier Institute research report that found “by a 79 to 21 ratio, respondents believed that ‘215 Indigenous residential school children were buried in a mass grave on school grounds in Kamloops, BC,’” a story lacking factual or historical evidence “but which most media and virtually all politicians have been reluctant to contradict.”

The Kamloops Burial Hoax

The Kamloops “confirmation” – growing more inconclusive all the time – consisted solely of signs of sub-surface soil irregularities: GPR cannot detect human or other organic material, and is only reliable in finding graves in known cemeteries.

Still, immediately following the Kamloops announcement, there were angry vigils, public displays of grief and shame, solidarity speeches, promises to revolutionize society, and the burning down of dozens of predominantly Roman Catholic churches.

The furore attending the Kamloops discovery accelerated as later findings were announced in other provinces, with the number of purportedly identified graves soon exceeding 2,000. Frequently heard among activists was the cry that these announcements were proof of a hidden “Holocaust” or “Final Solution” perpetrated against Aboriginal students by Canadians working in residential schools. The Kamloops school was alleged to have been a “concentration camp” and the 2021 “burials” evidence that there had been a horrific crime.

Evidence Challenging the Hoax

Entrenched public opinion on what increasingly looks like a burial hoax was damaged on August 18, 2023, when the 14 closely spaced soil disturbances detected using GPR in the basement of the Roman Catholic church on the site of the former Pine Creek Residential School were found to contain animal bones and debris, not human remains.

These findings were preceded by several other inconclusive discoveries.

In August 2021, a team of researchers in Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, conducted an excavation at the former Shubenacadie Residential School in search of clandestine burials, but to no avail. Two months later, a search was conducted for unmarked graves on the site of the former Camsell Indian Hospital in Edmonton. The facility treated Indigenous people, many of whom suffered from tuberculosis, and some Indigenous leaders claimed that the dig would uncover patients that had been buried there, but no such evidence was discovered.

One discovery still making headlines is the unearthing of child-sized skeletons in a reputed “mass grave,” most likely the result of repeated accidental excavation and haphazard reburial by community grave diggers in the community cemetery on Alberta’s Saddle Lake Cree Indian Reserve. Without a shred of evidence, community members have attributed the death of some of these children to murder at the hands of a school official that was never reported to the police.

That there are no missing or secretly buried students who attended the reserve’s Indian Residential School is proven by the absence of relatives in the past or present searching for loved ones who never returned home. By comparison, in all of Canada, only two distant relatives have been identified as looking for their ancestors. In both cases, the children’s death certificates were found “buried” in the provincial archives whose records showed they were buried correctly on their home reserves.

Two easily located students’ records are surely vastly different from the “15,000 to 25,000 … maybe even more” children Murray Sinclair, former Chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, has claimed may be missing.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the Kamloops claim, and the many copycat allegations it fomented, are fallacious. More commentators are awaking to the “mass grave” propaganda, even though the Canadian mainstream media barely responded to the Pine Creek discovery of presumptive graves containing no human remains, an important reason this hoax is still very much alive.

Indigenous Elites Support the Hoax

Among the most prominent of many Indigenous perpetrators of these inflammatory claims of murder, mass graves, and even genocide has been RoseAnne Archibald, former National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, Canada’s largest and best-known Indigenous lobbying group.

At a July 15, 2021, Kamloops Indian Band public presentation, Archibald maintained that the Kamloops case told the world “how 215 innocent children died and were buried in unmarked graves” and that this “crime against humanity” constituted “genocide.”

Completely ignoring the caution of all the known researchers conducting these band-sponsored GPR searches, Archibald added that “this ground penetrating technology is revealing evidence, undisputable proof, that crimes were committed.”

In an interview broadcast by the BBC on August 4, 2021, Archibald charged that Canada’s Indian Residential Schools were “designed to kill” Indigenous children. “And we are seeing proof of that,” she said. “1,600 children, innocent children, have been recovered so far…. We are going to be in the thousands upon tens of thousands of children found. I am not sure how you can say that the recovery of that many little children does not signify what it is – genocide.”

Chief Archibald failed to mention that not a single child’s body “has been recovered so far” or that three years later, no bodies have been exhumed.

A lack of verified evidence of children buried in unmarked graves, some supposedly after priests murdered them, has done nothing to deter the federal government from funding several lavish programmes meant to continue this effort. One of these initiatives was the August 10, 2021, announcement of the allocation of $321 million to help Indigenous communities search burial sites at former residential schools and to support survivors and their communities.

Such programmes have doubtless hardened the public opinion expressed in the Macdonald-Laurier Institute poll. Allied beliefs discovered by the study are also at work: 54 percent of all respondents consider the legacy of Indigenous colonialization to be a problem today; 55 percent vs. 45 percent believe that Indigenous peoples should have a unique status because they were here first; by 48 percent for to 41 percent against, Canadians believe the harm from Indigenous residential schools will continue rather than be resolved; and 19 percent of Canadians think children at residential schools were “purposefully killed” with another 39 percent saying that children also died of neglect.

But the most critical determinant of the exceptionally high belief in the “killing field” at the Kamloops residential school lies in “political culture in Canada,” according to the study: “Much seems to come down to the culturally left-liberal political culture in Canada. That is, the elite norms that hold sway in the media and among mainstream politicians are predominantly culturally leftist.”

As the report says: “It is well established that the media and politicians can cue the issues they want voters to focus on, making decisions to elevate some questions and ignore others.”

This obvious assertion allowed the Macdonald-Laurier Institute report to argue that:

Canadians’ relatively high trust in institutions and cultural elites grants considerable latitude to them to frame the issues that people talk about while neglecting other questions…. There is no better illustration of this than the Kamloops mass graves question, where the code of silence practiced by the media and mainstream political parties has resulted in a clear majority of the public believing this false account.

On the Indigenous side, the Kamloops discovery, and its promise of lots of money, quickly unleashed a flood of similar GPR searches across Canada. To date, the unmarked graves are presumed to hold the remains of mainly unknown and unaccounted for individuals, primarily children, at 26 sites that have been identified since 1974[RC1] .

The allocation of funds to search for graves was followed in June 2022 by appointing an investigator to work with Indigenous communities and the government to propose changes in federal laws, policies, and practices related to unmarked graves at residential schools.

Kimberly Murray, former Executive Director of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, was given a two-year appointment as Canada’s “independent special interlocutor for missing children, unmarked graves, and burial sites associated with the Indian Residential Schools.”

Murray’s appointment was simply one part of a campaign, whether deliberately organized or not, to label Canada as a genocidal country long engaged in the systematic murder of Indigenous children whose remains were dumped into mass graves.

Attempts to Stop Hoax Challengers

On June 16, 2023, Murray released an interim report arguing “urgent consideration” should be given to legal mechanisms to combat what activists have termed “residential school denialism.”

Unsurprisingly, her “opening words” in the report stated:

… my role is to give voice to the children. It is not to be neutral or objective – it is to be a fierce and fearless advocate to ensure that the bodies and Spirits of the missing children are treated with the care, respect, and dignity that they deserve” even if that “conflicts with my responsibility to function independently and impartially, in a non-partisan and transparent way.

This attack on the fundamental precepts of objective search for truth based on reason, logic, and scientific evidence rooted in a scientific paradigm that clashes with Indigenous ways of knowing gave her leave to label genocide denial as an “attack” on her version of the truth whenever there were announcements of the discovery of possible unmarked graves.

Moral certainty based on Indigenous ways of knowing, not objective evidence based on science, allowed Kimberly Murray to state that the Canadian government has a role in combatting “denialism,” an inflammatory distortion of what is simply scientific scrutiny, by giving “urgent consideration” to the legal tools that already exist to address the problem, including civil and criminal sanctions.

“They have the evidence. The photos of burials. The records that prove that kids died. It is on their shoulders,” Murray told a crowd gathered on the Cowessess Indian Reserve in Saskatchewan on June 16, 2023.

But there is no photographic evidence of children buried beside the shuttered Kamloops Indian Residential School nor at any of the other former Indigenous schools in Canada.

The only photographic evidence shows typical church burials and thousands of schoolchildren engaged in everyday activities. As for the records, they reveal that the few residential school children who died at the schools were buried in school cemeteries beside school staff members or the nearest reserve cemetery. But most deceased children were interred on their home reserves. All of them received a proper Christian burial after they died, most succumbing to contagious diseases like tuberculosis over which Indigenous people had little natural immunity.

Several of those labelled denialists have argued that there are few missing students, only missing records about their school attendance and death. On March 21, 2023, Murray inadvertently confirmed this assertion in her testimony before the federal government’s Standing Senate Committee on Indigenous Peoples when she said:

The family doesn’t know where their loved one is buried. They were taken to a sanatorium, an Indian residential school. They were just told … that they died. I can get the name of that [missing] individual, I can log into the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, find the name of the student, find a record, which will lead me down to another record, which will lead me to Ancestry.com. Why are families having to go to my office to find the death certificate of their loved one on Ancestry.com when the provinces and territories won’t just provide those records?

And then those records will lead you to where they’re buried, hundreds of miles away from their home community. We are now seeing families going to cemeteries. I get this a lot. The children aren’t missing; they’re buried in the cemeteries. They’re missing because the families were never told where they’re buried. Every Indigenous family needs to know where their child is buried. When we find that, and we know that they’re going to have a little bit of closure now, they know the truth and they have some answers, that’s what keeps us going. [emphasis added].

Even though there is little evidence that thousands of children’s deaths were not reported to their parents, and lots of evidence that this is not true, including the refusal of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation to remove the names of children whose cause of death and place of burial have been found, from its Memorial Register, a list now totalling over 4,100 named and unnamed “children who never returned home from residential schools.”

Murray’s statement contradicts the established public narrative about missing children. None of these facts have ever been communicated to the public by the mainstream media.

The latest anti-denial effort emanated from the Canadian Senate Standing Committee on Indigenous Peoples, which released a 30-page report on July 19, 2023, titled “Honouring the Children Who Never Came Home: Truth, Education and Reconciliation.” The study recommends “that the Government of Canada take every action necessary to combat the rise of residential school denialism.”

According to lawyer John Carpay, president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms:

The use of state resources to promote one opinion on a scientific or historical matter is nakedly totalitarian. Apart from that, the senators’ aggressive language calling on government to “take every action necessary” suggests that it would be okay for the government to punish the likes of Michelle Stirling, Mark DeWolf, and others who dare to disagree with the dominant narrative.

The report fails to define “denialism” yet claims it “serves to distract people from the horrific consequences of Residential Schools and the realities of missing children, burials, and unmarked graves.” This omission suggests that “denialism” means disagreeing with the dominant narrative that Indian Residential Schools were houses of horror marked by racism and genocide.

Decades of an Aboriginal blood libel assertions hang over all these claims, with an army of activists and their supporters acting as its eager propagandists. It is long past time to find the underlying cause of this fake news by exhuming the reputed unmarked graves and identifying any remains they might contain. If that never happens, Canadians will be paying vast amounts forever to keep this hoax about missing and murdered Indigenous children alive.

Hymie Rubenstein is editor of REAL Indigenous Report and a retired professor of anthropology, the University of Manitoba.

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Frontier Centre for Public Policy

It’s Time To Stop Church Arsons And What Fuels Them

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From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Lee Harding

Religious freedoms and the right to worship have been a recognized hallmark of civilized societies for centuries. The preamble of Canada’s constitution says our country is built on the principles that acknowledge the supremacy of God and the rule of law. In defiance of both, almost 600 Canadian places of worship have suffered arson in recent years. Nothing could be more unCanadian.

The stats were revealed by Member of Parliament Marc Dalton following a formal inquiry to the federal government. The response showed 592 arsons had been set on places of worship between 2010 and 2022. they rose from 58 in 2020 to 90 in 2021, then down to 74 in 2022.

The peak coincides with claims made in May of 2021 that the remains of 215 school children had been discovered on the site of the former Kamloops Residential School.

Although Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called a subsequent wave of church burnings “unacceptable and wrong” he also called their likely motivations “real and fully understandable.” This hardly doused the flames.

These arsons far outnumber those made on Canadian churches in the 1920s by the Ku Klux Klan, which opposed non-Protestants and non-whites. In those years the KKK desecrated Sarnia’s St. Joseph’s Catholic Church. They killed ten people when they set Saint-Boniface College in Winnipeg on fire. They also burned the Cathedral-Basilica of Notre-Dame de Quebec. In 1926, three Klan members were jailed after they blew up St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church in Barrie, Ont.

The Klan soon fizzled out, seemingly unlike these recent church burnings. The 110-year-old Notre-Dame-des-Sept-Allégresses Catholic church burned down in Trois-Rivières, Quebec last month, but whether arson was involved has not been confirmed.

The presence of bodies underneath the former residential school in Kamloops has not been confirmed either. A 1924 septic field could also account for soil anomalies found there by ground-penetrating radar. Eight million federal tax dollars spent to investigate the site have yielded no remains and details on how the money was spent are sketchy. It’s high time the site was excavated to confirm or rule out the graves and do autopsies on any corpses found there.

Federal funds also fuel the Canadian Anti-Hate Network (CAHN), the Orwellian title for a group that fuels resentment against socially conservative organizations with negative characterizations. On August 7, CAHN published “40 Ways To Fight The Far-Right: Tactics for Community Activists in Canada” thanks to $640,000 from Ottawa.

“White boys and men make up the majority of people involved in hate-promoting movements,” the handbook explains. Pro-life and pro-parent groups, CAHN says, are among those “characterized by racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, misogyny, anti-2SLGBTQ+ views, and pro-colonialist/ anti-Indigenous bigotry.”

CAHN says the Catholic-dominated, pro-life organization Campaign Life Coalition is a “hate movement.” Liberty Coalition Canada, a legal defence organization, and the activist organization Action4Canada are similarly denigrated for their alleged belief that Canada was founded on Christian values and attempts to reassert such values.

Meanwhile, the CAHN guide advocates “antifascist” doxing, including infiltration of right-leaning organizations. getting people fired, and ending friendships.

Dalton’s Bill C-411 the “Anti-Arson Act” would do more to deter hate-motivated crimes than CAHN ever will. The legislation would punish those who set fires and explosions at religious places. A first offence would get a mandatory five-year jail sentence, while subsequent offenses would prompt seven years.

When respect for the supremacy of God and the rule of law fail, rights give way to wrongs. It’s time to stop the fires and the disputable claims that fuel them, and restore respect for people of faith, their right to worship, and their places of worship.

Lee Harding is a Research Associate for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

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Censorship Industrial Complex

Another Mass Grave?

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No. One outrageous lie was quickly discounted, yet another lives on, to the detriment of everybody involved.

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Brian Giesbrecht

The  Kamloops claim didn’t come out of the blue. The TRC’s well-publicized “missing children” wild goose chase thoroughly indoctrinated indigenous communities. It convinced foolish people, like Casimir, Leah Gazan and Kimberley Murray, that thousands of “missing children” had been secretly buried  all across Canada.

“My brother Rufus saw them take all those children and stand them up next to a big ditch, and then the soldiers shot them all and they all fell into that ditch. Some of the kids were still alive and they just poured the dirt in on top of them. Buried them alive.”

This mass murder happened in 1943 — not in Nazi-held Europe, but in Brantford, Ontario.

So, there you have it — the personal story of a residential school “survivor” describing the day the Canadian Army lined up 43 Indian children in front of a residential school at Brantford, Ontario, shot them and dumped their bodies into a mass grave. The May 27, 2021 announcement that the remains of 215 former students of the Kamloops residential school wasn’t the first time that a claim  about sinister residential school deaths and clandestine burials had been made.

This Brantford story is obviously untrue. Any reasonably well-informed person with a lick of sense would know that at a glance.

But that didn’t stop the claim from making the social media rounds for years. According to the fact-check tens of thousands of people have read this bogus claim over the years, and many appear to have believed it completely. In fact, despite the fact checks proving that the claim was entirely false it continues to circulate today.

Both the Kamloops and Brantford claims came basically from the same place — the strange mind of a defrocked United Church Minister, Kevin Annett. It was Annett who created the bogus Brantford claim. In a strange twist, the picture at the top of the page — said to be from Brantford — is actually a photo of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, as it looked in the 1920s. 

And it was Annett who inspired the TRC’s misguided “missing children/unmarked graves” wild goose chase that, in turn, inspired Chief Rosanne Casimir to make the Kamloops claim. Both claims were equally and obviously false: The Kamloops claim was that the “remains of 215 children were found.” In fact, only radar blips (anomalies) were detected- blips that turned out. to most likely be from previous excavations, and not graves. Casimir and Annett both knew that they were making false claims.

Annett’s bogus claims come from his imaginative reworking of stories of “survivors” that he publicized in his blogs, books, interviews and movies.

His most famous movie is Unrepentant. This movie has been viewed by tens of thousands of Canadians, particularly in indigenous communities, such as the Tk’emlups community at Kamloops.

It has won awards, and been praised by eminent people, such as Noam Chomsky. Despite being every bit as false as the claim that the Canadian army shot 43 indigenous children, it actually convinced Member of Parliament, Gary Merasty, that it was accurate history. It is nothing short of amazing that this highly suggestible MP  was then able to convince the equally gullible, and newly appointed TRC commissioners that there were many thousands of such “missing children”, as Annett alleged.

The TRC commissioners then launched their “missing children/unmarked graves” campaign despite having no mandate from the federal government to do so. (Independent researcher, Nina Green, describes this in detail here.)

You see, the  Kamloops claim didn’t come out of the blue. The TRC’s well-publicized “missing children” wild goose chase thoroughly indoctrinated indigenous communities. It convinced foolish people, like Casimir, Leah Gazan and Kimberley Murray, that thousands of “missing children” had been secretly buried  all across Canada. 

Indigenous people became hooked on these stories.

Annett’s most famous book is his 393 page opus, “Hidden No Longer.” That book introduced the idea that the deaths of these thousands of “missing children” (his estimates range from 50,000 to 250,000, depending on the telling) constituted  genocide. It is absolutely shocking that our MPs actually voted to condemn Canada of genocide based essentially on Kevin Annett’s bogus claims.

Based on those same bogus claims Annett was hired by the Brantford Mohawk community in 2011 to dig up the graves that he claimed existed in the apple orchard area of their residential school. According to Annett, these were the graves of indigenous students who had been secretly killed and buried in the apple orchard at the school, with the forced help of fellow students. 

Sound familiar? It should. That was essentially the same grisly tale repeated by Chief Rosanne Casimir years later in Kamloops. (See above.)

Except that the wiser folks within the Brantford Mohawk community twigged on to Annett’s tricks. And when Annett was found on the streets of Toronto, waving around chicken bones, and pretending that they were the bones of children he had unearthed at Brantford, the Mohawk elders came together and publicly denounced Annett as a fraud at a community meeting.  They then banished him from their community. 

Unfortunately, Casimir became a useful idiot for Annett — just as the gullible TRC commissioners did — and no such leadership has yet come forward from the wiser elements within the Kamloops indigenous community. Those folks are silent, while the more vocal contingent are still sticking to their story that the  soil anomalies are the “remains of 215 children,” and not what they almost certainly are — 1924 septic excavations. 

So, the questions should be asked: Is the claim that the Canadian army shot 43 indigenous children, and dumped them in a mass grave, any more or less believable than the claim that priests killed and secretly buried 215 children at Kamloops, (or any of the copycat claims that followed it?)

What is it about that Mohawk claim that gives it appeal to only the most gullible among us, while the equally improbable Kamloops claim is still taken seriously by so many people?

On the surface, both claims are outrageous, and have no real evidence to support them. Quite the contrary, every Canadian history book ever written is cogent evidence  that both stories are false. But the Mohawk claim was dismissed as the nonsense it obviously was, while the Kamloops claim lives on.

At least part of the answer to those questions appears to be in the response of the government in power, and the media to the claims. If the Brantford claim had been met by a prime minister who immediately ordered that flags be lowered, and offered hundreds of millions of dollars to any other indigenous communities who wanted to make similar claim, no doubt that Brantford claim would have been taken seriously.

Or, if the Brantford claim had been made in a time when a highly ideological CBC would ask no questions, and blindly promote the claim, the results might have been entirely different. As it is, the Brantford claim died a merciful death, while the equally specious Kamloops genocide claim still languishes like a stinking albatross around the neck of every Canadian.

Although the international community is increasingly broadcasting the obvious fact that the Kamloops claim is bogus Canada’s media remains asleep. That is not likely to change until leadership changes in Ottawa, and at the CBC. Pierre Pollievre, when questioned on this topic, stated clearly that he stands for historical truth, accuracy, and a full investigation into all questions pertaining to claims about residential school deaths. Hopefully, that means that excavation and a full inquiry will follow.

But Tk’emlups indigenous elders better wake up, like the Mohawk elders did. You are not doing your communities a favour by letting politicians and journalists treat you like children, by pretending to believe your bizarre claims. These false claims are already doing great damage.

Fortunately, there are many thoughtful indigenous people who do not blindly accept the claims about murderous priests and secret burials.

Here is one such wise indigenous person. He is a priest, and he is willing to do what our federal government and our CBC failed to do from the beginning namely to intelligently discuss the issue.

Thoughtful people like this need to be involved in a full investigation that will clear the air about the Kamloops claim, and get Canada back on track.

Brian Giesbrecht, retired judge, is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

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